Author: Ophelia Benson

  • London Does Not Need Art to Tiptoe Around

    Consider, rather, the rest of us who demand, now more than ever, intelligent, challenging thought.

  • Tate Bans Work for Fear of Offending Muslims

    ‘The Muslim Council of Britain was not consulted on the issue.’

  • Political Spirituality

    I’ve been reading Foucault and the Iranian Revolution by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, and the picture it paints is not pretty.

    As Afary and Anderson note, although Foucault’s particular fascination with the revolution is well known in France, the full range of his writing about it has never been translated into English. In fact, since much of that writing was originally published by the Italian daily Corriere della sera, and until now was not republished, the full extent of his thoughts has rarely been taken into account even by Foucault’s French readers. Foucault made two, week long trips to Iran in the fall of ’78. He interviewed a number of prominent political actors, wrote nearly a dozen brief journalistic essays, and gave a long interview defending his distinctive views of the revolution. His response, in short, was deeper and more enthusiastic than his more well known, contemporaneous support of Solidarity and of Vietnamese refugees. Yet, the three volume, English language collection of Foucault’s “essential works” (in fact, otherwise uncollected brief essays and interviews) includes only one of the Iran pieces—and the last and most qualified. As Afary and Anderson point out, since that essay came at the end of a prominent political dispute, in which Foucault’s critics on the Parisian left took him to task for his uncritical support of Khomeini and Islamic government, reading it in isolation has been a confusing experience.

    Fortunately, Afary and Anderson redress that problem. Their volume reprints all Foucault’s Iran writings, as well as the criticisms leveled against them at the time by, among others, an anonymous Iranian feminist and the prestigious Marxist historian of the Middle East Maxime Rodinson. Those reprints are prefaced by a long, patient depiction of Foucault’s context and by a sustained effort to reconsider the relation between Foucault’s brief enthusiasm for the revolution and his work more generally.

    Given the fact that admirers of Foucault in English pay little attention to this aspect of his career and that, until quite recently, some defenders doubted that Foucault was actually enthusiastic about Islamic revolution, this is certainly welcome attention. Unfortunately, so far, it doesn’t look like the book will become much of an event. It’s still quite new, but as of yet, so far as I can tell, there hasn’t been much buzz. In the course of a nearly hagiographic defense of Foucault (“the gentle apostle of radiant uncertainty”), Jonathan Rée gave it a long, eloquent, but I think glibly backhanded dismissal in The Nation. The key lines: “One could hardly have asked for more. One might have asked for less, however.”

    According to Rée, in other words, Afary and Anderson are carried away by prosecutorial zeal and make far too much of a minor episode. Although they “have spent ten years working on their book,” he says, “it has not been a labor of love, and their summaries of Foucault’s achievements are consistently hostile and tendentious.”

    I think that’s not right. Most basically, Afary and Anderson’s tone is moderate to a fault. They have nothing like the verve and style Rée shares with Foucault, but I suspect that’s deliberate. Their book turns down the flame as low as possible. Likewise, their judgments—though certainly arguable in some cases—are generally plausible and far from extreme. No daring leaps of the sort that Foucault himself practiced.

    Their most contestable claim is simply that Foucault’s view of the revolution is integrally related to attitudes displayed consistently throughout his work—in particular to a one-sided hostility to the modernity of the west. (At one early stage in the revolution, Foucault worried that visions of Islamic government too closely resembled “the catchphrases of democracy–of bourgeois or revolutionary democracy. . . . We in the West have been repeating them to ourselves ever since the eighteenth century, and look where they have got us.”) Afary and Anderson believe that attitude blinded Foucault not just to the likely outcomes of Islamic government, but more particularly to the repression it promised women and homosexuals.

    More specifically, Afary and Anderson construct an unfamiliar picture of Foucault as not just an anti-modernist, but as a defender of traditional societies. Rée leaps all over this, calling it “preposterous,” and I suspect he’s basically right. But it’s worth noting that, as Afary and Anderson emphasize, in all his major works, Foucault describes the ostensible improvements of modernizing reform as less appealing than what they displaced. That doesn’t seem controversial.

