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

The Paradoxical World of Foucault
many dangers and contacts, to be isolated from others so that it would retain
its differential value. (Foucault 1978a, 123)
As Stoler points out, Foucault's use of the passive voice in this sentence covered
up the fact that this pampering and cultivation of the bourgeois body
required a whole host of maids, servants, butlers, and wet-nurses, who performed
these functions in the colonies. These new technologies of the body
relied on "an intimate set of exploitative sexual and service relations between
European men and native women, between European women and native
men, shaped by the sexual politics of class and race" (Stoler 1995, 111) .
. But why did Foucault avoid a more in-depth discussion of colonial culture,
when a number of contemporary French intellectuals were engaged precisely
in such a project? Foucault's fascination with the more traditional social
norms of the East and the binary distinction he maintained between modern
and premodern social orders might have prevented him from exploring the
colonial roots of the European technologies of sexuality. A closer exploration
of imperialism would have required a discussion of the gradual transformation
of the East by modernity and Western modalities, as well as interracial
sexual relations between Western intellectuals, colonialists, or tourists and
the indigenous population. All of this could have led him to seriously rethink
his project. Thus, a more porous, fluid, and hybrid interchange between the
East and the West is missing from Foucault's discourse, though it can be found
in the writings of several of his contemporaries, including Frantz Fanon and
Albert Memmi, whose psychoanalytic observations on sex across the racial divide
relied on Freud and Lacan, as well as Hegel, Marx, and Sartre (see Fanon
1967; Memmi 1965).
Foucault's Grand Narrative
As Foucault wrote in 1971, in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, " the social
world showed an endless repetition of the process of domination, which
played itself out in "rituals that imposed rights and obligations" (Foucault
1971, 85). The search for truth in history was not possible. The desire for
knowledge, the ultimate task of history, was useless and even destructive,
since "it may be that mankind will eventually perish from this passion for
knowledge" (96). Therefore, the main point in doing history was to discover
discontinuities. In this new way of writing history, which he alternately called
"genealogy" or "effective history, " Foucault suggested that the genealogist
does not pretend that he can go back in time only to "restore an unbroken
continuity." His work did not resemble "the evolution of a species, " nor was
21