The place of the Iranian Revolution in the history of truth: Foucault on neoliberalism,spirituality and enlightenment

1. Introduction: Political spirituality and Foucault’s philosophical politics

…only when we know what this governmental regime called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is. (Foucault 2008: 22)

Persia has had a surprising destiny. At the dawn of history, it invented the state and government. It conferred its models of state and government on Islam, and its administrators staffed the Arab Empire. But from this same Islam, it derived a religion that, throughout the centuries, never ceased to give an irreducible strength to everything from the depths of a people that can oppose state power…(Foucault 2005d: 203)

This is the Aufklärung in the wide sense of the term to which Kant, Weber, etc. referred…the organization of a confrontation between the art of being governed and that of not being quite so governed. (Foucault 1997e: 46–47)

In the wake of the publication of Heidegger’s Schwartze Hefte, the question of how deeply a thinker’s philosophical views and political action are connected has been raised with a new fervour. And Foucault’s involvement bears superficial resemblances to Heidegger’s. His support of Khomeini’s revolutionary form of political Islam has resulted in charges of fascism or– at least – romantic fascist sympathies on his part. ¹ This should not be all too surprising. Heidegger’s philosophy, with all its anti-modern, anti-Western resonances, had a direct influence on the views of Ali Shari’ati, one of the most important theological influences behind the rise of political Islam during the revolution. ² Foucault famously declared that Heidegger was for him ‘the essential philosopher’ and in his writings on Iran, Shari’ati is one of the only Muslim intellectuals that Foucault discusses.

Of course, there has been a decades-long debate over the extent to which Heidegger’s unrepentant Nazism displayed the limitations of his project of fundamental ontology. While Foucault’s journalism and reflections on the Iranian Revolution were criticized roundly at the time, they have hardly coloured the reception of his thought – or, indeed, the perception of his other avenues of more palatable activism – in the same way. While both Foucault and Heidegger were markedly silent about their respective political involvements after the fact, in the former’s case it is often seen as being part and parcel of a more drastic political and philosophical shift from a thoroughly anti-humanist approach to knowledge and power to an avowedly ‘liberal’ focus on the care of the self and free human subjectivity. ³

Ironically, perhaps, Foucault’s alleged ‘liberal’ or ‘ethical’ turn, from the late 1970s through to his death in 1984, have received their own share of criticism. There are, of course, the famous interrogations of Foucault’s theoretical consistency from Habermas, Dews and others, who find Foucault’s late work on ancient ethical practice and Kantian enlightenment to be a rejection of his earlier views, that is, to betray a staggering intellectual inconsistency. Of course, from Foucault’s critics further to the left, any such turn towards mere liberalism would itself be suspect. Recently this ‘liberal’ or ‘ethical turn’ is beginning to appear as a ‘neoliberal’ turn. Since the publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France from 1977–1979 on the history of governmentality from Machiavelli to the Chicago School of neoliberal economics, there has been an explosion of scholarly output on these topics, some of which seem quite perturbed by Foucault’s lack of an explicit denunciation of neoliberal policy. ⁴

However, in this article, I want to argue that Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian Revolution was neither romantic fascist atavism nor does it presage any sort of transformation of his thought. Indeed, Foucault’s investigations of neoliberalism and subsequent work on spirituality, truth-telling and ethics are fully continuous with his critical genealogy of power. This is an important point, as we shall see, insofar as Foucault’s journalism on the Iranian Revolution occurs in the midst of his Collège de France lectures on biopolitics and governmentality. Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Revolution might indicate, albeit very indirectly, directions for thought that might resist neoliberalism.

I will argue that Foucault was engaged in a very specific telling of the ‘history of truth’, emphasizing a partisan and agonistic form of truth-telling, and transformation through struggle and ordeal, as opposed to the pacifying, neutralizing, and normalizing forms of modern Western power. The ‘political spirituality’ Foucault witnessed on the streets of Tehran was a reactivation of this agonism, and – I will claim – a literal embodiment of what Foucault calls the ‘ethos of critique’.

In 1978, shortly before leaving for Iran, in a lecture and interview published as “What is Critique?” Foucault first makes public his allegiance to the Enlightenment and explicitly situates his own work as part of a purportedly Kantian project: what he calls a ‘historico-philosophical’ discourse that he finds emerging in Kant’s occasional writings. This self-understanding remains constant in his thought until his death; much of the text, and many of the main ideas of the 1978 lecture, form the basis for the 1984 essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ with many passages serving almost word for word as the introductory lectures in his 1983 course on ‘The Government of Self and Others’. So, the question arises: how could Foucault align himself with the tradition of Kant, of Marx, Weber, Adorno and Habermas, that is, a tradition of critical rationality, while at the same time supporting a radical, politicized Islam? What did he take from the Iranian situation, and how can we make sense of it in the context of his professed relation to Kant and ‘critique’? What role could spirituality play in the ‘politics of truth’?

To understand all of this, and how Foucault could place political spirituality at the heart of a historically rationalist tradition of critique, we must first turn to the origins of Foucault’s discussions of biopolitics and governmentality, which frame both his turn to Kant and Iranian journalism.

2. The truth in war discourse

In “Society Must Be Defended”, Foucault’s original discussion of bio-politics appears as a coda to a semester-long history of the concept of ‘race war’. Indeed, Foucault is very sympathetic to the discourse of race war, a fact which prima facie requires some explaining. After all, one might be surprised, on a first reading of “Society Must Be Defended”, to find that in determining the sources and limits of the discourse of the race war Foucault is explicit in praising it. Why would he do so, especially given that it is precisely the tendency towards racialized violence that marks his substantive discussions of biopolitics? To see what Foucault is after, one must remember that his avowed goal in this lecture course is to investigate the origins, limits, and fecundity of analysing power relations in terms of war, in terms of military tactics. Indeed, more than anything else, this sort of discursive practice is the focus of the course: the attempt to ‘invert Clausewitz’ dictum’ and see ‘politics as war by other means’ (Foucault 2003: 15 et passim).

