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

Notes to Pages 30-44 283
17. The novelist Maurice Clave), a fri end of Foucault, suggested that the "man whose
death was proclaimed in Les Mots et les chases IThe order of things) was 'man without God"
(cited in Carrette 1999, 15).
18. Up to a point, this was correct. Thomas Aquinas wrote of the human being's
"natural inclination to virtue, " which was of course corruptible by · sin. " However,
Aquinas deemed homosexuality to be against nature, a "perversion Ithat) stood in need. of
correction " (1953, 41, 52).
19. Foucault's criticism of psychoanalysis is quite nuanced. He recognizes, for
example, Freud's challenge to biologically based racist theories (Foucault 1978a, 150), but
he does not acknowledge the extent to which many of his own ideas were initially raised by
Freud. For example; Freud readily acknowledged that human beings had an "unmistakably
bisexual disposition " (Freud 1989, 61), that civilization normalized human sexuality, that
ch ild sexuality was suppressed, that polymorphous fo rms of sexuality were prohibited, that
all sexual activity was channeled into heterosexual, monogamous relations, and that this
constituted a tremendously damaging psychological trauma resulting in neurosis. Unlike
Foucault, Freud believed that such restrictions were a necessary price to be paid in order to
establish modem civilization, to attain a measure of peace and security, and to control the
aggressive drives.
20. For another discussion of Freud and Foucault, see Stoler 1995. Earlier, Nietzsche
had intoned against "that will toward self-tormenting, that repressed cruelty of the
animal-man made inward and scared back into himself, the creature imprisoned in the
'state' so as to be tamed" (1967, 92).
21. Recently, some scholars have attributed Di5asters to Coya's son, but the evidence
is inconclusive.
22. For a discussion of the visual representation of these symbolic roles, see
Chelkowski and Dabashi 1999.
Chapter 2
1. On July 13, 2002, a Shi'ite passion play, or Ta'ziyeh, was performed at Lincoln
Center in New York. The performance was preceded by a daylong conference on "Ta'ziyeh:
Performing Iran's Living Epic Tradition, " at the Asia Society and Museum, with leading
scholars in the fields of performance and Iranian studies. This chapter has benefited from
the performance and the papers at these events.
2. A few years after the revolution, these same newspapers were filled with pictures of
martyrs who had lost their lives in the jails of the Islamic Republic. Even Iranian student
organizations in the United States drew their political legitimacy from the number of
martyrs they had given to the cause. On these issues see especially Abrahamian 1999.
3. The phrase "the Karbala paradigm, n used below, was coined by Michael Fischer
(1980).
4. Shi'ites ofIran also refer to designated leaders of the Friday prayers as imam jom'eh.
In Sunni Islam, the term imam is used more routinely and can refer to any high cleric
(Richard 1995, 27-29).
5. The Garden of the Martyrs (Rowzat al-Shohada) was one of the first such accounts