[A-List] The Treason of the Clerics

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050815/ree>
The Treason of the Clerics
by Jonathan Rée

[from the August 15, 2005 issue]

Unlike some other stars of Parisian intellectual life, Michel Foucault
was always reluctant to air his opinions about big political issues.
It was not that he was uninterested in politics or indifferent to
human suffering, just that he was suspicious of the sort of
thinkers--"universal intellectuals," he called them--who consider it
their privilege and duty to set the world to rights, as if history had
appointed them to speak on its behalf, or morality had summoned them
to be the conscience of the human race.

Anyone who has read his books--from Madness and Civilization and Birth
of the Clinic, published in the early 1960s, to the multivolume
History of Sexuality, which he was still working on when he died in
1984 at the age of 57--will understand why Foucault would not presume
to speak in the name of others. He was in his way a hands-on
historian, who spent half his life peering at brittle old documents in
the Bibliothèque Nationale. He was also a social theorist with a
special interest in small-scale processes, or in the "micro-power," as
he called it, that travels through the "capillaries" of the
institutions by which we live. On top of that he was an accomplished
writer in a particular French tradition, and an admirer of the
"radiant uncertainties" of the Surrealist poet Raymond Roussel. There
is a Surrealist exuberance in all of Foucault's works, and he was
constantly on the lookout for themes that refused to align themselves
with the normal ways of the world--tales of oddballs, fantasists and
fanatics, or idiosyncrasies, exceptions and discrepancies. He was, you
might say, a poet of the uncommonplace: a philosopher of the
unphilosophical, a historian of the unhistorical and a politician of
the unpolitical.

As a student in Paris in the early 1950s, Foucault had a three-year
fling with the Communist Party. It ended badly on both sides, and
though he remained on the left, he became an unforgiving critic of
leftist conservatism, sentimentality and nostalgia. His political
activism would from then on be confined to supporting scattered groups
of prisoners, psychiatric patients and young unemployed immigrants,
and encouraging them to organize themselves on their own terms,
without reference to warders, nurses or social workers, let alone
political parties or, for that matter, Surrealistic littérateurs like
himself.

It goes without saying that he did not blame his misfits, lunatics,
delinquents and eccentrics for deviating from conventional norms; his
originality was that he did not praise them either. He was perhaps the
first thinker to identify the perversity of the kind of progressive
thinking that expects the oppressed to conform to a preconceived model
of resistance or revolt. According to the progressive norm, genuine
victims of injustice will be ennobled by adversities, strengthened by
misery and purified by suffering. They will bear witness to their
authenticity by playing a starring role in the good old drama of
democratic resistance to oppression. And they will gratify their
patrons by bringing new vigor and militancy to the part, and perhaps a
dash of cathartic revolutionary violence, not to mention unimpeachable
moral authority. If Foucault had a mission in life, it was to
discredit the progressive model of the perfect rebel.

The main argument of his never-to-be-completed work on the history of
sexuality was that the cheerleaders of "sexual liberation" could be as
pompous, despotic and self-deceiving as the repressive prudes they
took pride in defying. The ideas of the self-appointed liberators
could, as Foucault noted, be traced to the Freudo-Marxism of Wilhelm
Reich and Herbert Marcuse, but he regarded them as part of something
far larger. Speaking in Tokyo in April 1978, he went so far as to
suggest that the bogus mantras of sexual liberation could be heard
throughout the entire history of "the West." We Europeans, Foucault
said--or rather, cutely correcting himself, "we others"--have been
engaged for millennia in a quixotic adventure unparalleled in the rest
of the world: an earnest quest for the truth about ourselves in the
form of "the truth about our sexuality." Throughout the twentieth
century, moreover, we "European others" have been regaling ourselves
with a tale about how Freud eventually exploded the age-old
hypocrisies, allowing sexuality to be "released from its fetters" at
last:

    First movement: Greek and Roman antiquity, where sexuality was
free, and capable of expressing itself without hindrance.... Next,
there was Christianity, which--for the first time in the history of
the West--imposed a great prohibition on sexuality, saying "no" to
pleasure and to sex.... But then, beginning in the sixteenth century,
the bourgeoisie found itself in a situation...of economic domination
and cultural hegemony; it took over the...Christian rejection of
sexuality and made it its own, enforcing it with unprecedented rigor
and severity, and perpetuating it into the nineteenth century, until
at last...the veil began to be lifted by Freud.

