>Foucault very quickly made it clear to me that he had nothing to
>contribute to the seminar and would be leaving directly for his
>daily bout of research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I was pleased
>to see my book Beginnings on his bookshelves, which were brimming
>with a neatly arranged mass of materials, including papers and
>journals. Although we chatted together amiably it wasn't until much
>later (in fact almost a decade after his death in 1984) that I got
>some idea why he had been so unwilling to say anything to me about
>Middle Eastern politics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon
>and James Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in Tunisia
>and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War.
>Foucault had said at the time that the reason he left had been his
>horror at the 'anti-semitic' anti-Israel riots of the time, common
>in every Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian colleague
>of his in the University of Tunis philosophy department told me a
>different story in the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been
>deported because of his homosexual activities with young students. I
>still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the
>Paris seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in
>Iran as a special envoy of Corriere della sera. 'Very exciting, very
>strange, crazy,' I recall him saying about those early days of the
>Islamic Revolution. I think (perhaps mistakenly) I heard him say
>that in Teheran he had disguised himself in a wig, although a short
>while after his articles appeared, he rapidly distanced himself from
>all things Iranian. Finally, in the late 1980s, I was told by Gilles
>Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends, had
>fallen out over the question of Palestine, Foucault expressing
>support for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians.