 Foucault's revolution
French philosopher's views on the
1979 revolution
May 19, 2005
iranian.com
From the introduction to Foucault
and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism by
Janet Afary and Kevin
B. Anderson (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Throughout his life, Michel
Foucault’s concept
of authenticity meant looking at situations where people lived
dangerously
and flirted with death, the site where creativity originated. In
the tradition of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, Foucault
had embraced the artist who pushed the limits of rationality and
he wrote with great passion in defense of irrationalities that
broke new boundaries.
In 1978, Foucault found such transgressive
powers in the revolutionary figure of Ayatollah Khomeini and the
millions who risked death as they followed him in the course of
the Revolution. He knew that such “limit” experiences
could lead to new forms of creativity and he passionately threw
in his support.
This was Foucault’s only first-hand experience of revolution and it led
to his most extensive set of writings on a non-Western society.
Foucault first visited Iran in September 1978 and then met with
Khomeini at his exile residence outside Paris in October. Foucault
traveled to Iran for a second visit in November, when the revolutionary
movement against the shah was reaching its zenith. During these
two trips, Foucault was commissioned as a special correspondent
of the leading Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, with his
articles appearing on page one of that paper.
Foucault’s
interest in the Iranian Revolution was much more than a journalistic
curiosity. His earlier work had shown a consistent though subtle
affinity for the Orient and the more traditional social norms of
the East, as well as a messianic preoccupation with Eastern thought.
Foucault believed that the demise of colonialism by the 1960s had
brought Western thought to a turning point and to a crisis. During
a 1978 encounter at a Zen temple in Japan, Foucault remarked that
this was “the end of the era of Western philosophy. Thus
if philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside of
Europe or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between
Europe and non-Europe” (1999, p. 113).
Later that year, Foucault went to Iran “to be there at
the birth of ideas.” He wrote that the new “Muslim” style
of politics could signal the beginning of a new form of “political
spirituality,” not just for the Middle East, but also for
Europe, which had adopted a secular politics ever since the French
Revolution. As he wrote in Corriere della sera in November 1978:
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And
these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate
than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the
birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books
expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles
carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule
the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it
constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those
who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and
for all, what it must think. This is the direction we want these “journalistic
reports” to take. An analysis of thought will be linked
to an analysis of what is happening. Intellectuals will work
together
with journalists at the point where ideas and events intersect.
(cited in Eribon [1989] 1991, p. 282)
In addition to Corriere della Sera, Foucault wrote on Iran in
French newspapers and journals, such as the daily Le Monde and
the widely circulated leftist weekly Nouvel Observateur. Iranian
student activists translated at least one of his essays into Persian
and posted it on the walls of Tehran University in the fall of
1978. In spring 1979, the Iranian Writers Association published
an interview with Foucault from the previous September on the concept
of revolution and the role of the intellectual. All of Foucault’s
writings and interviews on Iran are published in English in their
entirety for the first time in the appendix to this volume, alongside
those of some of his critics.
Foucault staked out a series of distinctive political and theoretical
positions on the Iranian Revolution. In part because only three
of his fifteen articles and interviews on Iran have appeared in
English, they have generated little discussion in the English-speaking
world. But this itself is curious. Why, given the wide accessibility
in English of even his interviews and other minor writings, have
these texts not previously been made available to the English-speaking
public, especially given the wide interest in Foucault by scholars
of non-European societies?
Many scholars of Foucault view these
writings as aberrant or the product of a political mistake. We
will suggest that Foucault's writings on Iran were in fact closely
related to his general theoretical writings on the discourses of
power and the hazards of modernity. We will also argue that Foucault’s
experience in Iran left a lasting impact on his subsequent oeuvre
and that one cannot understand the sudden turn in Foucault’s
writings in the 1980s without recognizing the significance of the
Iranian episode and his more general preoccupation with the Orient.
Long before most other commentators, Foucault understood that
Iran was witnessing a singular kind of revolution. Early on, he
predicted that this revolution would not follow the model of other
modern revolutions. He wrote that it was organized around a sharply
different concept, which he called “political spirituality.” Foucault
recognized the enormous power of the new discourse of militant
Islam, not just for Iran, but for the world. He showed that the
new Islamist movement aimed at a fundamental cultural, social,
and political break with the modern Western order, as well as with
the Soviet Union and China:
As an “Islamic” movement, it can set the entire region
afire, overturn the most unstable regimes, and disturb the most
solid. Islam -- which is not simply a religion, but an entire way
of life, an adherence to a history and a civilization -- has a
good chance to become a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds
of millions of men.... In fact, it is also important to recognize
that the demand for the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian
people” hardly stirred the Arab peoples. What would it
be if this cause encompassed the dynamism of an Islamic movement,
something much stronger than those with a Marxist, Leninist,
or
Maoist character? (this edition, p. 241)
He also noted presciently that such a discourse would “alter
the global strategic equilibrium” (this edition, p. 241)
Foucault’s experience in Iran contributed to a turning
point in his thought. In the late 1970s, he was moving from a preoccupation
with technologies of domination to a new interest in what he termed
the technologies of the self, as the foundation for a new form
of spirituality and resistance to power. We argue that the Iranian
Revolution had a lasting impact on his late writing in several
ways.
