Social Text

Theres Nothing Revolutionary

about a Blowjob
Drucilla Cornell and Stephen D. Seely

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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an impossible emancipatory metanarrative, but that the proliferation of

antisocial sexuality is the only means of escaping the grip of the hetero
sexist symbolic order.1
To answer this line of thought, we are going to use thinkers who
are not often associated with our main aim, which, to state it clearly, is to
return queer theory to revolutionary politics. Those two thinkers are
Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, who at least in US-based queer theory,
have often been used to disavow the continuing desirability of revolution.
We will begin this essay by responding to the (mis)reading of Lacan that
authorizes the so-called antisocial thesis in queer theory and the renunciation of revolutionary possibility that accompanies it. But beyond that, we
want to return to Foucaults later work in order to suggest that not only was
Foucault not a postrevolutionary, but that he was profoundly concerned
with how certain forms of so-called sexual freedom were part and parcel
of the worst side of capitalism, in which people imagine that they are free
just at the moment when they are most commodified. Indeed, we will seriously reassess the significance of Foucaults interest in and engagement
with the Iranian Revolution at the same time as he was developing The
History of Sexuality project. Why, given Foucaults many reservations about
the communist revolutions in both Europe and Asia as well as about the
sexual revolution, was he so captivated by the Iranian Revolution? In
what ways might a reflection on this question help illuminate Foucaults
stance toward revolutionary politics in general?
Of course, our purpose here is not to defend the Iranian Revolution,
even as a revolution. (This, to be clear, is not because it was Islamic, but
because it was Islamized, to use Hamid Dabashis telling phrase, into a
dictatorial theocracy.)2 Our point is instead that Foucault was concerned
to demonstrate that what we think of as free sexuality is not only a form
of constraint, but that there was something right in the Muslim refusal of
a liberal division between public and private. To make this argument, we
have to look again at The History of Sexuality and Foucaults late project
of elaborating an ethical care for the selfa care that, let it be said at the
outset, includes ethical limits when it comes to fucking around.3 Indeed,
we want to explicitly argue that reading The History of Sexuality alongside
Foucaults interest in the Iranian Revolution, rather than in terms of the
development of purportedly queer forms of sex and desire, provides a more
telling glimpse into what Foucault had in mind with his call for new ethical
arrangements of bodies and pleasures. It is thus our contention here that
neither Lacan nor Foucault consigns us to the inevitability of our capture by
either the symbolic order or by power (whether in the form of heteronormativity or otherwise) and that, instead, both insist that we turn ourselves
toward the future by reimagining our fundamental modes of being.
This debate, for us, is not simply another theoretical intervention into
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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

Before we turn to Foucaults work, we feel that in order to suggest a return

of queer theory to revolutionary possibility, we must first grapple with
Lee Edelmans forceful assertion that the commitment to futurity that
must necessarily underwrite any form of revolutionary politics is always
already both conservative and heteronormative. As Edelman writes:
For politics, however radical the means by which some of its practitioners
seek to effect a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative
insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which
it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child. That
Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the
fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention. . . . What, in that
case, would it signify not to be fighting for the children? How could one
take the other side, when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one
to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a political order that
returns to the Child as the image of the future it intends?4

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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in a unique sense. Through Lacanian analysis we lose the fantasy of being

completely plugged into the Other, but through that loss we gain awareness
of ourselves of having our own psychic life. On the other side, however, is
psychic death, or the wish to extinguish the subjectivity that is born with
our desire and remain instead an object for the Other. The ethical goal is
thus to reach the point where the patient can see that jouissance is actually
within us and not an all-powerful entity who can obliterate us. The fantasy
that we are subjected to the Other is a difficult one to release precisely
because the unconscious needs to fend off capture by the jouissance of the
Other. Paradoxically, we need the fantasy of the symbolic law to feel safe
from being consumed by the Other insofar as this Law purports to prohibit
certain threatening desires. Right-w ing women, for example, develop an
unconscious wish for a law that can protect them from the jouissance of
the Other, which they identify with the fantasy figure of the homosexual.
Thus, anti-gay politics can be seen as a defensive reaction formation in
the classic sense: the jouissance of the Other is outlawed by outlawing gay
and lesbian marriage, and therefore the subject is safe.
It is this unrealizable unconscious wish that Edelman interprets as a
a tear in the social fabric.12 But an unrealizable wish is not an impossible Real, as Edelman seems to think. To quote Edelman himself on this
misunderstanding in his attempt to salvage jouissance for the acting out of
impossible queerness:
But to the extent that jouissance as a tear in the social fabric of symbolic reality as we know it unravels the solidity of every object, including the object
as which the subject necessarily takes itself, it evokes the death drive that
always insists on the void both in and of the subject beyond its fantasy of
self-realization in the domain of the pleasure principle.13