This is by no means the first time that Foucault adopts this approach. He had already made limited use of this model of analysis in Discipline & Punish. In that work, he is explicitly ‘presupposing’ that we think about power in terms of strategies of ‘battle’ rather than in terms of either ‘contract’ or ‘conquest’ (1995: 25). We all know that Foucault thinks of power as producing rather than repressing subjects with given channels of desire, practices of pleasure, and sources of values. But viewing power as a battle, allows us to think of the production of bodies, individuals, etc. through power relations as intrinsically contestable, as unfinished. If every site of power is a site of resistance as well, it is because every site of power is a site of struggle. Foucault echoes Nietzsche’s claim that the ‘higher natures’ among us have become ‘genuine battlegrounds’. ⁵ Long before his ‘ethical turn’, and in direct opposition to his teacher Althusser, Foucault recognizes that it is not the State but we who are the stakes and site of political struggle.

One can make the best sense of Foucault’s discussion of race, racism and the basic structure of his insights into biopolitics with this dimension of the ‘war-model’ in mind. In the context of the emergence of the discourse of race war, ‘race’ is not taken in even a quasi-biological sense; it originally refers to something perhaps closer to ‘class’, and is indeed the discourse from which Marx and Engels claim to have found the concept of ‘class war’ (2003: 79). But Foucault’s main interest in the discourse of race war as it emerged in early modern England and, later, France, is that it is an oppositional discourse, an ‘historico-political’ discourse that opposes what he calls philosophical or juridical discourses.

While he does not elaborate on the nature of philosophico-juridical discourse at much length, and makes remarks noting that this tradition goes back to the Greeks, it is fair to say in this context his main target to the great tradition of modern political thought, from Hobbes through Kant, at least; indeed, insofar as Hobbes takes it to be the case that political authority is established through contract, we might refer to it as the modern liberal tradition. What Foucault worries about, explicitly, is the way in which philosophico-juridical discourse attempts to provide us with an impartial view of the normative order of things, a view on which – if one were simply rational, perhaps – one could see the way things ought to be, the rights held by oneself and others, without holding any prior commitments. Indeed, it might be that the sort of partial, partisan commitments such as at work in the discourse of race war are impediments to objectively assessing the objective normative order. For example, in Locke’s Second Treatise, the need for an unbiased judiciary is a major impetus for individuals to leave the state of nature, despite their pre-political, rational grasp of natural law.

As is suggested above, the important point of contrast lies in the constitutive partiality of historico-political discourse. On this view, rights and other normative phenomena, are not neutral parts of the moral landscape waiting to be recognized or discovered, as they are for philosophico-juridical discourse. Crucial for understanding this point is the conception of truth at work in historico-political discourse, a conception of truth as partial, as reserved for partisans. As Foucault puts it,

And if this subject who speaks of right (or rather, rights) is speaking the truth, that truth is no longer the universal truth of the philosopher. It is true that this discourse about the general war, this discourse that tries to interpret the war beneath peace, is indeed an attempt to describe the battle as a whole and to reconstruct the general course of the war. But that does not make it a totalizing or neutral discourse; it is always a perspectival discourse. It is interested in the totality only to the extent that it can see it in one-sided terms, distort it and see it from its own point of view. The truth is, in other words, a truth that can be deployed only from its combat position, from the perspective of the sought for victory and ultimately, so to speak, of the survival of the speaking subject himself. (2003: 52. Emphasis added)

Historico-political discourse, in this sense, rests on an authority that comes not from some sovereign right of subjectivity but from one’s investment in a struggle, situated in an agonistic context or field of force-relations. And, I would like to suggest, there is an irreducibly first-personal dimension to this; the rights claimed by, say, the Diggers or the Levellers are grounded in who they are, and the sides they have chosen. They are not ‘objective’ in the sense that they could necessarily be agreed to by anyone who does not share the same first-personal commitments, or the same singular history. Rather, these discourses, and the practices in which they are embedded, constitute ‘sites of veridiction’, areas of our lives that come to figure centrally in our self-conceptions. And they are truths about who one is precisely because they are integrated into projects and, consequently, struggles; such a discourse could not be used to ‘guide’ action from a disinterested vantage point.

First because the subject who speaks in this discourse, who says ‘I’ or ‘we’, cannot, and is in fact not trying to, occupy the position of the jurist or the philosopher, or in other words the position of a universal, totalizing, or neutral subject. In the general struggle he is talking about, the person who is speaking, telling the truth…is inevitably on one side or the other: he is involved in the battle, has adversaries, and is working toward a particular victory. Of course, he speaks the discourse of right, asserts a right and demands a right. But what he is demanding and asserting is ‘his’ rights – he says: ‘We have a right’. These are singular rights, and they are strongly marked by a relationship of property, conquest, victory, or nature. It might be the right of his family or race, the right of superiority or seniority, the right of triumphal invasions, or the right of recent or ancient occupations. In all cases, it is a right that is both grounded in history and decentered from a juridical universality. (2003: 52. Emphasis added.)

I have tried to suggest that Foucault’s praise of the war model, as a way of rendering power relations intelligible, and in particular of the discourse of race war, as a paradigmatic mode of employing the war model, is most importantly praise for its constitutive partiality. This is central to Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics and governmentality. We shall see in the next section how Foucault views the history of the neutralization and objectification of this partiality.

3. Genealogy against the neutralization of truth

Foucault’s readers have, of course, noted his enthusiasm for the discourse of race war. It has, for obvious reasons, struck some as deeply problematic, and as something that Foucault ultimately repudiated, insofar as his discussion of the agonistic struggle of ‘races’ concludes with the emergence of the discourse of State racism (cf. McWhorter 2011; Hoffman 2014, especially ch. 3). In this section I want to argue that the emergence of the discourse of State racism is not the inevitable and condemnable outcome of the sort of war discourse Foucault admires, but rather its inversion. It is, precisely, the capture of war discourse by (broadly liberal) ‘juridico-philosophical discourse’. In the course of doing so, we will see how Foucault thematizes this sort of objectifying, neutralizing discourse, and its consequences.

Though Foucault’s most famous remarks about racism come in the context of biopolitics and the State racism of totalitarian regimes, it is not absent from earlier works like Discipline & Punish. In the latter, he discusses how – with the rise of disciplinary technologies and the emergence of the figure of the delinquent – the ‘criminal’ came to be seen as a racial phenomenon, not in a biological sense, but in the quasi-social sense of the term as it was often used prior to the 20th century. Indeed, it seems that the inhabitants of the ‘carceral society’ were among those who thought ‘society must be defended’, though, in this case, from a ‘criminal’ race or species,

…crime is not a potentiality that interests or passions have inscribed in the hearts of all men, but that it is almost exclusively committed by a certain social class: that criminals, who were once to be met with in every social class, now emerged ‘almost all from the bottom rank of the social order’…that ‘nine tenths of murderers, thieves and idlers come from what we have called the social base’…; that it is not crime that alienates an individual from society, but that crime is itself due rather to the fact that one is in society as an alien, that one belongs to that ‘bastardized race’, as Target called it, to that ‘class degraded by misery whose vices stand like an invincible obstacle to the generous intentions that wish to combat it’…(1995: 275–276. Emphasis added.)

What Foucault wants to show us is how the constitution of the social body as a social body, threatened by internal enemies from which it must be protected, is wrapped up with the emergence and dissemination of various new power-relations. But, in particular, he is interested in the way that the constitution of ‘society’ takes place through the neutralization and displacement of the agonistic relations expressed through the discourse of war. This, I take it, is already clear in the closing lines of Discipline & Punish, which is precisely supposed to serve as ‘background’ to future historical studies, likely including the original plan for The History of Sexuality,

…what presides over all these mechanisms [of power] is not the unitary functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the necessity of combat and the rules of strategy…[C]onsequently, the notions of institutions of repression, rejection, exclusion, marginalization, are not adequate to describe, at the very centre of the carceral city, the formation of the insidious leniencies, unavowable petty cruelties, small acts of cunning, calculated methods, techniques, ‘sciences’ that permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual. In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of incarceration, objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle. (1995: 308)

The issue is one of pacification, and its effects on subject formation. For example, at one point the spectacle of punishment was an opportunity for agitation, an event inviting instability and focusing resentment against sovereign power; indeed, it could be an occasion for revolt (cf. Foucault 1995: 58–59). These spectacles were opportunities for a people to express their discontent – and even to constitute themselves as a people in doing so. Once the features of criminality become objective, quasi-biological and sociological properties of individuals, punishment takes the form of correction, and the punishment spectacle-as-opportunity-for-subject-formation is neutralized.

In Society Must Be Defended the same broad process is described with respect to the advent of ‘racism’ from the discourse of race war, with explicit reference to the claims of Discipline & Punish. The relevant section warrants quoting at length,

…the theme of the binary society which is divided into two races or two groups with different languages, laws, and so on will be replaced by that of a society that is, in contrast, biologically monist. Its only problem is this: it is threatened by a certain number of heterogeneous elements which are not essential to it, which do not divide the social body, or the living body of society, into two parts, and which are in a sense accidental. Hence the idea that foreigners have infiltrated this society, the theme of the deviants who are this society’s byproducts. The theme of the counter history of races was, finally, that the State was necessarily unjust. It is now inverted into its opposite: the State is no longer an instrument that one race uses against another: the State is, and must be, the protector of the integrity, the superiority, and the purity of the race. The idea of racial purity, with all its monistic, Statist, and biological implications: that is what replaces the idea of race struggle…Whereas the discourse of races, of the struggle between races, was a weapon to be used against the…discourse of…sovereignty, the discourse of race (in the singular) was a way of turning that weapon against those who had forged it, of using it to preserve the sovereignty of the State…Thanks to the shift…from races in the plural to race in the singular, from the emancipatory project to a concern with purity, sovereignty was able to invest or take over the discourse of race struggle and reutilize it for its own strategy. State sovereignty thus becomes the imperative to protect the race. It becomes both an alternative to and a way of blocking the call for revolution that derived from the old discourse of struggles, interpretations, demands, and promises. (2003: 80–82)

As is well known, Foucault finds, in Society Must Be Defended, that the discourse of race war becomes both co-opted by State power, and the truths it produces rendered objective by incorporation into the scientific discourses of medicine and (misguided racial) biology. ⁷ The oppositional aspect of the discourse is absorbed into the State discourse, and so the opposition between rival combatants is transformed into an internal division, a division within the unity of society and the combative, agonistic dimension neutralized into a project of purification. ⁸ The discourse of race war is only able to be co-opted and neutralized in this way through its ‘objectification’ in biological discourses; the truths of ‘race’ are available to all, and their normative authority is no longer linked to first-personal struggle but to a third-personal discourse of health. Health therefore takes on political significance, the State takes on the responsibility of administrating it, and political problems and medical problems begin to overlap. All of this results in the eclipse of the sovereign State’s right to ‘let live or make die’ by the imperative to ‘make life live’. This discourse of the State’s responsibility for the health of the nation plays itself out in the history of State racism. Foucault thinks that bio-political strategies of State power were made possible in part by the assimilation of an oppositional discourse into objective, scientific discourse and the transformation of the discourse-as-struggle into discourse-on-(internal)-struggle.

