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

32 Foucault's Discourse
the continuity between Christian methods of confession and modern techniques
of psychoanalysis and pedagogy. He had argued that the confessional
techniques of Christianity, including the need to reveal all transgressive and
evil thoughts to a priest, gradually lost its ritualistic dimension. It also lost its
exclusivity, spreading through other relationships, whether those of" children
and parents, students and educators, patients and psychiatrists, [or) delinquents
and experts." Thus, by the nineteenth century there was "too much
rather than not enough discourse" on sexuality (Foucault 1978a, 65). Only
two years later, in 1978, Foucault seemed to have moved away from this
earlier focus on the continuity between the Christian confessional or penitential
methods and the modern technique of confession. Now he was more
interested in the differences between monastic and modern disciplinary techniques.
The pastor required obedience from his flock, and the believers were required
to confess all truth to the pastor. But Foucault now stressed that, in
Contrast to the modem psychiatrist, the priest did not label people abnormal.
)8 The assumption that all human beings could be fooled by the devil
meant that repentance could be achieved through true confession. Christianity,
it now turned out, had constructed a "moderate morality" between asceticism
and civil society: "The Christian flesh was never conceived as an absolute
evil which had to be got rid of, but as a perpetual source, within subjectivity,
within individuals, of temptation which risked leading the individual beyond
the limits posed by the common morality: marriage, monogamy, the sexuality
of reproduction, and the limitation and disqualification of pleasure"
(Foucault 1978b, 126).
Foucault also made a distinction between the verbal methods of confession
and the physical methods of penitence. He tried to formulate new "technologies
of the self" that drew on and refashioned the old Christian rituals.
Given his new reading of Christianity, Foucault's interest in the religious dimension
of the Iranian Revolution was surely more than a journalistic curiosity.
As we shall see in chapter 2, he was moved both by the political message
of the revolution and by its use of rituals of penitence, which were in some
respects similar to the Christian practices he had started to explore.
F reedom-Toward-Death: A Liminal Space for Creativity
Foucault belongs to a group of Western thinkers, from Schopenhauer to the
existentialists, for whom the reality of death has not only to be acknowledged
but also embraced by the living. Nietzsche's "overman" (Obermensch)
remained "joyfully and proudly" aware of death as the proper finale to his