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Notes to Pages 9-2 3
6. We would like to thank Michael Uiwy for helping us to clarify this point.
7 . Georg Stauth (199 1 ) has written that, rather than supporting the Iranian Islamists,
Foucault was merely analyzing their movement (see also Olivier and Labbe 1991). Another
Foucault supporter, Keating, pointed out that "Foucault turned out to be horribly wrong
about the Iranian Revolution ," but that, nonetheless, his Iran writings offered something
important. This was because they revealed a "largely unarticulated theory of.resistance"
(Keating 199 7, 181, 182). For very helpful critical analyses of the relationship of Foucault's
thought to matters of cultural aiterity involving Japan, Iran, and Islam, see Fuyuki Kurasawa
(1999) and Ian Almond (2004).
Chapter 1
1. Of course, as discussed below, both Foucault and the Islamists deployed numerous
elements of modernity. For the Islamists, this meant utilizing ail the levers of power of a
modern state after the revolution.
2. Two decades earlier, the neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse expressed a somewhat
similar view in his Eros and Civilization: "There is no freedom from administration and
its laws because they appear as the ultimate guarantors of liberty. The revolt against
them would be the supreme crime again-this time not against the despotic animal who
forbids gratification but against the wise order which secures the goods and services for
the progressive satisfaction of human needs. Rebellion now appears as the crime against
the whole of human society and therefore as beyond reward and beyond redemption.
However, the very progress of civilization tends to make this rationality a spurious
one. The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of
domination; they themselves become instruments of repression. " Unlike Foucault, Marcuse
believed that the system maintained itself through the manipulation of the individual's
consciousness, including the promotion of "thoughtless leisure activities" and a relaxation
of sexual taboos (1962, 85-86).
3. Foucault adopts two seemingly contradictory attitudes toward the concept of
silence in volume 1 of the History of Sexuality. In one place, as above, he praises the
premodern culture of silence, "where secrets of sex are not forced out" (1978a, 59), in
contrast to the "regime of truth " established after the seventeenth century in Europe. In
another place, however, he criticizes the silence imposed upon children conceming their
own sexuality in the modern era, which results in parents and educators speaking for
children in such matters (27). What he misses is that premodern silences are also imposed
and forced, especially on women.
4. Michael Gillespie makes a valuable point when he writes that Heidegger's rejection
of categorical reason in favor of pure intuitionism runs the danger of "mistaking the
subrational for the suprarational" (1984, 174).
5. As we will see below, Foucault did explore the regulation of fertility in the West
and the racist views about genetics and colonized peoples that accompanied it. Here again,
his emphasis was on the West.
6. Foucault often leaves out facts that could undermine his thesis. For example, he
does not mention that after the French Revolution, the penal code of 1791 decriminalized
h omosexuality and only recognized one type of sexual crime, the rape of a woman. France
thus became the first European country to abrogate antisodomy laws. This did not mean