Foucault and Iran

My attention has been drawn to a new book about Foucault in Iran. I would like to say a couple of things about this topic, partly because I suspect that this episode in Foucault’s career will be pressed into the service of certain current arguments. In fact, I suspect the existence of those arguments ‘authorised’ the commissioning of the book – ‘topicality’ is a familiar imprimatur. The ‘topicality’ in question would be something like ‘Western left intellectuals being naïve about Islam and, motivated by opposition to the West, seduced by an Other they almost totally misunderstand.’ I’m guessing, of course. (see this article, btw)

So, just two small points. It would certainly be foolish to try and represent Foucault as some sort of typical ‘left intellectual’, as occupying that polemically convenient place. To assign him to this place runs directly against the unpredictable, contradictory lines of his thinking and action. Pro-Iranian revolution, yes; reportedly also pro-Israeli, scornfully dismissive of Marxism; who, if he found the ‘political spirituality’ of the Iranian revolt intuitively fascinating also loved and perhaps found neon fragments of utopia in the vast highways and the bars of California.

Secondly, to find the future in the past. Not the immediate past, which typically appears only as the pre-history of the present, but a past so different, so unfamiliar, that it confronts and questions the assumptions of the present and so clears a space for a possible future. Or, indeed, a past which offers us figures, sketches of such a future. So, for example, the sexual practices of ancient Greece – were these not, for Foucault, partly a way of thinking his way outside modern notions of ‘sexuality’ and the historically ingrained ‘regime’ supporting them. And didn’t Foucault discover also in the Greeks an idea of ‘self-fashioning’, of life as art, which dissolved some of the Present’s cherished categories and, at the same time, pointed towards or opened a space for the New.

There is a phrase of Kristeva’s that comes to mind here – ‘an archaeology in search of a utopia’. A curious phrase: a digging into the past which both unsettles the foundation of a seemingly natural Present but which also unearths forms, practices, concepts which suggest other possibilities of being in the world. Sometimes a site of ruins and a construction site can be remarkably similar. Now this motif, wherein the search for the New, the genuinely New (a search partly prompted by the ‘false’ novelty of the commodity-world) co-exists with the leap into the ancient/ archaic past, seems to me an eminently Modernist theme, and we might place the likes of Foucault in such a category. I assume that this take on Modernism is not unfamiliar to you, this antiquarian/ avant-garde simultaneity. I take it we recognise those moments when the present seizes on something from the remote past as it flashes up like a cryptogram or photographic negative of the Future.

But what has this to do with the Iranian revolution, which is not an event in the remote past but in the present. Yes and No. The present is not homogeneous after all. Interestingly enough, that phrase from Kristeva I quoted to you, ‘an archaeology in search of a utopia’ was one she used about her trip to China. Not a tiger’s leap into the past but a geographical leap into a space where forms from the past (as it were) were still current. What Kristeva, it seems, half expected to find in China was the ancient and the New joining hands over the Present. The archaic and the avant-garde, with the latter taking some of its poetry from the former, could here side-step, avoid the traps set by the present, the trap of being just the ‘latest thing’, the latest instalment of Progress.

To which there are a number of responses. First, and most quotidian, she misunderstood the nature of what was happening in China. So, all there is to say is that her representation of what was happening didn’t correspond to the reality. You’ve then got things nicely set up for an easy polemical point. Well done. Secondly, bracket off, for the time being, the ‘reality of what is going on in China’ and look at the thinking to which ‘China’ gives shape. Look at it in its own terms. Look at the concepts that China generates, see if they are interesting, productive concepts.

Now needless to say, in talking about Kristeva and China I am also necessarily talking about Foucault and Iran. Believe me, I’d intended to look in detail at one of his writings on the subject, to examine the thinking of those writings, but not just in terms of the impoverished categories of representation/ misrepresentation, but no, this post has already  wandered far beyond the bye line of the Kotsko readability rule, and those of you who have reached this far, you surprise me. But perhaps I will post something else, after all, on one of Foucault's Iranian essays.  

Comments

[hum]

i for one would like to read more of your thoughts on this subject.
just a quick point.
foucault's self-criticism of his take on iran was that he had underestimated the difficulties of journalism. it also led him - who had helped found "libe" - to analyze/critique the relation between journalism and 'doxology.'( needless to say, this is of relevance to the blogosphere and the proliferation of 'opinions.')
speaking of "libe", perhaps you know they have a dossier on foucault, marking the 20th anniversary of his death.

http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Rubrique=FOUCAULT

[Matt]

May I just say, I would too, Mark.

Regarding Foucault, Nietzsche and 'the Orient' assume you've seen this?

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/pdf/128_almond.pdf

Concerning Kristeva, if possible I'd very much like to qualify what was said in passing earlier about her use of language when I get the chance, but that's another subject. The Tel Quel generation's response to Maoist China was indeed naive (especially in hindsight, Sollers and Derrida perhaps excepted?), but that doesn't mean one should ever feel comfortable dismissing their larger project or priorities, the orientation of "their" sustained commitment (itself complexly historical, and in ways newly sensitive to langauge esp.) tout court or simply out of hand.

[Amish Lovelock]

Was the Tel Quel generation's response to revolution in China so naive?

Robert Young has a few things to say on Foucault and Iran in his "postcolonialism" books. He has a thought provoking look at Mao and Althusser in a new introduction to the second edition of "White Mythologies".

[hum]

on the subject of foucault and iran, may i recommend the chapter "la revolte aux mains nues" in didier eribon's "michel foucault". i think it has been translated in english?
tel quel certainly had it's moment, but after a certain point sollers and kristeva are, i don't know how to say this nicely, utterly insufferable. matt, you would be taken aback by sollers' vituperation about blanchot ( that i will not even quote ), same for kristeva on derrida.

[Matt]

hum,

yeah i've gotten wind of it, in bits and pieces.

[Mark Kaplan]

'la revolte aux mains nue' - isn't this translated in vol. 3 of the Essential Works?

[hum]

i don't have the english translations of "dits et ecrits" ( i imagine that's what the "essential works" are? ) so cannot vouch for the translation.
anyway, i wasn't referring above to that text, rather to the chapter of the same name in didier eribon's book.

[Catherine]

On the subject of the visualising the new via a recourse to the past - I believe that something of this nature is what Walter Benjamin proposes in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History", and in sections of the Arcades Project. By blasting an image of the past out of the continuum of history - you use the phrase "a past so different, so unfamiliar, that it confronts and questions the assumptions of the present and so clears a space for a possible future" - Benjamin states that we may perform an act of 'soothsaying', and investigate the future.

The value of this method for Benjamin is that, through it, we do not investigate the future directly - it allows us to consider the future, or arrest the present, without fetishizing "the new", which is the trap that historicism falls into. All this does, by Benjamin's argument, is legitimise the status quo, as it valorises the category of 'progress'.

I think (I don't have the text on hand unfortunately) that the French Revolution's depiction of itself via the imagery of Rome (David's paintings, for instance) is the example that Benjamin uses.

[Catherine]

It just occurs to me - I'm probably spelling out the much too obvious in the above post ;)

It's interesting to see such similar points crossed in Kristeva and Benjamin's trajectories, however.

Thanks for the post - it didn't wander too far at all.

[mark kaplan]

Never be afraid to point out the blindingly obvious - we might have been blinded by its obviousness. Your right that immersion in the remote past can be the most intent and tactful way of preparing for/ thinking about the future.

Taking a look at your blog, glad to see you're a fan of Einbahnstrasse - a sufficient condition of being added to the CS blogroll.

[Thomas]

The first thing that comes to my mind is the most well noted case of a philosopher being, in hindsight, over-optimistic in his analysis of a popular movement ... Heidegger and early Nazi movement. (Or, as Nietzsche is mentioned above, Nietzsche's analysis of early Wagner and the hoped for rebirth of tragedy from music.)

I worry about this myself as i am prone to read too optimystically [oops, typo, but i decided i like it so i'm leaving it] into people's movements, the Zapitista movement being the latest for me. Eventually, i suppose, i'll support one that will eventually turn into a Pol Pot "Killing Field", but then again, maybe my discernment may save me.

[martin deck]

I can't help wondering if you've taken the time in the four months since this post to actually look at and/or read the book in question, "Foucault and the Iranian Revolution."

I found this blog looking for a "pro-Foucault" (for want of a better epithet) reaction to the book.

Aside from your blog, the only thing I found was a review by Jonathan Ree in the Nation, which, I must confess, I may not fully understand, being a trifle under-versed in Foucault. The review is, however, a little over-clever and more than a little disingenuous.

The subtitle of the book, "Gender and the Seductions of Islamism" tells you already what the book focuses on: Foucault's blindness or indifference to the status of women in Islamist thinking and practice. Ree's review doesn't even begin to touch on this theme.

How 'bout you?

[Mark]

Martin, to answer your initial question directly, I have read parts of the book but not all of it, and would like to write a response at some point. I'm a little curious about the use of "Islamism" in the title. I was under the impression that this term (in it's contemporary sense) came into force after the Iranian revolution. This doesn't seem to be entirely true - there's a history here:

http://hnn.us/articles/1671.html