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

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who is a very different kind of figure; there is the girl who puts on the chador to
show that she is against the regime and another girl, partly secularized, partly
Muslim, who doesn't put on the veil, but who will also say, ''I'm a Muslim
and Long Live Khomeini" . . . ; 117 among all these people there are different
levels of thought. And yet everybody shouts, at one and the same time, with
great fervor, "Long Live Khomeini," and those different levels fall away.
MICHEL FOUCAULT: I don't mow whether you've read Franc;:ois Furet's
book on the French Revolution. liB It's a very intelligent book and might help
us to sort out this confusion. He draws a distinction between the totality of
the processes of economic and social transformation that began well before
the revolution of 1789 and ended well after it, and the specificity of the revolutionary
event. That's to say, the specificity of what people experienced deep
inside, but also of what they experienced in that sort of theater that they put
together from day to day and which constituted the revolution. I wonder
whether this distinction might not be applied to some extent to Iran. It is
true that Iranian society is shot through with contradictions that cannot in
any way be denied, but it is certain that the revolutionary event that has been
taking place for a year now, and which is at the same time an inner experience,
a sort of constantly recommended liturgy, a community experience, and so
on, all that is certainly articulated onto the class struggle: but that doesn't
find expression in an immediate, transparent way. So what role has religion,
then, with the formidable grip that it has on people, the position that it has
always held in relation to political power, its content, which makes it a religion
of combat and sacrifice, and so on? Not that of an ideology, which would
help to mask contradictions or form a sort of sacred union between a great
many divergent interests. It really has been the vocabulary, the ceremonial,
the timeless drama into which one could fit the historical drama of a people
that pitted its very existence against that of its sovereign.
PIERRE BLANCHET: What struck me was the uprising of a whole population.
I say whole. And if you take, for example, the demonstration of the
'Ashura, add up the figures: take away young children, the disabled, the old
and a proportion of women who stayed at home. You will then see that
the whole of Tehran was in the streets shouting "Death to the king, " except
the parasites who, really, lived off the regime. Even people who were with
the regime for a very long time, who were for a constitutional monarchy as
little as a month before, were shouting "Death to the king." It was an astonishing,
unique moment and one that must remain. Obviously, afterwards, things
will settle down and different strata, different classes, will become visible.
MICHEL FOUCAULT: Among the things that characterize this revolutionary
event, there is the fact that it has brought out-and few peoples in history