[lbo-talk] Power (Waiting for Foucault)

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Thu Jul 3 15:49:36 PDT 2008


as i said before, i completely agree with this. that's why i like freudian theory: eros and thanatos are inextricably intertwined.

in order to change and grow as a human being, i have to destroy those things about me i no longer want to be. i have to destroy my ignorance in order to learn -- and do so over and over again. in order to become, say, a more generous person, i have to be willing to destroy my tendency to be selfish. the examples are endless. i always like the one that occured to me: an infant, in the primary state of narcissism, can't diffferntiate itself from the world, right? when it first latches on to a breast or bottle in order to it, it doesn't really undertand that the breast is not itself. infants can be pretty frantic and aggressive about latching on when they're hungry -- or something has stimulated the fight/flight response. and, in order to eat, they have to have the impulse to latch on and suck at something, eating and destroying, really, itself (if you buy the primary state of narcissism thingaroo).

so why should it be so strange to claim that reason and violence are bound up together, when freudian theory (last i checked anyway) tended to see eros and thanatos as bound up together?

this is why i asked you if you'd read hirschhorn's _workplace within_ becaue he shows how the process works, from a freudian perspective that's rooted in the analysis of social relations _between_ people not in internal psychic processes of an isolated individual (which doesn't ever exist anyway...)

At 04:05 PM 7/3/2008, Ted Winslow wrote:
>Dennis Claxton mentioned:
>
>>Ted's selected quotes
>
>No need to use Ted's. The following "selected quotes" will work just
>as well.
>
>>All human behavior is scheduled and programmed through rationality.
>>There is a logic of institutions and in behavior and in political
>>relations. In even the most violent ones there is a rationality. What
>>is most dangerous in violence is its rationality. Of course violence
>>itself is terrible. But the deepest root of violence and its
>>permanence come out of the form of the rationality we use. The idea
>>had been that if we live in the world of reason, we can get rid of
>>violence. This is quite wrong. Between violence and rationality there
>>is no incompatibility.
>
>and
>
>>http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze
>
>The questions answer themselves as can be seen from what's been
>substituted for answers.
>
>Ted
>
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