In order to avoid misunderstandings with his Japanese audience,
Foucault spelled out his opinion that the Freudo-Marxist epic of
sexual liberation was "misleading and untenable, for hundreds of
reasons." But in the History of Sexuality he simply presented a parade
of awkward and bizarre case studies and left his readers to draw their
own conclusions. His aim, after all, was not to replace our old smug
certainties with new ones but to help us formulate some uncertainties
of our own, as radiantly tentative as possible. Dogmatics and polemics
could never be his style.

When Foucault's Japanese hosts thanked him for the clarity of his
exposition, he turned the compliment gracefully. Obscurity was
unforgivable, he said; indeed it was "a form of despotism." Yet he had
to admit that his own elucidations sometimes had the effect of
cafouillage, of messing things up and leaving them more confused than
ever. But at least he could never be accused of false or factitious
clarity. He never emulated the kind of Freudianism that confidently
discovers vast unconscious realities behind the carnival of false
consciousness in which the rest of us live our lives. Nor did he yearn
for the Marxist self-assurance that scolds a benighted political
present by the light of a glorious future that has not yet dawned on
anyone else. Foucault was never going to sign on to an a priori
separation between those who are in the know and those who are not,
and his cafouillage was not a feckless abrogation of intellectual
responsibility so much as a principled avoidance of the arrogance of
authority. He simply wanted to radiate uncertainty.

Shortly after returning from Japan, Foucault got another chance to
travel in the non-European world. Protests against the Shah's regime
in Iran had been intensifying since the beginning of the year, and by
August 1978 millions of Iranians were participating in strikes and
demonstrations. In September Foucault got himself a berth as special
correspondent for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, and went off
to spend ten days with strikers and demonstrators on the streets of
Iran.

In one of his earliest reports, he dissected the standard Western take
on the crisis in Iran: that the Shah, though not the most fragrant of
statesmen, embodied the forces of "modernization" and
"secularization," and therefore had the future on his side, while the
oppositionists were a rabble of backward peasants and religious
fanatics who had yet to adjust to the reality of the modern world.
Foucault's informants in Iran saw things very differently: As far as
they were concerned, their struggle was against corruption rather than
modernization. The "honest people" of the West might turn a blind eye
to the "speculation, corrupt practices, embezzlement, and swindling
that constitute the veritable daily bread of our trade, our industry,
and our finances," but for the protesters that was no longer possible.
Corruption in Iran was manifestly the "dynasty's way of exercising
power and a fundamental mechanism of the economy"; but it was a
parasite that was beginning to destroy its host. The modernization
that had once seemed unstoppable was being derailed by corruption: "As
a political project and as a principle of social transformation,"
Foucault wrote, modernization "is a thing of the past in Iran."

In early October, Foucault was describing groups of unarmed
demonstrators who were stopping government troops in their tracks with
shouts of "Islam, Islam!" and "Come with us to save the Quran!"--a
living refutation, as he observed, of the Marxist adage that "religion
is the opium of the people." He was at first surprised to find
left-wing students clamoring for "Islamic government." But then he
realized that the Shiite clergy was nothing like a Catholic hierarchy.
It had no popes or cardinals nor any centralized system of authority,
and if the mullahs were galvanizing a popular revolt against
corruption, it was not because they were in command but because they
were giving ordinary Iranians exactly what they needed: "a way of
being together, a way of speaking and listening, a means of
understanding each other and sharing each other's desires."

The protesters who were calling for Islamic government explained
themselves to Foucault by speaking about an "ideal" or "utopia"
fashioned from Islamic values as they understood them: the dignity of
labor, respect for minorities, equality before the law and government
accountable to the people. Foucault confessed that he was embarrassed
and disappointed by what they said:

    It is often said that definitions of Islamic government are
imprecise. To me, however, they seemed to have a clarity that was
completely familiar and also, it must be said, far from reassuring.
"These are simply the catchphrases of democracy--of bourgeois or
revolutionary democracy," I said. "We in the West have been repeating
them to ourselves ever since the eighteenth century, and look where
they have got us." But they immediately replied: "These catchphrases
were part of the Quran long before your philosophers adopted them; in
the industrialized Christian West they may have lost their meaning,
but Islam is going to restore their value and their force."

