A recent review has brought me back to some writing I put together a few years ago but never
posted on Michel Foucault's "Iranian dispatches" and his notion of
political spirituality. I have little to say about the review itself which is
determined to draw a very dubious line from "authoritarian Nietzsche", to "Nazi-friendly
Heidegger" up to Foucault's own refusal to "plead forgiveness"
for supporting the Iranian uprising and inchoate Khomeini regime. The point of
this is seemingly to tar all of post-structuralist thought (a philosophical
current to which Foucault is relevant but hardly the undisputed figurehead)
with the suspicion of illiberal or even downright conservative undertones. It
is interesting however that the author of the review draws inferences regarding
the current situation in the Middle East from Foucault's approach and the
continuity between his writing and other authors on the Left who supposedly
favor a narrow anti-Imperialism over opposing internal oppression. The
situation with both the French
intellectual's articles on Iran and the current mire in Syria is clearly more
complex than that simple dualism would suggest but there is something about
Foucault's intervention and the resulting controversy that resonates today and
has much to teach us about Western attitudes towards the self-determination of
the peoples of the Middle East. That continuing relevance is why I felt a
defence of Foucault against the claims made by Afary and Anderson in their book were worth
writing about. It's far from a complete defence and focuses quite heavily on
the areas of his work I am most interested in but I think it's worth putting
out there.
Note: Obviously the situation in Syria, Libya
and elsewhere has altered and deteriorated dramatically over the last three
years, so in some respects my references to the possibilities of the "Syrian
revolution" seem very much out-of-date. But I think the general points of
argument still stand.
In Our Time of Uprisings
We live at a time of uprisings. Whether it is
against autocratic regimes outside of Europe, or against the asset strippers of
the IMF and World Bank within it, people around the globe are banding together
in a collective drive towards revolt. At the same time the hopes of millions in
the Middle East for an end to tyranny are under threat. This threat comes from
the counter revolutionary forces of the Egyptian military, from Bashar Al-Assad’s
murderous regime, and from the West’s unrelenting desire to use its weapons to
shape the fortunes of the Arab world to its advantage. Under these circumstances,
with such a degree of uncertainty, and with the weight of past disappointments
lying heavily on our ability to think another world many observers lapse into
what Adam Curtis has termed Oh dearism; a posture of resignation when faced with a
situation which defies the simplistic narrative of “good guys versus bad”.
Predictably the polarised spectacle of media
“debate” leaves little room to take up a position in support of Arab self-determination.
For some, to say one is in support of the uprising in Syria is tantamount to
direct support for the most violent sections of Islamic fundamentalism.
Conversely, for others, to openly question the constituents and motivations of
the opposition or to talk of a sectarian element in the conflict is little more
than an apology for the Assad regime or at least ignores the genuine
revolutionary character of the uprising. To paraphrase Michel Foucault - whose
writings on Iran provide the occasion for this piece - this is the risk and the
interest in talking about the Middle East.
Undoubtedly there is a risk, particularly for
those Western commentators who throw their weight behind an uprising and refuse
to take the standard cynical position which Western voices predominantly show
towards Arab aspirations. The risk is firstly that you will be associated with
a bad outcome or at least an outcome that runs against your stated expectation;
“look at what has happened! Did you want this? How could you have supported
this rabble? You must recant!” Such accusations and demands were put, and posthumously
are still being put to Michel Foucault over his support for the Iranian uprising
of 1978/79. I say “uprising” rather than support for “Khomeini’s revolution” as
I hope it will be made clear over the course of this piece that it was the
former which was always the subject of his journalism in those months. A relatively
recent text by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson has collected together Foucault's
writing on Iran for the first time in English. The authors have also included
their own lengthy essay attempting to demonstrate that Foucault’s “error” was
the result not just of a misreading of the events but the symptom of a more
general malaise in his work. Such is the risk of talking about the Middle East.
What will follow is a series of rebuttals to some
of the author’s core claims about Foucault’s oeuvre and his approach to the
Iranian Revolution, particularly that he viewed the uprising in an
undifferentiated and orientalist fashion, a symptom they claim of his
privileging of archaic social practices and flawed approach to Modernity. This
will not be an exhaustive refutation. It will I hope serve to demonstrate that some
of Afary and Anderson’s core claims are grossly overstated.
