{"id":2743,"date":"2017-12-11T13:00:51","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T18:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/?p=2743"},"modified":"2017-12-11T13:17:35","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T18:17:35","slug":"bernard-e-harcourt-introduction-to-foucault-on-iran-revolt-as-political-spirituality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-introduction-to-foucault-on-iran-revolt-as-political-spirituality\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Introduction to Foucault on Iran: Revolt as Political Spirituality"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt<\/strong><\/p>\n

Michel Foucault identified in the Iranian uprising of 1978 a modality of religious political revolt and a form of political spirituality that privileged, in the secular realm, expressly religious aspirations. What Foucault discovered in Iran was, in his words, a political<\/em> spirituality<\/em>: a mass mobilization on this earth modeled on the coming of a new Islamic vision of social forms of coexistence and equality.<\/p>\n

Foucault described the mass mobilization in Iran as an Islamic uprising. He did not minimize in any way its Islamic religious foundations or modes of expression. On the contrary, Foucault framed the uprising through the lens of Ernst Bloch\u2019s thesis, in The Principle of Hope<\/em> (3 vols., 1954-1959), on the rise, in Europe, from the twelve to the sixteenth century, of the religious idea that there could come about on this earth a form of religious revolution (see Foucault, There Can\u2019t Be Societies without Uprisings,<\/em> interview with Far\u00e8s Sassine, August 1979). Foucault related the events in Iran to this religious model, originally formulated by dissident religious groups in the West at the end of the Middle Ages\u2014and which Foucault referred to as \u201cthe point of departure of the very idea of Revolution.\u201d (Ibid.<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Foucault explicitly characterized the will of those Iranians in revolt with whom he had contact as taking the form of a \u201creligious eschatology\u201d\u2014not the form of a quest for another political regime, nor in his words for \u201ca regime of clerics,\u201d but instead for a new Islamic horizon. (Sassine interview, 4) When those in revolt spoke of an Islamic government, Foucault maintained, what they had in mind were new social forms based on a religious spirituality, sharply different than Western models. (Sassine interview, 5-7) Foucault pointed to Ali Shariati as the thinker who had most clearly posed the problematic and formulated this vision. (Sassine interview, 10)<\/p>\n

