>>> Dennis Claxton
Are you talking about this passage? "Instinctive violence" here does not refer to individuals but to knowledge as a social process. So I think Miles is right about strange reading.
^^^^ CB: That would be a misuse of the word "instinct". Only individuals have instincts. Instinctive violence wouldn't come out of knowledge as a _social_ process. Instinctive violence would be biological.
Foucault could be using "instinct" in the opposite sense of its basic definition. I don't know. That is, we might have a strange _writing_ by Foucault, as is much discussed on this list.
In the "Waiting for Foucault" aphorism, Sahlins started with a caveat on F's strange writing:
" A man of a thousand masks" one of his biographers said of Michel Foucault, so how seriously can we take the guise he assumed to say that power arises in struggle , in war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.
>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." pp. 162-3
><<http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/ngh.pdf>http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/ngh.pdf>
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