The Philosopher and the Ayatollah

Peter Edman

Amazing and surprisingly nuanced article in the Boston Globe (hat-tip—ALD) on Michel Foucault’s initial infatuation with the Islamist revolution in Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini.

The article, by Wesley Yang, is titled “The philosopher and the ayatollah: In 1978, Michel Foucault went to Iran as a novice journalist to report on the unfolding revolution. His dispatches — now fully available in translation — shed some light on the illusions of intellectuals in our own time.”

The article is inspired by the publication of Kevin Anderson and Janet Afary’s Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism

Yang offers an interesting balance of appreciation for Foucault’s courageous insights and his ideologically driven blindness, and definitely helps us appreciate the way worldviews or ideologies shape actions. Two quotes from the article follow:

Foucault’s Iranian adventure was a “tragic and farcical error” that fits into a long tradition of ill-informed French intellectuals spouting off about distant revolutions, says James Miller, whose 1993 biography “The Passion of Michel Foucault” contains one of the few previous English-language accounts of the episode. Indeed, Foucault’s search for an alternative that was absolutely other to liberal democracy seems peculiarly reckless in light of political Islam’s subsequent career, and makes for odd reading now as observers search for traditions in Islam that are compatible with liberal democracy. But at a time when religion is resurgent in politics and Western liberals are divided between interventionists and anti-imperialists, Foucault’s peculiar blend of blindness and insight about the Islamists remains instructive.

and

In an interview with an Iranian journalist conducted on his first visit, in September 1978, Foucault made plain his disillusionment with all the secular ideologies of the West and his yearning to see “another political imagination” emerge from the Iranian Revolution. “Industrial capitalism,” he said, had emerged as “the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine.” The failure of Communism, for which Foucault had no great sympathy, left us, “from the point of view of political thought,” he argued, “at point zero.”

It seems to me that we’re still essentially at point zero. 

Gleanings, Faiths and Worldviews, Good and Evil, Public Square, Religious Liberty, Society, Thu 16 Jun 2005