[lbo-talk] Merely cultural and post-Situ: Soft Focus w/ Ian Svenonius

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Mon Apr 2 06:56:38 PDT 2007


Doug Henwood wrote:


> A phrase I in turn stole from Judith Butler, who used it in her post-
> Sokal essay responding to all those old dinosaur leftists who thought
> "class" is what matters, and the "merely cultural" was fluff (for the
> girls, you might say).

Doesn't Butler share with Sokal et al an understanding of "class" and "culture" that logically excludes any space for the conception of either as the locus for the the development and expression of "subjects" able to actualize "freedom" as relations of "mutual recognition"?

Nietzsche and Foucault use the mere inconsistency of the Hegel/Marx conception of human history as the development of such "subjects" with the modern idea of "science" as a basis for rejecting it. They self-contradictorily substitute for it the idea of human history as "the endlessly repeated play of dominations" and (it would appear) of "freedom" as the "prodigious idea" of "humanity sacrificing itself" in a final direct acting out of instinctive self-destructiveness.

“Where religions once demanded the sacrifice of bodies, knowledge now calls for experimentation on ourselves, calls us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge. ‘The desire for knowledge has been transformed among us into a passion which fears no sacrifice, which fears nothing but its own extinction. It may be that mankind will eventually perish from this passion for knowledge. If not through passion, then through weakness. We must be prepared to state our choice: do we wish humanity to end in fire and light or to end on the sands?’ We should now replace the two great problems of nineteenth- century philosophy, passed on by Fichte and Hegel (the reciprocal basis of truth and liberty and the possibility of absolute knowledge), with the theme that ‘to perish through absolute knowledge may well form a part of the basis of being.’ This does not mean, in terms of a critical procedure, that the will to truth is limited by the intrinsic finitude of cognition, but that it loses all sense of limitations and all claim to truth in its unavoidable sacrifice of the subject of knowledge. ‘It may be that there remains one prodigious idea which might be made to prevail over every other aspiration, which might overcome the most victorious: the idea of humanity sacrificing itself. It seems indisputable that if this new constellation appeared on the horizon, only the desire for truth, with its enormous prerogatives, could direct and sustain such a sacrifice. For to knowledge, no sacrifice is too great. Of course, this problem has never been posed.’” Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," <http:// www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/ngh.pdf>p. 163

Ted



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