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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what is impossible as opposed to the subject that is constituted through

the disruption of a Real that is unknowable but that affects us by throwing time out of joint, as Jacques Derrida reminds us again and again. The
beyond of the Real that disjoins temporality or the narrative of historicism
is precisely what keeps the future open as a promise of the indetermination that itself disrupts the self-enclosure of the symbolic order. We need
to underscore this point: the Real is not some-thing. The Real is not
there. It is, instead, precisely only thinkable as that which disrupts the
self-enclosure of the symbolic order, but that is not to say that the Real is
no-t hing. Instead, the Real is what remains as it effects the disruption
of the self-enclosure of the symbolic. It is there only in its effects, one of
which Derrida emphasizes in Specters of Marx as the disjoining of time that
keeps open the future. Indeed, Edelmans mistake is to frame the real as
impossible, because the very notion of the impossible is a symbolic one
and the Real remains forever other to the symbolic. In other words, if the
Real is beyond the knowable then we can never know what is impossible.16 The
future is a promise and not a narrative precisely because the other remains
other to all historical attempts to capture what is beyond. To quote Derrida:
It was then a matter of thinking another historicitynot a new history and
still less a new historicism, but another opening of event-ness as historicity
that permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access
to an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as
promise: as promise and not as onto-t heological or teleo-eschatological program or design. Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it
is necessary to insist on it more than ever, it seems and insist on it, moreover,
as the very indestructibility of the it is necessary. This is the condition of
a re- politicization, perhaps of another concept of the political.17

This future, as promise to come, is exactly what cannot be narrated

because there can be no end that encloses the story.18 And, moreover,
this future has nothing to do with heteronormativity, fantasies of imaginary children, or narcissistic self-projection. Or, in other words, since
the future is not there any more than the Real, it cannot be fucked.19
Edelmans relentless struggle to keep us safe from the emancipatory desire
ironically keeps us captured in the jouissance of the Other, here positioned
as the inevitability of capitalism, which hangs onto us even as we buy our
next sex toy.
The future to come remains forever other because the dead can never
be put in their place, and they incessantly return to issue demands upon us
in the present. For Derrida, the heterogeneity of the Real, or of any event,
is precisely that it is an ineffaceable trace. This is why deconstruction, for
Derrida, is justice, precisely in that it endlessly moves through the disjoining
of time to keep open a place for the other to come. Again to quote Derrida:
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This necessary disjointure, the de-totalizing condition of justice, is indeed

here that of the presentand by the same token the very condition of the
present and of the presence of the present. This is where deconstruction
would always begin to take shape as the thinking of the gift and of undeconstructible justice, the undeconstructible condition of any deconstruction, to
be sure, but a condition that is itself in deconstruction and remains, and must
remain (that is the injunction) in the disjointure of the UnFug. 20

Edelman would be wise to remember why the future-to-come matters to

us. Indeed as Derrida urgently reminds us, Without the opening of this
possibility, there remains, perhaps, beyond good and evil, only the necessity of the worst. A necessity that would not (even) be a fated one.21 And
for Edelman, it seems that queer theory is indeed fated by the necessity
of the worst in its purported identification with the death drive. The
dead, or more specifically, the specter, is for Derrida the thing that is no-
thing in this world. And yet it is there as a spectral asymmetry, which as
Derrida writes, desynchronizes, in the sense that it confronts us with
what is other and remains an unmasterable disproportion. What Derrida
names a hauntology is precisely what forces us to be turned toward the
dead as the other who calls to us and at the same time disjoins the present
so that what we inherit is also a promise to the future, not of the Child,
but of the ghost. Thus the future, for Derrida, is our inheritance, not our
childrens. And it is what always turns us to the other, and in that sense,
the nonnarratable. This is a completely different understanding of death,
the future, and inheritance than the one offered by Edelman in his insistence that queerness demands an identification with the death drive as that
which rejects futurity in a destructive embrace of jouissance in the present.
Indeed, even Lacan asserted that any will to destruction in the death
drive fundamentally coexists with a will for an Other-thing [Autre-
chose].22 It is by recognizing that both the symbolic and the narrative
structures of history are fantasies that we might open ourselves to a future
beyondone that is indeed unknowable, but one that is ours to inherit.
Revisiting Foucault and Iran

