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

8 Introduction
critic Edward Said, hardly unsympathetic to Foucault, sought to distance himself
from the two Iran writings included there by suggesting that they "seem
very dated" (2000b, 16-17).
Another factor that has minimized the discussion of Foucault's writings
on Iran in the English-speaking world has been the tendency of scholars sympathetic
to him to group the Iran writings together with a number of other
ones on political issues during the same period. Macey did so in his 1991
biography. Soon after, James Bernauer and Michael Mahon wrote that the
Iranian Revolution and Poland's Solidarnosc were "two events in the political
realm" on which Foucault commented during his last years (1994, 144).
In his introduction to Foucault's shorter writings on power, James Faubion
extended this list to include Foucault's 1979 intervention on behalf of Vietnamese
boat people (see Foucault 2000a, xxxvi).
While in no way minimizing the political significance of these interventions
over Poland and the Vietnamese boat people, each of which had an
impact on French politics, we maintain that they had a character very different
from Foucault's writings on Iran. Quantitatively, he simply wrote far more
on Iran than on Poland, let alone the Vietnamese boat people. Qualitatively,
there were also major differences between his writings on Iran and these other
interventions. On the Vietnamese boat people, an issue that came to the fore
in the spring of 1979, Foucault joined with other intellectual luminaries such
as Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron to demand asylum for people fleeing
a repressive Stalinist dictatorship. Concerning Poland, he worked during
1981 and 1982 alongside the well-known sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and
the famous actress Simone Signoret, among others, to support Solidarnosc,
driven underground in December 1981. Thus, he did not carve out much
of a distinctive position on these issues, and he may in fact have used these
interventions to regain his standing in the Parisian intellectual world after the
embarrassment of the Iran episode in 1978-79. In addition, on Poland and
Vietnam, Foucault's positions were part of a broad shift within the French
intellectual Left, after decades of leaning toward Russian and then Chinese
versions of communism. On Iran, however, Foucault stood virtually alone.
Instead of merging his Iran episode with these other, less controversial,
political interventions, we therefore emphasize its singularity, to use a favorite
term of Foucault's. We believe that, except for his more intensive and longterm
organizing activities in the prisoner support movement during the early
1970s, his writings on Iran represent the most significant and passionate political
commitment of his life. It was an episode that ended in failure, as
he himself seemed to recognize in his silence on Iran after May 1979. We