In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek

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       Michel Foucault and the Iranian event

      One of the main anti-totalitarian clichés is that of “intellectuals” (in the infamous Paul Johnson sense of the term) seduced by the “authentic” touch of violent spectacles and outbursts, in love with the ruthless exercise of power which supplements their limp-wristed existence—the long line from Plato and Rousseau to Heidegger, not to mention the standard list of the dupes of Stalinism (Brecht, Sartre …). The facile Lacanian defense against this charge would be to point out that the least one can say about Lacanian psychoanalysis is that it renders us immune to such “totalitarian temptations”: no Lacanian has ever committed a similar political blunder of being seduced by a mirage of a totalitarian revolution …

      However, instead of such an easy way out, one should rather heroically accept this “white intellectual’s burden.” Let us approach it at its most problematic. The contours of the debate about the status of Heidegger’s Nazi engagement (was it just a passing mistake of no theoretical significance or was it grounded in his thought itself? Did it contribute to the turn Heidegger’s thought took afterwards?) are strangely reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s brief engagement on behalf of the Iranian revolution.¹⁶ How could the following lines not evoke a striking parallel with Heidegger?

      Many scholars of Foucault view these writings [on Iran] as aberrant or the product of a political mistake. We suggest that Foucault’s writings on Iran were in fact closely related to his general theoretical writings on the discourse of power and the hazards of modernity. We also argue that Foucault’s experience in Iran left a lasting impact on his subsequent oeuvre and that one cannot understand the sudden turn in Foucault’s writings in the 1980s without recognizing the significance of the Iranian episode and his more general preoccupation with the Orient.¹⁷

      In both cases, one should invert the standard narrative according to which the erroneous engagement awakened the thinker to the limitations of his previous theoretical position and compelled him to radicalize his thought, to enact a “turn” that would prevent such mistakes from occurring again (Heidegger’s shift to Gelassenheit, Foucault’s to the aesthetic of the self): Foucault’s Iranian engagement, like Heidegger’s Nazi engagement, was in itself (in its form) an appropriate gesture, the best thing he ever did, the only problem being that it was (as to its content) a commitment in the wrong direction.

      Rather than reproach Foucault for his “blunder,” one should read his turn to Kant a couple of years later as his response to this failed engagement. Foucault is interested in the notion of enthusiasm as Kant deploys it apropos the French Revolution (in his Conflict of Faculties, which we already quoted in Chapter 1): as we have already noted, for Kant, its true significance does not reside in what actually went on in Paris—many things there were terrifying, outbursts of murderous passions—but in the enthusiastic response that the events in Paris generated in the eyes of the sympathetic observers all around Europe … Did Foucault thereby not propose a kind of meta-theory of his own enthusiasm about the Iranian revolution of 1978—79? What matters is not the miserable reality that followed the upheavals, the bloody confrontations, the new oppressive measures, and so on, but the enthusiasm that the events in Iran stimulated in the external (Western) observer, confirming his hopes in the possibility of a new form of spiritualized political collective.

      Was Iran, then, for Foucault the object of “interpassive authenticity,” the mythical Other Place where the authentic happens—Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia today …—and for which Western intellectuals have an inexhaustible need? And, incidentally, one could redeem in the same way not only the enthusiasm evoked by Stalinist Russia in many Western intellectuals and artists in the 1930s and 1940s, but even the enthusiasm stoked in those who were otherwise bitter critics of Stalinism by the Maoist Cultural Revolution: what matters was not the brutal violence and terror in China, but the enthusiasm fired up by this spectacle amongst the Western observers … (And—why not?—one could claim the same for the fascination of Nazi Germany for some Western observers in the first four years of Hitler’s rule when unemployment fell rapidly, and so on!)

      However, the problem with this reading is that, in his interpretation of the Iranian events, Foucault turns this perspective around and opposes the enthusiasm of those engaged in the event to the cold view of the external observer who discerns the larger causal context, the interplay of classes and their interests, and so on and so forth. This shift of the enthusiasm aroused in an external observer to the enthusiasm of those caught in the events is crucial—how are we to think the link of these two locations of enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of direct participants and that of external and disengaged (disinterested) observers? The only solution is to “deconstruct” the very immediacy of the lived experience of the direct participants: what if this immediacy is already staged for an observer, for an imagined Other’s gaze? What if, in their innermost lived experience, they already imagine themselves being СКАЧАТЬ