Populism, post-Marxism and Iran: an essay towards a decolonization of knowledge

Abstract

This essay is an exposition of the philosophy of populism, a philosophy by and large inspired by Michel Foucault to herald the New Discourse called ‘post-Marxism' a term made famous by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe which would lay the foundations for not so much the secular New Social Movements comprising multiple issues like gay rights and environment, but ironically would be an apologia for right-wing populist movements based on messianic theologies. It claims that while post-Marxism wanted to jump over Marxism, in actuality it became partner to radical messianic politics as in the case of Foucault's ardent support for radical Shiite Islam in Iran. This essay concentrates on the theory of populism and connects it to the politics of messianism in Iran claiming that these theories of populism are theories created in Western universities comprising Eurocentric ideas based on the uncanny combination of the theory of the ‘essential spiritualism of Asia' and ‘biopolitics'. This essay claims that the contemporary politics of Shiite Islam in Iran have less to do with the internal history of Iran, and more to do with a form of ‘manufactured Islam' where Islamic radicals picked up Ali Shariati's existential rendering of ‘authenticity’ as jihad and martyrdom (shahadat) in order to mobilize the masses first against the shah and then in the bloody war against Iraq. It argues for a decolonization of knowledge that leads to the decoupling of the nineteenth and twentieth century European ideas of spiritualism and biopolitics in order that one is able to see non-Western societies as they are and not as they are imagined by Orientalist scholarship.