Well worth a few minutes of your reading time is David Frum’s review of a book with the unpromising title Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism.
Michel Foucault (1926–1984, died of AIDS) was (and is) a leading light of post-modern, thought discourse. He loathed Western civilization, bourgeois morality and, above all, the United States of America (except for the bath houses in San Francisco, that is). He was thus ready to fall in love.
French philosophers have a long and ugly history of apologetic for tyranny, from Voltaire’s enthusiasm for Frederick the Great up through the craze for Maoism that swept Paris in the 1960s.
But of all the absurd infatuations ever to sweep literary Paris, none has ever matched the absolute incongruity of Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979. Foucault, a man utterly devoid of religious feeling, a homosexual who reveled in the brutalities of San Francisco’s sado-masochistic bar scene, decided in 1978 that the Khomeini revolution offered mankind’s best hope for personalliberation. . . .
Foucault perceptively perceived that communism was fading as a challenger to the western liberal order he despised. Perceptively (indeed presciently), he decided that radical Islam offered the only effective challenge to western liberalism. He welcomed this challenge and published more than a dozen essays celebrating the Iranianrevolution. . . .
Even after the Khomeinites began putting homosexuals to death, Foucault insisted that the sentenced men had been punished not for their sexual orientation, but for support of the shah, with homosexuality as a convenient excuse. (He may in fact have been right about this latter point – but it’s an odd defense to come from a man like Foucault: “Homosexuality was not the reason for murder. It was the pretext for murder. See – nothing to worry about!”)
The authors of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution find roots in Foucault’s theories for his Islamofascist nympholepsy. Whether they are right about that, I can’t say. (If I knew the Foucault oeuvre well enough to pass judgement, I would have been guilty of a plentiful waste of time in my earlier years.) What’s striking is how little Foucault is unique. Though not all share his puppy dog-like devotion to the Ayatollah, a vast number of intellectuals find excuses for preferring the terrorist perpetrators of medieval superstition over the contemporary West. The common denominator among them, Foucault and the Islamofascists is not homosexuality or post-structuralism or attitudes toward women; it is pure hatred of Judaism and Christianity, of American culture and of the Western tradition of individual liberty. Next to the diabolical George W. Bush, Ruhollah Khomeini – or Osama bin Laden – looks like a post-modernist saint.
Recall that in "Cthulhuism and the Cold War" Michael Foucault dies by being torn in pieces by a nightgaunt over the Boulevard St-Germain. That's a pretty squamous, rugose, and blasphemous thought.
Posted by: Joseph T Major | Monday, August 27, 2007 at 03:31 AM