Traces of a Revolution

Abstract

What would it mean to understand the Islamic revolution as more than a given, enclosed sequence of events? What might happen if we consider these events as continuous precipitations, within the boundaries of the nation-state, but also for the greater region, and in the world itself? Such a thought-image would be reminiscent of a Borgesian past in which fragments are never entirely lost; traces are not effaced but continue to mark the present. In his erudite analysis of Iran’s revolution as well as a much-needed exploration of Michel Foucault’s position of critical reticence, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi guides us to consider these questions by resurfacing the embryonic possibilities that inhered in the revolutionary moment of 1979, beyond the myth of the “stolen revolution.” Foucault in Iran begins with a discussion of Foucault’s indictment from both French intellectuals and scholars of Iran who followed and perpetuated a teleological conception of history. In an attempt to understand this moment of defiance, the study traverses a number of issues that faced both Foucault and our understanding of Iran: chapter 1, “Thinking the Unthinkable; The Revolutionary Movement in Iran”; chapter 2, “How Did Foucault Make Sense of the Iranian Revolution”; chapter 3, “Misrepresenting the Revolution, Misreading Foucault”; chapter 4, “The Reign of Terror, Women’s Issues, and Feminist Politics”; chapter 5: “Was ist Aufklärung? The Iranian Revolution as a Moment of Enlightenment”; “Conclusion: Writing the History of the Present.” By revisiting this significant historical unfolding, Ghamari-Tabrizi conducts a critical historiographical narration of the revolutionary movement to repair much of the epistemic violence committed by dismissive critics and to highlight the contingency of historical change. His provocative historical account reopens the affective space-time of the revolution, not to simply reflect on its failures but to think of them as historical possibilities that continue to reverberate in the Iranian ethos and in our larger political present. This timely work attempts to reach beyond a reinforcement of Iran’s contemporary geopolitical status (by offering a historical narrative untethered from the force of its historical present) and to shift our attention to the theoretical significance of the Iranian Revolution. Equally important is his account of Foucault, whose engagement with Iran has been largely dismissed by both scholars of Foucault and Iranian history, alike. Thus Ghamari-Tabrizi introduces a new historiography “in which trajectories, ideas, relationships, and other eventful contingencies are understood as elements in a condition of historical possibilities” (fi, 7).Ghamari-Tabrizi begins with a reflection on the difficult task of separating his own narrative of events as a participant in the revolution from the revolution as its own temporal unfolding.1 While most historical accounts of the Iranian Revolution cast the heavy weight of postrevolutionary atrocities back onto the powerful moments prior to the revolution, Ghamari-Tabrizi’s striking account addresses these horrors while also recapturing the moment of historical possibility that was of interest to Foucault at the time. Against contemporary conditions in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the revolutionary moment of 1979—its impasse, contingency, and novelty—is routinely seen as having been swallowed by a reign of terror that retroactively subjected the Islamic revolution to a theocratic inevitability. This common assumption is linked to the binary entrapment, which reduces the revolution to a struggle between Islamic forces and secularists. With this sensibility in mind, we are invited to appreciate the “conceptual significance” of the Iranian Revolution concurrently as a “phenomenon of history,” as well “as a phenomenon that defies it” (fi, 6). And for this, we turn to Foucault, who saw in Iran a moment of history in action, outside the purview of a Western teleological schema.As an intellectual who sought to actively engage with his own present, Foucault’s approach was that “one must stay close to events, to experience them, be willing to be effected and affected by them.”2 With this in mind, Foucault avoided prescriptive intellectualism and approached the Iranian Revolution through its own autonomy, allowing him to be moved by the singularity that constituted its force. Foucault’s first visit to Iran in 1978 prompted criticisms from numerous corners. Secularist intellectual circles in France were disturbed at the thought of Foucault’s support for the Islamic revolution and in most instances dismissed it as part of what they identified as a reactionary “antimodern” bias. Today, dominant discourses continue to echo this sentiment and fail to consider Foucault’s writings on Iran as more than an embarrassing aberration within his own intellectual trajectory. As a result, most scholarship on Foucault either disregards any relationship between his writings on the revolution and his later writing on the self, history, and enlightenment theory or regards these writings