On 10/7/06, seth weiss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Please forward widely!
The New SPACE (The New School for Pluralistic Anti-Capitalist Education)
presents:
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
A Talk by Kevin B. Anderson
Wednesday, October 25 at 7:00 pm
Suggested Donation: $7 - $10
Beginning in 1978, Michel Foucault covered the mass unrest against the
Shah in Iran as a journalist for Italian and French publications. He paid
particular attention to the Islamic wing of the Iranian Revolution, which
he rightly identified as a major new force in world politics. His search
for an alternative to Western liberal democracy led him to favorably judge
the first major victory of radical Islam as a new "political spirituality."
His support for this movement raises an important question
about how Foucault, a major theorist of modern power, could have
overlooked the repressive nature of Khomeini's movement. With _Foucault
and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism_, Janet
Afary and Kevin Anderson have written the definitive English account and
analysis of this episode. They suggest some troubling connections between
Foucault's political judgment and his theoretical critique of modernity.
The connections in question are many, but the most important is that
Foucault was not in favor of political liberalism, whereas critics of
his judgment mostly are. Neither were most Iranian leftists.
Moreover, political liberalism tends to be tied up with economic
liberalism (now called neoliberalism) on the periphery, though
political liberalism at the core can come with a preference for
relatively robust social democracy of the Rawlsian sort at the core
(though even at the core the most classically politically liberal
countries, full of checks and balances, are found in
anti-social-democratic Anglo-American countries rather than less
liberal and more social democratic Europe). That probably was not
Foucault's reason, but that was part of the reason why many Iranian
leftists favored supporting Islamists rather than Islamic liberals.
Other reasons include the fact that Islamists have tended to be more
anti-imperialist than Islamic liberals who were (and still are)
readier to open up Iran's politics and economy to the West's control.
In the context of Iran as well as many other countries, when you hear
the Western media say hard-liners, that means they are not in favor of
selling out their countries' resources as cheaply as those, like
Rafsanjani, whom the Western media call "moderate."
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
