Political Spirituality

This essay considers the overlap between ʿAli Shari’ati’s ethical reflections and his discussion of insurrectionary violence. Davari argues that the earlier lectures discussing bāzgasht be khishtan (a return to self) formed the conceptual foundation for his advocacy of shahādat (martyrdom) as a model of self-formation. These intellectual tendencies were rooted in a tradition of anticolonial and insurgent political thought, exemplified in Shari’ati’s case by an engagement with the writings of Frantz Fanon. Shari’ati’s borrowing of Fanon’s notions of return and decolonial violence involved alterations within a shared framework. Most notably, Shari’ati emphasized the prospect of a return to a religious self, redefined as political ethics. Whereas Fanon privileged an embodied experience of racialization as the most fundamental constraining and enabling factor in the realization of a new humanism, Shari’ati’s presentation of the “new man” as shahid involved a hermeneutic relationship with a collective self imagined across historical time. In Shari’ati’s hands, Fanon’s eschewal of history became an engagement with historical memory in the present tense. In the process, the body was reimagined as that which dies, its physical death marking the future where Fanon’s new man was said to be found. The shahid’s choosing to die—as opposed to the colonized’s need to kill the colonizer—led to the revision of two central conclusions pertaining to the process of decolonization: the discussion of means as ends, and the critique of a hierarchical relationship between revolutionary leaders and the led.

This chapter introduces Michel Foucault’s key arguments and situates them in relation to currents and debates in political sociology and social theory. It also offers a political history of those ideas, noting the ways that Foucault’s conceptual innovations are rooted as responses to the political events, experiences and commitments in which he participated, including anti-psychiatry, sexuality, anti-racism, anti-imperialism and anti-state militarism through the 1960s and 70s. The chapter explains Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge and its relationship to both the cultural turn in political sociology, and the increasing importance of culture, media, scientific expertise and knowledge in politics in the mid-20th Century. Genealogical enquiry is explained as a critical alternative to the Marxist tradition of ‘ideology critique’, whilst Foucault’s positive theory of power is situated in relation to his rejection of orthodox Left and Liberal politics. The chapter offers a detailed account of Foucault’s key contributions to understanding modern power relations, including his archaeology of modern knowledge and accounts of discipline, biopolitics, liberalism and governmentality. Whereas some have characterised Foucault’s work on ethics and spirituality as a retreat from politics, the chapter argues that in fact this work calls for a more profound and revolutionary politics, seeking to ‘teach anew the vision of a future’.

In this essay, I will argue the relationship between Foucault's concept of political spirituality and the Iranian Revolution. Regarding Foucault's concept of political spirituality‖, what must be stressed is that spirituality is combined with politics. For him, spirituality is a desire to liberate the body from the prison of the soul. He regarded spirituality as nothing to do with a religious doctrine, while he did not reject that Shi'i Islam was the source of political spirituality. Therefore, it would be necessary to ask what kind of politics can be realized through spiritual practice. I contend that this question is about the rationale of Foucault's intervention into the Iranian Revolution. Unlike mischievous Western propaganda, the establishment of theocracy was a realistic solution to the limit of liberal democracy. The disjunctive dualism of political Islamism, affirming a difference between the representative democracy and God's decision, suggests an alternative to Schmitt's answer to the question concerning liberal democracy. I argue that God is nothing else than the void of sovereign power, prohibiting any human tyrant who would occupy the place of absolute authority. Only divine violence can be possessing the authority to suspend the legal system and declare a state of exception. Foucault's concept of political spirituality should be grasped with this concept of political Islamism to solve the problem of liberalism.

Reading Foucault’s final works, two developments strike me as central. First, while for a long time Foucault considered the subject merely as the after-effect of disciplinary practices – a subject constituted through techniques of domination –  his work from the 1980’s onwards begins to conceive of a different, reflexive subject, constituted through techniques of the self – practices in which the self has a relation to itself. Second, as Gross notes, the 1982 course on The Hermeneutics of the Subject contains a new thinking of truth (525), further elaborated in his very last lectures, Fearless Speech and The Courage of Truth. Here, Foucault explicitly takes up the question of truth, or rather the question of a situated truth-teller: “who is able to tell the truth, with what consequences, and with what relations to power?” (Fearless 170). His conception of a new form of subjectivity thus seems to be related to a rethinking of the question of truth. In a 1983 interview, Foucault claimed that his “problem has always been the question of truth, of telling the truth, the wahr-sagen - what it is to tell the truth - and the relation between "telling the truth" and forms of reflexivity, of self upon self” (Politics 33). This relation between telling the truth and forms of reflexivity (i.e. subjectivity) - the question how true discourse relates to the practices and techniques of the self upon the self -  is a key concern for the final Foucault. “I have tried therefore to find, with Socrates, the moment when the requirement of truth- telling and the principle of the beauty of existence came together in the care of self” (Courage 163).