as an inflection point that rouses Foucault to retreat back to the liberal humanism of the Enlightenment. Prominent among those is Kevin Anderson and Janet Afary’s book on Foucault and Iran,3 which declares that Islamists stole the revolution. This reading of history is used both to denounce Foucault for his inability to foresee the looming “Islamist disaster,” as well as “to cast the revolution as a regressive denunciation of modernity” (fi, 75). For his part, Ghamari-Tabrizi undertakes a careful reconstruction of Foucault’s writings on Iran as a necessary corrective to Anderson and Afary’s reductive schemata. Ghamari-Tabrizi instead considers Foucault’s conceptual significance to be important both for our approach to history as well as a guide for critical humility and solidarity in times of struggle.Ghamari-Tabrizi judiciously accounts for the divergent political factions of the revolution without falling into the trap of casting judgment on whether Foucault was “right” or “wrong.” Why, then, is Foucault’s critical philosophy useful to our understanding of the Islamic revolution and its historical precipitations? Ghamari-Tabrizi reflects on this question in his second chapter. Foucault traveled to Iran in 1978 with the goal of writing several pieces about prerevolutionary upheavals for the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della sera (fi, 60). In Iran, Foucault was able to embody the modality of social critique he described as an attitude, an ethos, and a philosophical life. This philosophical ethos is characterized as a “critical ontology of ourselves” and at the same time considers “the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”4 For Foucault, critical philosophers should cultivate a deep attentiveness to their present; they must embody the inertias of the contemporary moment. While Foucault had already articulated this sentiment abstractly, for Ghamari-Tabrizi, his travels to Iran allowed him to concretize the task of the critical philosopher. In this light, Foucault’s critical ontology5 fashioned new ways of approaching the question of modernity, without simply reifying the teleological framework of the Enlightenment. What is more, as these writings provide the most sustained attentiveness to a non-Western society in all of Foucault’s work, Ghamari-Tabrizi elaborates both the importance of Foucault for Iran, as well as Iran for Foucault.To further consider the past’s residues, Ghamari-Tabrizi sets the scene for his discussion with a reflection on contemporary events since 9/11, the “war on terror,” and the Arab uprisings. By situating the Islamic revolution on the world-historical stage, Ghamari-Tabrizi points to the stakes of 1979 and its materialized traces still felt in global politics. As the site of the twentieth century’s first Islamic revolution, 1979 Iran carried many other possibilities integral to its happening, especially as it created history while escaping the “Enlightenment as the Universal Referent” (fi, 5). Thus reopening this moment functions not only as a discursive gesture; it facilitates deeper understanding of its residual unfolding in the world-historical plane. What is more, it made the vision of historical change outside the cognitive maps and principles of the Enlightenment a tenable possibility. Ghamari-Tabrizi contends that by naming the Arab uprisings the “Arab Spring,” dominant media narratives precluded their future. As such, this discursive closure did not permit these uprisings to articulate their unfolding outside recognized patterns of revolutionary transformation. Quickly, both liberal and leftist parties celebrated the end of political Islam and the restoration of secular politics (a threat that had remained since the Islamic revolution of 1979). Ghamari-Tabrizi suggests that had we embodied a critical humility toward these events and embraced their singular forces (rather than defining them within a limited binary frame), their outcomes might have been something quite different. With that said, Ghamari-Tabrizi does not suggest that it was a commitment to linear progressive history that caused the coup in Egypt to halt the unfolding of the Arab uprisings. He does, however, point to the political stakes of making revolutionary actors legible to the “March of History” instead of making history the subject of the force of their uprising (fi, 4). Further, the narrative that bifurcates secular and religious politics simplifies our conception of global politics. As argued by Ghamari-Tabrizi, this has led to narratives of the Iranian Revolution (and by extension, the entire Middle East) being recast “as a struggle between progressive, democratic, secular forces against reactionary, autocratic Islamists” (fi, 4). It is through his reflection of these contemporary acts of epistemic violence that Ghamari-Tabrizi revisits Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution.When Foucault arrived in Iran he quickly recognized a political formation outside the Islamist-secular divide; he saw the constitutive force of Shi’ism and the way it functioned both as popular cultural endowment and as a liberation theology (fi, 20). In a meeting with