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

250 Appendix
very anxious to be able to debate here and now the question of Iran, as soon
as Le Matin will give me the opportunity. Blanchot 114 teaches that criticism
begins with attention, good demeanor, and generosity.
Iran: The Spirit of a World without Spirit
This conversation with Foucault originally appeared as the appendix to Claire Briere and
Pierre Blanchet, Iran: la revolution au nom de Dieu (227-41), first published in March
1979. Briere and Blanchet were the Iran correspondents of Liberation, the leftist Paris
newspaper. Their book is one of the more uncritical accounts of Iran's Islamic Revolution.
CLAIRE BRIERE: Could we begin with the simplest question? Like a lot of
others, like you, I have been fascinated by what happened in Iran. Why?
MICHEL FOUCAULT: I would like to go back at once to another, perhaps
less important question, but one that may provide a way in: What is it about
what has happened in Iran that a whole lot of people, on the left and on
the right, find somewhat irritating? The Iran affair and the way in which it
has taken place have not aroused the same kind of untroubled sympathy as
Portugal, 115 for example, or Nicaragua. I'm not saying that Nicaragua, in the
middle of summer, at a time when people are tanning themselves in the sun,
aroused a great deal of interest, but in the case of Iran, I soon felt a small,
epidermic reaction that was not one of immediate sympathy. To take an ex­
ample: There was this journalist you know very well. At Tehran she wrote
an article that was published in Paris and, in the last sentence, in which she
spoke of the Islamic revolt, she found that the adjective "fanatic, " which she
had certainly not written, had been crudely added. This strikes me as being
fairly typical of the irritations that the Iranian movement has provoked.
PIERRE BLANCHET: There are several possible attitudes to Iran. There's
the attitude of the classic, orthodox, extreme left. I'd cite above all the Com­
munist League, l lG which supports Iran and the whole of the extreme left,
various Marxist-Leninist groups, which say they are religious rebels, but that
doesn't really matter. Religion is only a shield. Therefore we can support them
unhesitatingly; it is a classic anti-imperialist struggle, like that in Vietnam,
led by a religious man, Khomeini, but one who might be a Marxist-Leninist.
To read L'Humanite, one might think that the PC [Communist Party) had
the same attitude as the LCR [Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League).
On the other hand, the attitude of the more moderate left, whether of the
PS [Socialist Party) or that of the more marginal left around the newspaper
Liberation, is one of irritation from the outset. They would say more or less