Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Liberation paves the way for new power relationships, which must be
controlled by practices of freedom.
Michel Foucault
In the early 1970s, one of the authors was told by a member of the central committee of her Marxist-L eninist organization that it is part of her
revolutionary responsibility to provide him with a blowjob. Young and
earnest, she decided to write an internal response to this demand. She did
not call her response Theres Nothing Revolutionary about a Blowjob,
although this was her point, and instead wrote a paper entitled True
Love and the Transition to Socialism. Yet, the bottom line, then and
now, is that not only is such a demand utterly sexist, but it has nothing
to do with revolution whatsoever. For those of you who are laughing at
this story, we wish to sober you up, at least a bit, by examining the way in
which certain tendencies in US queer theory seem to actually think that
there might in fact be something revolutionary about a blowjob; indeed,
that a certain sexual acting out is the only true resistance to heteronormativity. Now, it might seem a leap from a rather extreme heteronormative story to queer theory. But, as we will see, one of our arguments is
that the compulsion to sexualize all relations is not just a phenomenon of
the heteronormative. Nor, of course, are we arguing that queer theory
per se sexualizes all relations. That said, however, we do want to offer a
critique of a particular and powerful trend within queer theory, noting
all the while that there are many queer theorists who strongly disagree
with this trajectorya trajectory that holds that not only is revolution
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DOI 10.1215/01642472-2419540 2014 Duke University Press
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the works of Lacan and Foucault. We write with some urgency because
the Left (feminist, queer, and Marxist) in the United States has, by and
large, failed to grapple with right-w ing sexual politics, which are often
written off as merely a sign of ignorance and prejudice, and responded to
by the proliferation and celebration of sexuality as a mode of resistance. For
example, homosexuality has long been read by the right wing as not only a
form of decadence, but one that spreads a kind of infection into society as a
whole. One response to that within queer theory is that the spreading of a
queer infection within the social body is all to the good because, through an
identification with the death drive, queers have the power and possibility of
unraveling the heterosexist foundations of the social as a whole, a claim that
we will answer shortly. Ultimately, our concern is not to simply argue that
homosexuality is not this type of infectious decadence, nor simply to note
the obviouswhich is that gays and lesbians are being scapegoated here. It
is instead to point out the legitimate fear of ethical collapse that precipitates
such virulence against queer subjects, a fear that takes a tremendous toll
on a majority of people under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. Thus,
we want to return queer theory to revolution as the only ultimate solution
to the rightful terror that comes with living in a dying empire, with all its
violence (including sexual violence), its decadence, and the disintegration
of anything like a shared ethical worldincluding ethical forms of caring
for ourselves and for others.
Inheritance and the Promise of the Future
Edelmans refusal of politics postulates what he takes to be the radical negativity of jouissance as an unnamable remainder, which when harnessed
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through an identification with the death drive, whatever that means, can
actually unravel the social.5 The problem, if we can be a little technical
here, is the unpsychoanalytic way in which Edelman mobilizes Lacanian concepts.6 As practicing Lacanian analyst Judith Feher Guerwich
points out, Jouissance is a legal termin Latin usufructusreferring
to the right to enjoy the use of a thing as opposed to owning it. 7 Thus,
jouissance is not a disruptive remainder; it is instead the subjects experience of being for the Other as an object of enjoyment, of use or abuse, in
contrast to being the object of the Others desire. What happens when
one is captured by the jouissance of the Other is that the Other becomes a
frightening mystery, so that the subject is constantly caught in an unanswerable question: What does the Other want from me? 8
The jouissance of the Other then has the special quality of being both
real and mythical. The subject attributes qualities to the Other that do not
really exist (indeed Lacan goes so far as to argue that the big Other does
not exist) precisely because the subject remains clueless about who, or even
what, this Other actually is. One of the goals of Lacanian psychoanalysis
is thus to demystify the Other, and as such, the Oedipal fantasy needs to
be exposed as fantasy. When Lacan writes that the unconscious is the
discourse of the Other, he means that our desires and fantasies come to
us from the place of the Other rather than our own conscious ego.9 These
unconscious fantasies, particularly the Oedipal myth, are developed in
order to fend off our fear of being encompassed by the jouissance of our
primary Other(s) (especially the mother) who leave us helpless before the
ultimate question: what does the Other want of us? This fear becomes a
wish, including a wish for a law that could keep us from being obliterated
by or collapsed into the jouissance of the Other. And this is why, as Feher
Guerwich argues, the Oedipal myth in Lacan is an effect rather than a cause
of subjectivity. In Freud, acceptance of the threat of castration is what
allows the boy to renounce his primary Oedipal desires for the (m)Other
and is thus a cause of subjectivity.10 For Lacan, however, castration names
the recognition of the incompleteness of the Other, which is precisely what
allows the subject to escape from capture by the Others jouissance. Yet,
in order to defend against this traumatic recognition, the subject develops
the myth of the paternal law that enables the subject to believe that he
could fulfill the (m)Other if only it werent prohibited. As Lacan puts it,
Castration means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained
on the inverse scale of the Law of desire.11
Because no ones fantasy is completely correlated with that of another
subject, no one can ever be completely reduced to someone elses object of
use ( jouissance). Our uniqueness resides in our fantasy life, so from that
point of view, our subjectivity is never completely extinguished even in
madness. For Lacan, the subject of desire is the subject of the unconscious
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He then goes on to claim that queerness marks . . . the place of a jouissance from which [the symbolic] can never escape.14 For Edelman, then,
queerness is a kind of radically negative and unnamable Real, a site of
disruptive jouissance, the death drive within the social order. Here, Edelman concedes to capture in the jouissance of the Other by clinging to the
symbolic law that purportedly prohibits queerness, which can therefore
only reappear as a self and socially destructive tear from within. Edelman,
in other words, takes the fantasy of the symbolic law as reality, appearing
to forget that for Lacan the Other doesnt exist. As we have pointed
out, the all-encompassing Other (or symbolic) who has the power to
completely determine the subject is ultimately only a fantasy, which is why
Lacan frequently refers to it as the barred Other.
There is no beyond accommodation to a self-encircled symbolic
order, as it is described in Edelmans work.15 He is the subject who knows
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Indeed, in his comments on the gulag, Foucaults problem with European versions of socialism or revolutionary attempts to think through
what good government might be is that all had this narrow focus on
the state. (Of course, if anything, Marx himself believed that the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism would necessarily entail the dissolution of
the state and, as such, Marxists should not get bogged down in thinking
new forms of state power as revolution.) But the Foucault who is indeed
critical and wary of the kind of state capitalism that was developed in the
Soviet Union, and what were in actuality its colonies in a Europe divided
after World War II, was concerned precisely that revolution had become
monstrous: a violent form of so-called scientifically necessary modernizations that could not take place without at the same time the development
of a devastating gulag and secret police. This is the kind of revolution
that Foucault insisted we had to problematize and rethink. And indeed
we certainly must. But does this make Foucault a post-M arxist? Certainly
not in any simple sense, as is evident in his famous debate with Noam
Chomsky. 25 But what Foucault clearly focused on in all of his later writings is how thoroughly Third International socialism and its obsession
with modernization and government have completely negated the revolutionary agenda of the complete transformation of society, or the way we
actually live together. And, more important, the question of what transformations would be necessary on ourselves if we were to become human
beings who could live together differently. Foucault speaks, for example,
of a disappointment on the part of European intellectuals when Vietnam
and Cambodia did not achieve that kind of sweeping transformation to a
classless, nonalienating society, and this he calls one of the serious crises
of the 1960s that revolutionaries had to face.
Foucault has often been ridiculed for his interest in the Islamic revo8
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In particular, Foucault recognizes Ali Shariati, an Iranian revolutionary and a thinker who is certainly essential to any new political imagination that might allow us to begin to think differently about revolution.
Shariatis work continues to inspire generation after generation of Islamic
revolutionaries. Indeed he, again to borrow a phrase from Foucault, was
the invisible Present of the ever-present Absent of what has been called
the Arab Spring.29 For Shariati, Shiism was not so much to be found
in the institutionalized religion, but rather in the sermons of social justice
that had already been preached by the First Imam. 30 What took Foucault toward Shiism is precisely the belief that until the Twelfth Imam
returns, there can be no perfect justice but only a constant mobilization
and struggle against all forms of oppressive power in the name of a justice
that awaits us, but one that also inspires us to try to live differently now. 31
For Shariati, the state capitalist version of so-called socialism completely
rejected the sweeping ethical transformation envisioned as the hope for a
socialist future. For socialism, conceived by Shariati, is a form of political
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Foucault makes it very clear that he does not think of the Shiite clergy
as a revolutionary force, and why would he? The establishment of a
theocracy as a brutal form of state power immediately undermines the
ardor wherein the political and the religious lie side by side, creating
an oppressive elite that now announces that justice has been done and
the revolutionary force of Shiism must now be kept in check, ironically
by the very same people who were supposed to lead the revolution. What
interests Foucault is precisely the paradox in Shiism that Dabashi profoundly underscores: in a certain sense the necessary failure of any form
of government to be the last word on justice. The people may always have
to mobilize as they continuously await the return of the Twelfth Imam.