Foucault's
Pre-Modern Privileging
Foucault travelled to Iran on two occasions in late
1978 during which the anti Shah movement was at its height. He was commissioned
by the Italian newspaper Corriere della
sera, in which the majority of his writings on Iran were published, the
last appearing in February 1979. It is important to note that in these articles
Foucault was writing reports and not theory, and thus the attempt to analyse
them as a continuation or emanation of his overtly theoretical texts is
immediately problematic. This can also be said of some of Marx’s journalism, some
of which (see the British Rule in India) have evoked accusations of excusing
tyranny in favour of ‘world historical development’. Similarly it is worth
noting that Foucault was one of the few Western intellectuals who had taken
such interest in Iran and was certainly the most prominent in writing on the
subject at that time. As such he was in
many respects sticking his neck out. Nevertheless it still takes considerable
misreading of Foucault’s reports on Iran to justify the accusation of
orientalism that Afary and Anderson then project onto the rest of his work.
Their main argument is that in criticising the
grand narratives of progress and enlightenment in Western history Foucault reconstructs
his own meta-narrative about an idyllic pre-modern past corrupted by
technological rationality. This “new” meta-narrative reveals itself in Foucault’s
genealogical studies (and his Iranian reports) which “stage a binary construct
wherein traditional social orders were privileged over modern ones” (Afary and
Anderson pg22). Hence for the authors Foucault's support or at least blind spot
regarding the reactionary religiosity of the Khomeini movement was the
correlate to his dismissal of the foreign backed modernisation program Iran had
undergone under the Shah. In addition to this notion of an idyllic pre-modern
past they attribute to Foucault an analogous view of the East as an exotic
counter discourse to the rationality of the West. Curiously they argue that
Foucault’s orientalism is structured temporally according to the opposition
modern/pre-modern rather than the geographical East/West, and this despite
quoting a passage from the preface to Madness and Civilization which they admit
demonstrates Foucault’s opposition to viewing the East as an “other” along any
kind of binary axis. Additional examples used to verify this claim are equally
unconvincing. In one they latch onto a short passage where Foucault citing
practices from ancient Greece and Rome states he is in favour of developing
silence as a cultural ethos. The authors read into this the French
philosopher's support for pre-modern hierarchical and paternalistic
relationships that subordinate women and children. He fails to criticise the
power-relation at work since he privileges these archaic practices over modern
“callous forms of individualism” (Ibid 18).
While it is indisputable that such hierarchical
relationships existed it is a simplistic leap of reasoning to assume that
Foucault was unaware of this, or that in supporting practices involving silence
he was passing a general endorsement of those social arrangements. In fact his
examination of the use of silence was part of a series of studies on
“technologies of the self” which were wide ranging and sophisticated. The
authors also seem to forget that the principle that children “should be seen
and not heard” was practiced in various institutions (especially educational)
as recently as the mid 20th century and beyond. It is thus something
of a stretch to consider regimes of silence as primarily pre-modern. The
encomium to silence was in fact equally to do with practices of listening and
learning that Foucault examined in the writing of Epictetus, Plutarch, and Seneca.
The aim of these studies being to refute the standard criticism which Afary and
Anderson repeat that such codes of conduct aimed merely at repression rather
than being articulated towards self-development and the listener’s personal
relationship to truth. What Foucault claims is that in the writing of the Stoics
what we find is a code of silence very different from that found in
Christianity and the modern demand for children to be seen and not heard. This
code which is applicable not just for children but to all subjects insofar as
they are capable of logos revolves
around the status of hearing as the sense which is simultaneously the most
passive (pathetikos) and yet the one
most receptive to truth (logikos).
This dual aspect of the sense of hearing is the root of how practices of
listening were problematized in the writers Foucault examined. The question
then was what type of listening practice to adopt that would allow the subject
to take in the logos while still
engaging the will so to stave off the passivity which can lead a student to
attending only to ornament, to the fine voice and the search for words and
style (Foucault 2005 pg338). Part of the answer was to be found in silence, as
well as other aspects of gesture and physical comportment which were thought to
be necessary. The generative aspect of these codes of conduct, finding their
target in the soul of the listener as prolegomena to the development of logos clearly sets them apart from the
one dimensional relations of domination Afary and Anderson appear to have in
mind.