Foucault was not persuaded, but as the students elaborated their
"dreams" of Islamic government, it occurred to him that he was
witnessing an outbreak of "political spirituality" similar to what
swept through Europe in the time of Calvin or Cromwell. It might not
amount to a political program, but still it was impressive in its way:

    It impresses me as what you might call a "political will." It also
impresses me as an attempt, in response to current problems, to
politicize structures that are both social and religious. And it
impresses me as an attempt to open up a spiritual dimension in
politics.

It was now October 1978. The streets were resounding with calls for
"Islamic government," but the Shah was still in his palace, and the
spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini was biding his time in Paris and
keeping his options open. Back home, liberal commentators were doing
their best to fit the new political possibilities into the old
progressive narratives. But Iran did not present the familiar
lineaments of a struggle between pure-hearted youthful rebels and
dark-souled reactionaries, and it was difficult to see it as another
China, Cuba or Vietnam, or a second edition of Paris in 1968.
Meanwhile, the very idea of "political spirituality" seemed like an
anachronism that could never get any traction in the modern world.

Foucault, who had just returned to Paris, was not so sure. He admitted
that he "knew very little about Iran," but it struck him that the
entire Iranian population was acting like a massive political hedgehog
with a single contradictory passion: the desire for a process that
would somehow "prevent politics from gaining a foothold." The movement
was clearly unsustainable, but that did not make it aberrant or
deplorable. The idea of Islamic government would settle down
eventually; it would prove to be either "a reconciliation, a
contradiction, or the threshold of something new," but for the time
being it was impossible to tell. "Let us admit," Foucault concluded in
the middle of October, "that we Westerners would be in a poor position
to give advice to the Iranians on this matter."

Two weeks later he was back in Iran. He was struck by the way the
resistance was gaining ground not through military strength but
through the power of information. Protests were sustained by a diffuse
system of communication that the state could neither monitor nor
control: Messages from unidentified sources were transmitted by
telephones and sermons and above all by "the tool par excellence of
counter-information": the audiocassette recorder. "If the shah is
about to fall," he said, "it will be due above all to the cassette
tape."

Everyone he spoke to expected Khomeini to come back soon, but Foucault
was assured that "there will not be a Khomeini party; there will not
be a Khomeini government." What the protesters wanted was not even a
revolution as Westerners understood it: "Everybody is quite aware that
they want something completely different," something whose
consequences would come as a surprise to the political cognoscenti.
The only certainty was that the new revolt of Islam was "irreducible"
and unpredictable--"the form of revolt that is the most modern and the
most insane."

Foucault's experiment in political journalism earned him rebukes in
the French press from the very beginning. Maxime Rodinson, a venerable
Marxist scholar of Islam, informed him wearily that an Islamic
government was bound to usher in some kind of "archaic fascism." And
an exiled Iranian feminist claimed that Foucault's interest in
"political spirituality" was blinding him, like many other Westerners,
to the inherent injustice of Islam, especially toward women. For the
time being, Foucault refused to respond, but events seemed to be
vindicating his critics. The Shah fled Iran in the early weeks of
1979, Ayatollah Khomeini returned in triumph and at the end of March
an Islamic republic was ratified in a popular referendum: a classic
case, it would seem, of a resurgence of reactionary authoritarian
populism. Many of the possibilities that Foucault had canvassed were
coming to nothing, and in April he published an open letter to the new
Iranian Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan, expressing dismay at the
abridgment of rights under the incoming "government of mullahs."

But while he remonstrated with his friends in Iran, Foucault never
yielded an inch to his critics in Paris. Despite their accusations, he
had not taken it upon himself to advocate Islamic government: He had
simply recorded some of the aspirations of the protesters, while
trying to dismantle the stale and defensive notions that filled the
heads of Western observers. "The problem of Islam as a political force
is an essential one for our time and for the years to come," he wrote,
"and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start
out from a position of hatred." At the end of March, when the veteran
leftists Claudie and Jacques Broyelle called on him to confess his
"mistake," he blew his top. He was appalled by the peremptory summons
to confess his "errors," saying that it "remind[s] me of something,
and of many things, against which I have fought." And if things were
indeed turning out badly in Iran, that did not invalidate his remarks
about how they might have been different; nor did it show that events
were bound to revert to a familiar pattern and lose their capacity to
surprise us. But Foucault was wounded by the taunts of his critics,
and at the end of May 1979 he retired from the conflict. His adventure
as a contrarian political journalist was at an end.

