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

Introduction 3
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 wold. 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 1991, 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 Le 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 published writings
and interviews on Iran appear 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 accessibility in English of even his interviews and other minor
writings, have these texts not previously been made available to the Englishspeaking
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 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 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