The worry is that the discourse on struggle is itself neutralized. No longer does history serve as a catalogue of grievances, through which subjects might constitute themselves individually and collectively, asserting their will through the rejection of being governed and the weaponized demand for rights. The colonization of normative discourses by ‘sciences’, by objective and universal discourses, is precisely what Foucault argues genealogy is supposed to oppose.

Genealogies are, quite specifically, antisciences. It is not that they demand the lyrical right to be ignorant, and not that they reject knowledge, or invoke or celebrate some immediate experience that has yet to be captured by knowledge. That is not what they are about. They are about the insurrection of knowledges. Not so much against the contents, methods, or concepts of a science; this is above all, primarily, an insurrection against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with the institutionalization and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours…Genealogy has to fight the power-effects characteristic of any discourse that is regarded as scientific. (2003: 9. Emphasis added.)

Foucault, while no conservative, nevertheless recognizes that in the scientification of various normative discourses, something is lost or, at least, rendered dormant: something specifically local, and not bound by the need to be universally or globally accessible or intelligible. He specifically refers to this as ‘local knowledge’,

…genealogy is, then, a sort of attempt to desubjugate historical knowledges, to set them free, or in other words to enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse. The project of these disorderly and tattered genealogies is to reactivate local knowledges against the scientific hierarchicalization of knowledge and its intrinsic power-effects. (2003: 10–11. Emphasis added.)

Much of what we value, and the rankings of our values, is contestable; we disagree with others about how to live our lives, and, in particular, about how to live our lives together, in the collective settings into which we are thrown. Even if we agree on some central value, say, freedom, or equality, we can differ greatly in what we take those concepts to entail. Moral disputes of this nature, as Alasdair MacIntyre points out, are often interminable (2007). MacIntyre blames this condition on the lack of a common shared framework that would provide shared, objective grounds for making such judgments. We need not share the specifics of his diagnosis in order to accept that individuals and groups may not share sufficiently moral experiences, concepts, or theories to be able to come to agreement about the basics of how we ought to live with one other.

The great promise of liberal democracy was to allow us to live with one another without unacceptable constraint; the negative liberty afforded by the rule of law prevents others from impinging upon our projects. But it is no novel insight that this conception is riven by an internal tension between liberalism and democracy, between a neutrality that guarantees our rights and a genuine sense of self-rule, of shaping our lives as both individuals and collectives. Foucault – whose criticism of liberalism in this period, at least, is acknowledged – does not follow Schmitt or Mouffe or Arendt in arguing against this sort of depoliticization explicitly, but rather looks to the ways in which it actually takes place, how the sites of struggle in the normative landscape are neutralized.

This, of course, is the point of his account of the production of ‘docile bodies’, in Discipline & Punish. While it’s true that he makes use of Guéry and Deleule’s work on the creation of a productive body in the service of the development of capitalism, even that discussion takes place in the context of a contrast with Weber’s explanation of the rise of Western capitalism.

If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. (1995: 220–221)

4. Economic truth-telling as hermeneutic of self

In “Society Must Be Defended”, Foucault’s discussion of the partisan, contentious form of discourse known as “race war” ends with a discussion of biopolitics. In that text, and in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, biopolitics is discussed briefly, but never thoroughly examined. Foucault’s most sustained discussion of biopolitics occurs in his two lecture courses at the Collège de France: Security, Territory, Population in 1977–1978, and The Birth of Biopolitics in 1978–1979, which in fact bookend his engagement with the Iranian Revolution. Each begins with a statement to the effect that Foucault’s aim in the course is to study biopolitics. As his readers have noted, it is ambiguous whether the content of the courses does so. However, in each of these courses devoted to biopolitics, we unsurprisingly discover sustained interest in the discourse of liberalism. In The Birth of Biopolitics, we even find Foucault saying that ‘only when we know what this governmental regime called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is’ (2008: 22).

It should be unsurprising, at this point, that Foucault’s great worry here is liberalism, conceived as a form of political thought and action that neutralizes and depoliticizes. Indeed, early in Security, Territory, Population, he discusses liberalism explicitly as a technique of government, that is to say, of power. ⁹ There are three important features of this liberalism technique. First, its target: liberalism takes as its aim not the correction or direct training of individuals, as with disciplinary techniques, but rather the population as a whole (cf. Foucault 1978: 137–139). ¹⁰

Second, it aims at the happiness, or well-being of the population. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault notes that the well-being of the family unit, and of the town, was originally the aim of policing, as part of the imperative of Raison d’État, a very different form of governance and mode of power (2009:103–104, 327–328). We see here the germs of biopolitical governance in the sense of the general imperative of ‘making live and letting die’, which Foucault famously contrasts with the sovereign power of ‘letting live and making die’. While the state use of police force to increase well-being is focused on the family unit, the shift from Raison d’État to liberal governmentality moves focus to the population as a whole, as newly discovered object, whose well-being must be promoted (2009: 345–347).

Third and finally, the liberal technique of governmental power functions by working through freedom. Foucault tracks this form of laissez-faire government from the Physiocrats, in Security, Territory, Population, through the German ordoliberals and Chicago School economics of the later 20th century in The Birth of Biopolitics. As opposed to Raison d’État, or disciplinary mechanisms, the liberal technique of power aims for the well-being of the population through the management of the free pursuit of individual interests.

So, liberalism is a specific type of biopolitics that aims for the well-being of the population through the managed and structured free action of individuals. And, as we have seen, Foucault takes liberalism to be a particularly neutralizing and depoliticizing form of discourse. In contrast to the partial, partisan truths put forward in war-discourse, in discourse-as-war, we find new ‘objective’ truths about ourselves, namely, those truths about our well-being that are to be found in biomedicine, positive psychology, and the like, and new truths about the most effective ways to produce that wellbeing, that are to be found in the market.

