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

The Paradoxical World of Foucault 23
of support for the two great reformers of the period, the Quaker William
Tuke (1732-1822) in England and the French revolutionary Phillippe Pinel
(1745-1826). The two reformers had simply subjected the insane to the intense
gaze of the " other." Gradually, through regimented work, observation,
surveillance, and the alternation of reward and punishment, they had instilled
a system of self-observation and self-discipline. The purpose of this
new treatment was not to understand the mentally ill better or even to relieve
them of their traumas. It was to control their behavior and conduct in
order to make them adhere to society's codes of normality and proper morality.
Here again, Foucault followed Nietzsche in his negative assessment of
the French Revolution. Where Nietzsche argued that the French Revolution
represented the triumph of the slave morality, of "Ieveling" and of "wanting
to set up a supreme rights of the majority" (Nietzsche 1967, 54), Foucault
critiqued the normative power of the French Revolution and its new institutions.6
Foucault made a similar argument in 1963, in The Birth of the Clinic,
where he wrote that a new medical "gaze" emerged in the eighteenth century,
breaking with the earlier, traditional form of medicine, which had relied
on classifying illness and curing a particular category of illness. Instead,
medicine began focusing on the symptoms of the individual. This transformation
took place as a result of the new sociopolitical climate of the French
Revolution. Once the patient is treated as an individual, a new conception
of life and death also emerges: "Disease breaks away from the metaphysic
of evil, to which it had been related for centuries" (Foucault 1994a, 196).
This new empirical science of medicine immediately defines human beings
by their limits. The magic of modem medicine is that it endlessly repudiates
death: "health replaces salvation" and scientists become philosophers. Medicine
"is fully engaged in the philosophical status of man." Contemporary
thought was still in this empirical straitjacket: "We are only just beginning to
disentangle a few of the threads which are still so unknown to us that we immediately
assume them Lo be either marvelously new or absolutely archaic"
(199).
In The Order of Things, first published in 1966, Foucault developed similar
perspectives, this time focusing on the evolution of language and its relation
to scientific inquiry in the seventeenth century. Until the modern period,
human beings had assumed that there was a relationship of "sympathy and
similitudes" between the objects of nature and their purpose. For example,
he noted, the walnut's shape was similar to the human head and, therefore,
walnuts were regarded as a cure for various forms of head ailments. The Renaissance
and the introduction of the printing press elevated language to the