A similar misreading
occurs when the authors address Foucault’s criticism of modern disciplinary
techniques which according to their reading “gave the appearance of being more
humane than pre-modern physical forms of restraint and punishment, but were in
fact more pervasive and powerful because they categorized labelled, diagnosed,
and monitored according to a regimen” (Afary and Anderson pg22). Like the false
claim that Foucault supported hierarchical relations in antiquity here the authors
assert that his critique of modern “enlightened” practices of punishment
commits him to deny that those practices have become more humane, something
that Foucault never did. Rather as Discipline
and Punish (Foucault 1977) makes clear the question is not so much whether
these practices have become more humane but instead whether these observed
changes occur due to a process of “humanisation”; i.e. did we abolish the rack
because we became more enlightened or because such spectacles became obsolete
owing to the development of more efficient less violent and more precise forms
of discipline. So one might say that it was in fact the underlying assumptions
of humanism and "the humane" that were being called into question. By
focussing on the issue of whether modern forms of punishment represent a more
humane approach Afary and Anderson ignore Foucault’s principle preoccupation in
the text which is to study the subtle changes in the
aim of these disciplinary techniques which shifted in the modern period from
punishing the body in response to a breach of law, to disciplining the “soul”
in line with a series of normative imperatives linked both to the development
of the human sciences and the demands of political rationality. It is a more
complex question than simply the supposed transition from barbarism to
civilization, and it is this ambiguity in regimes of practices concerning their
relationship to freedom and truth that Foucault brings to bare in his writings
on Iran.
These examples are indicative of Afary and Anderson’s approach
throughout the text where at every turn they overstate their case regarding
Foucault’s attitude towards modernity and his valorization of pre-modern social
arrangements. Like Marx, Foucault never denied the formerly egalitarian
framework of liberal democracy, nor did he think it was a mere mask. But like
his German predecessor he recognized the ambiguous relationship liberalism has
with freedom: liberalism “as the art of
government formed in the eighteenth century, entails at its heart a productive
/ destructive relationship with freedom. Liberalism must produce freedom, but
this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of
coercion, and obligations relying on threats etcetera” (Foucault 2010 pg64). It
is only by ignoring the wider concerns of Foucault’s critique of modernity and
work on “technologies of the self” that the authors are able to maintain the
false thesis that he preferred pre-modern social arrangements to modern ones,
and subsequently accuse Foucault of a strange kind of orientalism.
Penance and Practices of Freedom
As we have seen the
core of the authors argument is that through his critique of modernity Foucault
comes to privilege archaic practices (in particular from antiquity) and it is
this privileging combined with what they take as his superficial and
orientalist view of Iranian culture lead him to show uncritical support for
Khomeni. Another important instance of this is their claim that Foucault’s
interest in the ritualistic and self-effacing nature of some of the Iranian
protests derives directly from his supposed preference for early Christian
forms of confession and penitence. Here is an example from his reports they
draw attention to from the article titled The
Revolt of Iran Spreads on Cassette Tapes published in Corriere della sera on Nov 19th 1978:
"On December 2,
the Muharram celebrations will begin. The death of Imam Hussein will be
celebrated. It is the great ritual of penitence. (Not long ago, one could still
see marchers flagellating themselves.) But the feeling of sinfulness that could
remind us of Christianity is indissolubly linked to the exaltation of martyrdom
for a just cause. It is a time when the crowds are ready to advance towards
death in the intoxication of sacrifice. During these days, the Shi'ite people
become enamoured with extremes" (Afary and Anderson pg216).
For the authors the
French philosopher is "mesmerised" by such public displays and this
fascination for both Islamic and Christian passion plays and rituals is
troubling since it ignores how fascistic regimes have often deployed the
rhetoric of martyrdom and self-sacrifice to bolster their ideology and further
their ends (Ibid pg55). At a broad level this is undoubtedly true although one
might point to common instances of liberal regimes using similar rhetoric of
self-sacrifice in public discourse especially around issues of the military. However
to really understand Foucault's interest in these practices and why he thought
their prominence was key to the possibility of a rupture in Iranian society
during the revolution it's necessary to look at them from the perspective of a
person's autonomy and their relation to self and other.
Foucault's most
in-depth analysis of these practices came in the late 1970s with his work on
the evolving institution of penance and confession in the early Christian
church. Through readings of the church fathers and figures such as John Cassian
and Clement of Alexandria Foucault identifies two differing truth-practices
centred around the penitent. The first and older variant was exomologesis a term with no literal
translation but that refers to the penitent's manifesting their agreement or
acknowledgement of their status as sinner. This manifesting however was not a confessio in the sense that the Latin
church would eventually succeed in conferring upon it. It did not center around
an individual giving a detailed verbal account of their sins to a member of the
clergy. The earliest variant Foucault identifies takes the form more of a
collective prayer recited by each and in which each says individually, but also
in which all say collectively: I am a sinner, we are sinners. So it does not
involve a confession of what one has done but of a collective profession or
supplication concerning what one is, namely a sinner (Foucault 2014 pg203).
