Foreseeing the past (Foucault in Iran)

Abstract

In this paper, the author explores Foucault?s newspaper reporting from Iran during the autumn of 1978. It is first demonstrated that his decision to accept the journalistic challenge was not only the result of circumstance, but that it was also influenced by a series of previously adopted attitudes, above all the one about the need to disengage philosophy from eternity and make it the driving force for the creation of, as he called it, the history of the present. However, his Iranian reports were generally not well received and the impression was that his refusal to take a negative stance towards the revolt against the Shah was an act of enthusiasm for the establishment of a theocratic state. In the central part of the paper, it is proven that Foucault did not write affirmatively about the demands for an Islamic government, but that his refusal to condemn a priori the very idea of an Islamic government was the result of an effort to take a hermeneutically neutral position. Using the method of close reading, it is demonstrated that the main question of Foucault?s journalism - that of political spirituality - is rooted in his strictly theoretical texts, written months before he left for Iran. Furthermore, it is shown that his separation of revolt from revolution, on which the evaluation of Iranian turmoil was based, originates in his books and texts written in the late sixties and early seventies. The key result of this paper is the discovery that the concept of anti-strategic morality, which Foucault mentions for the first and last time in his final text on Iran, is the thread that connects his earlier works with the concept of parrh?sia, to which he would dedicate his last seminar in 1984.