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

134 Foucault's Writings on the Iranian Revolution
by Raymond ATOn. Manent zeroed in on the looseness of the criteria Foucault
had used in explaining his support for the Islamist movement in Iran.
In particular, Manent focused on the metaphysical, spiritual dimension of
Foucault's theory and ethics of revolution, especially his evident fascination
with martyrdom and death: N Michel Foucault wants to close off all discussion,
even the possibility of a discussion, on the well-foundedness of this or that
uprising, by stressing the unassailable fact . .. of one who 'stakes his life.' . ..
The irreducibility of this act is supposed to close off any inquiry into its reasons
or justifications" (Manent 1979, 372). To Manent, a decided nihilism
seemed to lurk behind Foucault's political spirituality.
In a coda to the controversy, in 1993, nearly a decade after Foucault's
death, Rodinson made public the fact that his articles in Le Monde and Le
Nouvel ObservateuT during the Iranian Revolution had been aimed mainly at
Foucault. He did so in a lengthy essay accompanying their republication, 14
where he wrote: "A very great thinker, Michel Foucault, part of a line of radically
dissident thought, placed excessive hopes in the Iranian Revolution"
(NCritique of Foucault on Iran," app., 270). In part, Rodinson attributed this
to Foucault's lack of knowledge concerning the Islamic world . He criticized
not only Foucault's enthusiastic reports in the fall of 1978 on a new "political
spirituality" and the prospects for an "Islamic government." He also took
issue with Foucault's April 1979 open letter to Bazargan, which had been
somewhat critical of the outcome of the Revolution. Additionally, Rodinson
suggested that when Foucault's open letter had defended the principle of an
Islamic government against those who expressed suspicion about the adjective
"Islamic, " this was a criticism directed at Rodinson's own writings on the
revolution: "To the extent that I was myself the target of Foucault's open letter,
I will respond that if I cast suspicion on the adjective 'Islamic: it was the same
thing concerning every adjective that denoted an attachment to an ideal doctrine,
whether religious or secular" (ibid., 275). Relying heavily on Weber's
theory of charismatic domination, Rodinson wrote that "religious charisma
reveals itself to be much rnore effective than all types of secular charisma"
(ibid., 272). Foucault, however, Rodinson concluded, had "yielded" to "the
banal and vulgar conception of the spiritual" that "shrank from questioning
the foundations" of a "dissident" movement like Iranian Islamism (ibid.,
276).
Rodinson detailed a number of brutal and destructive features of the Islamic
Republic, referring to Khomeini's notorious hanging judge, the cleric
Sadeq Khalkhali. He recalled his February 1979 response to Foucault, where
he had suggested that, rather than something similar to the English revolutionar
y Cromwell (as Foucault had written), what might be in store for