> 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
How does a passage from Deleuze demonstrate that an interpretation of the following passage from Foucault on the relation of "instinctive violence" expressed as a "murderous," "malicious," "rancorous," "cruel" "instinct for knowledge," "will to knowledge," to "all" "forms of scientific consciousness," "all knowledge," is "terribly wrong"?
“But if it [‘historical consciousness’] examines itself and if, more generally, it interrogates the various forms of scientific consciousness in its history, it finds that all these forms and transformations are aspects of the will to knowledge: instinct, passion, the inquisitor's devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice. It discovers the violence of a position that sides against those who are happy in their ignorance, against the effective illusions by which humanity protects itself, a position that encourages the dangers of research and delights in disturbing discoveries. The historical analysis of this rancorous will to knowledge reveals that all knowledge rests upon injustice (that there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to a truth or a foundation for truth) and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous opposed to the happiness of mankind). Even in the greatly expanded form it assumes today, the will to knowledge does not achieve a universal truth; man is not given an exact and serene mastery of nature. On the contrary, it 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 its 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.” pp. 162-3 <http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/ngh.pdf>
In the same essay, Foucault says of the development of "law" that:
“the universe of rules … is by no means designed to temper violence, but rather to satisfy it.” p. 150
“Following traditional beliefs, it would be false to think that total war exhausts itself in its own contradictions and ends by renouncing violence and submitting to civil laws. On the contrary, the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence.” p. 151
“‘guilt, conscience, and duty had their threshold of emergence in the right to secure obligations; and their inception, like that of any major event on earth, was saturated in blood.’ Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.” p. 151
Of the "non-place" of the "emergence" of "the concept of goodness," he claims:
“In a sense, only a single drama is ever staged in this ‘non– place’ [the ‘non-place’ of the ‘emergence’ of ‘the concept of goodness’] the endlessly repeated play of dominations.” p. 150