Foucault and Iran
Jesse Walker | September 25, 2004, 12:15pm
When Michel Foucault's American admirers discuss his work, his enthusiasm for Iran's Islamist revolution doesn't get much attention. This is partly because most of his articles on the topic are not available in English, and partly because his fans just don't know what to make of such an unsympathetic position. It's usually written off as an aberration or a mistake.
Writing in the socialist journal New Politics, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson -- authors of the forthcoming Foucault, Gender, and the Iranian Revolution: The Seductions of Islamism -- take a closer look at what Foucault said and how it fits his body of work. Rejecting the idea that his stance was an anomaly, they argue that "Foucault's Iran writings reveal, albeit in exaggerated form, some problems in his...one-sided critique of modernity." They also note that Foucault is not the only leftist to misjudge radical Islam -- an important point at a time when principled opposition to the war in Iraq sometimes morphs into sympathy for fundamentalist thugs.
[Via Doug Ireland.]
Ramin Parham | September 27, 2004, 5:09pm | #
This article is an essay which retraces the genesis and the culmination of the views that one of the past century's most prominent philosophers, the French Michel Foucault, held on the birth of Islamism in Iran.
The article, written from a leftist perspective and addressing what it calls the "International Left", is republished here, for we believe that it provides a good example of how, that ?international left', through one of its most eminent figures, provided Khomeini and his revolutionary coalition with what they needed most, in particular in order for them to rally behind their ?cause' Iran's highly educated middle classes: secular-looking legitimacy. Today, 25 years after that disastrous alchemy of "Spiritual Politics", even the most radical elements of the theocratic establishment inside Iran bear witness to the fact that the revolution was not, at its inception, prior to it being "taken over by the masses", as the Tehran conservative daily Kayhan puts it, a purely religious phenomenon. At its start, there was a legitimate demand for political participation and the application of the 1906 Constitution; constitutionalism versus absolutism; more consensual modernization versus what the authors, Afary and Anderson, justifiably call the Shah's "highly authoritarian program of economic and cultural modernization." For those who witnessed and took part in those early events, the Tehran Goethe Institute's "Nights of Poetry", back in 1978, attended by the society's most politically dynamic and progressive elements, did not preach the revolutionary overthrow of Monarchy nor the establishment of an Islamic theocracy. During those nights, Iranian intellectuals asked for what had come to be termed as "open political atmosphere." What metamorphosed that embryo of freedom into the monster of the "revolution of Islam", now inscribed into the "constitution" of the Islamic republic, could be the subject of a different article. Here, we want to end this introductory note on the following correction-reminder:
The authors assert that, shortly after "tak[ing] power", Khomeini "sponsored a national referendum [italics by RP] that declared Iran an Islamic republic by an overwhelming majority." In our opinion, no virtuality could be more farfetched and detached from reality. What Afary and Anderson call "national referendum" was nothing more than a religious fatwa, from an Imam whose "picture" had, only a few months earlier, adorned the surface of the moon, disguised as a referendum. There was no choice presented to the Iranian people, neither in form nor in content. What there was, in the shadows of freshly "imported" AK47 rifles from "brother" states and those summarily executed officers of the Imperial Army whose tragic end seems not to have reached the authors' compassionate list of atrocities committed by the Khomeini against "homosexuals" and "leftists"? what there was, was Khomeini's injunction: "Islamic Republic; Not a Word More; Not a Word Less." It is tempting to ask Afary and Anderson and the "international left", which, in their own words, has failed "to chart an adequate response to religious fundamentalism", on the basis of which principles, reliable data, and ethics they call that demagogical populist plebiscite a "national referendum"?
The authors' introduction, prior to proceeding with Foucault's "Distinctive Positions" is rigged with yet another farfetched such statement. In tracing back Foucault's fascination for Khomeini's "morbid transgressive powers" to the philosopher's Nietzschean embracement of the "artist who pushed the limits of rationality", the authors assert that "millions" of Iranians "risked death as they followed him [Khomeini] in the course of the revolution." This is simply nonsense! Masses, as opposed to the revolutionary vanguard, which, by definition, constitutes a tiny social minority, both qualitatively and quantitatively, do not take "risks", particularly not "death" risk! Masses join the engine ignited by the vanguard only and only when the "risk" element is sufficiently low. Any Leninist would know that! Paradoxically and technically speaking, one of the main catalysts of Khomeini's access to power was the Shah's soft approach to the power struggle that opposed him to the heretic "saint": He, not Khomeini, freed "political prisoners", including members of armed Marxist and/or Islamist organizations that later became known and labeled, worldwide, as terrorists; He, not Khomeini, put stringent conditions on the use of legitimate force, even in the face of open provocation of chaos; violation of private properties; and savagery, the most abhorrent example of which was staged at the Rex Theatre, in the southern city of Abadan, where an estimated 400 people were burned alive by the "revolutionaries", heralding hyper-terrorism on a global scale...
