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

30 Foucault's Discourse
pleasure and adopt a "polymorphism" that refused any limits on one's objects
of sexual desire . Only in this way could the old "regimes of desire" be
deposed (Nye 1996, 235).!6
Messianic Confessions
How far can we extend the dualism in Foucault's oeuvre? Can we also suggest
an emerging theological subtext to his discourse? In the late 1970s Foucault
was exploring a new "political spirituality," most notably in his Iran writings.
He engrossed himself in the Christian monastic literature and in Eastern religious
text. This material was apparently intended for a projected fourth volume
of The History of Sexuality, which remains unpublished, since Foucault
had requested no "posthumous publications" (cited in Carrette 1999, 46).
Jeremy Carrette, editor of Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault (1999), and
the Jesuit philosopher James Bernauer, who wrote the introduction to that
book, both suggest that Foucault was indeed mapping out a new spirituality.
Bernauer characterized this as "a Christian style of liberty, which combined
a care of the self with a sacrifice and mortification of that self" (Bernauer,
in Carrette 1999, xiv). This new spirituality did not shun the world; it was
a "spiritual existence" that exposed subjects to the mysteries of themselves
and others (XV).!7 Foucault rejected the notion that the premodern Christian
world was a time of sexual austerity. "Never did sexuality enjoy a more immediately
natural understanding and never did it know a greater 'felicity of
expression' than in the Christian world of fallen bodies and of sin" (Foucault
1963, 57). Foucault's interest in the Iranian Revolution was clearly related to
his wider fascination with the concept of "political spirituality." He wished
to explore this new idea, not only by returning to the practices and rituals
of the early church, but also by searching for it in non-Christian societies
(Carrette 1999, 43). By 1979, Foucault was developing a new hermeneutics
of Christianity, a reading of Christian rituals and techniques that involved
a new concept of spirituality, one that he hoped would accommodate late
twentieth-century attitudes toward sexuality (Hadot 1992).
In April 1978, only months before he visited Iran, Foucault presented the
broad outlines of his future work in a lecture at Tokyo University. He reiterated
his familiar contrast between the East, here again including the Greco­
Roman world as part of the East, and the West. He soon reached, without
reservation, the following conclusion: The discourse on sexuality had very
quickly developed into a scientific discourse in the West, whereas, in the East,
it was shaped around methods that intensified pleasure, hence constituting
"sex:ualityas an art." The East had erotic arts, and the West had sexual science.