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

The Paradoxical World of Foucault 35
to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?" (Foucault 1965, 282;
Sade 1992).
Foucault's discussion of the Spanish painter Francisco de Coya followed
the same logic. Coya has been celebrated for his two series of etchings known
as the Caprichos (1799) and The Disasters of War (1810-20). Most critics see
the Capnchos as the embodiment of the best ideals of the Enlightenment. The
satirical caricatures of monks, witches, and goblins suggest that huanity
can be improved through science, that reason can eradicate superstition and
religious dogma. The Disasters of War, a commentary on the Peninsular War
between Spain and Napoleonic France, is in turn regarded as a magnificent
criticism of violence and brutality in war, and of the limits of both modernity
and the Enlightenment. Finally in some of his last etchings, Coya turned to
the subject of cannibalism (Licht 1979).21 Foucault's interest lay in the representations
of madness and insanity in these works as a liminal experience. In
Coya's work "madness has become man's possibility of abolishing both man
and the world" (Foucault 1965, 281). Through Sade and Coya "the Western
world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence and of
recovering tragic experiences beyond the promises of dialectic" (285).
The "Will to Power" on the Streets of Tehran
Foucault's long-standing preoccupation with the near-death experience as a
locus for human creativity would find a kindred spirit in the daily unfolding
of the Iranian Revolution. In Persia (Iran), the dualistic principles of the ancient
Zoroastrian religion were first formulated nearly three thousand years
ago, around the fight between the forces of good (Ahura Mazda) and the
forces of evil (Ahrimari). In Iranian Shi'ite Islam, aspects of the old Persian
religion would find a new articulation. As we shall see in chapter 2, Shi'ite
theologians saw a reenactment of this fight between good and evil in a war
that took place in 680 CE between two men, the saintly Hussein (grandson of
the prophet Muhammad) and the supposedly evil Yazid, his rival. The battle
ended in the massacre of Hussein and his supporters and the martyrdom of
Hussein, which is commemorated annually in the month of Muharram by
Shi'ites the world over.
In 1978, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an ascetic Muslim cleric known
for his uncompromising opposition to Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (r.
1941-79), emerged as the leader of the revolutionary movement. He cast
himself in the role of Hussein and portrayed the shah in the mantle ofYazid.
He also reenacted the old epic, which was now combined with powerful antiimperialist
rhetoric. 22 The Islamist tendency and even many Iranian leftists of