This chapter examines modes in which the Black Arts Movement emphasised the “inner life” as an important expression of political will, and reads that legacy in light of a radical aesthetic being developed by contemporary Queer African American poets. Danez Smith and Ricky Laurentiis are among poets who position an understanding of Queer Black inner life as an individualized source of political power, and as influenced by two types of emphasis on the inner life that emerged from the BAM era: a highly masculinized politics and poetics on one hand, and a powerfully feminist counterculture on the other. Smith’s and Laurentiis’s poetry explores these contrasting legacies in the sensual terrain of personal relationships, articulating the intense danger and yet potential freedom of being openly desiring in a racist and homophobic environment. In this way they invoke a sublime inner life which is continuous with both radical thought and political revolution.

Este estudio examina las diversas menciones de la idea de «voluntad» a lo largo del corpus iraní a fin de explicitar y problematizar la afirmación foucaultiana de la sublevación como "hecho irreductible". Demostraremos cómo un análisis a nivel de las diversas temporalidades en las que la idea de voluntad se ve implicada en los acontecimientos iraníes, nos brinda un registro de modos de subjetivación específicos que permiten dotar de cierta inteligibilidad histórica y crítica, a una noción de voluntad nunca definitivamente delimitada por Foucault. La articulación con la lectura que el autor hace de Kant ese mismo año-1978-en Qu'est-ce que la critique?, será capital para la reconstrucción de este recorrido reflexivo, que tiene en la voluntad decisiva de insubordinación su acontecimiento y su entusiasmo. Palabras clave: voluntad, temporalidad, crítica, modos de subjetivación, sublevación iraní. Abstract: This study examines the various mentions of the idea of "will" throughout the Iranian corpus in order to make explicit and problematize the Foucauldian affirmation of the uprising as an "irreducible fact". We will demonstrate how an analysis at the level of the various temporalities in which the idea of will is implicated in the Iranian events, gives us a record of specific modes of subjectivation that allow to endow a certain historical and critical intelligibility, to a notion of will never definitely delimited by Foucault. The articulation with the author's reading of Kant that same year-1978-in Qu'est-ce that critique?, will be capital for the reconstruction of this reflective process, which has in the decisive will of insubordination its event and its enthusiasm.

, Foucault wrote some reportages about the Islamic revolution. The importance of the texts emerges from both the events in Iran and essentially the time that Foucault wrote them. In his annual course at the Collège de France in 1978, which had delivered five months before his first trip to Iran, Foucault traced the idea of governmentality and "the genesis of a political knowledge that put the notion of population and the mechanisms for ensuring its regulation at the centre of its concerns" (Foucault, 2007: 363).

The philosophy of the Imperial Stoics is often described as apolitical or politically conservative, but Imperial Stoicism was neither of these. The Imperial Stoics were highly engaged with developing a philosophy that was one of the most politically ambitious philosophies in all of ancient philosophy. By insisting that philosophy was a way of life, the Stoics tried to provide a philosophy that could change humanity for the better, and as a consequence also transform human societies. For the Stoics, everyone should undergo a rigorous philosophical training regime in order to become a divine sage, and this they thought could potentially lead to a radically new society that would be entirely rational, deeply egalitarian, and completely property-less. This dissertation attempts to outline how the Imperial Stoics’ philosophy as a way of life comprised a political spirituality that was firmly grounded in a metaphysical claim of the existence of a divine Cosmic City in which all of humanity lived. This dissertation provides readings of the ancient sources through the lens of such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Henry Lefebvre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Peter Sloterdijk in a novel re-interpretation of ancient Stoic political philosophy, and argues that the Stoics were some of history’s first radical political thinkers.

