January 18, 2026

WHEN FOUCAULT MET THE AYATOLLAH:

Earlier that year [1978], Foucault had been commissioned by Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera to write a regular ‘Michel Foucault Investigates’ column – and other pieces for several French papers, too. The original focus was supposed to be America under its new president, Jimmy Carter. But as the Iranian people began rising up against the shah’s autocratic reign, Foucault’s focus shifted eastwards. And so, between the summer of 1978 and early 1979, he visited Iran twice, and contributed a series of op-eds, features and interviews on what, come early 1979, would culminate in the Iranian Revolution and the birth of the Islamic Republic.

By the time Foucault sat in awe before Iran’s future supreme leader, under the shade of an old apple tree, he had already become a full-throated supporter of the revolt against the shah. Plenty of leftists in the West had. But Foucault’s stance was different. Unlike those Western left-wingers at the time, who supported the revolt in spite of its religious character, Foucault supported it precisely because of its religious character.

At first glance, this may look like a very odd coupling – the Western radical, libertine and poststructuralist, and the Islamist reactionary. But dig a little deeper, and it’s an alliance built on a shared, anti-Western animus. Foucault’s radicalism, drawing deep on a counter-Enlightenment tradition of thought, rested on a profound critique and rejection of modernity as a whole. He conceived of Western society along the lines of Max Weber’s ‘iron cage of rationality’, a spiritless, disenchanted system of domination in which ‘individuals’ are little more than the effects of power. And in Islamism, Foucault effectively saw a solution – a spiritual alternative to the supposedly empty, prison-like rationalism and materialism of the modern West. Indeed, an interview with Foucault published in March 1979 is even called, ‘Iran: the spirit of a spiritless world’.

Related: Roger Kimball on “The perversions of M. Foucault:”

Self-destruction, in fact, was another of Foucault’s obsessions, and Miller is right to underscore Foucault’s fascination with death. In this, as in so much else, he followed the lead of the Marquis de Sade, who had long been one of his prime intellectual and moral heroes. (Though, as Miller notes, Foucault felt that Sade “had not gone far enough,” since, unaccountably, he continued to see the body as “strongly organic.”) Foucault came to enjoy imagining “suicide festivals” or “orgies” in which sex and death would mingle in the ultimate anonymous encounter. Those planning suicide, he mused, could look “for partners without names, for occasions to die liberated from every identity.”

A notion that Foucault took horrifyingly literally:

Tweet continues, Foucault “thought AIDS was just another fictional moral panic engineered to stigmatize ‘marginalized groups.’ Then he died of AIDS in 1984.”

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

BOMB CANADA — THE CASE FOR WAR:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

CHRIS BRAY: What Blue Zone Collapse Looks Like: “In my last post, I said that the Blue Zones are functionally insolvent. ‘The well is dry.’ Several commenters responded with the observation that they’ve been hearing this story for twenty years or more, but the Blue Zones are still going, so what insolvency and collapse are you talking about? But the collapse of the Blue Zones doesn’t look like Enron or K-Mart; California doesn’t shut down. The state has 39 million golden geese to cut open. There’s a lot of ruin in a state. But the collapse remains real, and it’s already happening. It looks like this.”

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

FROM ANNA FERREIRA:  The Flight of Miss Stanhope: A Short and Sweet Regency Romance.

 

Marianne Stanhope is in trouble. Her family is urging her to accept the attentions of a most odious suitor, so she turns to a gentleman of her acquaintance for aid. But Mr. Firth has his own reasons for assisting Miss Stanhope, and it falls to her childhood friend Mr. Killingham to convince her that she’s made a dreadful mistake.

Posted at 7:01 am by Sarah Hoyt

DOUBLE-STANDARD JUSTICE: Authorities’ inaction on threats against Trump voters is alarming.

In America, threatening a voter with death is both unacceptable and a felony. In 2024, Pennsylvanians with Trump signs in their yards received anonymous, chilling death threat letters, a crime the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Pennsylvania State Police and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service are doing nothing about.

“We know where you live,” the menacing letters said. “You are in the database. In the dead of a cold winter’s night, this year or next and beyond, there is no knowing what may happen. Your property, your family may be impacted, your cat may get shot. And more.”

Why has no one been arrested, going on 15 months after these threats were made?

An orchestrated effort to threaten to kill Trump supporters unfortunately hasn’t seemed to matter to our appointed and elected guardians of American values. But it does matter to Americans who value our precious civil society.

History proves that threats of political violence are too often followed by actual political violence. Unfortunately, the institutions responsible for protecting civil society from political threats of violence in Pennsylvania have failed.

They could find who sent this, if they wanted to. They don’t want to.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

January 17, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds