foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Introduction 5
existence" -practices that could be refashioned for our time and serve as the
foundation for a new form of spirituality-Foucault often referred to Greco­
Roman texts and early Christian practices. However, many of these practices
also had a strong resemblance to what he saw in Iran. Additionally, many
scholars have wondered about Foucault's sudden tum to the ancient Greco­
Roman world in volumes 2 and 3 of History of Sexuality, and his interest in
uncovering male homosexual practices in this era. We would suggest aI"l: "Oriental"
appropriation here as well. Foucault's description of a male "ethics of
love" in the Greco-Roman world resembles some existing male homosexual
practices of the Middle East and North Africa. Foucault's foray into the
Greco-Roman world might, therefore, have been related to his longstanding
fascination with ars erotica and the erotic arts of the East in particular, since he
sometimes combined the discussion of sexual practices of the contemporary
East with those of the classical Greco-Roman society.
The Iranian experience also raises some questions about Foucault's overall
approach to modernity. First, scholars often assume that Foucault's suspicion
of utopianism, his hostility to grand narratives and universals, and his stress
on difference and singularity rather than totality would make him less likely
than his predecessors on the Left to romanticize an authoritarian politics that
promised radically to refashion from above the lives and thought of a people,
fo r its ostensible benefit. However, his Iran writings showed that Foucault was
not immune to the type of illusions that so many Western leftists had held
with regard to the Soviet Union and, later, China. Foucault did not anticipate
the birth of yet another modem state where old religious technologies
of domination could be refashioned and institutionalized; this was a state
that propounded a traditionalist ideology, but equipped itself with modern
technologies of organization,· surveillance, warfare, and propaganda.
Second, Foucault's highly problematic relationship to feminism becomes
more than an intellectual lacuna in the case of Iran. On a few occasions, Foucault
reproduced statements he had heard from religious figures on gender
relations in a possible future Islamic republic, but he never questioned the
"separate but equal" message of the Islamists. Foucault also dismissed feminist
premonitions that the revolution was headed in a dangerous direction,
and he seemed to regard such warnings as little more than Orientalist attacks
on Islam, thereby depriving himself of a more balanced perspective toward
the events in Iran. At a more general level, Foucault remained insensitive
toward the diverse ways in which power affected women, as against men. He
ignored the fact that those most traumatized by the premodern disciplinary
practices were often women and children, who were oppressed in the name
of tradition, obligation, or honor. In chapter 1, we root his indifference to