Given the dominant reception of Foucault in US queer theory, it might be

surprising that we turn to his work in order to argue for a revolutionary
queer politics. Over and over again we hear repeated quotations interpreted to mean that Foucault rejects the very idea of the revolution. In
the interview The End of the Monarchy of Sex, for example, he claims
that the very desirability of the revolution is the problem today.23 But
as always with Foucault, he is here speaking to a very particular notion of
revolution, one that he attributes to both French and German philosophy,
which focuses more on the development and establishment of a bourgeois
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nation-state than on the radical transformation of society. Indeed, he

reminds us that the problem is how these European thinkers, who we
associate with the thinking of revolution, typically focused on a very limited notion of transformation through principles of good government. For
Foucault, famously, this limited form of European thinking in France,
England, and Germany did not lead to the great Marxist aspiration of the
complete transformation of actual conditions of social life. As he puts it:
In actuality, out of this philosophical visionthe vision of non-a lienated,
clear, lucid, and balanced societyindustrial capitalism emerged, that is,
the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society
one could possibly imagine. I do not want to say that the philosophers were
responsible for this, but the truth is that their ideas had an impact on these
transformations. More importantly, this monstrosity we call the state is to a
great extent the fruit and result of their thinking. 24

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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lution in Iran. We will return momentarily to some of Foucaults remarks

on Shiism, including his insight into it as a revolutionary political will.26
But for now, we want to emphasize two important points. The first is that
Foucault never stopped thinking about the problem of revolution; indeed,
it remained at the heart of his thought until the end of his life. 27 It is precisely this commitment to rethinking what revolution might be that turned
his attention to the initial revolutionary uprising in Iran. And secondly,
Foucault never embraced the Islamic theocracy under Ayatollah Khomeini.
Once again, his interest is in the development of a new revolutionary
potential within Shiism, not in the establishment of a new Iranian state.
To quote Foucault on what is needed to rethink the very idea of revolution:
I think we live at a point of extreme darkness and extreme brightness.
Extreme darkness, because we really do not know from which direction the
light would come. Extreme brightness, because we ought to have the courage to begin anew. We have to abandon every dogmatic principle and question one by one the validity of all the principles that have been the source of
oppression. From the point of view of political thought, we are, so to speak,
at point zero. We have to construct another political thought, another political
imagination, and teach anew the vision of a future. I am saying this so that
you know that any Westerner, any Western intellectual with some integrity,
cannot be indifferent to what she or he hears about Iran, a nation that has
reached a number of social, political and so forth, dead ends. At the same
time, there are those who struggle to present a different way of thinking
about social and political organization, one that takes nothing from Western
philosophy, from its juridical and revolutionary foundations. In other words,
they try to present an alternative based on Islamic teachings. 28

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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spirituality in which the material practices of being a Muslim transform

one not only into a revolutionary engaged in the struggle to overthrow
colonialism and capitalism, but into someone who is able to begin to live
differently so that in ones own lifestyle one poses a constant challenge
to the commodifying relations of advanced capitalism. Indeed, Foucault
makes a similar point in his last lecture series at the Collge de France
when he argues that revolution is not just a political project; it [is] also
a form of life, a form of life that ensures that ones life bears witness,
breaks, and has to break with conventions, habits, and values of society.
And it must manifest directly, by its visible forms, its constant practices,
and its immediate existence, the concrete possibility and the evident value
of an other life, which is the true life.32 In a deep sense, then, Foucaults
admiration for Shariati is that revolution is not just fighting for another
world, but for how to be a different subject in this one, and therefore in
a sense making a profound linkage between, in Foucauldian terms, new
forms of conduct in social relations and new ways of conducting oneself.
Shariati never tired of condemning colonialism and capitalism.
Although some young thinkers have seen Shariati as engaged in a rejection of the European Enlightenment through his engagement with Martin
Heidegger, in fact Heideggers own interest in Shariati was precisely that he
was thinking revolution as a thoroughgoing transformation away from the
annihilation of Being that Heidegger himself characterized as the Gestell
of modern technology. 33 Shariatis entire work is an engagement with the
best of revolutionary thinking from Marx to Fanon, but his emphasis on
how Muslim revolutionary thought, as a practice of life-t ransforming ethical ways of being in the world, always in the name of a justice-to-come,
certainly begins, at least, the kind of rethinking of revolution that Foucault
felt we must undertake. Indeed, Foucaults deep respect for Shariati, a
respect we share, is precisely that through a complicated and rich engagement with the failures of not only the very thinking of revolution, but the
failures of how revolution had been institutionalized, Shariatis thought
and the revolutionary movements in Iran might be the beginning of a way
forward. As Foucault puts it:
The other question concerns this little corner of the earth whose land, both
above and below the surface, has strategic importance at a global level. For
the people who inhabit this land, what is the point of searching, even at
the cost of their own lives, for this thing whose possibility we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity, a political
spirituality. I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they
are wrong. 34

