> There is no substantive philosophical
> chasm between Foucault and Marx.
It depends on which Foucault you mean. As I've pointed out before, the Foucault that wrote "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History" explicitly, with Nietzsche, rejected the "idealist" philosophy of history sublated by Marx's "historical materialism."
The passage from that essay quoted yesterday by Robert Wood continues as follows:
"On the contrary, it ['the will to knowledge'] ceaselessly multiplies the risks, creates dangers in every area; it breaks down illusory defenses; it dissolves the unity of the subject; it releases those elements of itself that are devoted to subversion and destruction. Knowledge does not slowly detach itself from its empirical roots, the initial needs from which it arose, to become pure speculation subject only to the demands of reason; its development is not tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject; rather, it creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence. 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
The two assertions:
"Knowledge does not slowly detach itself from its empirical roots, the initial needs from which it arose, to become pure speculation subject only to the demands of reason; its development is not tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject; rather, it creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence."
"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.’"
implicitly reject the essence of Marx's philosophy of history. They are also self-contradictory i.e. they must themselves be expressions of "the will to knowledge" understood in this way and, therefore, not treatable consistently as rationally groundable knowledge claims.
In contrast, as Brian Dauth pointed out some time ago, the Foucault of vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality, "The Care of the Self," provides a sympathetic and insightful account of the Stoic conception of the human "soul" and the "care" its full development requires. As Foucault points out and elaborates there, the Stoic conception sublates the Plato/Aristotle conception, a conception also sublated in the Hegel/Marx philosophy of history that the Foucault of "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" rejected.
Ted