    Likewise, Rée dismisses as misinterpretation A & A’s emphasis on the importance to Foucault of “limit experiences,” suggesting that such “notions . . . have no place in his work except as butts of his teasing paradoxes.” This is, I think, simply untrue. Not central perhaps, but there’s no doubt that Foucault spoke several times about limit experiences, and the case can be made, as for example in this essay by Gary Gutting (Project Muse) that they played a significant, though submerged role in his thinking over all.

    It would be easy, in short, to overemphasize A & A’s minor stumbles or contestable claims (like their further argument that the last volumes of the History of Sexuality were significantly inflected by Foucault’s interest in the customs of homosexuality in Muslim societies) and to miss the central problem. In my view, the most striking, indisputable, and disturbing claim is simply that Foucault was fascinated by “political spirituality,” and that when his critics and friends pointed out to him its dangers, he was initially indifferent (state repression in Iran after the revolution appears to have changed his mind somewhat) because he was far more concerned about the evils of modernity and the arrogance of the west. At one point Foucault’s Gallimard editor Claude Mauriac worried about the dangers of combining “spirituality and politics”: “we have seen what that gave us.” Foucault’s response was simply to ask: “And politics without spirituality, my dear Claude?”

    A & A have a plausible case that Foucault was fascinated by the revolution, not just because it was a challenge to repression or to American imperialism, but because, as he said, it was “an attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.” They likewise have a colorable claim that this interest depended on a significant blind spot in Foucault’s thinking and further that this blindness was part and parcel of his larger concerns about governmentality, subjectification, etc. Their book deserves to be taken seriously—though on the evidence of Rée alone I suspect strongly that they won’t be.

    Update. For a better review than Rée’s, see Wesley Yang’s excellent
    piece in the Boston Globe.

    This article was first published on The Valve on September 15 and is republished here by permission.

  • The Tate Did What?

    Brilliant. Perfect. Let’s let worries about ‘offending’ religious sensitivities determine what art we’re not allowed to see. What a good idea! Why didn’t someone think of it sooner? It would save such a huge amount of trouble, for one thing – we would all have to spend so much less time in museums and at the theatre and reading blasfeeemous books. Think how much more efficient we would be. We would be able to put new colours on the stripes in toothpaste. We would make the world a more beautiful (and of course less blasfeemous) place.

    One of Britain’s leading conceptual artists has accused the Tate gallery of ‘cowardice’ after it banned one of his major works for fear of offending some Muslims after the London terrorist bombings. John Latham’s God Is Great consists of a large sheet of thick glass with copies of Islam, Christianity and Judaism’s most sacred texts – the Koran, Bible and Talmud – apparently embedded within its surface. The work was due to go on display last week in an exhibition dedicated to Latham at London’s Tate Britain, but gallery officials took the unprecedented decision to veto it because of political and religious sensitivities.

    Well that certainly sounds offensive and blasfeemous. I can see why the Tate was all in a swivet.

    Tate Britain says that it had to take the ‘difficult decision’ to avoid its motives being misunderstood given the attacks, which killed 52 people in July, and the present political climate. However, it admitted it had not consulted the Metropolitan Police or the Muslim Council of Britain.

    What? It hadn’t what? It hadn’t ‘consulted’ the cops or the Muslim Council of Britain? The MCB is running things now? People are supposed to ‘consult’ it? People who are wondering if a given piece of art might or might not be ‘offensive’ to Muslims are supposed to ‘consult’ the MCB? Because – what? They have such a good record on that kind of thing? What with boycotting the Holocaust, and thinking death is too good for Salman Rushdie?

    Why are they the people to consult? Why, why, why? They’re just a self-appointed group, they’re not elected, they’re not representative, they’re not ‘the Muslim community’ – why are they given some kind of de facto official role? Not that anyone should be given such a role, but that goes double for the MCB.

    Last night Latham, 84, who insists that the piece is not anti-Islamic, told The Observer: ‘Tate Britain have shown cowardice over this. I think it’s a daft thing to do because if they want to help the militants, this is the way to do it.’

    Yeah you could say that! Flop down on the floor and show your belly, cringe, whine, cry, pee on the floor, sweat, faint, and then send the Tate’s entire inventory to a secret vault in Kidderminster lest something might someday offend someone. That’s what I call curating!

    Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, supported the artist. ‘We share his concern,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what precise thought processes were going on at the Tate but I am concerned about the signal this sends at a time when we see free speech quite significantly under threat. I think that after 7 July we need this kind of artistic expression and political expression and discourse and disagreement more than ever, which is why this is worrying. Is three holy books in a piece of glass going to incite controversy? Frankly, whether it does or doesn’t, controversy is what we have in a flourishing democracy.’ She added: ‘I ultimately level my criticisms against legislators and certain lobby groups who’ve allowed free speech to be put in such peril and are making the climate that leads the Tate to have this kind of nervousness.’

    Exactly. It’s that wretched religious hatred bill – plus the media’s bad habit of treating the MCB as some sort of official Spokesgroup.

    Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, defended the gallery’s decision to hold back the piece…’It was a very difficult decision,’ he said, ‘but we made it due to the exceptional circumstances of this summer and in the light of opinions that we value regarding religious sensitivities.’

    Why? Why do you value those opinions? And especially, why do you value them so much that you grovel before them and let them influence what you do? Why?

    The Muslim Council of Britain was not consulted on the issue. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, its secretary, said: ‘I’m not aware of this particular exhibition, nor I am aware of any Muslim group that has protested. However, if the art gallery itself felt the display of the divine and holy books in such a manner would be deeply offensive to the believers of the three religions and therefore withdrew it, then I respect their decision.’

    Yes I bet you do! I bet you’re just hugging yourself with glee. I bet you feel that the MCB has really arrived at last – that along with the K, getting the Tate to withdraw a sculpture without even asking it to must mean the MCB has some pretty impressive clout.

    Well I don’t respect their decision. I hope they get a torrent of outrage and mockery and contempt that makes their fears of an imagined ‘offended’ Muslim community look like a pack of butterflies out for a waltz. That’s what I hope.

  • Echoes

    Dogmatism, we were talking about the other day. Via this remark by Simon Blackburn in Truth.

    Today’s relativists, persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as a green light to believe what they like with as much conviction and force as they like. So while ancient scepticism was the sworn opponent of dogmatism, today dogmatisms feed and flourish on the desecrated corpse of reason.

    A day or two after posting that I read a related comment by Hume.

    You propose then, Philo, said Cleanthes, to erect religious faith on philosophical skepticism; and you think that if certainty or evidence be expelled from every other subject of inquiry, it will all retire to these theological doctrines, and there acquire a superior force and authority. Whether your skepticism be as absolute and sincere as you pretend, we shall learn by and by, when the company breaks up: We shall then see, whether you go out at the door or the window; and whether you really doubt if your body has gravity, or can be injured by its fall…

    That’s from the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and it’s the epigraph to chapter 4 in Francis Wheen’s Mumbo Jumbo.

    There’s another thing I quoted from Blackburn.

    In the intellectual world, toleration is the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion; in other words, to protect freedom of speech, and to confront divergence of opinion with open critical reflection rather than suppression or force.

    Yesterday I re-read this article on Islamophobia-phobia by Piers Benn.

    The real lesson of tolerance is that disputes should be settled by reasoned dialogue rather than abuse or violence, and that we should always accept that we may have much to learn from people whose beliefs initially appear strange. But these virtues are a far cry from the sentimental pretence that all claims to religious truth are somehow ‘equal’…

    There, you see? It all ties up. Skepticism and relativism can be hijacked to the purposes of dogmatism, and tolerance doesn’t mean never disagreeing with anyone, it means disagreeing by means of reasoned dialogue not by force. Both of those points are quite useful to keep in mind.

  • Nick Cohen on Religious Schools [scroll down]

    British education will be divided by the two most toxic causes of strife on the planet.

  • Tobacco Companies Turn to Subliminal Advertising

    Red and white furniture, pictures of cowboys, that kind of thing.

  • The Washington Times Reviews Scruton

    For Burke, society is held together by custom, tradition, and prejudice.

  • Scruton and Midgley Write Memoirs

    Between confidence and anxiety.

  • Amputation for Stealing a Motorbike

    Nigerian Islamic judges have ordered that a teenager from Niger have his hand cut off.

  • Richard Dawkins on Gerin Oil Junkies

    If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain.

  • If Religion is All That’s Left

    It’s not surprising that people turn to it.

  • Mathematicians See ‘Proof’

    Not much actual math, but the mathematicians are recognizable.

  • Seyla Benhabib on Religion and Politics

    Why the US and Europe differ.

  • Is Journalism About Truth or Diverse Opinion?