Foucault does not pretend to be an expert on Shiism, but he does

certainly understand what Hamid Dabashi calls its fundamental paradox:
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Shiism never can succeed as a governmental power because there can be

no ideal justice until the return of the Twelfth Imam, and so there is a
sense in which Shiites must always be the political opposition. 35 In terms
of modern political philosophy, they pose as a constituent power always
poised to fight against oppression. However, when they institutionalize
themselves as a government, they contradict the very spiritual power of the
political will and the ethical determination to practice life differently now
in the name of that justice-to-come. Shiite revolutionaries thus certainly
reject the idea that religion is the opium of the people; instead, religion
here constitutes a set of political practices that subtend Shiism as a revolutionary force, as well as an aesthetic and ethical enactment of practices
of remembrance of wrongs done and the need to keep the oppressors at
bay who enforce those wrongs. Foucault, then, in no way embraces the
idea that the Shiite clergy as institutionalized by Khomeini could possibly
be a revolutionary force. Indeed, Foucaults own descriptions of Shiism
come very close to the Shiism of which Hamid Dabashi has written so
eloquently. To quote Foucault:
Around 90 percent of Iranians are Shiites. They await the return of the
Twelfth Imam, who will create the reign of the true order of Islam on earth.
While this creed does not announce each day that the great event will occur
tomorrow, neither does it accept indefinitely all the misery of the world.
When I met Ayatollah Shariatmadari (he is undoubtedly the highest spiritual authority in Iran today), one of the first sentences he uttered to me was:
We are waiting for Mahdi, but each day we fight for a good government.
Shiism, in the face of established powers, arms the faithful with an unremitting restlessness. It breathes into them an ardor wherein the political and
the religious lie side by side.36

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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Foucault mentions two intolerable aspects of the European rejection of

the Iranian Revolution:
(1) It merges together all the aspects, all the forms, and all the potentialities
of Islam within a single expression of contempt, for the sake of rejecting
them in their entirety under the thousand-year-old reproach of fanaticism.
(2) It suspects all Westerners of being interested in Islam only due to scorn
for Muslims. What could we say about a Westerner who would scorn Islam?
The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and
the coming years. In order to approach it with a minimum of intelligence, the
first condition is not to begin by bringing in hatred. 37

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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both individually and collectively. As Foucault clearly and emphatically

states at the close of the first volume of The History of Sexuality:
We need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different
economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how
the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able
to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to
the endless task of forcing its secret, of extracting the truest of confessions
from a shadow. The irony of this deployment is in having us believe that our
liberation is in the balance.43

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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a sovereign. Philosophys question is not the question of politics; it is the

question of the subject of politics.47
Whether one agrees or disagrees with Foucaults understanding of
the philosopher as both necessary and exterior to politics in a democracy,
we can certainly understand his criticism of vanguardism as a form of
the manipulation of citizens that runs against the radical egalitarianism
implied in the equal right to speech. But for our purposes here, we want
to return to how the concern for the subject in politics is inextricably part
of Foucaults own rethinking of forms of conduct that, in his later writing,
he referred to as government of the self and others. This focus on forms
of conduct certainly enriches his earlier writing on resistance and takes
us back to his engagement with the Iranian Revolution as offering us new
ways of thinking about how to conduct ourselves together. And, moreover,
Foucaults project of seeking new arrangements of bodies and pleasures
should be read precisely as an attempt to articulate new forms of individual
and collective conduct, or, in other words, an attempt to produce revolutionary bodies and minds.
It is indeed this struggle for new forms of conduct that takes us to
the heart of what Foucault means by political spirituality and its relation
to practices of freedom.48 The care of the self, here imagined as itself a
practice of freedom, must embody different ways of being with oneself
and with others (and the two are always combined in Foucault) that
demand of us completely new ways of not only thinking of truth, but of
living truth. And it is this relation to truth that makes this project both
a political and a spiritual one, insofar as the very heart of politics, for
Foucault, consists of a search for new practices of governing oneself and
others through a way of dividing true and false that has not been with us
before. As he writes: How can one analyze the connection between ways
of distinguishing true and false and ways of governing oneself and others? The search for a new foundation for each of these practices, in itself
and relative to the other, the will to discover a different way of governing
oneself through a different way of dividing up true and falsethis is
what I could call political spirituality.49 Needless to say, by foundation, Foucault did not mean a new overarching, philosophical theory
of rationality or any other form of onto-theology. Instead, he was
interested in how practices found themselves so as to embody new ways
of caring for the self that promote freedom. It is precisely this founding
of new revolutionary practices of governmentality (in the unique sense
in which Foucault uses the term) that he sought to grapple with in his
trips to Iran during the revolutionary fervor and uprisings of the masses
of people. Often Foucault is read as if he simply forsakes the struggle
for liberation, but this simply is not the case. On the contrary, we see in
Foucault a complicated distinction between practices of liberation as
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the struggle against domination and practices of freedom as the care

