NM's blog

The Philosophers' Epidemic

Sexuality and Solitude Foucault and Sennet, 1981

What is required is a Foucaultian investigation into the conditions of possibility for truth statements about "Islam." Instead of assuming and seeking to uncover the machanisms by which something called sexuality operates inside the category Islam, scholars must begin with the "positive mechanisms" that generate this Western will to know. Folowing Foucault, "we must investigate the conditions of their emergence and operation ... we must define the strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowledge." The outcome of this kind of approach will reveal much about how Western scholarship on sexuality not only constitutes something it calls "Islam" but also how it constitutes "Europe," the "West," as an always already racialized normativity." The question to ask then is not what is the nature of "sexuality," its operations, repressions, manifestations, and productions in Islam, but rather in a specific ...

Sartre est effectivement resté constant dans son philo-sionisme fondamental. Peur de passer pour antisémite, sentiment de culpabilité devant l’Holocauste, refus de s’autoriser une perception en profondeur des Palestiniens comme victimes en lutte contre l’injustice d’Israël, ou quelque autre raison   ? je ne le saurai jamais. Tout ce que je sais, c’est que, dans sa vieillesse, il n’était guère différent de ce qu’il avait été jadis : la même amère source de déception pour tout Arabe, Algérien excepté, qui admirait à juste titre ses autres positions et son œuvre.  Ma rencontre avec Jean-Paul Sartre

Foucault's  History of Sexuality : A Marxist Engagement

"30 years later, the point of conflict between Said and de Beauvoir is still hotly debated following Western assaults on hijabs, niqabs, burqas and other traditional Muslim attire. The defense of these garments, taken on by thinkers like Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod is often deeply indebted to Said’s work on racist Western conceptions of the East." "A bitter disappointment": Edward Said on his encounter with Sartre, de Beauvoir and Foucauld and  Edward Said's diary 

Michel Foucault as a new orientalist by Ian Almond,  See p. 22 (pdf)