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

Debating the Outcome of the Revolution, Especially on Women's Rights
out their good and bad forms, and defined their laws of development. For
uprisings, it established preliminary conditions, objectives, and ways of
bringing them to an end. Even the profession of revolutionary was defined.
By thus repatriating revolt into the discourse of revolution, it was said, the
uprising would appear in all its truth and continue to its true con clusion. This
was a marvelous promise. Some will say that the uprising thus found itself
colonized by realpolitik. Others will say that the dimension of a rational history
was opened to it. ("Is It Useless to Revolt? " app., 264)
The experience of Iran could thus be a turning point for the world. It could
free uprisings from the paradigms dominant since 1789, whether liberal
democratic or socialist.
However, Foucault's attempt to link the Iranian Revolution to premodern,
elemental mass revolts was harder to swallow, even if one left aside the secular,
leftist, and feminist tendencies. With its clandestine committees under
the control of a religious hierarchy and its use of the then cutting-edge technologies
of communication such as cassette tapes, the lslamist movement
was as meticulously organized from above as the most Stalinized vanguard
party, something that was becoming more evident by the day. Foucault, in
his utter and sometimes nihilistic rejection of modern Western forms of state
power, seemed unable to grasp that an anti-Western, religiously based system
of power could be in the process of creating a state that would prove to be
every bit as oppressive as Stalinist or fascist totalitarianism. Similar to fascism,
this new state was in the process of combining many modernist features with
an antimodernist ideology.
To Foucault, the events in Iran seemed outside the Western paradigm of
revolution. Further, they were perhaps even outside history itself, part of a
timeless "political spirituality" that the modern concept of revolution had
tried vainly to supplant:
They inscribed, on the borders of heaven and earth, in a dream-history that
was as religious as it was political, all their hunger, their humiliation, their
hatred of the regime, and their will to bring it down. They confronted the
Pahlavis, in a game where each one staked his life and his death, a game that
was also about sacrifices and millennial promises. Thus, came the celebrated
demonstrations, which . . . unfold according to the rhythm of religious
ceremonies, and finally refer to a timeless drama in which power is always
accursed. This drama caused a surprising superimposition to appear in the
middle of the twentieth century: a movement strong enough to bring down a
131