Was ist Aufklärung?
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other words, the subject could not emancipate herself by deriving the principles of her politics from the same rationality that has constituted the conditions of her subjugation. This position does not necessarily lead to political defeatism or philosophical nihilism. Did Foucault “raise a question whether or not there is such a thing as a way out?” Charles Taylor answers his own question, “Foucault’s analyses seem to bring evils to light; and yet he wants to distance himself from the suggestion that would seem inescapably to follow, that the negation or overcoming of these evils promotes a good.”22 Although Taylor analyzes Foucault from a more sympathetic position, he voices a general consensus that a critical standpoint is not credible unless it relies on what Habermas calls a “normative yardstick.”23 A whole host of critics follow the same logic: namely, that without the introduction of normative notions of right and wrong, as Nancy Fraser argues, one cannot oppose “the modern power/ knowledge regime.”24 Nancy Hartsock expands on this idea and further situates Foucault as part of a repressive patriarchal system, which writes from a position of male domination and, with his theory of ascending power, condemns women and other modern subjects to perpetual oppression. Despite his objection to the project of Enlightenment, Foucault remains, Hartsock stresses, within its boundaries because he fails to put “anything in its place.”25 The novelty of Foucault’s critique of the Enlightenment and universal Reason coincides with the same point that his critics identify as his failure. He did not imagine the exit from modern disciplinary power as being a strategy of escaping from the prison house of one epistemic regime (i.e., the Enlightenment) into the haven of another. He found in the ambiguity he encountered in the Iranian Revolution—its nonprogrammatic discourse of negation, and the unfamiliar concept of an Islamic government—a historical illustration of his genealogical project. “The revolution,” he wrote in February 13, 1979, two days after the collapse of monarchy, “showed, at certain moments, some of its familiar traits, but things are still astonishingly ambiguous. . . . Maybe its historic significance will be found, not in its conformity to a recognized ‘revolutionary’ model, but instead in its potential to overturn the existing political situation in the Middle East. . . . Its singularity, which has up to now constituted its force, consequently threatens to give it the power to expand.”26 In Iran he found a revolutionary movement that instantiated the