Foucault and the Making of Subjects

Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Martina Tazzioli, Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Martina Tazzioli

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781786601049
• eBook ISBN: 9781786601063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Michel Foucault's account of the subject has a double meaning: it relates to both being a "subject of" and being "subject to" political forces. This book interrogates the philosophical and political consequences of such a dual definition of the subject, by exploring the processes of subjectivation and objectivation through which subjects are produced. Drawing together well-known scholars of Foucaultian thought and critical theory, alongside a newly translated interview with Foucault himself, the book will engage in a serious reconsideration of the notion of "autonomy" beyond the liberal tradition, connecting it to processes of subjectivation. In the face of the ongoing proliferation of analyses using the notion of subjectivation, this book will retrace Foucault's reflections on it and interrogate the current theoretical and political implications of a series of approaches that mobilize the Foucaultian understanding of the subject in relation to truth and power.

Chapter 1

Foucault, the Iranian Uprising and the Constitution of a Collective Subjectivity

Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli

As is well known, Foucault went to Iran twice in 1978 (on 16–24 September and 9–15 November) as a special correspondent of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, writing a series of short articles that were immediately translated and published in Italian in the form of a reportage (Foucault 2001b, 662). Only a few texts on the Iranian uprising actually appeared in French in those months, and from the summer of 1979 till his death, five years later, Foucault chose not to refer publicly to Iran anymore. His stances on this subject gave rise to numerous misunderstandings and to some violent critiques, especially in France. Foucault indirectly responded to them through his article ‘Inutile de se soulever?’, published in Le Monde in May 1979 (Foucault 2005d), but eventually decided to keep silent, maybe because he did not want to get involved in political controversies with people who—as he said—were ‘fabricating things about my own texts and then attributing that to me’ (infra, 30). However, in August 1979, Foucault conceded a long and incredibly rich interview to a young Lebanese philosopher, Farès Sassine, giving him permission to translate it in Arabic for the weekly An Nahar al’arabî wa addûwalî.1 This interview was unavailable in its complete and original French version until the journal Rodéo finally published a full transcription of it in 2013; we are glad to offer here its first English translation.

Philosophical Journalism

Why did Foucault get interested in the Iranian uprising and decide to go there and write a series of newspaper articles in the first place? The answer to this question is complex and multifaceted. There were of course ‘material’ conditions that made it possible: the Italian publisher Rizzoli had proposed him a regular collaboration with Corriere della Sera in the form of ‘points of view’. Foucault accepted and started a project aiming at constituting a ‘team’ of intellectuals-reporters whose task was to ‘witness the birth of ideas and the explosion of their force’ everywhere in the world, ‘in the struggles one fights for ideas, against them or in favour of them’ (Foucault 2001d, 707). Foucault’s reportage on the Iranian uprising was the first which was realised; only two other reportages followed—Alain Finkielkraut’s reportage on the United States under the Carter administration and André Glucksmann’s reportage on the boat people (Foucault 2001b, 706). No doubt there was also a more or less fortuitous or accidental reason: as Foucault explains it at the beginning of his interview with Sassine, when the news about a mass uprising taking place in Iran began to be reported, he was under the impression of his recent reading of Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (Bloch 1986). So, he decided to go there and see what was happening as a way to ‘test’ Bloch’s theses about the relationship between political revolution and religious eschatology (infra, 25–26). However, those material conditions and contingent reason should not prevent us from trying to grasp the more general framework within which Foucault’s decision to go to Iran and write a reportage on the uprising taking place there can be inscribed.

In the beginning of the 1970s, Foucault had already presented his work and the work of philosophy in general—or better of philosophy as he wanted to practise it—as a ‘radical journalism’: ‘I consider myself a journalist’, he wrote in 1973, ‘to the extent that what interests me is the actualité, what is happening around us, what we are, what is going on in the world’. According to Foucault, Nietzsche had been the first ‘philosopher-journalist’, that is to say, the first who introduced the fundamental question about today (aujourd’hui) into the field of philosophy (Foucault 2001a, 1302). In January 1978, a few months before his reportage on the Iranian uprising, Foucault again evoked the idea of philosophy as a form of journalism, liking it this time to Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant’s texts on the Aufklärung, published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784: these texts, according to him, inaugurate a ‘philosophical journalism’ whose task is to analyse the ‘present moment’ (Foucault 1991, 9–10). He referred again to the same idea in May 1978, in his conference ‘What Is Critique?’ (Foucault 2007b, 48), as well as in April 1979, in a short article published in Le Nouvel Observateur (Foucault 2001e, 443). It is thus possible to suggest that Foucault’s willingness to go to Iran and see what was happening there was a way, for him, to put into practice—in the most concrete sense of the word—the task of a philosophical journalism which tries to think of the present, the ‘today’, highlighting both the difference it introduces in relation to the past and the way in which it contributes to redefine our perception of ourselves as part of this actualité. After all, Foucault never ceased to present the work of philosophy in these terms: indeed, the concept of ‘historical ontology of ourselves’ that he elaborates in a series of lectures and articles at the end of his life is precisely for him a way of dealing with a series of questions—‘What is our actualité? What are we as part of this actualité? What is the target of our activity of philosophising insofar as we are part of our actualité?’ (Foucault 2015b, 84)2—which for sure Foucault already wanted to deal with in his reportage on the Iranian uprising.