Later in the 3rd and 4th century the practice has undergone a transformation
into a more dramatic and spectacular form which Foucault draws attention to by
citing the penance of a Roman woman Fabiola described by Saint Jerome:
"Fabiola stood in the ranks of the penitents. The bishop, priests, and the
people weep with her, her hair dishevelled, her face pale, her hands unwashed,
her head soiled with ashes and humbly bowed. She wounded her bared breast and
the face with which had seduced her second husband, she revealed to all her
wound and Rome in tears contemplated the wounds on her pale body"
(Foucault 2014 pg207). The dramatic and visual aspect of these rituals has a
clear parallel with the "extremes" Foucault witnessed in Iran during
the Muharram celebrations. But what was it that he thought was being manifest
in these practices which to modern ears sound like a kind of public humiliation?
For Foucault it was not so much the sin as the fact of having sinned which was being
manifested and this without any verbal confession. "A spectacular
manifestation of the fact that one recognised that one was a sinner, of the
consciousness one had of being a sinner, a manifestation of the remorse one felt
and the desire to be reintegrated" (Foucault 2014 pg208). Exomologesis is precisely this form of
visual ritual of penance and manifestation of the truth of oneself.
The second practice which Foucault identifies
is the one which became dominant in the Latin church and was officially codified
in the 12th century, this is exagoreusis, again a term with no
obvious translation but is best described as 'putting one-self into discourse'.
This form marks a decisive shift from the acknowledgement of past actions to the
examination of thoughts which derives from the type of monastic practice of
permanent self-examination that for the monk was meant to assure his mind was
always turned towards God. Foucault demonstrates a rich correspondence between
these practices and various Stoic (specifically Senecan) askesis that aimed at examining one's mental representations. The
emphasis however in Christian exagoreusis
shifts from recalling the deeds of the day and comparing them to rules and principles
of action to scrutinising thoughts in the present and on a permanent basis in
search of some hidden impurity. In the writings of John Cassian that Foucault
highlights it is a question of scrutinizing the direction of one’s thoughts; do
they aim towards God or do they suggest a hidden evil or sinful purpose? All of
this is based upon the Christian idea of a fundamentally fallen or corrupt
nature that always risks turning our spirit away from God. The operative notion
here is of a spirit that is polukinetos
(perpetually moving), and needs to be rendered immobile and fixed onto God
through the permanent vigilance of thought (Cassian in Foucault 1997 pg247).
There is an analogy originating in the Discourses of Epictetus and elaborated
by Seneca that Cassian borrows to illustrate the role of conscience. In this
analogy conscience is the moneychanger of the self scrutinising thought as if
examining the quality of the coins. Are they the correct weight and purity? Are
they mixed with impure desire? Just as
the moneychanger checks the coins for the effigy of the Emperor, so too must
the Christian check his thoughts for the effigy of God so not to be drawn away
from Him into sin.
The relationship between the student and the ancient
master and the monk and Bishop were also significantly different, the latter
being a very explicit relation of obedience in which "self-examination is
subordinated to obedience and the permanent verbalisation of thoughts. By
telling himself not only his thoughts but also the smallest movements of
consciousness, his intentions, the monk stands in a hermeneutic relation not
only to the master but to himself" (Foucault 1997 pg248). It is this
form of penitential procedure, this form of monastic and confessional relation
that demands permanent verbalisation that Foucault claims constitutes the
paradigm for modern confessional discourses of power such as psychiatry, an
analysis he began with the first volume of his History of Sexuality in 1976.
The decisive difference between the two forms described
can clearly be seen by examining the role of self-renunciation in each: firstly in exomologesis “penitence of sin does not have as its target the
establishing of an identity but, instead, serves to mark the refusal of the
self, the breaking away from self: ego
non sum, ego. This formula is at the heart of the publicatio sui. It represents a break with one’s past identity.
Self-revelation is at the same time self destruction” (Foucault 1997 pg245). In
exagoreusis however the relationship
is quite different: “Here, obedience is complete control of behaviour by the
master, not a final autonomous state. It is a sacrifice of the self, of the
subjects own will” (Ibid pg246). In the
earlier lectures given at the College de France Foucault summarised this
distinction arguing in the case of the more ancient form that direction is a
jurisdiction of actions with a view to the subject's autonomisation. Whereas in
the later form direction is obedience to the other with veridiction of oneself
for its instrument (Foucault 2014 pg308).