It is to this model of uprising as political spirituality, this modality of religious political revolt that we turn to in Uprising 6\/13<\/a>. By contrast to the modality of revolt that we discussed during our seminar Uprising 3\/13 on the Arab Spring<\/a>, the modality of revolt that Foucault identified in Iran in 1978-79 was expressly and primarily religious. Much (but of course not all, as evidenced once again by subsequent events) of the ideological wellspring in Tahrir Square was more secular, leaderless, and occupational: a form of disobedience against a secular authoritarian regime\u2014at least as portrayed in much of the reportage and documentaries like Tahrir: Liberation Square<\/em>, directed by Stefano Savona (2012). The situation was very different in 1978 Iran, at least on Foucault\u2019s assessment. And it gives rise to a different modality of revolt: a religious eschatological modality of uprising.<\/p>\n

~~~<\/p>\n

In 1978-79, Foucault published a series of long-form essays<\/a>, part editorial, part reportage, in the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera <\/em>regarding the uprising in Iran. His first editorial, \u201cThe army, when the earth quakes,\u201d was published on September 28, 1978, after he returned from his first trip to Iran from September 16 to 24, 1978. By that time\u2014by the end of September 1978\u2014martial law had already been declared in Iran, following several months of uprisings and the brutal repression and mass murders of demonstrators by the Shah\u2019s army. Foucault published another five essays in October and early November, before returning to Iran from November 9 to 15, 1978. After that second trip, Foucault published three more essays in the Corriere della sera, <\/em>the final one appearing on February 26, 1979. By that time, the Shah was deposed, having left for exile mid-January 1979, Khomeini had returned to Teheran and formed a new government, and Mehdi Bazargan was heading the country. Only a month later, at the end of March 1979, the country voted by referendum for an Islamic republic. Foucault published his last intervention on Iran, a capstone editorial in Le Monde<\/em>, titled \u201cUseless to revolt?,\u201d on May 11-12, 1979. Foucault also gave several interviews over the period, and engaged in other debates, with a final interview in August 1979.<\/p>\n

From the opening essay (\u201cThe army, when the earth quakes,\u201d Sept. 28, 1978), practically in the first opening paragraph, Foucault identified Islam as the symbol, node, and magnet for power resistance to the Shah. The Shah, on one side, is represented by terms such as \u201cthe administration,\u201d \u201cthe government,\u201d \u201cthe ministry,\u201d \u201cthe official plans,\u201d and simple \u201cthe power\u201d [le pouvoir<\/em>]; and is associated with \u201cthe notables\u201d and the United States (D&E3 #241, 664, 668-69). The US, which restored the Shah to power, is portrayed as the dominating force in Iran\u2014with 30 to 40 thousand American advisers to the Shah\u2019s army, pervasive American military equipment, and the imposition of an American order in Iran. As a high military official, in the opposition, confided to Foucault, \u201cthe Americans dominate us.\u201d (668)<\/p>\n

The other pole is \u201cl\u2019islam<\/em>\u201d\u2014Islam: \u201cFacing the government and against it, Islam: for ten years already.\u201d (664). Islam is symbolically represented by that \u201ccleric,\u201d an anonymous cleric (not Khomeini, who does though already appear in the next paragraph), who leads and organizes the \u201cartisans\u201d and \u201cfarmers,\u201d and together who respond to the earth quake and destruction of their village by building a mosque. (664) The only other force present is the specter of communism: the 80 military officers executed for being communist, the apparent international communist uprising that is not, the government propaganda against communism. (667) But the mounting uprising remains \u201cthe street, the merchants of the bazaar, employees and the unemployed\u201d all \u201cunder the sign of Islam<\/em>.\u201d (667, emphasis added)<\/p>\n

This central opposition\u2014the American Shah versus an Islamic<\/em> popular movement\u2014motivates Foucault\u2019s interpretation of the events in Iran. And it is precisely the Islamic movement that he believes alone could overtake the army: \u201cof the two keys that might control the army, the one that seems more adapted for the moment is not the one, American, of the Shah. It is the one, Islamic, of the popular movement.\u201d (669)<\/p>\n

These themes run through the essays. The theme of Islam as the only possible form of opposition in a Cold War context where communism in Iran has been crushed by American domination in the face of the Soviet specter. It is within that geopolitics that Foucault identifies and develops a theory of political spirituality. A thesis about the Iranian uprising as a religious political form, modeled on religious eschatology:<\/p>\n

Their hunger, their humiliations, their hatred of the regime and their willingness to overthrow it, they inscribed it all within the bounds of heaven and earth, in an envisioned history that was religious just as much as it was political. [\u2026]\u00a0 Years of censorship and persecution, a political class kept under tutelage, parties outlawed, revolutionary groups decimated: where else but in religion could support be found for the disarray, then the rebellion, of a population traumatized by \u201cdevelopment,\u201d \u201creform,\u201d \u201curbanization,\u201d and all the other failures of the regime? (Useless to Revolt?<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The resulting modality of revolt that Foucault identified and developed in the Iranian context of 1978-79 was framed by the relation between political uprising and religious eschatology. (Sassine interview, 2) And it was, for Foucault, an important discovery\u2014not just in its descriptive accuracy, but also in its normative potential. For, as Daniele Lorenzini<\/a> correctly emphasizes, \u201cThis was what Foucault was looking for: a mass uprising, in which people stand up against a whole system of power, but which isn\u2019t inscribed in a \u2018traditional\u2019 (Western) revolutionary framework.\u201d<\/p>\n

Foucault did not condemn this mode of political spirituality\u2014to the contrary, he wrote about it with respect and admiration for those who rose up and risked their lives against their oppressors. Foucault did warn that \u201cIslam\u2014which is not simply a religion, but a mode of life, a belonging to a history and to a civilization\u2014risks constituting a gigantic powder keg, at the scale of hundreds of millions of people. Since yesterday, any Muslim state can be revolutionized from within, from the basis of its secular traditions.\u201d (A Powder Keg Called Islam<\/em>, D&E3 #261, 761). But he traveled to Iran without hostility, rather with sympathy for the uprising. (Sassine interview, 8)<\/p>\n

For that, Foucault was excoriated by the French press and by his peers. To this day, Foucault is criticized vehemently for not having taken a position against the Islamic uprising. The book by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson takes that position, guided by the opening question \u201cWhy, in his writings on the Iranian Revolution, did he give his exclusive support to its Islamist wing?\u201d and by its argument that Foucault\u2019s choice reveals deeper problems about his Nietzschean-Heideggerian influence. The controversy continues to the present, with the most recent publication, in 2016, by our guest, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi<\/a>, of Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment<\/em> (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), offering a dramatically opposite reading. On this recent controversy, I will here leave the last word to Talal Asad:<\/p>\n

One may recall here a remark Foucault once made in relation to the Iranian revolution: \u201cConcerning the expression \u2018Islamic government,\u2019 why cast immediate suspicion on the adjective \u2018Islamic\u2019? The word \u2018government\u2019 suffices, in itself, to awaken vigilance.\u201d Naive critics of Foucault have taken his interest in the Islamic Republic of Iran as evidence of his romance with political Islam (in response perhaps to his early criticism of\u00a0 the left-wing romance with revolution). But they are mistaken. Foucault\u2019s reaction to the Iranian revolution is his concern (as so often in his writings) to think beyond clich\u00e9s and, in particular, to formulate questions about how truth is manifested in connection with the exercise of self on self, \u201cthe relations between the truth and what we call spirituality\u201d\u2014atopic that preoccupied him in his last years. In the comment about the Iranian revolution he is posing a question about the modern state\u2019s practice of sovereignty and the sovereign subject in that state. The modern state (including varieties of the liberal state) is held together not by moral ideals and social contracts but by technologies of power, by instrumental knowledge, and also, importantly, by the way it requires dependence on and demonstration of truth (traitors are those who conceal the truth).[1]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

