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

Notes to Pages 250-2 72 301
115. Foucault refers to the Portuguese Revolution of 1974-76, which overthrew a
fascist regime in power since the 1920s.
116. This refers to the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), a Trotskyist party
with links to the Belgian economist Ernest Mandel.
117. Ellipsis points in original.
118. The noted liberal historian Franois Furet (1927-97) had recently published a
widely read interpretation of the French Revolution (1981).
119. Foucault refers to Marx's comment on religion, just after the one about the
·opium of the people: but less widely known: ·Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the
opium of the people" (1843, 175).
120. God Is Great.
121. Ellipsis points in original.
122. Ellipsis points in original.
123. The shah had made a state visit to Washington in January 1978. President Jimmy
Carter termed him a defender of human rights, while Iranian students demonstrated in the
streets outside.
124. This is very likely a reference to Rodinson.
125. This refers to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis.
126. The word is used in the sense that a roof hangs over a building. This notion of
·overhang" also has some affinities with the Marxian term superstructure. Since the French
word plomb means "lead, " surplombe also could be translated as "weighed down."
127. Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) was a Frankfurt School philosopher and
sociologist.
128. Sadeq Khalkhali (1926-2003) headed the revolutionary courts. He gloated
publicly over the more than five hundred executions he ordered, later complaining that he
had executed too few people. He also advocated the destruction of non-Islamic historical
monuments. Reza Afshari (2001) has suggested that in the decade 1979-88, the Khomeini
regime carried out about twenty thousand political executions.
129. [Rodinson's note] On Ali Shariati (1933-1 977), see the brief remarks in Richard
1980, 11 Off. and Richard 1995. There is a selection of his writings in French (Shariati
1982). The choices of the editors and translators could be questioned; they artificially ·
privilege certain aspects of Shariati's thought, the appeal of which was perhaps due to his
use of ultramodern language (the influence of Sartre, Fanon, etc.) to call for a shake-up of
Islamic values in order to tum them into "national" ones. The preface by Jacques Berque
partially corrects the way in which the translators have understood the ideas of the author.
130. Here and elsewhere in this article, Rodinson ignored Foucault's philosophical
repudiation of humanism, of which he was surely aware.
131. [Rodinson's note] Max Weber carried out the most far-reaching analysis of
charisma. He stressed that it was a "specifically creative revolutionary force in history,"
showing as well its singular instability, while also studying its forms (Weber 1978, 1117).
Because, under its varied forms, charisma puts forward "'natural' leaders in moments of
distress-whether psychic, physical, economic, ethical, religious or political-[who) were