It is thus clear what Afary and Anderson miss
in their reading is the central place of autonomy in Foucault’s analysis of
these rituals. Although both forms of Christian confession require a type of
self renunciation the status of the will in each is different. In exomologesis despite the traumatic and
very public ritual of penance the subject retains the status of an autonomous
individual whose self sacrifice before the community is ultimately tied to a
personal relationship with God rather than obedience to an earthly master.
There is a break with a past identity, the identity of the sinner, but not a
renunciation of the will. This is not the case with exagoreusis where the ritual of self effacement becomes a permanent
verbalization under the gaze of a master (in this case the bishop) who never
ceases to demand further verbal examination and obedience. As such this second,
and as Foucault argues more important form of confessional discourse, models
itself on the renunciation of the will not just the self. What is in question
with this distinction is I believe not Foucault’s preference for the more
archaic form of confession, as Afary and Anderson claim, but rather a critique
of modern confessional forms that bare the signature of that renunciation of
the will characteristic of exagoreusis.
For as he claims in a late interview the questions of autonomy and freedom are
intimately linked to the subject’s constitution as an ethical being: the slave
has no ethics (Foucault 1997 pg286). The criticism he thus aims at exagoreusis is precisely to do with the
type of power relation through which the demand for self-examination is
articulated. This critique and the counterpoising of it with other forms of
confessional practice allow us to see that the way such practices developed and
have been handed down to us could have been otherwise, and that this knowledge
gives us the possibility of thinking differently about and possibly changing
such practices in the future.
If Foucault appeared to show enthusiasm for the
Iranian passion plays and rituals during the uprising it is perhaps because in
them he saw practices of truth and ethical subjectivation that in his own words
represented a more radical rejection than simply the ousting of the Shah; the
rejection by a people not only of foreigners, but of everything that had
constituted, for years, for centuries, its political destiny (Foucault in Afary
and Anderson pg253). The "political destiny" mentioned here is I
think clearly the one imposed by Western powers and Western notions of
modernisation in which such overt expressions of religiosity are consigned to
history, not (as Afary and Anderson claim) some kind of meta-historical
narrative that Foucault is projecting onto Iranian culture. For as he claims
during the same conversation with Claire Briere and Pierre Blanchet published
in their book of 1979, the Iranian people were not just demanding regime change
but were saying "we have to change ourselves. Our way of being, our
relationship with others, with things, with eternity, with God, etc., must be
completely changed, and there will only be a true revolution if this radical
change in our experience takes place" Ibid pg255). As is generally the
case with Foucault's work it is the rupture in the ordinary course of history
that he is seeking, not the movement of any progressivist grand-narrative form
of history, even one opposed to Western progressivism.
Was There Still Naiveté?
While Afary and Anderson's arguments are
clearly overstated it may also be claimed that Foucault's enthusiasm contained
a degree of naiveté. However this being so one should resist the urge to
condemn and especially the demand to recant. In the concrete situation that
would entail effectively saying Foucault would have done better by remaining
silent or as some commentors did argue that even the Shah's murderous regime is
a better option than any kind of Islamic republic. It also seems apparent that
for Foucault the principle danger was that the revolution would fall back away
from the religious element that for him constituted it's greatest strength and
move towards a more secular bourgeois revolution of the European kind; a
concern he expressed to Briere and Blanchet: "Many here and some in Iran
are waiting for and hoping for the moment when secularisation will at last come
back to the fore and reveal the good, old type of revolution we have always
known. I wonder how far they will be taken along this strange, unique road, in
which they seek, against the stubbornness of their destiny, against everything
they have been for centuries, something quite different" (Ibid pg260). The
risk of theocracy and what that may entail did indeed seem secondary to
concerns about the nature of political life and government more generally. In a
letter to Iranian interim government leader Mehdi Bazargan Foucault quips that
"concerning the expression "Islamic government", why cast
immediate suspicion on the adjective "Islamic"? The word
"government" suffices, in itself, to awaken vigilance" (Ibid
pg261).
Similarly the hope expressed in that letter that
by invoking Islam the government would place limitations on its sovereignty grounded
in religious obligations now appears hopelessly optimistic. His view may well have
been informed by his studies of the Reformation and the radical elements of
that era such as the Anabaptists, Presbyterians of the 17th century and even
Catholic radical reformers such as Savonarola. All three are mentioned by
Foucault in his article of Oct 8th 1978 in comparison with the thunderous
speeches of the mullahs in Tehran. The romance of the messianic figure calling
forth the apocalypse to sweep the threshing floor clean is one that clearly
appealed to him. However these radical elements that threaten the order of
things to their very core are of a very different kind of religious rupture to that
of an established governmental regime that grounds itself in a transcendent obligation.