As Foucault demonstrates in his Response to Atoussa H., his understanding of Shiism is at least rich enough to be respectful both of its
revolutionary force and of the great thinkers of that revolutionary force as
being important to all of us who want to rethink revolution. In this letter
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Simply put, Foucault was grappling with how what Dabashi refers to as
Islamic liberation theodicy as a possible praxis of Shiism is an opening to the light of a new way of thinking about revolution. What was his
concern, then? One word: revolution.
So how does this take us back to the title of our paper? The political spirituality of the ritual practices of Muslims does indeed involve the
regulation and moderation of sexuality. 38 And why would that moderation
and regulation, in terms of ethical practices and not state-ordered sanctions,
interest Foucault? Famously, Foucault rejected the repressive hypothesis,
which holds that somehow or another there has been a taboo on sex and
that it would be liberating if we could lift that taboo. 39 Instead, he points to
a history that goes very much against the grain of the repressive hypothesis,
showing us that if there is a compulsion around sexuality, it is a compulsion
to sexualize all relations and to import a kind of discourse of sexuality as
a way of inscribing subjects into an embodied sexual being that cannot
escape from the obsession with sex. Edelman, for his part, tells us that there
is no after sex because this is who we are as subjects of a heteronormative
symbolic order, and therefore we cannot hope to find other ethical practices
that might take us to a different way of being together in relationships.40
In this model, it seems, queers must simply embrace the negativity of
jouissance imposed on us as people who must do as much fucking as possible and then talk about it every chance we get, hoping for nothing more
than to produce small tears in the social fabric as we go.41 The whole
third volume of The History of Sexuality, however, can be seen as a daring attempt to think about how different forms of caring for the self can,
in fact, reorganize power, and indeed biopower.42 They are not outside
it of course, but different ethical practices do allow for a transformation
in who and what we might become if we were to develop other modes of
organizing our sexuate being and, indeed, our erotic and emotive selves.
For Foucault, sexuality is indeed coextensive with power (i.e., there is no
sexuality without power); however, not all power is sexuality, which leaves
open the possibility of a radical reconfiguration of bodies and pleasures,
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The problem with much queer theory, then, is that the project of pitting
different forms of sexuality against each other (e.g., queer or non
normative sexualities against normative sexuality), or the attempt to
locate subversive sexual practices, does not in any way challenge the
ways in which all bodies, pleasures, and forms of relationality become
commodified by the austere monarchy of sex. Far from a revolutionary
action, then, the struggle for sexual freedom is rather one of the most
tragic ruses of the dispositif of sexuality that allows for the control of
our bodies, minds, and relationships at the deepest levels, all under the
illusion of liberation or resistance.
Revolutionary Being-Together and Political Spirituality
We have suggested so far that Foucault was far from being a naive supporter of Shiism and, in fact, intuitively grasped what Hamid Dabashi
has described as the heart of Shiisms emancipatory force. Shiism for
Foucault, and as Dabashi profoundly underscores, when it is mobilized
in a mass revolutionary movement, seeks not state power but the righting
of wrongs and, through its rich aesthetic tradition, the reimagining of
what it means to be human together. To critique Foucault for supporting a reactionary clerical regime then completely misses what he saw as a
reimagining of political possibility in the early Iranian uprisings. But for
us, this misreading of Foucault does not just involve a correction of his
serious, engaged, living relationship to a revolutionary mass movement in
Iran but also to how he has been fundamentally misunderstood in his view
of politics in general. Indeed we are going to dare to argue that Foucault
should not be considered a postrevolutionary at all, but rather somebody
who spent a lifetime engagingand never answeringthe question: how
can we still hope for revolutionary possibilities and politics, and what does
such a hope entail if it does not lead us to a political spirituality?