Foucault notes that the emergence of political economy, as a new form of scientific discourse, is correlated to the arrival on the scene of the ‘population’ as an object of both scientific inquiry and governmental intervention. And it is through political economy – and not merely in its original form, focused on the source of national wealth, but through its contemporary forms, including human capital theory – that an objective truth about ourselves is revealed. Again, we should note that Foucault is not raising an epistemic critique of political economy. It may indeed reveal objective truths about ourselves. What Foucault contests is the central normative authority of the truths revealed about ourselves by political economy, or economic science more generally.

It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of veridiction which has a political significance. That is what I wanted to say regarding the question of the market or, let’s say, of the connecting up of a regime of truth to governmental practice. (2008: 36–37)

Foucault notes that this way of treating human beings has not remained completely constant in its signification, moving from cases of rational self-interested participants in exchange to competitive entrepreneurs for whom every personal endeavour is a matter of investing in oneself, hence producing one’s own satisfaction. As we move from the original laissez-faire politics of the Physiocrats to the ordoliberals to the Chicago School, human action becomes rational economic action, across ever new domains, far beyond the reach of anything plausibly called ‘exchange’. ¹¹

This is particularly depoliticizing and neutralizing insofar as the desires or interests of the self are taken as given, to be satisfied or not. As opposed to the sort of partisan demands for rights, and the militantly constructed truths about oneself that one finds in war-discourse, there is no sense of attempting to alter the normative landscape for oneself and others, to constitute oneself as a full-fledged member of a people, through struggle or transformation. Ironically, this is done by making competition – though not struggle, in the sense that Foucault means – the ultimate principle not only of market interactions but of all social life; the agonistic struggles that mark the war-discourse, or even the earlier forms of ethical subject-formation that Foucault will later discuss in the context of Classical Athens, have been neutralized as objective features of ‘natural’ human existence.

One of the major novelties of neoliberal thought, in its Austrian and US forms, is its complicated assessment of economic truth and knowledge. Indeed, for thinkers like Hayek, neoliberalism is as much a politico-epistemic project as anything else (cf. Mirowski 2009, also Krašovec 2013, especially 63–69). As Foucault puts it, in this respect economics is an ‘atheistic discipline; economics is a discipline without God…economics is a discipline that begins to demonstrate…the impossibility of a sovereign view over the totality of the state he has to govern’ (2008: 282). In brief, neoliberal economics does without the possibility of a God’s eye view that could discern the desires and interests of its subjects, because there is no such totality to be viewed. And yet the economic interactions of individuals require that they have some knowledge of the desires and interests of others, in order that they be able to coordinate. It will be, ultimately, the totally free market and its ability to set prices that will disclose the relevant information; they will be produced through interaction. What is striking to note, here, is that under neoliberalism, we might not even be aware of what our normatively authoritative desires are. There is a sense in which our real desires – and thus, in a very real sense, who we are – are only disclosed through these competitive, economic interactions. In this way, we are compelled to produce these truths about ourselves, that is, compelled to participate in economic action, simply in order to understand ourselves: consumption as confession.

In the (neo)liberal case, we find Foucault interrogating a form of truth-telling embodied in action, a special case where we are opaque to ourselves, though trained experts might be able to make sense of our actions through observing them. Targeting this sort of truth-telling is part and parcel of Foucault’s project throughout the late 1970s. Indeed, we should note the similarities here between liberal economic truth-telling and psychoanalytic truth-telling; in each case, we are compelled to put into discourse, and action, our most central truths. In the latter case, it just so happens that our desire is narrowly sexual, whereas in liberal truth-telling, interest is simply desire as such, with no further nature: just empty want, irreducible beyond the basic, subjective sensations of pain and pleasure. It leaves no room for an ethic beyond Lacan’s psychoanalytical slogan: ‘Do not give up on your desire’.

Indeed, Foucault claims that the first volume of the History of Sexuality could be read as an ‘archaeology of psychoanalysis’, as a way of articulating the structures that make possible the ‘task of truth’ (1978: 130). For Foucault, the archaeology of psychoanalysis is, in some central sense, about the way in which the truth about our sexual desires became fundamental to our self-conception, and hence to our way of life. And at roughly this juncture in his intellectual itinerary, Foucault was beginning to think about archaeology as intimately related to the forces and structures that compel us to speak the truth.

I shall say that the problem for the archeology…of knowledge will not be an overall study of the relations of political power and knowledge or scientific knowledge. The problem will be regimes of truth, that is to say, the types of relations that link together manifestations of truth with their procedures and the subjects who are their operators, witnesses, or possibly objects…[T]he archaeological history I am putting forward…shift[s] the accent from the ‘it is true’ to the force we accord truth. This type of history will not therefore be devoted to the way in which truth succeeds in tearing itself from the false and breaking all the ties in which it is held [i.e. it will not be history of science or ideological critique], but will be devoted, in short, to the force of truth and to the ties by which men have gradually bound themselves in and through the manifestation of truth. Basically, what I would like to do and know that I will not be able to do is write a history of the force of truth, a history of the power of the truth, a history, therefore, to take the same idea from a different angle, of the will to know. (2014: 100–101. Emphasis added.)

I think it is thus fair to view the neoliberal construal of economic action and, consequently, economic truth-telling as part of the long history of the hermeneutics of the self that is already starting to crystallize as a key problematic for Foucault’s thinking. When Foucault endeavours to explain what he is up to – to an audience of Americans in 1980 – he says the following.

