> Because it doesn't pull out terms, put them in quotation marks, and
> then put them in an order that says (or you seem to think so anyway,
> I don't see it) what you want to have them say.
>
> Maybe this passage from an interview with Foucault will help:
>
> 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.
You need to show, as opposed to merely assert, that this
"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"
misrepresents this:
“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>
and the meaning given to "violence" in the additional passages I just quoted.
The passage you quote itself identifies "reason" with "violence," i.e. "the idea" [Marx's] that "if we live in a world of reason, we can get rid of violence" is "quite wrong" because "between violence and rationality there is no incompatibility."
This repeats the association, in the passage I've been quoting, of "instinctive violence" with "knowledge," with "all" "forms of scientific consciousness."
Here, however, Foucault makes the association "what is most dangerous in violence."
In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," he takes a different view of the prospect opened up by the association.
“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.’” p. 163
Ted
The dif