According to one of the great thinkers of Foucaults work, Ed Cohen,
Foucaults obsession with the relationship between thinking and living
returned him again and again to the question of how one cares for the
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self and develops an art of living that is inseparable from how one lives as
a philosopher capable of thinking differently, and therefore for Foucault,
capable of thinking at all.44 We are arguing that what Cohen has recently
emphasized in Foucaults late focus on psychagogy is precisely a form of
political spirituality. To quote Cohen: Psychagogy works on the soul; it
conducts the soul towards a new relation to itself by conducting it towards
a new, more truthful relation to being. Moreover, it incorporates the truth
insofar as it relentlessly governs the lives of those whom it engages.45 In
his last lectures, Foucault emphasized the relationship of the philosopher
to political parrhesia. For Foucault, there is a dilemma inherent in the
recognition in a democracy of everyones right to speak. This is what Foucault referred to as isegoria, which is the protection of the right to speak
as a matter of law. The problem for Foucault is that although everyone is
equally given the right to speak, not all have the same rhetorical power, and
therefore the danger of rhetoric is real. Foucault, then, using the example of
the political noninvolvement of Socrates even at the time of his own death,
points to how the philosopher has to teach through this parrhesiatic function, even at the cost of his own life. Thus the philosopher, as Foucault
puts it, has a necessary and yet exterior relation to politics: Philosophy
has to play a certain role in relation to politics, it does not have to play any
role in politics. And Plato refuses to give any advice in the field of politics,
before the Assembly, to those who will have to take decisions. Philosophical
parrhesia will not be this type therefore. It does not tell the truth to politics
in politics.46 This understanding of philosophy as playing a crucial role
in education in a democracy differs, however, from pedagogy in that both
the philosopher and those with whom he engages are transformed in the
exchange by confronting the difference between truth and false opinions.
To a certain extent, then, this can be seen as a difference, for Foucault,
from at least one version of Marxism in which the goal of philosophy is
only to serve the revolution and if that means lying to the people then so be
it. This is why Foucault consistently worried about vanguard parties and
the misuse of philosophy by them. The engagement through parrhesia, on
the other hand, is not simply a commitment to truth, and a true life, which
allows ones words to be heard for their worth in the judgments that we all
must make in a democracy about truth and false opinions. It is also a form
of soul work in that this commitment to truth actually changes the person
who in the body of the philosopher seeks constantly to bring truth to light.
It is this soul work that we are suggesting that Foucault takes back to the
question of revolution even while always wanting to maintain an exteriority
between philosophy and the polis. Again to quote Foucault: What concerns philosophy is not politics, it is not even justice and injustice in the
city, but justice and injustice inasmuch as they are committed by someone
who is an acting subject; acting as a citizen, or as a subject, or possibly as
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In like manner, Foucault never shied away from using the word domination, or the need to name relations of domination as precisely what
paralyze practices of freedom (although never completely). We have in
Foucault, then, a complex thinker of liberation, freedom, and domination,
who is perhaps never more timely than in a world in which we know that
liberation is not enough, that the seizure of state power by a revolutionary party does not guarantee practices of freedom and transformation,
and that the struggle to violently overthrow the oppressors takes its toll
precisely on practices of caring for the self and others.
Following this, we now want to return to our argument that it is
wrong to think of Foucault as, in any simple sense, a post-M arxist, as his
reception in much US queer theory implies, or that a Foucauldian politics
in any way involves the proliferation of sexuality. Simply put, we want to
suggest that a careful rereading of Foucault is essential to any queer feminist revolutionary materialism. We do so, in part, by thinking Foucault
with Rosemary Hennessys pathbreaking work, a leading Marxist feminist
theorist of sexual politics.51 Hennessy uses E. P. Thompsons notion of
experience as the way in which we materially live out our relations with
others within capitalism through relations of exploitation, which then
further involve us in varying degrees of accommodation, resistance to it,
or organized rebellion against it, and which inform our consciousness of
who we are and how we live in the world. We want to powerfully argue that
Foucault never rejected the idea that relations of sexuality couldand we
would argue shouldbe read in terms of how capitalist exploitation is not
just an overarching framework of meaning, but is materialized in all the
ways we live together, and this never more obviously so than in neoliberal
capitalism. Foucaults argument against the repressive hypothesis should
be understood as trying to grapple with how power materializes itself, not
just through discourse, but in the way we are in the world both singularly
and collectively, including in sex. We thus read Foucault in terms of a
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Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
2007). While the projects of Foucault and Marcuse bear some similarities, Foucault
offers a much stronger critique of the psychoanalytic conceptual lexicon that Marcuse retains. An analysis of the relationship between these two thinkers is beyond
the scope of this essay.
4. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004), 23, emphasis added. Again, we do not mean to
imply that Edelman (or the antisocial thesis) is representative of queer theory as a
whole. However, since its publication, No Future has provoked an incredible amount
of response, both critical and affirmative, and has subsequently set the parameters
of several of the ongoing debates within queer theory.
5. Ibid., 25.
6. In other words, Edelman deploys Lacanian jargon in a manner that, while
perhaps not entirely unauthorized by Lacans own work, seems primarily in service of staging his polemic against politics, rather than understanding the concepts in their analytic function. We are not suggesting that Lacans work is, in any
way, transparent or carries a unified meaning, but pointing out that Lacan himself
remained fundamentally committed to the analytic scene. Indeed, in a decidedly
un-E delmanian formulation, Lacan explicitly states: Analysis can have as its only
goal the advent of true speech and the subjects realization of his history in its relation
to a future (Jacques Lacan, The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis, in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink [New York: Norton, 2002], 249).
7. Judith Feher Guerwich, The Jouissance of the Other and the Prohibition
of Incest: A Lacanian Perspective, Other Voices 1, no. 3 (1999), www.othervoices
.org/1.3/jfg/other.php.
8. Remember, for Lacan, the capital O Other (the big Other) is the symbolic
order as language and law beyond the subjects knowledge. The phallic mother is she
who first inhabits the position of the Other, or (m)Other, until the subject recognizes
that the Other is incomplete insofar as being the mothers object of desire means
that, as a subject who desires something, she must necessarily be incomplete (this is
precisely the castration complex and the loss of the phallic mother). Similarly, the
symbolic itself is incomplete in that there is no signifier that ultimately closes the
system. Because of this radical incompleteness of the Other, we experience ourselves
as captured by it (we know it wants something from us), but it remains a mystery to
us (we know not what it wants). See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1987), and Dylan
Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge,
1996), 13536.
9. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar on the Purloined Letter, in Ecrits, 10.
10. For the basic outline of the theory of castration, see Sigmund Freud, Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books,
2000). For Freuds later thoughts on how this process differs in girls, see Femininity, in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, 1965), 13967.
11. Jacques Lacan, The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire
in the Freudian Unconscious, in Ecrits, 700.
12. For example, Edelman writes of conservative politics: Conservatives,
of course, understand this is in a way most liberals never can, since conservativism
profoundly imagines the radical rupturing of the social fabric. Again, however,
Edelman misinterprets what the unconscious wish for a law against the jouissance of
the Other on the part of conservatives signifies.
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13. Lee Edelman, The Future Is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification,
and the Death Drive, Narrative 6 (1998): 27.
14. Ibid., 26.
15. See Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991).
16. See Drucilla Cornell, Rethinking the Beyond of the Real, Cardozo Law
Review 16 (199495): 72992. Here Cornell argues that even Lacan himself ultimately fails to adequately grapple with the Real in its complete alterity to any symbolic capture, instead enframing the Real within the symbolic as the impossible.
Cornell argues that it is Derrida who, more than Lacan, recognizes and remains
faithful to the complete otherness of the Real.
17. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994),
7475, emphasis added.
18. This is why Derrida speaks of this future as to come ( venir) rather
than as future ( futur), in order to insist on the radical event-ness and otherness
of the future to come.
19. As Edelman puts it in his most frequently cited passage: Fuck the whole
network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop (No Future, 36).
Ironically, then, Edelmans position cedes completely to the reality of the symbolic
law in his insistence that the only available nonheteronormative position is that of
an antisocial acting out through an identification with the death drive. Thus, rather
than demystifying the Other and revealing it as a fantasy, Edelmans position is
that of the Lacanian psychotic who is unable to escape or limit the jouissance of the
Other. Now, it is entirely possible that Edelman would endorse the psychotic position
as one that offers queers a position that is radically disruptive of heteronormativity.
Similarly, several queer theorists have endorsed the Freudian melancholic position
as the only one available to minoritarian subjects. Again, however, the problem is in
the unpsychoanalytic mobilization of these concepts: Lacans psychotic and Freuds
melancholic are not subject positions that any analyst would encourage or that can
be taken up at will. Far from being radical sites of oppositionality, they are involuntarily produced through deep psychic distress and frequently result in suicide (and
not only symbolic suicide).
20. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 28, emphasis in original.
21. Ibid., 29.
22. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 19591960, bk. 7 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. Denis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 212.
23. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 196184, ed. Sylvre
Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 223.
24. Michel Foucault, Dialogue between Michel Foucault and Baqir Parham,
in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, ed. Janet
Afary and Kevin B. Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 185.
25. Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On
Human Nature (New York: New Press, 2006).
26. Michel Foucault, What Are the Iranians Dreaming [Rvent] About?, in
Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 208.
27. Indeed, Foucaults last two lecture series at the Collge de France, given
during the last two years of his life, are preoccupied with the question of revolution.
28. Foucault, Dialogue between Michel Foucault and Baqir Parham, 185,
emphasis added.
29. Foucault, What Are the Iranians Dreaming [Rvent] About?, 207.
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30. See Ali Shariati, Red Shiism (the Religion of Martyrdom) vs. Black
Shiism (the Religion of Mourning), Iran Chamber Society, www.iranchamber
.com/personalities/ashariati/works/red_black_shiism.php (accessed 20 May 2013).
31. Without attempting to read Shiism through the lens of Derrida, we would
like to call attention to the similarities between the notion of Shiism as the active
struggle for a different life while remaining oriented toward a justice to come and
Derridas own late obsession with what he called a messianicity without messianism that demands an anticipatory stance toward the future to come without resigning oneself in any way to present injustices. See, among many examples in Derridas
late works, Specters of Marx.
32. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of the Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collge de France, 19831984, ed. Frdric Gros, trans. Graham
Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 184. Here, Foucault importantly
argues that there are in fact three ways in which revolution can be seen as a way of
life, only one of which is the party or institutional form of revolutionary politics.
Foucault obviously seems more interested in the way that revolution is lived as a
subjects own break with his society in order to manifest the truth.
33. See Ali Mirsepassi, Political Islam, Iran and the Enlightenment: Philosophies
of Hope and Despair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
34. Foucault, What Are the Iranians Dreaming [Rvent] About?, 209,
emphasis in original.
35. See Hamid Dabashi, Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (New
York: Routledge, 2008).
36. Michel Foucault, Tehran: Faith against the Shah, in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 201.
37. Michel Foucault, Foucaults Response to Atoussa H., in ibid., 210.
38. It should not go unnoticed here that it is often precisely issues of sexual
regulation or moderation that serve as manifest proof of the repression of Muslims
to many in the United States who subscribe to an equation of sexuality and freedom.
39. See Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
40. See Lee Edelman, Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social, in
After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 11019. For Edelman, there can be no
after sex for queer theory because this subscribes to the reproductive model of
history in which the after is a redemptive and generative development produced
from the before. Again, however, Edelman takes the particular historical discursive formation known as sex(uality) as a constitutive inevitability. Like Derridas
rereading of Hegels philosophy of history in Specters of Marx, Foucaults genealogical
project gives us a way of thinking the eventness of our symbolic forms (in this case
sexuality) without reproducing the (hetero)normative conceptions of temporality
Edelman cautions against.
41. Edelman, Future Is Kid Stuff, 27.
42. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986).
43. Foucault, Introduction, 159, emphasis added.
44. Ed Cohen, Live Thinking, or the Psychagogy of Michel Foucault
(unpublished manuscript on file with the authors, 2013).
45. Ibid., 2.
46. Michel Foucault, in The Government of the Self and Others: Lectures at the
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Collge de France, 19821983, ed. Frdric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 318.
47. Ibid., 319.
48. It may be surprising to some interpreters of Foucault how centrally we are
placing the notion of political spirituality, given that it barely appears as such in his
work. Ladelle McWhorter has written, to our knowledge, the only essay in English
dealing explicitly with this enigmatic concept. See McWhorter, Foucaults Political
Spirituality, Philosophy Today 47 (2003): 394 4.
49. Foucault, The Impossible Prison, in Lotringer, Foucault Live, 282.
50. Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,
in Lotringer, Foucault Live, 433.
51. See Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000). Hennessy is one of few queer theorists to incorporate an explicitly Marxist feminist frame. More recent work has also sought to
bring Marxism and queer theory together: see Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire:
Toward a Queer Marxism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and
Jordana Rosenberg and Amy Villarejo, eds. Queer Studies and the Crises of Capitalism, special issue, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 18, no. 1 (2012).
52. Indeed, it was to Kollontai that one of the authors referred in her aforementioned paper, True Love and the Transition to Socialism. See Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings (New York: Norton, 1980).
53. Paget Henry, Calibans Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (New
York: Routledge, 2000), 121.
54. See Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State (New York: Penguin, 2010).
55. Michel Foucault, Intellectuals and Power, in Lotringer, Foucault Live, 181.
56. See Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in The Marx-E ngels Reader,
ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 61852.
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