I conceived of a rather odd project: not the study of the evolution of sexual behavior but of the historical study of the link between the obligation to tell the truth and the prohibitions weighing on sexuality. I asked: How had the subject been compelled to decipher himself in regard to what was forbidden? It is a question that interrogates the relation between asceticism and truth. Max Weber posed the question: If one wants to behave rationally and regulate one’s action according to true principles, what part of one’s self should one renounce? What is the ascetic price of reason? To what kind of asceticism should one submit? I posed the opposite question: How have certain kinds of interdictions required the price of certain kinds of knowledge about oneself? What must one know about oneself in order to be willing to renounce anything?…Thus, I arrived at the hermeneutics of technologies of the self in pagan and early Christian practice. (Foucault 1997b: 224)

In fact, in Foucault’s last monographs on the history of sexuality, we can see how his archaeologies of liberal truth-telling fit into his project. While attempting to explain the modifications to the project since the publication of the first volume, he explicitly notes that he has been attempting a ‘history of truth’, and, more specifically, this history has led him to an ‘analysis of desiring man’, a phrase he repeats frequently (1990b: 5–7, 12–13, 224). It is within this project – a history of truth and analysis of desiring man – that the more commonly discussed ‘techniques of the self’, ‘hermeneutics of the subject’, or ‘aesthetics of existence’ all find their place. It seems likely that in the move from the discussion of biopolitics, and its neutralizing forms of veridiction, to the ethical practices of antiquity, Foucault is chasing the same thing: how it is that we came to see our desire – and ultimately, our interest, for the subject of interest is but the liberal subject of desire – as the central objective truth about ourselves, and how it is that we came to think that expressing this truth was of the utmost emancipatory importance.

We have already seen that Foucault takes it that the history of veridiction – of truth-telling – is of fundamental political concern, especially as those truths we take to be central to ourselves become neutralized and depoliticized. We can now see that those who think that Foucault might have some sympathy towards neoliberalism seem to ignore that neoliberalism is the pinnacle of the sort of political reason that Foucault criticizes in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. In that work, he is supremely dismissive of the idea that our freedom hinges on the recognition and free expression of the deepest and most authoritative truth about ourselves, which is nonetheless objective and given. Indeed, we might paraphrase the closing words of that text.

Moreover, we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy…people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of [the market], and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of [interest], so that we became dedicated to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest of confessions from a shadow. The irony of this deployment is in having us believe that our ‘liberation’ is in the balance. (1978: 159)

5. Liberalism, pastoral power and spiritual revolt in the Iranian Revolution

So, Foucault was concerned with the ways in which we are governed by the truth, and by the ways in which we are compelled to not only view it not only as given, but also as hidden, to be discovered and produced. Liberalism, in its many forms, is one of these ways. Of course, it is not simply the case that liberalism emerged as a sort of governmentality out of nowhere, and that we all decided to go along with it. Foucault is only interested, in this history of truth, with how we were compelled, and how these objective truths neutralized our ways of being; that is, he is concerned with how we became obedient.

It is nothing new to note that Foucault thinks that Western religious practices had a great deal to do with this linkage between obedience and truth. In Foucault’s first lecture series on biopolitics, the discussion of pastoral power is the focus of 9 out of 13 lecture meetings. What Foucault is interested in, here, is how pastoral power forms a model for biopolitical governance; both incredibly individualizing, and placing those individuals into a flock for whose wellbeing the pastor takes complete responsibility. And the pastor does so by discovering – indeed, compelling the flock to produce – their deepest inner truths, in order that he might use them to manage the behaviour of the flock. Looking earlier into Christian history, Foucault claims

[t]he objective of Christian direction…is not at all to establish a jurisdiction or codification. It involves establishing a relationship of obedience to the other’s will and at the same time establishing, in correlation with, as condition of this obedience, what I would call not a jurisdiction, but a veridiction: the obligation constantly to tell the truth about oneself, with regard to oneself, and in the form of confession…the formula for [Christian] direction is, I think, obedience to the other with veridiction of oneself for its instrument… (2014: 307–308. Emphasis added.)

As both Foucault (and others) note, the post-Second World War liberal project was not merely an economic one, but a political one. The ordoliberal project in post-war Germany, for example, aimed at founding the legitimacy of the State on its ability to produce and maintain a free market, and neoliberals knew that while the State must not attempt to govern the population, nevertheless a very strong and actively interventionist State would be required to produce the unimpeded market that would allow individuals to freely pursue the satisfaction of their interests. As Foucault put it,

So, it is a matter of a market economy without laissez-faire, that is to say, an active policy without state control. Neoliberalism should not therefore be identified with laissez-faire, but rather with permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention. (2008: 132)

The Tanner Lectures were delivered mere months after Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran. This is the lens through which we must view Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian Revolution. While it would be wildly inaccurate to claim that in the 1970s the Iranian government was instituting ordo- or neoliberal policies in a concerted fashion, it is nevertheless true that the Shah had instituted, over the course of several decades, a series of economic reforms. While these were not exactly fully liberal, it was nevertheless the case that they were more liberal, and that they served to strengthen the power of the State. We might think about it as a form of authoritarian liberalism; it was certainly not accountable to the demands of the populace. Indeed, the Shah was supported by US and UK forces in a coup against elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, largely on grounds that the latter was nationalizing the oil industry. Upon his return to power, the Shah became increasingly authoritarian, and the power of the SAVAK, or secret police, grew: a development to which Foucault would have been particularly sensitive.

While Foucault was vocally opposed to the corruption of the Pahlavi regime, it is ultimately precisely opposition to this project of economic modernization – which is at the same time a project of moderate economic liberalization – for which Foucault had sympathy.

Out of the whole Kemalist program, international politics and the internal situation left to the Pahlavis only one bone to chew on, that of modernization. This modernization is now utterly rejected, not only because of the setbacks that have been experienced, but also because of its very principle. (2005a: 196)

Foucault sympathized specifically with the Islamic wing of the Revolution. Indeed, he was incredibly impressed with the force of specifically Islamic ‘spirituality’ against the modernizations and liberalizations of the Pahlavi regime. He claims this repeatedly. It is worth noting here that the Iranian Revolution here is somewhat anomalous; its causes do fit established theories of revolution, and its ultimate character – as opposed to the character of the post-revolutionary regime – remains in question among scholars (cf. Foran 1994). Foucault himself noted that the Revolution did not follow the models or expectations of Western observers. And it is this conjunction of repeated support for Islamic spirituality with the rejection of modernization that has led commentators like Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson to see in Foucault’s support for the Revolution an atavistic, quasi-fascism, filtered through his rejection of dominant Christian spiritual practices and a dangerous focus on death, martyrdom, and suicide; Foucault views the Revolution as an (almost) exclusively Islamic cultural and spiritual phenomenon.

