technology of “disciplinary formations,” visible in madhouses,
prisons, hospitals, and similar institutions, determines our poor
being and consciousness. Cherished values, human rights:
from a Foucauldian perspective, these are simply fantasies that
have nothing to do with the harsh reality of history.
The sixty-eighters gathered inspiration from Nietzsche,
Foucault’s favorite philosopher, as well as Bakunin, Marx, and
Mao. The striking students of Paris inscribed a Nietzschean
slogan, “Soyez cruelle!” (Be cruel!) on their barricades. Instead
of speaking as Sartre did in the name of freedom, they cited
historical inevitability, the revolution: the call of the future,
which would transfigure us in frightening, exhilarating ways
we could hardly predict. In 1970 , Foucault himself manned the
barricades at the University of Vincennes, enthusiastically
throwing stones down at the police. A few years later, Foucault
would applaud Khomeini’s Iranian revolution because it fur-
nished another sublime spectacle: the masses urged into cease-
less activity.
In 1979 , when the Shah was overthrown, Foucault cared
only that the people were displaying fanatic revolutionary en-
ergy. It did not matter whether a just or unjust order was being
born in Iran. Foucault later reconsidered his enthusiasm for
Khomeini’s revolution. But he had revealed that he, like Sartre,
had a strong inclination to place his trust in the collective
rather than the individual, and in the sheer force of history, no
matter how violent. (This inclination against humanism and
toward mass violence for its own sake, common currency
among French intellectuals from the 1930 s on, has been ex-
pertly diagnosed by the historian Tony Judt in his book Past
Imperfect.)
Derrida does not mention Foucault in “The Ends of
Man.” But he clearly has him in mind: he wants to compete on
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 133