Foucault, Our Contemporary

Abstract In fall 1978, Michel Foucault proposes political spirituality as a prism for understanding the Iranian uprising's contravention of modernity's secular coordinates, thus continuing the chain of conceptualization begun earlier that year with counter-conduct and the critical attitude. But in extricating the facticity of uprising from revolutionary normative frameworks and narrative schemas, Foucault avowed — however briefly — a lived collective refusal incommensurable with the order of government, the kind of absolute refusal of government that appeared earlier only via negation, equivocation, and disavowal. This essay argues that Foucault thereby prefigured avant la lettre the contemporary paradigm of destituent power, adding to it the subsequently forgotten insight that thinking destituent uprising demands a correlated suspension of the secularizing disjuncture imposed with the age of revolution. From his reflections on Iran, this essay retrieves other uncharacteristic gestures — an antistrategic ethics, a prophetic vision of indefinite experimentation, and a call for world refusal — resulting in a nearly unrecognizable image of Foucault. In uncovering this minor Foucault, a stranger to his dominant portrayals, this essay suggests that a genuine fidelity to such a heterodox thinker may involve inventively attending to the rhetorical hesitations, conceptual ambivalences, and theoretical deviations of his discourse at least as much as systematizing his explicit utterances, an approach it finds characteristic of Daniele Lorenzini's The Force of Truth.