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Abstract
Educational philosophy has not discussed Foucault’s publications on the Iranian Revolution and the related controversy. Foucauldian concepts are applied to education, though his only writings which ‘sidetracked’ him from exploring power within the state, namely, his journalistic accounts of his visits to Iran, remain unexplored in our field. Against moralist accusations of Foucault’s views on Iran as ‘singularly uncritical’, and beyond standard postcolonial charges of Foucault with exoticism and orientalism, I examine how the writings in question reveal ambivalences and limits of Foucauldian philosophy and complicate the glorification of limit-experience in educational theory.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Nick Peim for a fruitful exchange of views on Foucault’s reception in educational philosophy.
Notes
1. For the employment of Foucauldian ideas in educational theory until 2000 see Chris Mayo’s (Citation2000) informative essay.
2. I clarify the meaning of these terms in a later section so as to avoid needless expansion of my introduction. There (and in my conclusion) I provide references to related sources.
3. On why Foucault’s Iran episode fits into the description of a limit-experience there is a long and indirect answer given by this article as a whole but also a short and direct answer given by reference to those sources in Foucauldian studies and political philosophy which have described it as a limit-experience (e.g. Afary & Anderson, Citation2010, pp. 2, 7, 34; Ahluwalia, Citation2010, p. 602).
4. Notice the geopolitical-geostrategic, territorial framing of Foucauldian analysis of the situation in Iran: ‘The other question concerns this little corner of the earth whose land, both above and below the surface, has strategic importance at a global level. For the people who inhabit this land, what is the point of searching, even at the cost of their own lives, for this thing whose possibility we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity, a political spirituality’ (Foucault, Citation2010, p. 209). As to what was the one question (the passage implies a question preceding ‘the other question’), it was significantly about the Islamic government being the eruption of something new: ‘With respect to this ‘political will’, however, there are also two questions that concern me even more deeply. One bears on Iran and its peculiar destiny. At the dawn of history, Persia invented the state and conferred its models on Islam. Its administrators staffed the caliphate. But from this same Islam, it derived a religion that gave to its people infinite resources to resist state power. In this will for an ‘Islamic government’, should one see a reconciliation, a contradiction, or the threshold of something new?’ (p. 208).
5. Foucault’s charging the Iranian sociologist with error registers modern influences as contaminating of the resistant, purely and authentically oriental other. Foucault makes an exception when it comes to modern thinkers whose influence on Iranian scholars such as Ali Shariati was not suspect of favoring modernity in any way (for instance, on Foucault’s mention of Shariati see, Foucault [Citation2010, pp. 207, 208]). Evidently, Foucault did not see Heidegger’s influence on Shariati’s thought as excessive Westernness. On how Shariati employed Heidegger’s discourse for exalting notions of Islamic martyrdom and authenticity, and castigated external influences on Islam, see Afary and Anderson (Citation2010, p. 60).
6. With the mention of the year 2000 Foucault alludes to the following: ‘According to Muhammad Reza Shah, by 2000, Iran was to have joined the “great civilizations” of the world’ (Afary & Anderson, Citation2010, p. 295).
7. We could liken the lack of any other aim with the Sobibor revolt and escape from the concentration camp, as Paras (Citation2006) indicates, but surely the likening ends there because the two cases are, in my view, utterly dissimilar.
8. Recall here the Enlightened philosophical premises of the debate of ‘les anciens et les modernes’ as well as the European, modernist time-consciousness of an absolute rupture with the ‘ancien régime’.
9. I claim, along with Corey McCall, that ‘unlike some other recent work on this aspect of Foucault’s corpus’, mine, like McCall’s, ‘is not an exercise in finger-pointing, telling us with the benefit of hindsight what Foucault got wrong and misunderstood about Iranian society and politics’. But McCall further states that, ‘while we need to acknowledge that Foucault’s views on Iran may have been misguided, rather than focusing solely on where he went wrong, we should also ask how these writings illuminate Foucault’s work during this period’ (McCall, Citation2013, p. 28). My reading of Foucault’s Iran episode complicates these latter points. Foucault ‘being misguided’ strikes a note of moral psychology, and ‘illumination of Foucault’s work’ seems to me like too exegetic an operation. I am more interested in tensions, ambiguities and political challenges to Foucault and to Foucauldian orthodoxy.
