Though Cowards Flinch

I cannot afford to study for my MA degree, so I am forced to air my love of philosophical dirty laundry here, to an uninterested public.

Never the less, here goes:

1

Despite claims that Michel Foucault is a straight up Kantian, with Nietzschean pretensions, he notes in The History of Sexuality that it is the perception of injustice that counts over any universal notion of what injustice is.

2

In his lectures, entitled Society Must Be Defended, Foucault levelled criticism at modernity and modern political discourse for wanting to erase partisan historical struggle and replace it with a pacified universalism, as per the modern history of “philosophico-juridicial discourse” (according to Andrew W. Neal in his essay Goodbye War on Terror? Foucault and Butler on Discourses of Law, War and Exceptionalism).

3

The charge of postmodernist is usually levelled at Foucault for his reversal of Francis Bacon’s affirmation that knowledge is power (he preferred power is knowledge; those who have power decide the axis of knowledge); but over and above this Foucault’s postmodernism informed the ridiculous rationale for his support of Islamism, namely that of Iran – in brief, if it is against modernism, it’s worth its salt.

4

Foucault, according to Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson in their book Foucault and the Iranian Revoltuion: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, note that the philosopher’s interest in the Iranian revolution was informed by what he called ‘political spirituality’; something higher than the mush implied in a universalist (as opposed to particular) notion of truth, established and pushed by a state. With Islamism, Foucault shared three main oppositions – to imperialism, colonialism, and modernity.

5

Though Foucault rejected grand narratives (as per postmodernism) he accepted the Islamism in Iran for what it was not, not what it was (itself a stab at imperialism and colonialism). Looked at another way, Foucault’s admiration for Islamism could open up his pre-modernism, where a sovereign state secures death for the living, as opposed to ensuring life against the enemy (a constituent feature of biopolitical power). But, in fact, Foucault sought something which subverted both truth and life as constitutive to politics (the liberalism inherent to neo-conservative projects) as well as political modernity.

6

In opining that hegemony consisted of truth as inseparable from power, Foucault did not concede that truth was obscured, but rather the domain – in its natural form – of partisan beings. For this reason, and others discussed above, Foucault’s thinking is postmodernist, and should be considered so in the archives.