~~~<\/p>\n

At the time, in 1979, Foucault responded to his critics. In both an essay in Le Monde<\/em>, \u201cIs it useless to revolt?\u201d published on May 11-12, 1979, and in several interviews at the time, Foucault argued that one cannot judge others when they revolt against their oppression and that one cannot judge another who revolts by the outcomes of the ensuing political developments. One should not engage in critical thought about political practice from a position of hindsight. (I believe that the Arab Spring now lends additional support to this position).<\/p>\n

In perhaps his most direct response, drawing on his histories of the asylum and of the prison, Foucault wrote:<\/p>\n

One does not dictate to those who risk their lives facing a power. Is one right to revolt, or not? Let us leave the question open. People do revolt; that is a fact. And that is how subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone) is brought into history, breathing life into it. A convict risks his life to protest unjust punishments; a madman can no longer bear being confined and humiliated; a people refuses the regime that oppresses it. That doesn\u2019t make the first innocent, doesn\u2019t cure the second, and doesn\u2019t ensure for the third the tomorrow it was promised. (Useless to Revolt?<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this sense, political spirituality becomes part of the \u201ccounter-conduct\u201d that Foucault explored and developed\u2014and that Arnold Davidson discusses so well in his essay \u201cIn praise of counter-conduct\u201d: \u201cAfter rejecting the notions of \u2018revolt\u2019, \u2018disobedience\u2019, \u2018insubordination\u2019, \u2018dissidence\u2019 and \u2018misconduct\u2019, for reasons ranging from their being notions that are either too strong, too weak, too localized, too passive, or too substance-like, Foucault proposes the expression \u2018counter-conduct.\u2019\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

It is here, in his last writing on Iran, that Foucault most clearly articulated what he called his own \u201ctheoretical ethic\u201d: \u201cIt is \u2018antistrategic\u2019: to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal.\u201d (Useless to Revolt?<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Respectful of the individual who rises up, in order to keep one\u2019s indignation and intransigence for the power that represses. What a remarkable statement\u2014and an excellent place to start our seminar on Foucault on Iran: Revolt as Political Spirituality.<\/p>\n

Welcome to Uprising 6\/13!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Notes<\/h1>\n

[1]<\/a> Talal Asad, \u201cThinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today,\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/em> 42 (Autumn 2015), p. 206.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Arnold Davidson, \u201cIn praise of counter-conduct,\u201d History of the Human Sciences<\/em>, 24(4):25-41 (2011), at p. 28. As Davidson argues, this relates closely to the \u201ccritical attitude,\u201d which he defines as \u201ca political and moral attitude, a manner of thinking, that is a critique of the way in which our conduct is governed, a \u2018partner and adversary\u2019 of the arts of governing (Foucault, 1990: 38).\u201d Ibid.<\/em>, p. 37.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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