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

The Paradoxica l World of Fo uca ult
Silence may be a much more interesting way of having a relationship with
people . .. . I think silence is one of those things that has unfortunately been
dropped from our culture. We don't have a culture of silence; we don't have
a culture of suicide either. The Japanese do, I think. Young Romans or young
Greeks were taught to keep silent in very different ways according to the
people with whom they were interacting. Silence was then a specific form of
experiencing a relationship with others. This is something that I believe is
really worthwhile cultivating. I'm in favor of developing silence as a cultural
ethos. (cited in Carrette 1999, 40)3
Here again, there are echoes of Heidegger, who wrote in Being and Time that
the discourse through which the self is finally brought back from the loud
idle talk of others and conscience is achieved is one of silence. "Remaining
silent has been characterized as an essential possibility of discourse . ... The
discourse of conscience never comes to utterance" (Heidegger 1962, 246). As
we shall see throughout the course of this study, to the extent that there
is an Orientalist subtext in Foucault's work, it is not a geographical and
spatial one, but a philosophical and temporal one, a discourse that moves
across the East/West divide and relies heavily on both Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Foucault's "East" implicitly privileges intuition and silence (read the
silence of mostly youth, women, and the lower classes in premodern social
orders) as the preferred modes of discourse and opens up the possibility
that pre-rational forms of thought could be mistaken for supra-rational
ones.4
For Foucault, silence was especially valued in the Eastern discourse on
sex (Le., what feminists working on the East are just beginning to challenge).
In The History of Sexuality he wrote that there were two great procedures
for producing the truth of sex. The West produced a scientia sexualis, procedures
for telling the truth of sex that were geared to a form of knowledge
as power, while the East produced something quite different. Note, however,
how Rome is here grouped together with Asian and Middle Eastern cultures:
China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies . . . endowed them·
selves with an ars erotica. In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure
itself . . . . There is formed a knowledge that must remain secret, not because of
an element of infamy that might attach to its object, but because of the need
to hold it in the greatest reserve, since, according to tradition, it would lose its
effectiveness and its virtue by being divulged. Consequently, the relationship
to the master who holds the secrets is of paramount importance; only he,
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