for the self and others. Again to quote Foucault:
I am not trying to say that liberation as such, or this or that form of liberation, does not exist: when a colonized people attempts to liberate itself from
its colonizers, this is indeed a practice of liberation in the strict sense. But
we know very well, and moreover in this specific case, that this practice of
liberation is not in itself sufficient to define the practices of freedom that
will still be needed if this people, this society and these individuals, are to
be able to define admissible and acceptable forms of existence or political
society. This is why I emphasize practices of freedom over processes of liberation; again, the latter indeed have their place, but they do not seem to me
to be capable by themselves of defining all the practical forms of freedom.50

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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powerful insistence that if we are to salvage revolution then we must dare

our own imaginations so that we can articulate a revolutionary subject who
does not simply replicate the worst forms of exploitation, understood in
the Marxist sense, once state power has been seized (if that is a necessary
step). And, furthermore, that this will inevitably involve a confrontation
with all levels of what we think of as sexuality through an elaboration of,
yes we will dare to say it, revolutionary love. Hennessy bravely brings back
the great Marxist feminist Alexandra Kollontai, whose novels, lectures, and
theoretical work always returned to the importance of not just reorganizing family and reproductive labor, as important as that is, but to the point
that what has been seen as most privatehuman sexuate beingmust be
revolutionized in its very underpinnings and assumptions.52 The content
of political spirituality has been downplayed by many Foucauldians, but
we are suggesting that it is at the very heart of what he means when he says
we have to transform our bodies and pleasures, reimagine what politics
entails, and confront the question of revolution in all its complexity. We
recognize that the phrase that Foucault himself uses, political spirituality, might seem disturbing to some in that it suggests some kind of metaphysical mysticism, but we would argue that it is a crucial dimension of
what the Caribbean philosopher Paget Henry has described as the vertical
dramas of consciousness that remain distinct from and yet necessary to
the horizontal dramas of nationalism, proletarian liberation, or societal
reorgnization.53 The vertical revolution, then, in Henry and other
thinkers in Caribbean philosophy, concerns different practices that are
spiritual in that they involve both actual rituals (i.e., practices of discipline or forms of conduct), as well as a reaching into the resources of the
imagination that have been suppressed beneath a cynicism that convinces
us that any true transformation is impossible. Thus the expression political spirituality seems to encompass the revolutionary transformations,
both psychic and ethical, that are demanded of us and we strongly uphold
Foucaults insight in his adoption of it.
To conclude, then, we want to argue that Foucault should not be
pitted against a sophisticated historical materialist analysis like that offered
by Hennessy. We want to argue instead that in the politics of the Third
International and its split-off organizations, the great dream of a new
political spirituality in which we might be together differently was lost.
And, moreover, as Hennessy among others rightly note, Marx and even
Engels (in what was once a pathbreaking book on the family)54 never
truly confronted the way in which other oppressed groups could ally with
the proletariat without finding themselves subordinate to the so-called
class claims in the revolutionary struggle. Foucaults attempt to make the
question of revolution more complex also involved him in questioning,
and indeed arguing for, the importance of oppressed groups entering the
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revolution in terms of their own interests in fighting against capitalism.

