aside from which, while knowledge isn't wholly violent, it often is, and i wouldn't be the least bit ashamed to be associated with the idea that, the will to knowledge, so far, as has had a violent cast (?caste? too lazy to look up). violent in the same sense as the quote below: the desire to rip from people their delusions, the desire to tear off their veils and force them to know truth. sometimes, it is expressed in an angry, vengeful, mean, violent way when intellectuals appear to enjoy the suffering of those who believed in myths, superstitution, magic and, as foucault characterizes N's view here, "malicious" in its desire to make people unhappy by forcing them to relinquish being "happy in their ignorance."
"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."
sheeeit, I ought to quote the magnificent *mean* ness of marx in critique of the gotha program who, you gotta believe, would have liked to have rubbed lasalle's nose in a pile of dog shit for his ignorance!
will to knowledge, baby! will to knowledge!
At 02:20 PM 6/20/2008, Ted Winslow wrote:
>Eric wrote:
>
> > 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
>
>
>
>
>
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