The whole of Foucault's Iranian journalism--a total of fifteen
articles and interviews--was republished in France in 1994 as part of
a four-volume anthology of his occasional writings. Ever since then,
French critics have made the most of his "error" over Islamism, and
some of them sought to implicate him in the attacks on Washington and
New York in 2001. In the English-speaking world, however, the Iranian
writings have hitherto been ignored; but the anomaly is now being put
right with some authority by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson. In
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, they tell the full story of
Foucault's sudden induction into the journalist's trade and his
contacts with exiles in Paris and rebels in Iran, concluding with an
appendix of 100 pages comprising translations of Foucault's articles,
together with some of the reactions they provoked, copiously annotated
and explained. (The translations are sound, though I have amended some
of them here.) One could hardly have asked for more.

One might have asked for less, however. Although Afary and Anderson
have spent ten years working on their book, it has not been a labor of
love, and their summaries of Foucault's achievements are consistently
hostile and tendentious. Noting that he was skeptical about
self-congratulatory Western narratives of progress and modernization,
they make the preposterous assertion that "Foucault privileged
premodern social relations over modern ones." Turning to sexuality,
they quote his Japanese lecture about the Freudo-Marxist epic of
sexual liberation but interpret it as a solemn declaration of faith
rather than an exercise in delicate satire, thus demonstrating not
only a spectacular impermeability to irony but also an inability to
turn the page and read Foucault's reminder that the story was, in his
opinion, "misleading and untenable, for hundreds of reasons." After
that it is no surprise that they misunderstand Foucault's histories of
asylums, hospitals and schools, which, pace Afary and Anderson, were
not celebrations of the self-affirming inner subjectivity of the
oppressed but arguments for seeing subjectivity as a complex byproduct
of systems of discipline. Finally, they seek to give philosophical
depth to their indictment by suggesting that Foucault was influenced
by Heidegger's notion of "being towards death," which may be true for
all I know, though Foucault could have told them that Heidegger was
trying to explain the difference between our sense of the future and
our sense of the past, rather than advocating some reckless dicing
with "limit situations."

Having constructed an imaginary Foucault intoxicated by
"authenticity," "creativity" and "living dangerously"--notions that
have no place in his work except as butts of his teasing
paradoxes--Afary and Anderson offer their readers the astonishing
assurance that "Foucault's concept of authenticity meant looking at
situations where people lived dangerously and flirted with death, the
site where creativity originated." And having transformed the gentle
apostle of radiant uncertainty into a philosophical version of Charles
Manson, they credit him with an "uncritical enthusiasm for the
Islamist movement of Iran." Foucault's quizzical mixture of excitement
and disappointment over Iran, together with his perceptive remarks
about corruption as a political issue and the recrudescence of
political spirituality in the Muslim world, are passed over in silence
as Afary and Anderson condemn him for an "uncritical embrace" of
Islamism and try to explain it in terms of a kinky fascination with
"limit experiences," "new forms of creativity" and even (yes, they are
serious) the "transgressive powers" of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Noting that Foucault sometimes described the Iranian rebellion as
"irreducible," Afary and Anderson suggest that the French word
irréductible had a peculiar significance for him, conveying a blanket
justification for every form of "opposition to Western modernity." But
there is no great mystery about the word: Go into any French nursery
and you will find that Astérix and the other valiant Gauls in the
classic children's books are known as irréductibles Gaulois on account
of their refusal to obey the well-established laws of history and bow
to the might of the Roman empire. Whatever else you may think about
them, the Iranian revolutionaries were as irreducible as Astérix,
Obélix and Panoramix; and so too was the philosophical historian who
did his best to listen to what they had to say.

On the one occasion that I met Foucault, in his immaculate white
apartment in Paris in 1976, he expressed uneasiness about his works
being translated into English. They were all written, he said, in
opposition to the know-it-all leftism of the Communist Party, and
without that framework, there was no telling what effect they might
have. I tried to reassure him as I gulped at my big tumbler of
whiskey, while he leaned back and smiled and sipped his mineral water.
All these years later, Afary and Anderson seem to have proved him
right: His skeptical radicalism is not easily transplanted. I am
reminded that Foucault had a serene way of rising above captious
criticisms: He would simply invoke the most elementary axiom of
political existence, not to mention Some Like It Hot: "Nothing's
perfect."
--
Yoshie