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

170 Epilogue
McCarthyite tactics led many leftists and progressives to close ranks, making
the needed critique of positions like those of Chomsky and Zinn harder to
carry out.
Some anti-imperialists went even further, such as the French postmodemist
philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In a long opinion piece published in Le
Monde on November 3, 2001, Baudrillard not only developed a justification
of the nineteen suicide attackers, but also seemed to express a certain admira­
tion fo r them. He wrote that September 11 "represents both the high point of
the spedacle and the purest type of defiance" and that therefore, "it could be
forgiven" (2001). In Baudrillard's essay, Al Qaeda represented the "other" of
the U.S.-led global system of domination, with nary a word about the various
forms of domination that it and its co-thinkers had established, from Iran and
Afghanistan to Sudan. Baudrillard also attempted to link September 11 to the
anti-globalization movement:
When the situation has been so thoroughly monopolized, when power has
been so formidably consolidated by the technocratic machine and by one­
dimensional thought [pensee unique I, what means of turning the tables remains
besides terrorism? In dealing all the cards to itself, the system forced the Other
to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because
the game is ferocious. Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity
to the heart of a generalized system of exchange. All those singularities (species,
individuals, cultures), which have paid with their deaths for the establishment
of a global system of commerce ruled by a single power, avenge themselves by
transferring the situation to terrorism. (Baudrillard 2001; emphasis added)
1b.is article produced a pungent retort a few days later from the liberal writer
and Le Monde editor Alain Minc, who instead linked "Islamic fundamen­
talism" to "fascism," accusing Baudrillard of "a morbid fascination for the
terrorists" and pointing as well to his long-standing philosophical "anti­
humanism" (Minc 2001). As mentioned in our introduction, Minc went on
to link BaudriIlard's stance to that of Foucault during the Iranian Revolution:
"After Michel Foucault, advocate of Khomeinism in Iran and therefore in the­
ory of its exadions, here is Baudrillard, philosopher of the terrorist model"
(2001). Even some of Baudrillard's language, especially the sentence about
th e "irreducible singularity" of the September 11 suicide attacks, echoed Fou­
cault's descriptions of the Iranian Islamism in 1978-79, which, as we have
seen, he regarded as a form of "irreducible" opposition to Western modernity.
Not all voices on the Left were as one-sided as those of Chomsky or
Zinn, let alone Baudrillard. The U.S. literary theorist Michael Berube, who