    Lines between what constitutes opinion and what constitutes truth are almost extravagantly blurred.

  • Strange and Disquieting Double Standards

    Poisonous paranoia is sort of expected from some people but not others.

  • The Leader

    Bush said an odd thing on Wednesday.

    Mr. Bush said he had been “thinking a lot” about the comparisons between the response to the attacks in New York and Washington, and the storm devastation. “We look at the destruction caused by Katrina, and our hearts break,” he said. Turning the subject to terrorists, he said: “They’re the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We’re in a war against these people.”

    ‘We look at the destruction caused by Katrina, and our hearts break.’ They do? We do, and they do? Who’s we? You mean you? Did your heart break? Really? Are you sure? Because that doesn’t seem to be how people remember it. That doesn’t seem to be how people saw it at the time. You may remember some comments to that effect?

    What was it that made people think your heart was intact, I wonder. The slowness to cut short your vacation? The telling ‘Brownie’ he was doing a heck of a job? The joke about Trent Lott’s front porch?

    I heard a commentary on NPR this morning on the effect of Katrina on Bush’s poll numbers, which said that the above speech was an attempt to improve his situation by emphasizing his ‘leadership’ qualities. That was supposed to be one of his strong points – strong and decisive leadership. I would like to know why. Even apart from that ridiculous juxtaposition above (terrorists would cause hurricanes if they could, so we’re at war with them, so I’m a tough guy), I would like to know why Bush’s ‘strong and decisive leadership’ is seen as a virtue, or as leadership.

    Leadership, and strength, and decisiveness, are only as good as the purposes for which they are being strong and decisive and leader-like. That’s not a big newsflash, is it? Hitler was a strong decisive leader, so was Stalin, so was Pol Pot. Strength and decision on their own are not necessarily virtues, are they.

    Bush’s ‘strength’ and ‘decisiveness’ can be and have been described with other words. Obstinate, unreflective, unwilling to think again, incurious, uninformed, indifferent to being uninformed. Furthermore, he thinks he was chosen by god to be president. Such a belief is almost a guarantee that one will assume one’s every thought is divinely inspired and therefore good. But it’s not likely to be a true belief, so its immunity from criticism and correction is not necessarily a good thing.

    Political rhetoric and political advertising are carefully designed to give the impression that ‘character’ is the most important thing about a candidate, and that various military virtues are (along with conjugal and parental and pet-owner virtues) both necessary and sufficient for a political candidate. This impression is quite incorrect. It would be good if people started to realize that, and so be able to resist the manipulations of the peddlers of ‘strong, decisive leaders.’

  • Over the Top

    This whole thing is…intolerable. Just intolerable.

    A bus carrying elderly evacuees out of the path of Hurricane Rita has caught fire on a gridlocked motorway, killing up to 24 people…Television pictures showed the entire bus alight, with explosions sending plumes of thick black smoke billowing into the sky. Officer Peritz said the blasts were apparently caused by oxygen containers for the elderly on board the vehicle…The passengers were being evacuated from a nursing home in Bellaire, south-west Houston, when the accident happened…Officer Peritz said the driver, who survived the fire, repeatedly went back onto the bus to try to rescue passengers.

    I can’t read that without wanting to blub. Hell and damnation – what next. You’re old and ill and you can’t breathe well, you have to get on a bus to escape a hurricane, you have to sit on that bus in a colossal traffic jam for – what? Many hours, certainly. News reports last night were saying 15 hours. You have to sit in misery for hours and hours – and then the oxygen that some of you need in order to breathe – explodes and burns most of you to death. Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.

    And then there is Templeman 3, one of the New Orleans city jails.

    As Hurricane Katrina began pounding New Orleans, the sheriff’s department abandoned hundreds of inmates imprisoned in the city’s jail, Human Rights Watch said today…These inmates, including some who were locked in ground-floor cells, were not evacuated until Thursday, September 1, four days after flood waters in the jail had reached chest-level…According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no food or water from the inmate’s last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday, August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench…As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility…Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. A number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get everyone out from their cells…Many of the men held at jail had been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass, public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and charged, much less been convicted.

    More flies, more sport.

  • Vatican to Ban Gay Priests

    Vow of celibacy no longer good enough.

  • Prisoners Left Locked in Cells During Katrina

    Human Rights Watch: water rising, no food, water or electricity.