Editing Openai/69651dc1-e168-8006-b56e-a23c6fb285ab (section)

=== Assistant: This episode is often treated as a personal failure of Michel Foucault, but many critics argue—convincingly, in my view… ===
This episode is often treated as a personal failure of Michel Foucault, but many critics argue—convincingly, in my view—that it reveals structural vulnerabilities in parts of continental philosophy, especially in its post-1968 French lineage.

I’ll try to be precise and non-polemical.

==== A defining strength of continental philosophy (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, etc.) is its extraordinary power of critique: ====
* exposing domination
* unmasking hidden power
* showing how “neutral” institutions discipline bodies and minds

But that strength comes with a weakness:
👉 it dismantles norms faster than it can justify alternatives.

===== Foucault was devastatingly effective at criticizing: =====
* Western liberal universalism
* secular modernity
* technocratic governance
* imperial power

But when faced with a non-Western alternative, he lacked normative criteria to say:

: 

Without some minimally universal commitments (women’s autonomy, freedom of conscience, limits on sacred authority), critique becomes directionless.

Result: opposition to Western power was mistaken for emancipation itself.

==== Much continental thought privileges: ====
* rupture over reform
* intensity over stability
* transgression over institution
* becoming over governance

Revolutionary energy is often treated as philosophically interesting in itself.

===== Foucault was captivated by: =====
* crowds risking death
* collective sacrifice
* a revolt “not mediated by ideology”
* a politics that looked other than liberalism or Marxism

This is a recurring pattern:

: 

But difference tells you nothing about how power will behave once institutionalized.

==== Another structural tendency is treating political movements as: ====
* symbolic events
* ethical gestures
* performative refusals
* sites of meaning rather than systems of rule

This works well when analyzing discourse.
It fails when power becomes administrative, coercive, and banal.

===== Islamism appeared as: =====
* poetry
* martyrdom
* spirituality
* resistance

But states are not poems.

Continental philosophy often excels at reading how power speaks, not how it governs.

==== Post-war continental philosophy developed a deep suspicion of: ====
* universal reason
* Enlightenment morality
* human rights discourse (seen as Western, imperial, or naïve)

This suspicion is often justified.

But here’s the trap:

: 

===== Islamic law arrived not as “one discourse among others,” but as: =====
* divine command
* non-negotiable truth
* total authority

A philosophy trained to distrust universals was ill-equipped to resist an absolute that did not present itself as rational at all.

==== This point is especially damning. ====

Foucault’s own work is deeply concerned with:
* bodies
* discipline
* sexuality
* biopower

Yet during the Iranian episode:
* women’s warnings were dismissed
* early veiling protests were minimized
* gendered coercion was framed as “cultural difference”

This reveals a structural blind spot:

: 

In practice, this often means:
* women
* sexual minorities
* religious dissidents

pay the price of philosophical abstraction.

==== Campism is often treated as a political error, but it has philosophical roots: ====

If your thinking is structured as:
* power vs resistance
* empire vs margin
* center vs periphery

then whoever resists the center acquires moral glow, regardless of what they build.

This binary thinking—ironically inherited from the very traditions continental philosophy sought to escape—reappears under a new vocabulary.

==== The Iran episode exposes this structural flaw: ====

: 

Or, more sharply:

: 

==== You probably sense why this still stings. ====

The same structure reappears in:
* indulgence toward religious authoritarianism
* relativism disguised as respect
* selective blindness to oppression when it is “non-Western”
* alliances justified purely by shared enemies

The lesson is not “return to naive Enlightenment faith.”

It is subtler:

: 

==== Continental philosophy taught us how power lies. ====

Iran taught us that power also prays, sings, and promises salvation—and that these forms can be more dangerous precisely because they refuse the language of reason.

If you want, next we could:
* contrast this with Hume’s moral minimalism
* look at Arendt’s very different diagnosis of revolution
* or explore whether Darwinian / ethological perspectives offer a sturdier grounding for critique without romanticism

Just say where you’d like to continue.