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

The Paradoxical World of Foucault 31
These were "two completely different discourses, belonging to two equally
different kinds of society" (Foucault 1978b, 119).
In this formulation about "two completely different discourses," Foucault
was surely in the realm of Orientalism. This notion of two separate discourses
was of course inaccurate with regard to the Middle East. To take one example,
the writings of scientists and philosophers such as Avicenna (980-1037 CE)
on anatomy were taught at European medical institutions until the seventeenth
century. Thus, Foucault was imposing a type of homogeneity on Eastern
thought that seemed at variance with his frequently expressed rejection of
metanarratives. By 1978, he further divided the history of Western sexuality
into three periods, Greco-Roman, Christian, and bourgeois:
The First moment: Greek and Roman antiquity, where sexuality was free,
expressed itself without difficulties, and developed effectively, was devoted,
in any case, to a discourse in the form of an erotic art. Then Christianity
intervened, Christianity which, for the first time in the history of the West,
would pose a great prohib ition on sexuality, which said "no" to pleasure
and by the same token to sex. This "no," this prohibition, led to a silence
on sexuality, a silence on sexuality essentially founded on these moral
prohibitions. But the bourgeoisie, starting in the sixteenth century, finding
themselves in an hegemonic situation, a situation of economic dominance
and cultural hegemony, somehow recaptured for themselves, in order to
reapply-more severely and with more rigorous means-this Christian asceticism,
this Christian refusal of sexuality, and in consequence prolonged it until the
nineteenth century, wh ere, finally, in the very last years, we began to lift the
veil with Freud. (Foucault 1978b, 120; emphasis added)
Here, Foucault surely recognized the limitations that Christianity had imposed
on sexuality. As we shall see below, he also pointed out that Roman culture
had already instituted many of the prohibitions we attribute to Christianity
and that the modern bourgeoisie had applied these prohibitions with a
meticulous rigor that had not been intended in the Christian era: "Polygamy,
pleasure outside of marriage, valorizations of pleasure, I sexual] indifference
toward children, had already essentially disappeared from the Roman world
before Christianity" (121). Only a small, rich elite refused to adhere to these
prohibitions. By increasing the responsibility of both Roman and bourgeois
ethical concepts for the modern prohibitions on sexuality, was Foucault trying
to reduce the burden on the Church for instituting these prohibitions and
hoping to present a more favorable view of medieval Christianity?
Earlier, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault had stressed