> Death to the Right, death to the neocons
> and death to the neoliberals seems like the only universal rallying
> cry
> here. Perhaps I am projecting.
I'm not free myself of sometimes taking a kind of delight in the idea of the "death" of some "others". I don't think this is a reasonable feeling though. it's inconsistent with the "radical enlightenment" ideas I've been attributing to Marx.
These ideas are also inconsistent, as I've pointed out before, with "pernicious tyranny---that of the hegemonic truths which constitute the meta-narratives of those in power". The "relations of mutual recognition" that constitute the "love" aspect of its conception of the "good" are, by definition, non-coercive. Stated more positively, the creator of beauty and truth can't coerce others into "appropriating" - i.e. "recognizing" - her creations. In their ideal forms, both "creating" and "appropriating", as understood within this tradition, actualize fully "free self-determination".
As Foucault's "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" demonstrates, Foucault rejects this on the grounds that the essence of human being is a will to "Death", a will displaced into human relations as a murderous violent sadistic "will to power" and into "science" as a murderous violent sadistic "will to knowledge". The latter creates the future possibility of humanity eventually directly realizing the will to Death in a final rapturous act of "sacrificing itself". This will be the "end" of human history.
Foucault also claims in that essay that all ethical principles can be shown to originate in and to express more of less obviously the displacement of the will to Death into the "will to power". This isn't true of Marx's ethical principles.
That Foucault is blind to this can in fact be explained by the psychoanalytic idea of "projective identification".
Ted