Islam and Logos

by E Michael Jones

  CHAPTER TEN

  Foucault in Tehran

  In 1979 Foucault was in Tehran, misreading the Iranian Revolution as the continuation of Paris in May 1968, when in fact it was its violent refutation. Foucault arrived in Tehran in September 1978, hoping that, in the words of James Miller’s book The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993), “perhaps a revolt against entrenched power was still possible,” convinced that what was happening in Iran was “one of the greatest populist explosions in human history.” The mullahs’ rebellion against the Shah’s attempts to modernize Iran had been simmering for years, but it entered its endgame phase on January 8, 1978, when police opened fire on seminarians demonstrating in the holy city of Qom. “The crowd had been calling for the return of the Shi’a religious leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, a longtime critic of the government of the Shah of Iran. When the guns fell silent, some twenty seminarians were dead — martyrs to the cause of revolt.” For the next fourteen months, the Shi’a faithful took part in ever greater numbers in demonstrations which provoked ever greater retaliation from the police, who in turn created more and more martyrs for the cause.

  That Foucault, who was a disciple of Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade, would find himself enthralled by the revolutionary violence is not surprising, nor should it come as a surprise that this violence blinded him to the meaning of the revolution he purported to explain. In an article which appeared in the Corriere della Sera on October 8, Foucault recognized that there was a religious dimension to the revolution. Shi’ism had inspired the demonstrators with “an ardor that is simultaneously religious and political.” Foucault, who never outgrew the Catholic faith in which he had been raised, found himself inspired by the ability of the mullahs to focus “the anger and aspirations of the community” into an energy that would create a new form of “Islamic government” which held out “the promise of a welcome new form of ‘political spirituality,’ unknown in the West ‘since the Renaissance and the great crises of Christianity.’” Foucault viewed the Ayatollah Khomeini as a “saint.” He felt that the Iranian Revolution might be “the first great insurrection against the planetary system, the most mad and most modern form of revolt,” which might bring about the end of America’s “global hegemony” as well as a total “transfiguration of this world” because the Shi’ites were willing to die for their beliefs. They were united by “the craving, the taste, the capacity, the possibility of an absolute sacrifice.”

  In his book The Ideology of Tyranny (2007), Guido Preparata feels that Foucault “sided with the mullahs” in 1979 “in the name of blood reprisal” rather than any deep understanding of the religious motivation which united Khomeini’s followers. As a result, Foucault misread the Iranian Revolution of 1979, failing to see that it was in reality a counterrevolution. The Revolution in Iran was in reality the coup d’etat which toppled Mossadegh in 1953 and installed the Shah as an American puppet who promoted modernity. When the Ayatollah came to power, “homosexuals were dispatched to firing squads.” Preparata finds it odd that Foucault “stood by his enthusiasm for the revolution in Iran,” when it is perhaps not so odd at all. Death was always part of the homosexual Faustian Pact. Deprived of society’s censure, the homosexuals set out to punish each other in the bathhouses of San Francisco, where some received the same death sentence that Khomeini and the Revolutionary Guard were handing down in Tehran.

  The conventional narrative sees 1979 as the triumph of Capitalism, when in fact, that year marked the beginning of its demise as the last philosophical justification for materialism. When it comes to 1979, markets had nothing to do with religion, and religion had nothing to do with markets. Khomeini’s revolution in Iran inspired the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, especially in the Farsi-speaking town of Heerat, where many of them gathered, in the wake of the Shah’s downfall, “bearing a message of religious militancy that galvanized their compatriots.” Religious ferment in Heerat led to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The subsequent ten-year long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, in turn, made it impossible for the Russians to send troops into Poland to quell the Solidarity uprising which began in the wake of the Pope’s visit to Warsaw in June 1979. The result of those two parallel religious uprisings was the fall of the Soviet Union. Markets had nothing to do with that story.

  We know that the CIA supported the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan and Solidarity in Poland, but the fact that these political alliances existed does not eliminate the deep philosophical, political, and religious chasm separating those who took part in them. That unbridgeable gulf only became apparent after the alliances vanquished the opponent and then fell apart, releasing its erstwhile allies, according to the dialectic of history, to wage war on each other.

  Even if we concede the libertarian point and admit for the sake of argument that Capitalism did triumph in the decade following 1979, history is dialectic, which is to say in constant motion, and any historical synthesis is always on the way to decomposing into a civil war based on its component parts. So, according to the dialectical Logos of History, the triumph of religion and markets in 1979 would of necessity lead to the civil war between religion and free-market Capitalism that is going on as we speak. There is no ontological link between religion and markets. The link is a pure figment of the Neoconservative imagination.