As Foucault says in his (in)famous dialogue with Gilles Deleuze, Intellectuals and Power:
In engaging in a struggle that concerns their own interests, whose objectives they clearly understand and whose methods only they can determine,
[oppressed groups] enter into a revolutionary process. They naturally enter
as allies of the proletariat, because power is exercised the way it is in order
to maintain capitalist exploitation. They genuinely serve the cause of the
proletariat by fighting in those places where they find themselves oppressed.
Women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals
have now begun a specific struggle against the particularized power, the
constraints and controls, that are exerted over them. Such struggles are
actually involved in the revolutionary movement to the degree that they are
radical, uncompromising and nonreformist, and refuse any attempt at arriving at a new disposition of the same power with, at best, a change of masters. And these movements are linked to the revolutionary movement of the
proletariat to the extent that they fight against the controls and constraints
which serve the same system of power.55

If we take Foucault seriously, then we are returned to the complexity

of his engagement with the power of capital as a set of material relations
that do not determine, in any strict sense, all other relations, but pervade
them. Foucaults elaboration of what it means that power pervades all
relationships and is productive shows us therefore that to shift relations of power cannot simply be done through a simple act of seizure of
a state apparatus, which of course was foreshadowed by Marx in his own
writings on the Paris Commune of 1871.56 But somehow or another in
our postrevolutionary times, Foucault came to be read as someone who
was not thinking of revolution anymore, but only of resistance. And in
the case of Edelman, even resistance if it has a political aim of any sort
is fundamentally conservative. Here, queer theory has moved away from
revolutionary struggleindeed, queerness becomes posed as directly
oppositional to any revolutionary hope for a different future. However, as
we have suggested in our rereading of the question of the future, inheritance, and revolution through Derrida, there is an entirely different way
of grappling with the bloody history of the twentieth century and those
who died fighting for a better world that does not risk a simple reinstatement of a heteronormative symbolic order. The revolutionary promise
in both Derrida and the liberation theodicy of Shiism requires both a
fidelity to the dead by acknowledging our responsibility to inherit from
them, as well as a fidelity to the radically other future to come, that is, to
justice itself. Here, the relentless struggle to bring about different ways of
living-together is inseparable from this promise of justice to come. And by
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bringing Foucault back into the fold of revolutionary thinking, we believe

that we can create a much richer alliance with historical materialism and
the efforts to reimagine new and different ways of being togethernew
practices of freedomthat recognize the basic Marxist insight that who and
how we are as finite, phenomenal, fragile creatures will always involve us
in questions of reproduction and production, as well as the fundamental
question of how we might survive together and even flourish if we were
to dare to fundamentally undo capitalist exploitation. And what is that
undoingwhich will also demand an undoing of ourselves as subjects
or, more accurately, objects of capital and the commodification of bodies,
pleasures, and relations that it entailsbut the holding onto revolution as
the only meaningful question of the politics of our time?
Notes
Several people read and contributed invaluable insights to this essay, including Maureen MacGrogan, Emma Bianchi, Max Hantel, Carolina Alonso, and two reviewers
at Social Text. We also want to thank Ed Cohen in particular, for his indispensable
assistance with the Foucault sections, including copies of his unpublished recent
work on Foucault and citational recommendations. Various versions of this paper
have been presented at public events, and we thank the organizers, audiences, and
our fellow presenters for their support and input: the 2013 Historical Materialism
Conference at New York University and Erin Schell, the 2013 Feminist Theory
workshop in the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria organized
by Karin van Marle, and the Department of Religion Studies at the University of
Johannesburg at the invitation of Farid Esack.
1. While in this essay we focus primarily on queer theory, we want to point to
the general celebration of sexuality as a measure of liberation that characterizes the
US Left in general (including many feminists). This form of sexual politics tends to
embrace a sort of anything goes mentality around sex, in which more and better
sex is seen as manifestly positive, and in which making any type of judgments on sex
is viewed as inherently reactionary. See Drucilla Cornell, In the Shadow of Heterosexuality, Hypatia 22 (2007): 22942, for an earlier discussion of this mentality in
reference to feminist theory.
2. As Dabashi puts it, what had happened in Iran between 1977 and 1979
was not an Islamic revolution, but a revolution that was forcefully and violently
Islamized (Hamid Dabashi, Shiism: A Religion of Protest [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011], 275).
3. To be sure, we are not arguing against the fact that a restructuration of
libidinal impulses, or the erotic, is crucial to liberation. We are simply suggesting
that this restructuration can certainly not take the form of embracing the death
drive. And indeed, the very word restructuration implies forms of discipline. The
work of Herbert Marcuse remains important here: for the restructuration of libidinal impulses, see Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston,
MA: Beacon Press, 1974). See also Marcuses Repressive Tolerance, which forcefully critiques the anything goes sexual culture that ultimately prevents libidinal
restructuration under the illusion of tolerance, in The Essential Marcuse: Selected

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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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