10. On transgression and its relation to the limit, consider Foucault’s following statement: ‘Transgression is an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses’ (Foucault, Citation1977, pp. 33, 34).
11. In a way, Foucault’s phrasing of his return to France after the illuminating limit-experience recalls the Platonic cave. I think we could make an interesting comparison of Foucault’s returning from the locus of his limit-experience and his desire to illuminate his ignorant, sneering compatriots with the Platonic cave narrative. But this is beyond the limits of this article.
12. He inserted this phrase in the original version of his article (Afary & Anderson, Citation2010, p. 298). For the French original in ‘À quoi rêvent les Iraniens?’ [What are the Iranians dreaming about?]: ‘J'entends déjà des Français qui rient, mais je sais qu'ils ont tort’. L'article italien comporte ce fragment supplémentaire : « ... moi qui sais bien peu de chose sur l'Iran ». https://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault143.html.
13. The parrhesiast’s moment of self-declaration as ignorant of the topos (place) in question could be seen in relation to another binarism, that of local knowledges vs the kind of ‘big picture’ (scientific) knowledge that comes from a historiography of the type that F. Braudel sweepingly chastised. But this is beyond the limits of this article.
14. ‘Living in Paris, I am profoundly upset by the untroubled attitude of French leftists toward the possibility of an ‘Islamic government’ that might replace the bloody tyranny of the shah. Michel Foucault, for example, seems moved by the ‘Muslim spirituality’ that would advantageously replace, according to him, the ferocious capitalist dictatorship that is tottering today’ (Atoussa, Citation2010, p. 209).
15. According to Foucault, Atoussa’s letter ‘merges together all the aspects, all the forms, and all the potentialities of Islam within a single expression of contempt, for the sake of rejecting them in their entirety under the thousand-year-old reproach of “fanaticism”’ (Foucault, Citation2010, p. 210).
16. A side issue here is that, in my view, to judge is more complex than this depiction. Also, the demands of reason go beyond modern theorizations of what counts as ‘reason’.
17. The title of Foucault’s dispatch which contains his certainties about the laughing French being wrong in looking askance at the Iranian revolution is: ‘What are the Iranians dreaming about?’. Let me here emphasize, however, that my critical reading of Foucault in no way condones the ‘epidermic reaction’ (Foucault’s words, Citation2010, p. 250) of the French public. I agree with Foucault that reactions of lack of sympathy were in most cases for the wrong reasons.
18. The other task is positive: ‘it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge,” “truth,” “consciousness,” and “discourse”’ (Foucault & Deleuze, Citation1977, p. 208).
19. Consider here that Foucault was influenced by philosophers for whom experience tries ‘to reach a certain point in life that is as close as possible to the “unlivable”, to that which can’t be lived through. What is required is the maximum of intensity and the maximum of impossibility at the same time’ (Foucault, Citation2000, p. 241).
20. Some commentators (e.g. Beaulieu, Citation2010) explain Foucault’s later work as a displacement to a degree influenced by his Iran experience of disillusionment.
21. This might not concern all Foucauldian ideas that are transferred to education and not all educational-philosophical writings that perform this transfer. Yet, when it comes to binary oppositions such as those mentioned above, I have not come across a source in our field that deconstructs the valorization of the one pole and the total incrimination of the other pole. Even if the limits of (my) research might explain why I have not found such sources, this is still significant because it shows that sources of this kind have not yet gained the academic visibility in our field that reverent approaches to Foucault have obtained.
22. Indicatively, see, (Geerinck, Masschelein, & Simons, Citation2010; Masschelein, Citation2006; Simons & Masschelein, Citation2010; Thompson, Citation2010; Zembylas, Citation2007).