the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, Foucault asked, “What is it about what’s happened in Iran that a whole lot of people, on the left and on the right, find somewhat irritating?” He continued, “Many here and some in Iran are waiting for and hoping for the moment when secularization will at last come back to the fore and reveal the good, old type of revolution we have always known. I wonder how far they will be taken along this strange, unique road, in which they seek, against the stubbornness of their destiny, against everything they have been for centuries, something quite different.” Foucault was quick to sense the novel character of the happenings in Iran. He identified in the streets of Tehran “an uprising of a whole population” and what he called “the collective will of a people.” Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that Foucault identifies in the masses of protestors an embodiment of “political spirituality” and history in the making, through a transformation of the self (fi, 58). With a tone of condemnation, Afary and Anderson conclude that it was Foucault’s Orientalism that led to his romantic idealization of the Iranian people and his blindness in the face of political Islam. While Ghamari-Tabrizi does not dismiss the fact that Foucault’s language evokes an air of romanticism, he leaves open the question of Orientalism6 (a matter to be further explored by scholars of either Foucault or Iran) and approaches Foucault for what he aptly identified in Iran—a radically new revolt. It was, in fact, the ambiguous nature of the revolution that generated a feeling of distress in most Western intellectuals, and yet for Foucault, its ambiguity was what he viewed as the Iranian subject at once creating history and defying it. Integral to these debates was of course the assertion that Iran was experiencing a “crisis of modernization” (fi, 60) in failing to operate within the progressive logic of history. Foucault opined that it was the Shah’s brute force of modernization that was archaic. He wrote, “What is old here in Iran is the Shah. He is fifty years old and a hundred years behind the times. He is of the age of the predatory monarchs. He has the old-fashioned dream of opening his country through secularization and industrialization. Today, it is his project of modernization, his despotic weapons, and his system of corruption that are archaic. It is ‘the regime’ that is the archaism.”7 Foucault identified a collective force in Iran—a force that subsumed frictions and embraced uncertainty (his emphasis on the collective led him to assert an unequivocal “otherness” to the political unfoldings in Iran). As noted by Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault does underplay the political makeup (class, gender, and ethnicity) of the Iranian collective. Yet his reasons for doing so are not to totalize or simplify the complexities of the collective but to dwell on the political will that united the Iranian body politic against the Shah. Foucault was more affected by the revolutionary experiences that compelled Iranians from all over the country, with all types of religious and political backgrounds, to shout, “Islamic government!” Indeed, it was precisely these utterances that concerned his detractors and led them to continue to insist that Foucault had “failed to acknowledge the inherent authoritarian and repressive characteristic of political Islam” (fi, 117).Of course such criticism of the revolution bore concrete political responses in the postrevolutionary period (and continues today), particularly with respect to the question of gender. A central criticism of Foucault’s support of the revolutionary movement was his gendered ambivalence toward the question of rights and civil liberties. Ghamari-Tabrizi does not close off the question of gender; rather, he skillfully unbinds historiography to include the narratives of revolutionary women in Iran, some of whom felt women in the West knew little of their struggle. Accordingly, Ghamari-Tabrizi’s critique of Western feminism and its missionary practices in Iran are both sharp and original. Most notably, Kate Millet’s missionary journey to Iran serves as an example of solidarity, which contrasts from that of Foucault, who himself claimed no role in advancing the cause of the revolution. Ghamari-Tabrizi quotes Millett, who declares: “I am not in fact going to Iran as a journalist. . . . I’m going on a mission to and for my sisters in Iran—and I want that designation” (fi, 39). Ghamari-Tabrizi writes that the American media along with much of the “Western left” (including Simone de Beauvoir) echoed this sentiment and titled her trip “Kate Millet in Iran to Aid Feminists.” He comically presents Millet’s misguided feminist mandate to save “brown women,” in Gayatri Spivak’s words, from “brown men.” Millet represents a form of self-serving “solidarity” uninterested in recognizing the intricate assemblages of revolutionary politics, religious sensibility, and anticolonial conviction within which women’s issues were articulated. Rather, this mode of feminist interventionism further marginalized Iranian women despite their