  Once religion and Capitalism united to destroy Communism, it was only a matter of time before religion and Capitalism would be at war with each other. This is precisely what happened in 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq and formally declared war on Islam. So, in the grand scheme of things, 1968 led to 1979, which led to 1989, which led to 2003 which led to the financial collapse of 2008, which led to the mess we are in today, but this trajectory also shows that World Spirit arrives at the truth by way of dialectic. Every successful revolution leads to a civil war. This means that there is no “End of History,” as Francis Fukuyama claimed at the end of the Cold War, but it also means that the dialectic always labors in the service of Logos, which is to say, in the service of God’s providence. No matter how messy their activity seems, the mills of history always grind out the truth. History is dialectical, but it is also teleological; it is always in some sense a manifestation of God’s will. To say that it isn’t is to affirm the materialism which ended up in the dustbin of history in 1979.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Daimonic Ordeals”

  In The Passion of Michel Foucault, Miller claims that Foucault “had pursued a ‘critical ontology,’ trying to transform and transfigure his self by experimenting, sacrificing himself, putting his body and soul to the test directly, through an occult kind of ascesis, centered on the daimonic ordeals of S/M.” Whatever. Less than six years after his trip to Iran, Foucault was dead. Like most, Miller claimed that Foucault died of AIDS:

  On June 27, 1984, Le Monde reprinted the medical bulletin issued by his doctors and cleared by his family: “Michel Foucault entered the clinic for diseases of the nervous system at the Hopital de la Salpetriere on June 9, 1984, in order to allow complementary investigation of neurological symptoms complicated by septicemia,” an infection of the blood. “These examinations revealed the existence of several areas of cerebral suppuration. Antibiotic treatment at first had a favorable effect...”

  During the same year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that AIDS was caused by a virus, subsequently named Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, a diagnosis contested by Professor Peter Duesburg, also of the University of California at Berkeley. Miller attributes the cerebral suppuration to toxoplasmosis, which afflicts people with debilitated immune systems. Whatever the specific etiology of his death, it seems clear that Foucault died of homosexuality, as he knew he would.

  Or did he and the other homosexuals who died in San Francisco during the ’80s die of Capitalism and the libertarian ideology of choice which was its philosophical foundation? On March 17, 1983, the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco’s gay newspaper, ran an editorial claimi
ng that: “each man owns his own body and the future he plots for it. And he retains ownership of the way he wants to die.” If this were true of the nobodies who gave up real lives and arrived in San Francisco in the ’70s to die for their fantasies, it was certainly true of Michel Foucault, who, when he died at the age of fifty-seven, was “perhaps the single most famous intellectual in the world.” The real cause of Foucault’s death was philosophical; it was, in Miller’s words, Foucault’s “uninhibited exploration of sado-masochistic eroticism.”

  And so it was only fitting that Jacques Derrida attended Foucault’s funeral. Foucault was a lapsed Catholic; Derrida was a Jew. What they shared was hatred of Logos, in all of its forms. Derrida gave the definitive explanation of “performative” speech in his magnum opus Of Grammatology, when he wrote:

  The surrogate does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow preexisted it. From then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought of in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus, but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic: that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse — provided we can agree on this word — that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and interplay of signification ad infinitum.

  If Foucault’s attack on Logos is fundamentally sexual, Derrida’s attack on the Logos is quintessentially Jewish. The opaque passage we just read is a veiled allegory of the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., the end of the Mosaic covenant, when God was present with his people, and its replacement by the synagogue, founded by Rabbi Jochanan ben Zacchai, as its surrogate. From that moment onward, which is to say, from the moment the Talmud replaced the Torah as the center of Jewish worship, “language invaded the universal discourse,” i.e, theology, and “everything became discourse,” i.e., pointless Talmudic quibbling. What Derrida and his followers refuse to see is that the covenant was fulfilled when the Logos became flesh. Foucault knew this much more intimately than Derrida, which is why his rebellion was much more terrible in its personal consequences and had to take place in the flesh as a demonic reversal of the transubstantiation that takes place at the moment of consecration in the Mass. Foucault’s long and ultimately fatal odyssey through the labyrinth of sadomasochism bespoke his attempt to undo the Incarnation, because the Incarnation meant that the Logos had become an inescapable part of our lives. The Word had become flesh. By violating the flesh, Foucault could exorcize the Word, or so he thought.

  Just as I was planning to leave Iran in 2015, I received an e-mail from Professor David Hawkes, whom I referred to earlier, who felt that there was a “remarkable convergence between our ideas,” especially concerning usury, sexuality, and the Faust myth. The professor was right; the correspondence between our writings is more than striking; it was uncanny. So we’re talking about great minds running in the same circles or the Zeitgeist or a combination of both. Professor Hawkes comes from a background that is both Protestant and Marxist. That means that at various points during the course of the intellectual history of the West, we would have been shooting at each other over two different literary critical barricades. The course of history, however, has made us unwilling allies in the culture wars because now the main battle is between those who believe in Logos and those who don’t, a group he denominates as Satanic. The alliance of those who don’t — which sometimes goes by the name of post-modernism, and sometimes by the name of deconstruction, after its champion Jacques Derrida — now controls academe, turning Protestant Marxists into a slightly antiquated persecuted minority based on an obsolete revolutionary movement, like, say, Anabaptism or Freemasonry. The Ash’arites who run ISIS and are now involved in beheading Christians, and Shi’a Muslims believe in Nietzsche’s Will to Power as fervently as the followers of Foucault and Derrida who now run Academe in America. Their nihilism is the driving force in history at the moment, and its politics have made strange bedfellows out of everyone who feels that Logos trumps will. All supporters of Logos — be they mullahs from Mashad, Catholic Hoosiers, or Marxist professors — have been turned into allies willy-nilly by their common enemy, which is to say, the Great Satan. This is the Zeitgeist in a nutshell. In case I had any lingering doubts, Professor Hawkes convinced me that America is the Great Satan.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Mullahs in Mashad

