foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

98 Foucault's Writings on the Iranian Revolution
the revolution, this article underlined what Foucault saw as its deeply radical
character and pointed to how the revolutionaries believed that the departure
of the shah and the establishment of an Islamist regime would solve their
social, economic, and political problems.
Foucault made five astute observations about the nature of the revolu­
tionary movement in Iran: (1) that the Iranian Revolution was not a cultural
movement aimed at a "liberation of desires" in the tradition of the 1960s
movement in the West; (2) that the vast antiregime coalition held together be­
cause its objective was defined so narrowly; (3) that Khomeini was a consum­
mate political leader, since his amorphous, down-to-earth, and at the same
time purposely obfuscatory discourse allowed different groups to assume that
their respective objectives would be realized once the shah was overthrown;
( 4) that this seemingly antimodern revolution relied on modern means of
communication (tape recorders, overseas radio broadcasts, newspapers) to
disseminate its ideas; (5) that a blending oftradition and modernity, of mod­
ern means of communication with centuries-old rituals of penitence, made
it possible to paralyze the modem authoritarian police state of the Pahlavis,
with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in the streets, as well as a gen­
eral strike.
Foucault concluded that the Iranian Revolution was beyond politics, an
expression of a totally unified society that rooted itself in thousand-year-old
cultural traditions:
This movement has no counterpart and no expression in the political
order.
The paradox, however, is that it constitutes a peifectly unified collective will.
It is surprising to see this immense country, with a population distributed
around two large desert plateaus, a country able to afford the latest technical
innovations alongside forms of life unchanged for the last thousand years, a
country that is languishing under censorship and the absence of public
freedoms, and yet demonstrating an extraordinary unity in spite of all this . . . .
Somewhat like the European students in the 1960s, the Iranians want it all,
but this "all" is not one of a "liberation of desires ." This political will is one
of breaking away from all that marks their country and their daily lives with
the presence of global hegemonies. ("Mythical Leader, " app., 222; emphasis
added)
Foucault assured his readers that there was no danger in this because "there
will not be a Khomeini party; there will not be a Khomeini government"
(ibid.).