However, if it is possible to observe a continual ‘resurgence’ of these theses in Foucault’s work, at least from the beginning of the 1970s until his death, it is worth noting that he completely abandoned the expression ‘philosophical journalism’ very soon after his reportage on Iran: we do not find any reference to journalism in his lectures and texts after 1979 (Lorenzini and Davidson 2015, 13–14, note 4). At the same time, Foucault did not carry on his collaboration with Corriere della Sera: his reportage on the Iranian uprising was his first and last experience as a ‘philosopher-journalist’ in the strictest sense of the term. And, it is not so implausible that the unpleasant controversies that followed this experience, above all in France, along with the outcome of the Iranian revolution, contributed in a decisive manner to this decision—which nevertheless should not be interpreted as a ‘retreat’ from contemporary political issues,3 nor as a symptom of a more or less significant transformation of his conception of the task of philosophy.

Religious Eschatology, Human Rights and Subjectivation

What about the Iranian uprising specifically? Why was Foucault so interested in it? The interview with Sassine gives us some precious clues in order to answer to this difficult question. Foucault claims that the Iranian uprising stood out and was particularly significant for him not only because he wanted to use it as a sort of ‘test’ for Bloch’s theses about the relationship between political revolution and religious eschatology, but also, and even more importantly, because it was neither ‘governed by a Western revolutionary ideology’ nor directed by political parties or organisations (infra, 26). This was exactly what Foucault was looking for: a mass uprising, where people stand up against a whole system of power, without being inscribed in a (Western) revolutionary framework. Indeed, in his works of the 1970s, Foucault tried to conceive of the possibility to think of resistance outside the traditional paradigm of revolution (Foucault 1978, 95–96; and 2001c, 546–47); in the Iranian uprising, then, he was precisely hoping to find a concrete instance of such a new way of thinking of resistance.

In his interview with Sassine, Foucault describes the Iranian uprising in terms that are clearly borrowed from the theoretical framework he depicted a year before in Security, Territory, Population and in ‘What Is Critique?’ It was—or at any rate it (initially) seemed to Foucault that it was—a ‘broadly popular’ movement which owed its force to ‘a will at once both political and religious’, constituted by people who were not revolting because they were ‘forced or constrained by someone’, but because they themselves ‘no longer wanted to put up with the regime’: ‘Collectively, people wanted no more of it’ (infra, 27–28).4 Borrowing a concept he introduced in Security, Territory, Population, we could say that Foucault was describing the Iranian uprising as a contemporary form of ‘counter-conduct’ (Foucault 2007a, 201) or—to refer to ‘What Is Critique?’—as a contemporary embodiment of the ‘critical attitude’, that is, the will not to be governed or conducted ‘thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’ (Foucault 2007b, 75). However, in the Iranian uprising, Foucault recognises not only a form of ‘negative’ resistance (the fact of saying ‘no’ to power and oppression) but also a ‘positive’ or ‘constructive’ one. Indeed, according to him, the Iranian people did not simply want to end up with the way in which they were conducted by the existing political regime: they also wanted ‘something else’, which was not another political regime but ‘a sort of religious eschatology’—a ‘non-political form of coexistence, a way of living together’ that didn’t follow the Western model. This was what, according to Foucault, gave form and force to their will, not to be governed like that anymore (infra, 28–29),5 and this is what ultimately interested him as a philosopher who was trying, in his own work, to redefine both power and resistance in a radically new way.

But through which lenses did Foucault look at Iran in order to test Bloch’s theses and interpret the uprising as an experience which radically diverged from the Western model of revolution? Some of the books that Foucault read during those months had a significant influence on him and can therefore shed some light on the economic, social, political and religious aspects he decided to focus on in his two trips to Iran and his numerous meetings with the opponents to the Shah. Nevertheless, Foucault’s stances on Iran cannot be simply reduced to the ideas expressed in those books. For instance, it is plain that Paul Vieille’s works were crucial for Foucault: Vieille was among the first French sociologists who specialised in contemporary Iran, its social history and its class composition, in order to criticise—from a Marxist perspective—the role American imperialism was playing in the managing of oil resources and in the resulting strategies of modernisation of the country (Vieille and Banisadr 1974; Vieille 1975). However, as the interview with Sassine clearly shows, Foucault was not willing to explain the Iranian events through a Marxist schema: indeed, he repeatedly insisted on the absence of a class conflict and of a revolutionary vanguard playing the role of a ‘fer de lance’ capable of carrying the whole nation with it (infra, 27–28).6

In order to understand Foucault’s inscription of religious eschatology in the field of politics, his re...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• Introduction: Foucault and the Making of Subjects: Rethinking Autonomy between Subjection and Subjectivation
• 1 Foucault, the Iranian Uprising and the Constitution of a Collective Subjectivity
• 2 There Can’t Be Societies without Uprisings
• Part I: Productions of Subjectivity
• Part II: Autonomy, Critique and the Norms
• Part III: The Power over and of Governed Subjects
• Index
• About the Contributors