[lbo-talk] Chuck's Cassirer posts

Eric rayrena at realtime.net
Fri Jun 20 09:49:44 PDT 2008


Ted wrote:


>The foundational ontological and anthropological ideas constitutive of
>this anti-humanism are the ideas that "being" is nothing but
>"violence" and "human being" nothing but "violence-doing."

Like the rest of this post, this is terribly wrong. Speaking of the "poststructuralists" I know best, for them violence is seen as an effect, not as an ontological foundation. Here's what Deleuze said about this in his book on Foucault:

What is Power? Foucault's definition seems a very simple one: power is a relation between forces, or rather every relation between forces is a 'power relation'. In the first place we must understand that power is not a form, such as the State-form; and that the power relation does not lie between two forms, as does knowledge. In the second place, force is never singular but essentially exists in relation with other forces, such that any force is already a relation, that is to say power: force has no other object or subject than force. This does not create a return to natural law, because for its part law is a form of expression, whereas Nature is a form of visibility _and violence a concomitance or consequence of force, but not a constituent element_. Foucault is closer to Nietzsche (and to Marx), for whom the relation between forces greatly exceeds violence and cannot be defined by the latter. Violence acts on specific bodies, objects or beings whose form it destroys or changes, while force has no object other than that of other forces, and no being other than that of relation: it is 'an action upon an action, on existing actions, or on those which may arise in the present or future'; it is 'a set of action upon other other actions'. We can therefore conceive of a necessarily open list of variables expressing a relation between force or power relation, constituting actions upon actions: to incite, to induce, to seduce, to make easy or difficult, to enlarge or limit, to make more or less probable, and so on.

(Gilles Deleuze, _Foucault_, p. 70)



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