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

256 Appendix
Martyr, " the Iranian population got rid of the shah. It's incredible and unprecedented.
But what can happen now? Everybody isn't just going to shout
"Martyr, Martyr" until everybody dies and there's a military coup d'etat. With
the shah out of the way, the movement will necessarily split apart.
MICHEL FOUCAULT: There'll come a moment when the phenomenon
that we are trying to apprehend and which has so fascinated us-the revolutionary
experience itself-will die out. There was literally a light that lit
up in all of them and which bathed all of them at the same time. That will
die out. At that point, different political forces, different tendencies will appear,
there'll be compromises, there'll be this or that; I have no idea who
will come out on top, and I don't think there are many people who can say
now. It will disappear. There'll be processes at another level, another reality
in a way. What I meant is that what we witnessed was not the result of an
alliance, for example, between various political groups. Nor was it the result
of a compromise between social classes that, in the end, each giving into the
other on this or that, came to an agreement to claim this or that thing. Not
at all. Something quite different has happened. A phenomenon has traversed
the entire people and will one day stop. At that moment, all that will remain
are the different political calculations that each individual had had in his
head the whole time. Let's take the activist in some political group. When he
was taking part in one of those demonstrations, he was double: he had his
political calculation, which was this or that, and at the same time he was an
individual caught up in that revolutionary movement, or rather that Iranian
who had risen up against his king. And the two things did not come into
contact, he did not rise up against his king because his party had made this
or that calculation.
CLAIRE BRIERE: One of the significant examples of this movement is
what has happened in the case of the Kurds. The Kurds, a majority of whom
are Sunnis, and whose autonomist tendencies have long been known, have
used the language of this uprising, of this movement. Everybody thought they
would be against it, whereas they have supported it, saying: "Of course we
are Sunnis, but above all we are Muslims." When people spoke to them of
their Kurdish specificity, their reaction was almost one of anger, or rejection.
"What! We are Kurds !" they replied to you in Kurdish and the interpreter
had to translate from Kurdish, "No, not at all, we are Iranians above all, and
we share all the problems of Iran; we want the king to go ." The slogans in
Kurdistan were exactly the same as those in Tehran or Mashad. "Long Live
Khomeini," "Death to the Shah."
MICHEL FOUCAULT: I knew some Iranians in Paris, and what struck me
about a lot of them was their fear. Fear that it would be known that they