> 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.
The following judgment
> 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.
is quite possibly mistaken.
It overlooks that the claims that "of course violence itself is terrible" and that "what is most dangerous in violence is its rationality" differ from the claims that "violence itself" is bad and that its worst form is that expressed through "rationality."
The word "terrible" is used by Heidegger to characterize "the violent" he claims a passage from Antigone identifies with "Being," with "beings as a whole." In relation to this: "Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming [ i.e. against "the violent" as "beings a a whole"].
"On the one hand, *deinon* names the terrible, but it does not apply to petty terrors and does not have the degenerate, childish, and useless meaning that we give the word today when we call something 'terribly cute.' The *deinon* is the terrible in the sense of the overwhelming sway, which induces panicked fear, true anxiety, as well as collected, inwardly reverberating, reticent awe. The violent, the overwhelming is the essential character of the sway itself. When the sway breaks in, it *can* keep its overwhelming power to itself. But this does not make it more harmless but only *more* terrible and distant.
"But on the other hand, *deinon* means the violent in the sense of one who needs to use violence - and does not just have violence at his disposal but is violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein. Here we are giving the expression 'doing violence' an essential sense that in principle reaches beyond the usual meaning of the expression, which generally means nothing but brutality and arbitrariness. Violence is usually seen in terms of the domain in which concurring compromise and mutual assistance set the standard for Dasein, and accordingly all violence is necessarily deemed only a disturbance and offense.
"Beings as a whole, as the sway, are the overwhelming, *deinon* in the first sense. But humanity is *deinon*, first, inasmuch as it remains exposed to this overwhelming sway, because it essentially belongs to Being. However, humanity is also *deinon* because it is violence-doing in the sense we have indicated. [It gathers what holds sway and lets it enter into openness.] Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming. Because it is doubly *deinon* in an originally united sense, it is *to deinotaton*, the most violent: violence-doing in the midst of the overwhelming." (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 159-62)
Heidegger also claims that the primal form of this "violence-doing" is "what is most uncanny and mightiest."
Marx's idea of the historical process as a set of "educational" "stages in the development of the human mind" ending in a "true realm of freedom" constituted by "universally developed individuals" "flourishing" within relations of "love" elaborated as "mutual recognition" is, therefore, the opposite of the truth. In this process "reason," in a sense incomprehensible to Heidegger, Foucault, etc., is substituted for "instinct" including the instinctive source of "violence."
So "violence" in this context can't be interpreted as the "violence" done to customary ways of feeling, thinking, willing and acting by the successive forms of "world-historical" "individuality" that in the Hegel/Marx philosophy of history constitute the agency that accomplishes this substitution.
The human historical process "is not a development but flattening down as mere widening out; it is the inability to hold on to the inception, it makes the inception innocuous and exaggerates it into a perversion of what is great, into greatness and extension purely in the sense of number and mass."
"we have also warded off the other opinion, according to which the ode recounts the development of humanity from a wild huntsman and a traveler by dugout canoe, to a builder of cities and person of culture. These are notions from cultural anthropology and the psychology of primitives. They arise from falsely transferring a science of nature that is already untrue in itself to human Being. The fundamental error that underlies such ways of thinking is the opinion that the inception of history is primitive and backward, clumsy and weak. The opposite is true. The inception is what is most uncanny and mightiest. What follows is not a development but flattening down as mere widening out; it is the inability to hold on to the inception, it makes the inception innocuous and exaggerates it into a perversion of what is great, into greatness and extension purely in the sense of number and mass. The uncanniest is what it is because it harbors such an inception in which, from over-abundance, everything breaks out at once into what is overwhelming and is to be surmounted (das Überwältigende, Zubewältigende)." (Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 165-6)
This then is the problem with any sort of "violence-doing" (e.g. instinctive violence directed at objects constructed through further reworking of its primal form via the defenses constitutive of paranoia, or instinctive violence sublimated and expressed as a "will to knowledge") that isn't of this primal kind. It's a "flattening out as mere widening out" of true end-in-itself "violence-doing."
There is, however, an alternative interpretation of the primal form of "terror" aroused by "the violent." That is that it's the "terror" aroused in the extremely weak unintegrated primal "ego" by the operation of the "death instinct."
Interpreted this way, "violence-doing" against "Being" is already a "flattening down as mere widening out" of the primal form of violence- doing. Through displacement it makes "beings as a whole" rather than the self the object of the death instinct.
The true primal form of "violence-doing" is then self annihilation. "Suicide," in the form of direct acting out of the death instinct "untamed by the ego," is the true end-in-itself moment to which one would say, were it not self-contradictory, "stay."
Foucault (provocative as usual) endorses this idea of the true "eudaimonic" moment:
"Some advice to lovers of humanity. If you really want to see a decrease in the number of suicides, support only those potential suicides which are committed with forethought, quietly and without wavering. Suicide must not be left to unhappy people who might bungle it or make a mess of it. In any case there are lots fewer happy than unhappy people. It's always struck me as strange that people say that death is nothing to worry about, because between life and nothingness death is nothing but a border. But is it true that this is all there is to the game? Make something of it, something fine.
"No doubt we've missed out on a lot of pleasures and we've had some that were pretty mediocre: others we've let slip by out of laziness or lack of attention, imagination or persistence. We should consider ourselves lucky to have at hand (with suicide) an extremely unique experience: it's the one which above all the rest deserves the greatest attention - but rather so that you can make of it a fathomless pleasure whose patient and relentless preparation will enlighten all of your life." (Foucault, "The Simplest of Pleasures" <http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/simple.pdf
>)
So it's not clear that, by claiming that "violence itself is terrible" and that "what is most dangerous in violence is its rationality," Foucault is claiming something different from the claim in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" that "what is most dangerous in violence" may one day realize this moment at a species level in the form Nietzsche described as "humanity sacrificing itself."
Ted