This paper explores connections between: the intrinsic immanent spirituality and faith that springs from living in common; experiences of divinity as the charismatic energy of spirit as in Pentecostal Christianity and African spirit traditions; and the spirit or spirituality of biopolitical population life as manifest in British imperialist nationalism – manifest in both the miraculous commons of the National Health Service and the hunger for pure life that fuels the racist and radically exploitative biopolitical death drive. In a speculative genealogy, the paper suggests that the holy spirit of Pentecostal and other Charismatic traditions might be understood as a kind of displaced, dispossessed, version of the spirituality of the commons. The experience of holy spirit might be seen as an answer to the problem of how to live in common in the absence of the material common of land, possession or place – which would explain its prevalence amongst the radically displaced revolutionary proletariat of the 17th-19th century transatlantic (as well as it’s current proliferation). Further, the paper suggests that the spirituality of biopolitics, which was honed in the class body of the 19th century bourgeoisie, might derive not only from the scientific invention/discovery of population level phenomena and disciplinary practice as Foucault argues, but might also be seen as a bourgeois appropriation of the spirituality of the transatlantic revolutionary proletariat – the monster – that the imperial bourgeoisie had by then spent two centuries fighting. The paper can be read as a warning as to the duplicity and dangers of this multifaceted spirituality of the commons – that the faith that inspires us can also be a snare. But it concludes with a hope – that the reinvestment of spirit in worldly matters of place, property and ecology might yet drown out the biopolitical siren songs of infinite life, growth, wealth and health that have generated so much injustice and violence.

Forty years after the establishment of the Islamic Republic and the rise of "theocracy", we have almost completely forgotten the original role that Islam played in Iranian uprising in 1978-79. Instead, in late 1978, such an originality was grasped by Michel Foucault who, in his analysis of Iranian facts, developed the concept of "political spirituality". This paper aims therefore to show the genesis of this core concept, on the one hand, in the tradition of Shia Islam and, on the other hand, in the research program on the counter-conducts that Foucault himself was developing at the end of the 1970s. The need to clarify this concept is due to at least two reasons: firstly because it provides an hermeneutic key to highlight the irreducibility of the Iranian uprising and of its Islamic inspiration-to its theocratic results; secondly because it conceptualizes the most radical form of resistance to power in terms of an autonomy that is gained in the exposure of life itself to the risk of death.

This article embarks on adventures in search of antifascist aesthetics—an excursion born of despair at the increasingly racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim poison of our political ground. It asks whether ecological attunement can provide a counter to such capitalist sorcery and barbarism. The article draws on feminist philosophy of science, new materialism, and ecofeminism. What, it asks these guides, can ecological attunement offer to the task of composing antifascist, anticapitalist political subjectivity or shattering the reality principle of the “no alternative”? Among the responses to that question are certain ideas that we might call theological figurations—figures that open onto the theological task of questioning the value of values, and the political task of mustering spirit. Centering on an attempt to think with Stengers, the article turns to three such figures: the enchantress, the witch, and the intrusion of Gaia. It asks how these figures might succeed and fail in speaking to a popular politics that could lift our despair.
本文开啓一个寻找反法西斯主义美学的探险——一个从我们逐渐加剧的种族主义、反移民、反穆斯林毒害的政治基础的绝望中诞生的旅程。本文质问生态调和是否能够用以反抗此般资本主义巫术和野蛮的未开化状态。本文运用科学女性主义哲学、新物质主义和生态女性主义，并质问这些索引，生态调和能够为组成反法西斯、反资本主义的政治主体性，抑或打破“别无选择”的现实信条之任务提供什麽？对上述问题的回答中，是有关我们可能称为神学形体的若干概念——通向质问价值的价值的神学任务之形体，以及鼓起灵性的政治工作。本文聚焦与考史坦格共同思考的企图，转向此般三种人物形体：妖妇、女巫，以及盖亚的侵入。本文质问这些形体如何成功或失败地诉诸可能解除我们的绝望的大众政治。
Este artículo se embarca en aventuras por la búsqueda de la estética antifascista – una excursión producto del desespero por el cada vez más grave envenenamiento racista, anti-inmigrante y anti-musulmán de nuestro terreno político. El artículo pregunta si la afinación ecológica puede proveer remedio contra a tal hechicería y barbarismo capitalista. Se apoya en la filosofía feminista de la ciencia, el nuevo materialismo y el ecofeminismo. ¿Qué puede ofrecer, se les pregunta a estas guías, la afinación ecológica a la tarea de componer subjetividad política antifascista y anticapitalista, o para devastar el principio de realidad de la “no alternativa”? Entre las respuestas a esa pregunta hay ciertas ideas que podríamos denominar figuraciones teológicas – figuras que se abren sobre la tarea teológica de cuestionar el valor de los valores, y la tarea política de soliviantar el espíritu. Centrándose en un intento de pensar con Stengers, el artículo vuelve sobre tres de esas figuras: la encantadora, la bruja y la intrusión de Gaia. Se pregunta cómo podrían estas figuras triunfar y fallar hablando a una política popular que pudiese levantar nuestro desespero.