Afary and Anderson are correct to note that, in the symbols of religious martyrdom Foucault saw an alternative to the Christian exhortation to exagoreusis, the continual putting of oneself into discourse that is continuous with the ‘incitement to discourse’ he discusses in the modern deployment of sexuality. In fact, they note that the resistance here is to the Western-liberal-cum-Christian demand that one ‘sacrifice oneself in order to learn the truth about oneself’ (Afary and Anderson 2005: 52), and it is true that Foucault was particularly interested in the way in which the Muslim religion allowed Iranians to stand up to a massively powerful military and police apparatus, which would lead them ‘to prefer the risk of death over the certainty of having to obey’. (2005b: 263). However, they mistakenly extrapolate from this, imputing to Foucault a total rejection of Western modernity and an advocacy of a return to traditional forms of life. As we saw above in the brief discussion of Bernard Williams, the resonance with traditionalism is there but Foucault was certainly never a traditionalist; if he valued local knowledge, he certainly never aimed at restoring traditional social orders.

Of course, Afary and Anderson did not have at their disposal Foucault’s lecture courses, and could not have known about Foucault’s concerns about liberal (biopolitical) truth-telling; they should be commended for recognizing that the relation to truth was at the heart of Foucault’s concerns at all. Nor could they have known the role that spirituality would have played in his thought both preceding and following the Revolution, or why it would loom so large in his appreciation of the event. It is striking to read Afary and Anderson’s claims that ‘In the tradition of Martin Heidegger, Foucault was interested in a secular, hermeneutic reading of Christianity, especially of those rituals and techniques that could be reinvented for a new spirituality, a modern form of penitence’ (Afary and Anderson 2005: 14). It is certainly odd to claim of a thinker who once claimed, in a discussion of revolutionary action, that he aimed ‘to obliterate the deep division between guilt and innocence’ a desire to find new forms of penitence (1980: 227). It is especially strange, given that many readers see in Foucault’s late writings on Antiquity the hope to find in ancient Greek and Hellenistic practices an alternative to Christianity entirely; as it stands, there is no unambiguous sense that Foucault approved of or sought to recover anything from these ways of life either, despite speaking of them almost always more approvingly than of Christianity. They were ‘disgusting’ and ‘all of Antiquity [was] a profound error’ (1990a: 244; 258). With respect to martyrdom and the fascination with death, Foucault dismisses it explicitly in recounting his discussion speaking with an irreligious writer in Tehran.

I did not even have to ask him whether this religion, which alternately summons the faithful to battle and commemorates the fallen, is not profoundly fascinated with death – more focused, perhaps, on martyrdom than on victory. I knew that he would have responded: ‘What preoccupies you, you Westerners, is death. You ask her to detach you from life, and she teaches you how to give up. As for us, we care about the dead, because they attach us to life. We hold out our hands to them in order for them to link us to the permanent obligation of justice. They speak to us of right and of the struggle that is necessary for right to triumph’. (2005d: 201. Emphasis added.)

Foucault, for quite some time in fact, had already seen in specific types of non-pastoral religious discourse a form of revolt against dominant powers. This religious form figures centrally in the war-discourse that he opposed to the juridical-philosophical theories of early modern philosophers.

[T]his new discourse is similar to a certain number of epic, religious, or mythical forms which, rather than telling of the untarnished and uneclipsed glory of the sovereign, endeavor to formulate the misfortune of ancestors, exiles, and servitude…With this new discourse of race struggle, we see the emergence of something that, basically, is much closer to the mythico-religious discourse of the Jews than to the politico-legendary history of the Romans. We are much closer to the Bible than to Livy, in a Hebraic biblical form much more than in the form of the annalist who records, day by day, the history and the uninterrupted glory of power. I think that, in general terms, it must not be forgotten that, at least from the second half of the Middle Ages onward, the Bible was the great form for the articulation of religious, moral, and political protests against the power of kings and the despotism of the church…Like the reference to biblical texts itself, this form functioned, in most cases, as a protest, a critique, and an oppositional discourse. (2003: 71)

It is the relation of ‘mythico-religious’, prophetic, mystic, and spiritual discourse to oppositional counterdiscourse and counterhistories that interest Foucault. So, when discussing Iran, Foucault’s discussions of Islamic government do not speak to a fascination with any actual doctrine, but with the partisan, motivating force that would lead one to risk death in disobedience. As someone constantly interested in the force of truth, here Foucault found a counterforce to hegemonic liberalism and, in his writings on the Iranian Revolution, he names this sort of discourse ‘political spirituality’.

Despite claiming that he ‘could hear the French laugh’ at the invocation of spirituality in politics, at this juncture in his intellectual itinerary, Foucault was already crucially interested in specifically spiritual forms of revolt. In the spring of 1978, Foucault describes them as irreducible to political, social, or economic concerns.

