Michel Foucault the Orientalist: On Revolutionary Iran and the "Spirit of Islam"

Abstract

Uta Liebmann Schaub has observed that a meeting of East and West occurs in the writings of Michel Foucault where, she asserts, a strong undercurrent of Buddhist thought is detectable. Although he never explicitly acknowledged its influence, Foucault appears to have been seduced by a radical otherness in Eastern philosophy, consistently drawing upon its premises in his historical critique of modern Western subjectivity. Surprisingly, in her analysis of Foucault's oriental subtext, Schaub makes no mention of a cluster of writings published between September 1978 and May 1979 in which Foucault encountered what is arguably Western civilization's most enduring and menacing Oriental other: the world of Islam. Claire Briere and Pierre Blanchat's Iran: La Revolution au nom de Dieu (1979) includes one such text, an interview with Foucault entitled L'Esprit d'un monde sans esprit'3 in which he commented extensively upon the politico-religious fervor that erupted in opposition to the Shah of Iran in the late 1970s. In this interview and numerous other writings on the subject, Foucault extolled the virtues of Iran's revolutionary spirit, remaining, I shall argue, singularly uncritical in his appraisal of the emancipatory potential and of the new subjectivity it was to bestow upon the Iranian people.4 Given Foucault's intellectual preoccupation with questions of power and moralizing discourses of corporal constraint, the largely unqualified enthusiasm he expressed for the Islamic revolution in Iran is perplexing indeed. His ardor is even more baffling when one considers that much of the repressive machinery set in motion immediately following the Shah's departure in February 1979 was directly applied-much like the disciplinary regimen he reproves in Surveiller et punir (1975)-to the body and soul of the Iranian populace, introducing levels of coercion unfathomable even under the Shah's ruthless reign. Judging from statements made in that interview and in his numerous articles published in the fall of 1978 and the spring of 1979 in both the French press and the Italian daily Corriere Della Sera,5 when he cast his Western intellectual gaze upon what for many progressive observers was a dumbfounding event in the history of modem national liberation movements, Foucault produced an Orientalist discourse-albeit one of decidedly Leftist inflection-that