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

264 Appendix
the possibility of this moment where life cannot be exchanged, where power
becomes powerless, and where, in front of the gallows and the machine guns,
men rise up.
Because it is in this way both "outside of history" and in history, because
each person stakes his life and his death, one can understand why uprisings
have been able to find their expression and their drama so readily in religious
forms. For centuries, all of these promises of the hereafter or of the
renewal of time, whether they concerned the awaited savior, the kingdom of
the last days, or the reign of the absolute good, did not constitute an ideolog­
ical cloak. Instead, they constituted the very manner in which these uprisings
were lived, at least in those places where the religious forms lent themselves
to such possibilities.
Then came the age of "revolution. n For two centuries, it hung over [surplombe)
126 history, organized our perception of time, and polarized hopes.
The age of revolution has constituted a gigantic effort to acclimate uprisings
within a rational and controllable history. "Revolution" gave these uprisings
a legitimacy, sorted out their good and bad forms, and defined their laws of
development. For uprisings, it established preliminary conditions, objectives,
and ways of bringing them to an end. Even the profession of revolutionary
was defined. By thus repatriating revolt into the discourse of revolution, it
was said, the uprising would appear in all its truth and continue to its true
conclusipn. This was a marvelous promise. Some will say that the uprising
thus found itself colonized by realpolitik. Others will say that the dimension
of a rational history was opened to it. I prefer the question that Horkheimer
used to ask, a naIve question, and a little feverish: "But is it really so desirable,
this revolution?" 127
Concerning the enigma of the uprising, for those who sought in Iran not
the Hdeep reasons" for the movement, but the manner in which it was lived;
for those who tried to understand what was going on in the heads of these
men and women when they risked their lives, one thing was striking. They
inscribed, on the borders of heaven and earth, in a dream-history that was as
religious as it was political, all their hunger, their humiliation, their hatred
of the regime and their will to bring it down. They confronted the Pahlavis,
in a game where each one staked his life and his death, a game that was also
about sacrifices and millennial promises. Thus, came the celebrated demonstrations,
which played such an important role. These demonstrations could,
at the same time, respond concretely to the threat of the army (to the point of
p aralyzing it) , unfold according to the rhythm of religious ceremonies, and fi­
n ally refer to a timeless drama in which power is always accursed. This drama