Ultimately as the work of Giorgio Agamben has amply shown all sovereignty
whether secular or otherwise is grounded upon a transcendent principle of
exception that rules out the popular will as a internalised point of restraint.
Hobbes' Leviathan holds both the Crosier and the Sword being final arbiter of
all matters secular and religious. Khomeini would come under the new
constitution of the Islamic Republic to hold similar authority. Foucault was
thus right to insist that the problem lay with the issue of government. However
he was mistaken in thinking the religious factor that fuelled the revolution
would stand in opposition to future governmental rationality. In the end they
proved cosy bedfellows.
It is undoubtedly the case that Foucault's
experiences in Iran deeply affected the orientation of his work. The series of studies
on governmentality that culminated in the lectures of 1978/79 titled The Birth of Biopolitics gave way after 1979
to new concerns with the constitution of subjectivity and what he called "technologies
of the self" often involving extended engagement with ancient philosophy. The
lectures at the College De France during the final three years of Foucault’s
life are almost entirely devoted to the notion of epimeleia heautou (care of the self) and more broadly the
relationship between philosophy and spirituality. One might even see these
analyses as detailed clarifications of what was lost in translation in his
writings on Iran. It would be too much I think to claim that the outcome of the
Iranian revolution dampened his enthusiasm for the possibility of a radical
rupture in Western modernity but the work he produced afterwards is in many
ways a more modest and limited analysis of the possibilities of political
spirituality and self transformation; but no less useful and interesting as a
result.
To conclude; the numerous references to
Foucault’s uncritical approach to his writing on Iran and his stubborn refusal
to seriously acknowledge the dangers inherent in the uprising are refuted by
what I think is his most telling and philosophical reflection on the Iranian
movement and ‘revolt’ in general. It’s worth quoting in full.
It is
certainly not shameful to change one’s opinions, but there is no reason to say
that one’s opinion has changed when one is against hands being chopped off
today, after having been against the tortures of the SAVAK yesterday.
No one
has the right to say, “revolt for me, the final liberation of each man hinges
on it”. But I do not agree with those who would say, “It is useless to revolt,
it will always be the same.” One does not dictate to those who risk their lives
in the face of power. Is it right to rebel, or not? Let us leave this question
open. It is a fact that people rise up, and it is through this that a
subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone) introduces itself into
history and gives it its life. A delinquent puts his life on the line against
abusive punishment, a madmen cannot stand anymore being closed in and pushed
down, or a people rejects a regime that oppresses it. This does not make the
first one innocent, does not cure the second, and does not guarantee to the
third the results that were promised. No one, by the way, is required to stand
in solidarity with them. No one is required to think that these confused voices
sing better than others and speak the truth in its ultimate depth. It is enough
that they exist and that they have against them all that strives to silence
them, to make it meaningful to listen to them and to search for what they want
to say. A question of morality? Perhaps. A question of reality, certainly. All
the disillusionments of history will not change this. It is precisely because
there are such voices that human time does not take the form of evolution, but
that of “history” (Foucault in
Afary and Anderson pg266).
Revolt does not guarantee redemption. Just as
the man in revolt is ultimately inexplicable all uprisings are similarly
undecidable. It is to Foucault’s credit that at this time of undecidabilty he
put himself on the side of the revolt, the rupture in history, rather than
accept the Western blackmail of being either for or against some supposedly
self evident outcome. Today when again we face this same crisis in Egypt, in
Syria and elsewhere we should remember Foucault’s wager and remain watching a
bit underneath history, a little behind politics, but always with those in
revolt against arbitrary power.
References:
-Afaray,Janet and Anderson, Kevin B, 2005 – Foucault and the Iranian Revolution:
Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago, University of Chicago Press)
-Foucault, Michel 1977 - Discipline and Punish
(London, Penguin Books)
-Foucault, Michel 1997 – Ethics:Essential Works of Foucault Vol 1
(London Penguin Books)
-Foucault, Michel 2005 – The Hermeneutics of
the Subject (Lectures at the College De France 1981-1982) (New York, Picador)
-Foucault, Michel 2010 – The Birth of Biopolitics (Basingstoke,
Palgrave Macmillan)
-Foucault,Michel 2014 - On the Government of the Living (Lectures at the College De France 1979-1980) (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan)