significant role in the making of the Iranian Revolution. Ghamari-Tabrizi writes, “Through such interventions, not only do Western feminists reaffirm their own emancipation, but, more importantly, they universalize the cultures and values that inform those experiences as the point of reference for universal, essentialized and singular liberated woman” (fi, 143). Of course, within Iran, revolutionary women continued to object to the instrumentalization of their struggle and the appropriation of their demands. Importantly, Ghamari-Tabrizi shifts our attention from the voices of these Western feminists to the narratives of women active in the revolution in Iran, including Simin Daneshvar and Homa Nateq, among others. Against the patronizing international feminist community, Foucault attentively saw in Iran a gender politics that referenced nonpatriarchal interpretations of Islam. What is more, he saw the opportunity to think “outside the universal referent on governmentality and power” (fi, 153).In his fifth chapter Ghamari-Tabrizi reconstructs the atmosphere of hostility and sarcasm (from Foucault’s critics, namely, self-identified secularists and French intellectuals) that led Foucault to abandon any explicit engagement with the topic after his final piece, “Is It Useless to Revolt?” Writing against the weight of voices who have passed over Foucault’s experiences in Iran with contempt or embarrassment, Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that the Iranian Revolution did not negate Foucault’s earlier conceptions of the self, nor did the postrevolutionary atrocities force him to reconsider his nonteleological conception of history or take refuge in liberal existentialism. In fact, the author argues, it was in the revolutionary moment in Iran that Foucault found an instance of what he considered the essence of Kant’s enlightenment: “Man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage” (fi, 161).8 In his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault revisits the historical and ontological roots of the “enlightenment” to expound its meaning, not to iterate faithfulness to its doctrinal elements, but to approach it as a “philosophical ethos” or what he calls “a permanent critique of our historical era.” It is this sense of the word—enlightenment as a mode of critical engagement with the present—that Ghamari-Tabrizi makes use of in this quotation. Yet Foucault’s reinterrogation of the enlightenment (contrary to what many would read as a return to the values of the Enlightenment and humanism as such) is in line with his experience in Iran and, as Ghamari-Tabrizi would argue, embodies what Foucault called a “critical ontology of ourselves” that is both reflective of its historical roots and at the frontiers of the present moment.By reading Iran into Foucault, Ghamari-Tabrizi attempts to resolve what critics understand as the irreconcilability of the “man in revolt” and the docile subject of disciplinary power in Foucault’s genealogical scheme. Thus while Foucault identified regimes of power and knowledge as ubiquitous, his philosophy did not eliminate the possibility of resistance. Counter to a defeatist or nihilist sensibility, it was not that the subject could not emancipate himself or herself but that “the subject could not emancipate herself by deriving the principles of her politics from the same rationality that has constituted the conditions of her subjugation” (fi, 165). Thus the Foucault who dreamed of an intellectual “who destroys evidence and generalities,” who locates and marks “weak points, openings and lines of force,” and who is “incessantly on the move” was able to transform this vision from abstraction to a concretized historical interruption.9 Hence the historical possibility he saw in Iran as well as his own embodied critical approach allowed Foucault to pose anew the question of modernity without reifying the values of the Enlightenment. Moreover, Ghamari-Tabrizi analyzes Foucault’s 1980 lectures at Dartmouth to illuminate the mark of the Iranian Revolution on his hermeneutics of the self. Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that the revolutionary movement inflected his knowledge of the care of the self, asceticism and spirituality in particular, and opened up the possibility of an epistemic departure from Christian asceticism or spirituality as merely a property of the elite. In Iran, Foucault saw the formation of an ethical subject willing to risk his or her life through Shi’a religious practice, what he famously called “the spirit of a world without spirit.”10 What is more, in his revivification of parrhesia,11 Foucault further elaborates the necessary acts of courage and fearless “truth-telling” in living a moral and ethical life. Thus, Ghamari-Tabrizi argues, Foucault reinvents parrhesia from its rhetorical usage to an active risk taking and committed politics invested in confronting unequal power structures. The concept of parrhesia as action offers a way to further reflect on the fearlessness Foucault saw in the revolutionary actors in Iran. And it is this affective space-time that compels the “man in revolt” to “prefer the risk of death