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that all of the penalties against homosexuality disappeared, let alone the stigma attached to
it (Sibalis 1996). The same penal code also removed some of the sanctions against suicide,
even though leaders of the French Revolution condemned suicide and regarded the body
o(i1 suicide as the property of the state.
7. The new emphasis on the written word and the shift away from the spoken word
had a gendered subtext as well. The spoken word now became merely the female part
of language." The active intellect was associated with writing. and the passive intellect,
with speaking. "Writing was the 'male principle' of language" and contained the "Truth"
(Foucault 1973, 39). Luce Irigaray and other post-structuralist French feminists have
developed this point further.
8. For a probing critique of the empirical. historical. and scientific assumptions and
observations of Foucault, which shows that his chronology was off by · a century in most
cases, see Rousseau 1972-73.
9. Foucault's relationship to Marxism, perhaps the dominant perspective of French
intellectuals from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, should also be mentioned in the
context of his Iran writings. While he had briefly joined the Communist Party in his
youth, by 1966 Foucault was writing about Marx's limitations in The Order of Things:
"Marxism exists in nineteenth century thought like a fish in water: that is, unable to
breathe anywhere else" (1973, 261). Jean-Paul Sartre, who had declared himself a Marxist
a decade earlier, launched an attack on Foucault, accusing him of "rejection of history" and
being trapped in a structuralist "succession of immobilities, " calling the argument in his
book "the last resort the bourgeoisie can enact against Marx" (cited in Macey 1993, 175).
However, such public polemics masked more subtle affinities between Foucault's thought
and some varieties of Marxism, at least through the 1970s. This is because the division
among postwar French intellectuals between humanists and antihumanists was probably
as important as that between Marxists and non-Marxists. On the humanist side, both
existentialist and Marxist, stood Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Henri Lefebvre, and Lucien
Goldmann, while on the antihumanist side, the side of Foucault, one found structuralists
and post-structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Louis
Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu. (For discussions, see Dosse 1991-92 and Anderson 1 9 9 5 . )
Foucault retained some ties to Althusserian Marxism until at least 1977, when he began
to attack and dismiss the Marxist notion of ideology, because in his view it implied not
only a rigid dichotomy between truth and falsehood, but also " something of the order of a
subject" (1977b, 60). This statement was a rejection not only of Marxism in general, but
specifically of Althusserianism, which Foucault now pronounced guilty of the very concept
that Althusser had labored so hard to remove from Marxism, subjectivity. (For a study of
how newer structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers have tended to accuse previous ones
of still holding onto forms of humanism and the subject, see Soper 1986.) In Foucault's
1978-79 Iran writings, one can discern the implicit use of the Marxist concepts of dass or
imperialism, even amid the explicit rejection of Marxism as a modernist ideology. For a
more general exploration of implicit Marxist dimensions in Foucault's thought, including
the many places he used Marx without naming him, see Paolucci 2003 .
10. Diamond and Quinby suggest another point of convergence in that both
feminism and Foucault criticize the claims to universalism in the proclamations of the
Western male elite on truth, freedom, and human nature (1988, ix-xxii). However, we have