What I would like to show you is that [spiritual revolts against pastoral government] are distinct from political revolts against power exercised by a form of sovereignty, and they are also distinct [from economic revolts against power]…They are distinct in their form and in their objective. There are revolts of conduct. After all, the greatest revolt of conduct the Christian West has known was that of Luther, and we know that at the outset it was neither economic nor political, notwithstanding the connections that were immediately established with economic and political problems. (2009: 196)

Intuitively, it seems that at least some forms of ‘spirituality’ – the ‘spiritual ordeal’, for example – are paradigmatic instances of partiality; the tasks and transformations demanded in spiritual ordeal matter precisely because they are part of one’s own project. One thinks here, for example, of Kierkegaard’s discussion of Abraham and Isaac. The teleological suspension of the ethical is precisely the suspension of impartial, universal rules of right in the name of a transformative calling that is constitutively partial. It is precisely this the sort of ‘spirituality’ that Foucault thinks has been missing from European culture since ‘the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity’, namely, a transformational relation to truth (2005c: 209). In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault thematizes at length about the tensions between spirituality and modern philosophy, discussing the general lack of a spiritual dimension since the 17th century’s ‘Cartesian moment’. Just as in his writings on the Iranian Revolution, Foucault dates the subordination of spirituality to a form of philosophical self-knowledge to the end of the Renaissance, and the beginnings of modernity. We should not be surprised that this coincides with the rise of modern ‘juridico-philosophical’ frameworks of thought to which Foucault opposes the ‘historico-political’ discourses of war.

Foucault would go on to develop the concept of spirituality. It does not die with his discussions of Iran. ¹⁴ Indeed, he saw it as central to his project of writing a ‘history of truth’.

A history of truth, not from the point of view of relations or structures of objectivity, or of intentionality, but from the point of view…of the subject’s relationship to himself, understood not only as a relationship of self-knowledge, but as a relationship of exercise of self on self, elaboration of self by self, transformation of self by self, that is to say, the relations between the truth and what we call spirituality…as that which qualifies the subject…and, at the same time, transforms it. (2014: 17–18)

So, Afary and Anderson are mistaken in viewing Foucault’s interest in the Iranian Revolution as an anti-modern revolt against Enlightenment values. It is part and parcel of his genealogical attempt to undermine scientific, or objectivized, forms of veridiction about oneself, paradigmatically in the forms of contemporary liberalism and neoliberalism. If Foucault prioritized the theme of Islamic spirituality, it is because ‘spirituality’, as such, when adopted as a form of partisan, struggling relation to truth, corresponds to a very specific form of revolt. It is a revolt against being governed by the truth, against obedience as it is demanded by the sorts of practice that have grown from the Christian pastorate; we have already seen that Foucault was most interested in the way that Islam motivated a refusal of obedience even at the risk of death. It was, to use a different Foucaultian phrasing, ‘the art of voluntary inservitude’ in extremis.

6. Conclusion: Spiritual revolt as the ethos of critique

In May of 1978, mere months before he began his work with Corriere della sera, and the very same month in which he referred to the object of his work as ‘political spirituality’, Foucault presented a lecture that would eventually be published under the title What is Critique? While it was certainly not his first writing on Kant, it marks the first time that he gives sustained attention to the latter’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ He would return to this essay multiple times over the next six years, often in the same terms. It is fair to say that, at least towards the end of his life, Foucault saw his own work as embodying a sort of ‘critical ethos’ that he found in Kant’s occasional writing.

In What is Critique? Foucault gives several tentative characterizations of the sort of critique that he pursues. As he puts it in 1978,

Well, then!: critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth. (1997e: 47)

It should be unsurprising, then, that Foucault is explicit in claiming that, on his reading, the Kantian project of critique is linked to the rejection of ‘governmentalization’, that is, the implementation of pastoral techniques into diverse technologies of power.

What Kant was describing as the Aufklärung is very much what I was trying before to describe as critique, this critical attitude which appears as a specific attitude in the Western world starting with what was historically, I believe, the great process of society’s governmentalization. (1997e: 48; cf. 2000b: 335)

Foucault would continue to reflect on the affinities between his thought and Kantian ‘critique’, however idiosyncratically he construed the latter, until his death in 1984. Indeed, discussions of Kant’s Enlightenment essay would comprise some of the last works of his life. Material substantially similar to the What is Critique? lecture comprises the opening sessions of his penultimate course at the Collège de France, as well as his final publication on Georges Canguilhem (Foucault 2010: 25–37; cf. Foucault 1998). In these later reflections, he would construe critique as an ‘attitude’ or ‘ethos’ (1997c: 312). I want to propose that whatever Foucault wanted to capture in his idea of an ethos of critique, that is, a way of being that rejects the assurances and certainties of the present in order to construct a new way of living is equally present in the notion of spirituality.

The upshot of this view is what Foucault calls the ‘experimental’ dimension of critique. If we know that Foucault rejects ‘global’ or ‘radical’ projects, it is at least in part because these would require the establishment of some sort of global or universal order. While critics have attacked Foucault for lacking an ethics that would speak, truly, of morals in a way that could provide guidance, the point is that Foucault demands that we ‘experiment’ by attempting to change the truth about ourselves, in partial and partisan ways. For example, he rejects the idea that desire – no doubt present in him – constitutes a normatively central truth about himself when he suggests that his task as a gay man is not to ‘liberate’ that desire but to constitute a gay way of life, in accord with different values. (cf. Foucault 1997d). The point is that these spiritual experiments, these essays in the critical attitude, are about one’s transformation, and that transformation may bring with it a revaluation of values that is only intelligible from the first-personal perspective. To the rest of the world, one’s attitude may seem indeed like a serious error.

However, there is nothing wrong with error in itself. In the last text that Foucault approved for publication in his lifetime, an essay on Georges Canguilhem, he once again discusses Kantian enlightenment, and places his own more immediate context of French historical epistemology in the tradition of critique. Following Canguilhem, Foucault notes the productiveness of error, of resistance to the truth, that is, of experiment,

…error is the root of what produces human thought and its history. The opposition of the true and the false, the values that are attributed to the one and the other, the power effects that different societies and different institutions link to that division – all this may be nothing but the most belated response to that possibility of error inherent in life…Nietzsche said that truth is the greatest lie. Canguilhem, who is far from and near to Nietzsche at the same time, would perhaps say that on the huge calendar of life it is the most recent error. (1998: 476)