  So, to get back to the mullahs in Mashad, there was a pause after their question about America and the Great Satan, as everyone leaned forward in anticipation of my response. The pause was not without tension. Being an Iranian means being forever at the conjunction of two conflicting points of view. On the one hand, no nation on earth is more passionately attached to talking about the political implications of religious belief and the religious implications of politics, but by the same token, no nation on earth is more committed to the idea that foreigners are guests who need to be shown hospitality. As a result, the Iranians chant “Death to America” as they march through the streets and then invite Americans home to continue the discussion over pistachio nuts.

  One of the few exceptions to that dichotomy is me saying that there is a tradition of Logos in the West that has been supplanted by the current regime which would complement the striving toward Logos which has been forced upon them by the flow of history. The Supreme Leader articulated this position a year ago when he said that groups like ISIS and Boko Haram were “American” Islam, which is to say, not true, and that the key to understanding true Islam was reason or Logos. By making this statement the Supreme Leader recapitulated the resurrection of Islamic philosophy which the Ayatollah Khomeini began by making the rule of the guardians, which he derived from reading Plato’s Laws, the norm for the Islamic Republic. We are talking about a change of millennial importance here. We are talking about correcting Ibn Rushd’s mistake and bringing an end to the millennium-long hegemony of the Ash’arite notion that God is pure will.

  Confronted with the spectacle of fellow Muslims, like the thugs who populate ISIS, beheading people because they are Christians or, more pointedly, Shi’a heretics, the Iranians have been forced by the Zeitgeist into a recognition that Logos is another word for God and that God is the Lord of History. In many ways, their discovery is analogous to Kant’s discovery that practical reason in man is proof for the existence of God. The Iranian universities are overwhelmingly technological in their orientation. Technology is a form of Logos, but as Newtonian physics has shown, it is inadequate as the basis for a cosmology and as such it is no substitute for metaphysics. When the Iranians hear that there is such a thing as metaphysics, or Logos, or that sex has a telos in procreation, or that there is a telos to anything, they rejoice and absorb the message like a dry sponge coming into contact with water. What happens afterward is anyone’s guess. But the lesson of 1979, as viewed through the lens of Hegel, is that reason is self-sufficient and can bring about what it wants when it wants with no seeming preparation. Given the alternatives they have been presented, is it surprising then that the young people in Iran are not having children? Given on the one hand an Ash’arite God whose will is absolute, even to the absolute negation of its own Logos, and on the other hand the dead, mechanical universe which is the legacy of Newtonian physics and the English Ideology, what would you choose? Would you choose to have children? Would you choose to have a life in the face of two ideologies that denied that you could have one? Wouldn’t you be happy if someone came up with an alternative that said that God was in control of history, and that he wanted you to have a life?

  As Friedrich Romig has pointed out in his book Der Sinn der Geschichte, Positivism (which is another word for the English Id
eology) means the end of history. The rise of science means the abolition of history. Everything is now just balls flying through space, and their trajectories are now entirely predictable. The end of history in this sense, as Hegel would point out a century and a half later, means the death of God, the real God of Christianity, and his replacement by the Unitarian, deist simulacrum, who is in reality nothing more than an exalted image of the usurper William of Orange.

  After watching Napoleon ride out of Jena and defeat the Austrian army and eventually abolish the Holy Roman Empire, the 36-year-old Hegel felt compelled to formulate a philosophy of history. Given the humiliating circumstances of its birth, Hegel’s history was remarkably optimistic. It was, in fact, a reworking of the traditional Christian doctrine of divine providence. History now had meaning again. God suddenly had power again. God was in control of history. Hegel’s understanding of divine providence entails an understanding of predestination, but his understanding of predestination does not abrogate the notion of man’s free will.

  A re-articulation of the idea of divine providence in up-dated, Enlightenment-friendly terminology was necessary at this point in the history of philosophy because of the development of British empiricism over the century which began with Newton’s Principia Mathematica and ended with David Hume’s skepticism. Kant’s articulation of the synthetic a priori put an end to Hume’s skepticism and set the stage for the full flowering of German thought in Hegel, who reintroduced Logos to the post-Enlightenment West and simultaneously set the stage for the emergence of the German nation in 1871.

  Because of its attachment to Newtonian physics and its global pre-eminence after the defeat of Napoleon, England had succeeded in creating a dead materialistic universe which was philosophically incoherent and which promoted an idea of motion which lacked telos (all motion had become what the Scholastics would call “violent motion”). As a result, life had become radically contingent. There was no plan, because, according to Positivism, there was no history. There were only atoms in motion, and those balls in motion had no history. In fact, as Laplace had told none other than Napoleon himself, once the laws of the universe were fully articulated, there would be no future either, just as the orbits of the planets had neither history nor future, just mathematically described trajectories that were eternally the same.