In his Iran writings, Foucault emphasized the deployment
of certain instruments of modernity as means of resistance.
He called attention to the innovative uses Islamists made of overseas
radio broadcasts and cassettes. This blending of more traditional
religious discourses with modern means of communication had
helped
to galvanize the revolutionary movement and ultimately paralyzed
the modern and authoritarian Pahlavi regime.
Foucault was also fascinated by the appropriation of Shi'ite
myths of martyrdom and rituals of penitence by large parts of the
revolutionary movement and their willingness to face death in their
single-minded goal of overthrowing the Pahlavi regime. Later, in
his discussion of an “aesthetics of existence” -- practices
that could be refashioned for our time and serve as the foundation
for a new form of spirituality -- Foucault often referred to Greco-Roman
texts and early Christian practices. However, many of these practices
also had a strong resemblance to what he saw in Iran.
Additionally,
many scholars have wondered about Foucault’s sudden turn
to the ancient Greco-Roman world in volumes II and III of History
of Sexuality, and his interest in uncovering male homosexual practices
in this era. We would suggest an “Oriental” appropriation
here as well. Foucault’s description of a male “ethics
of love” in the Greco-Roman world greatly resembles some
existing male homosexual practices of the Middle East and North
Africa.
Foucault’s foray into the Greco-Roman world might,
therefore, have been related to his longstanding fascination with
ars erotica and especially the erotic arts of the East, since Foucault
sometimes combined the discussion of sexual practices of the contemporary
East with those of the classical Greco-Roman society.
The Iranian experience also raises some questions about Foucault’s
overall approach to modernity. First, it is often assumed that
Foucault’s suspicion of utopianism, his hostility to grand
narratives and universals, and his stress on difference and singularity
rather than totality, would make him less likely than his predecessors
on the Left to romanticize an authoritarian politics that promised
radically to refashion from above the lives and thought of a people,
for its ostensible benefit.
However, his Iran writings showed that
Foucault was not immune to the type of illusions that so many
Western leftists had held toward the Soviet Union and later, China. Foucault
did not anticipate the birth of yet another modern state where
old religious technologies of domination could be refashioned
and
institutionalized; this was a state that propounded a traditionalist
ideology, but equipped itself with modern technologies of organization,
surveillance, warfare, and propaganda.
 Second, Foucault's highly problematic relationship to feminism
becomes more than an intellectual lacuna in the case of Iran. On
a few occasions, Foucault reproduced statements he had heard from
religious figures on gender relations in a possible future Islamic
Republic, but he never questioned the “separate but equal” message
of the Islamists. Foucault also dismissed feminist premonitions
that the Revolution was headed in a dangerous direction, and he
seemed to regard such warnings as little more than Orientalist
attacks on Islam, thereby depriving himself of a more balanced
perspective toward the events in Iran.
At a more general level,
Foucault remained insensitive toward the diverse ways in which
power affected women, as against men. He ignored the fact that
those most traumatized by the premodern disciplinary practices
were often women and children, who were oppressed in the name of
tradition, obligation, or honor. In chapter one, we root his indifference
to Iranian women in the problematic stances toward gender in his
better-known writings, while in chapters three and four, we discuss
Foucault’s response to attacks by Iranian and French feminists
on his Iran writings themselves.
Third, an examination of Foucault’s writings provides more
support for the frequently articulated criticism that his one-sided
critique of modernity needs to be seriously reconsidered, especially
from the vantage point of many non-Western societies. Indeed, there
are some indications that Foucault himself was moving in such a
direction.
In his 1984 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault
put forth a position on the Enlightenment that was more nuanced
than before, also moving from a two-pronged philosophy concerned
with knowledge and power to a three-pronged one that included ethics.
However, the limits of his ethics of moderation with regard to
gender and sexuality need to be explored and this is the subject
of the last chapter of this book.
 As against Foucault, some French leftists were very critical
of the Iranian Revolution early on. Beginning in December 1978
with a series of articles that appeared on the front page of Le
Monde, the noted Middle East scholar and leftist commentator Maxime
Rodinson, known for his classic biography of Muhammad, published
some hard-hitting critiques of Islamism in Iran as a form of “semi-archaic
fascism” (this volume, p. 233). As Rodinson later revealed,
he was specifically targeting Foucault in these articles, which
drew on Max Weber’s notion of charisma, Marx’s concepts
of class and ideology, and a range of scholarship on Iran and Islam.
In March 1979, Foucault’s writings on Iran came under increasing
attack in the wake of the new regime’s executions of homosexual
men and especially the large demonstrations by Iranian women on
the streets of Tehran against Khomeini’s directives for compulsory
veiling. In addition, France’s best-known feminist, the existentialist
philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, protested the Khomeini regime’s
suppression of women’s rights and sent a message of solidarity
to Iranian women (this volume, pp. 246-247). However, Foucault
refused to respond to the new attacks, issuing only a mild criticism
of human rights in Iran that refrained from any mention of women’s
rights or gay rights, before lapsing into silence on Iran.
Available on Amazon.com
Foucault
and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism
About
Janet Afary is
Associate Professor of Hisotry and Women's Studies at Perdue University. Homepage
Kevin B. Anderson is Associate Professor of Political Science at Perdue
University. Homepage
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