Michael Foucault and Militant Islam

Heidegger had his infatuation with National Socialism. Sartre with Communism; and Focoult with . . . Radical Islam? -- Alas, according to Kevin Anderson and Janet Afary's Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005). The Boston Globe has the story:

When Foucault went to Tehran, he was France's dominant public intellectual, famous for a critique of modernity carried out through unsparing dissections of modern institutions that reversed the conventional wisdom about prisons, madness, and sexuality. In his most famous work, "Discipline and Punish," Foucault argued that liberal democracy was in fact a "disciplinary society" that punished with less physical severity in order to punish with greater efficiency. More broadly, his counternarrative of the Enlightenment suggested that the modern institutions we imagined were freeing us were in fact enslaving us in insidious ways. . . .

Foucault was virtually alone among Western observers, Anderson and Afary argue, in embracing the specifically Islamist wing of the revolution. Indeed, Foucault pokes fun at the secular leftists who thought they could use the Islamists as a weapon for their own purposes; the Islamists alone, he believed, reflected the "perfectly unified collective will" of the people.

The Iranian Revolution, Anderson and Afary write, appealed to certain of Foucault's characteristic preoccupations — with the spontaneous eruption of resistance to established power, the exploration of the limits of rationality, and the creativity unleashed by people willing to risk death. It also tied into his burgeoning interest in a "political spirituality" (by which he meant the return of religion into politics, a suspicious phenomenon in rigorously secular France) whose rise was then still obscured by the Cold War. These preoccupations made Foucault both more sensitive to the power of political religion, but also more prone to soft-pedal its dangers. In his articles, Foucault compared the Islamists to Savonarola, the Anabaptists, and Cromwell's militant Puritans. The comparisons were intended to flatter. . . .

There is a long tradition of Western intellectuals going abroad to sing the praises of revolutionaries in distant lands and finding in them the realization of their own intellectual hopes. But the irony of Foucault's embrace of the Iranian Revolution was that the earlier intellectuals who had sung hymns to tyrants tended to share a set of beliefs in the kind of absolutes — Marxism, humanism, rationality — that Foucault had made it his life's work to overturn. Rather than pronounce from on high, Foucault sought to listen to what he took to be the authentic voice of marginal people in revolt and let it speak through him. In practice, this turned out to be a distinction without a difference.

The philosopher and the ayatollah, by Wesley Yang. The Boston Globe June 12, 2005.

Herbert on Heideggar

Did you know Franklin Herbert -- most popular for his SF novel/series Dune -- wrote a novel loosely-based on the philosophy of Martin Heideggar? It's called The Santaroga Barrier.

The Heideggerian philosophy blog Enowning relays the story and a brief critical review. For those who aren't amused and/or impressed by Herbert's literary exercise, try browsing a copy of Heidegger's 1927 Sein und Zeit ["Being and Time"] next time you're at a bookstore, and imagine rendering it as fiction.

Fight Club: The Return of Hobbes "Hobbes is reborn as Tyler to save "Jack" (a grown-up Calvin) from the slough of un-comic despair." From Metaphilm.com, which "absorb, filter, review, and interpret cinema for your entertainment and enlightenment." (For treatment of other films (including Spider Man II) click here).

Dictionary of a History of Ideas

Dictionary of a History of Ideas Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener, was published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1973-74. . . . The DHI has been out of print for many years. Aware of the new potential offered by electronic access to texts, the Directors and Board of Editors of the Journal of the History of Ideas authorized a grant to support digitization of the DHI. Substantial support has also been provided by the University of Virginia Library through its Electronic Text Center. The project has been undertaken with the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons and of The Gale Group, of which Scribner's is a part.

The Hazards of being a Radical Academic

So I'm reading The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller -- a biography about a philosopher I really didn't get the opportunity to study back in college. Miller portrays Foucault as perpetually obsessed with getting the upper hand on Sartre, desperately vying for academic recognition and lashing out in vehement opposition to the French existentialist's humanistic philosophy of free will and responsibility.

I'm very much amused by Foucault's love-hate relationship with the political radicals he courted -- embracing them in the thick of conflict with the establishment, 'sticking it to the man', so to speak, as when he joins his pupils in a uprising against his fellow colleagues at the university of Vincennes:

[January 23, 1969] That afternoon at Vincennes, Foucault joined a handful of other professors and some five hundred students and militants in occupying the administration building and amphitheater of the new campus, which had opened for classes just days before. The seizure was ostensibly a show of solidarity with students who had occupied the rector's office at the Sorbonne earlier that day . . . but to paraphrase a good slogan from the American student movement in those days, the issue was not the issue. The main point, one suspects, was to explore again, the creative potential of disorder. . . .

The occupation lasted less than a day. The police began their assault on the administration building in the predawn hours of January 24. Those still inside, including Foucault, fought back fureiously. . . . Some surrendered. Others, including Foucult, fled to the roof. There, they set about hurling bricks at the police gathered below. Witnesses recall that Foucault exulted in the moment, gleefully lobbing stones -- although he was careful not to dirty his beautiful black velour suit.

Foucault himself was in a position of authority at the university, having personally been charged with assembling the faculty of the department of philosophy. Of course, hiring the most revolutionary among them wasn't the brightest idea:

. . . Foucault, like Dr. Frankenstein, had to cope with the monster he had created in the form of Vincennes philosophy department. Offering countless coures with titles like "Cultural Revolutions" and "Ideological Struggle," Foucault's department naturally attracted dissidents of every conceivable type. Many of his militant colleagues were swept up in the enthusiasm of the moment: in 1970, Judith Miller, a professed Maoist (and Jacques Lacan's daughter), handed out certifications of course credit in philosophy to total strangers on a bus, explaining afterward in the pages of L'Express that "the university is a figment of capitalist society."

The president of the Republic was not amused. The minister of education fired Miller, and moved quickly to decertify the department as a whole . . . in public, Foucault staunchly defended the program, and also the continuing rebellion in the universities: "We have tried to produce the experience of freedom . . ."

In the end, however, Foucault finds his fraternization with the oppressed student minority counterproductive:

. . . the campus was constantly in an uproar, roiled by strikes, marches, and classroom demonstrations. Following the time-honored radical precept that "my closest friend is my own dangerous enemy," militant students targeted Foucault's lectures for disruption.

His patience wore thin. It was one thing to express solidarity with the left in interviews, or by pitching stones from rooftops -- that was fun! But it was quite another thing to have to put up with, day in and day out, with the insane harangues of the various ultra-left sects that stormed through his classroom.

Foucault had begun to feel, as he once suggested, like Sade at Charenton: staging subversive plays in the asylum, and then having the inmates rise in rebellion against the master himself.

Foucault's solution was simple: He spent as little time as possible on campus . . .

Trying to read (much less understand) Foucault can be daunting, but James Miller provides a decent introduction to the philosopher, flavored with his wry sense of humor. (From what I've heard David Macey's The Lives of Michael Foucault is the better of the two biographies, so I might tackle that somewhere down the line).

---

Excerpted from: The Passion of Michael Foucault, by James Miller. Harvard Univ Pr; (April 7, 2000). pp. 176-181.