BECAUSE NOT EVERY TRANSITION OF POWER CAN BE AS PEACEFUL AND PRO-FEMINIST AS THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION: “There’s an old joke about what happens when you cross a postmodernist academic and the Godfather: You get an offer you can’t understand,” Steve Hayward quips at Power Line:
To which might be added today, who needs Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, about to close after 146 years, when you’ve got liberals beclowning themselves nonstop for free. (I suspect there’s a connection between these two things.)
This comes to mind with today’s story about what is the most hilarious planned liberal protest against Trump on inauguration day. I’ll just let Inside Higher Ed tell you without embellishment:
Because hey, not every transition of power can be as peaceful and pro-feminist as the 1979 Iranian revolution – which Foucault supported. Or as the lefties at Truth-out pondered in September, “Why Did Foucault Disregard Iranian Feminists in His Support for Khomeini?”
Afary and Anderson observe that, while many progressives and leftists — both in Iran and elsewhere — favored the Revolution against the Shah but could not countenance the notion of an Islamic Republic replacing such despotism, Foucault was less critical toward Khomeini and the possibility of clerical rule. The authors argue that Foucault’s attitude in this sense — rather than signify some aberration or lapse in judgment — indeed follows from his post-structuralist political theorizing, which rejects the Enlightenment and despairs at the historical possibility of emancipation. As such, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution serves as an important warning for Western radicals and intellectuals vis-à-vis revolutionary movements, anti-imperialism and political authoritarianism in the rest of the world. Moreover, it raises questions about the liberatory potential of post-structuralism, detailing how that tendency’s preeminent spokesperson so clearly betrayed Iran’s workers, women, LGBTQ citizens, dissidents and religious and ethnic minorities by romanticizing what French leftist Maxime Rodinson refers to as “a type of archaic fascism.”
Which neatly sums up what we could we expect on Friday from those on the left not organizing read-ins of postmodern philosophy, come to think of it.