over the certainty of having to obey.”12 In sum, Ghamari-Tabrizi strongly argues for the ways in which Foucault’s encounter with Iran informed his philosophies of critique, expressly, his writings on the self, spirituality, and ethics.In his conclusion Ghamari-Tabrizi draws a comparison between his own historical gesture and that of Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel and Haiti (2009), in which she makes a powerful case for the project of recuperating universal history from Eurocentrism and, more specifically, ending the historical silence on Hegel and Haiti. While Ghamari-Tabrizi takes inspiration from Buck-Morss’s act of concretizing historical experience, he argues that what Foucault found in Iran inhered in a paradoxical quality, which Buck-Morss seeks to escape in the context of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and the Haitian Revolution. For Foucault, the paradoxical quality of the Iranian historical subject lay in the “desire to make history and at the same time be free from it” (fi, 188). The revolutionary moment thus engendered historical subjects who carried an indeterminate relationship both to themselves and to the becoming of history. We are made to wonder—what happens to historical narratives that progress and yet remain haunted by moments prior? What does such a gesture of recuperation do for our understanding of presents past or pasts present? Ghamari-Tabrizi illuminates the importance of reading not only Foucault into Iran but also Iran into Foucault. Such a dialectical reading practice is useful more broadly for a postcolonial awareness of the tensions that permeated the “collective spirit” that kindled Foucault’s interests. Ghamari-Tabrizi articulates that it is not only Foucauldians who have failed to recognize the importance of the Iranian experience in Foucault’s writings; it was Foucault himself (in his later theories of the self) who failed to acknowledge the significance of the political spirituality he identified on the streets of Iran. Nonetheless, Ghamari-Tabrizi illuminates the importance of a Foucauldian model of critical solidarity that can be used to understand diverse struggles, such as the revolution in Iran, based on its own historical stage, through its own unique cultural, religious, and political context.Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment begins a series of long-needed debates and conversations on the Islamic revolution, Iran, and Foucauldian thought. Its shortcomings should be read only as dialogical openings for further scholarship. The text reopens the world of a contingent past onto a political present still haunted by a moment that has been discursively, spiritually, and affectively closed off from us. And in the progressivist erasure of that revolutionary moment, there is also a loss of a critical perspective that Foucault embodied, as both philosopher and public intellectual, in relationship to a world-historical event. Reflecting on Foucault’s investment in this event is crucial in the way that Foucault represents a mode of approaching the world and its political events by offering solidarity without erasing alterity. Unlike other Western intellectuals of his time, Foucault embodied a discursive reticence and thus embraced the uncertainty and novelty of the revolution without a commitment to the temporal map of the Western teleological schema. As Jonathan Rée aptly articulates, “Foucault was never going to sign on to an a priori separation between those who are in the know and those who are not, and his cafouillage was not a feckless abrogation of intellectual responsibility so much as a principled avoidance of the arrogance of authority. He simply wanted to radiate uncertainty.” 13What makes Foucault’s model of solidarity distinctive is his attunement to singularity. Only in this way can we approach contemporary political events according to their own cultural, political, and religious forces. Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian Revolution lays bare the definitive meeting point of theory and praxis. Foucault’s model of critical reticence situates the intellectual as a humble subject, affected by his or her present, rather than simply proscribing its causality or anticipating its future. In this way, history comes forth, in its own singular form, with its own tensions and rhythms; in doing so it has the capacity to challenge the order of things (with an approach to the future that inhabits and accepts indeterminacy).14 By bringing to light Foucault’s writings on Iran, and the way in which this world-historical event is inflected in Foucault’s later works, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi presents the value of a critical approach that is as urgent today as it was for Foucault in 1979 Iran. And in his own triumphant historiographical gesture, Ghamari-Tabrizi resurfaces the radiating uncertainty of the revolution and ethical significance of Foucault’s critical humility. Ghamari-Tabrizi dialectically encounters the past and opens it up to the historical map of the present, permitting us to approach history without foreclosing singular possibilities of resistance.