Iran

The events in Iran over the last two weeks have brought to mind for many people the revolution of 1978-9 and Foucault’s “journalism” during a couple of trips he made there. The latest is Bernard-Henri Lévy, who offers his thoughts in the Huffington Post today.

Some of Foucault’s reporting is online if you want to read it, eg., here, and a lot of stuff here associated around the Afary and Anderson book at the University of Chicago Press.

Added:By the way, there is a great feature of Youtube called Citizentube, where people are posting cell phone video from Iran of the protests. It includes the sad footage of Neda, a girl who was shot by a sniper and who has been described as both a martyr and the face of the movement.

Please also see Nico Pitney in the HuffPo for daily video and liveblogging.

Full text of The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt

Full text of Foucault’s “The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt” published in Corriere della Sera, November 26, 1978.

Tehran – Iran’s year-long period of unrest is coming to a head. On the watchface of politics, the hand has hardly moved. The semi-liberal September government was replaced in November by a half-military one. In fact, the whole country is engulfed by revolt: the cities, the countryside, the religious centres, the oil regions, the bazaars, the universities, the civil servants, and the intellectuals. The privileged rats are jumping ship. An entire century in Iran – one of economic development, foreign domination, modernization, and the dynasty, as well as its daily life and its moral system– is being put into question.

I cannot write the history of the future, and I am also rather clumsy at forecasting the past. However, I would like to try to grasp what is happening right now, because these days nothing is finished, and the dice is still being rolled. It is perhaps this that is the work of a journalist, but it is true that I am nothing but a neophyte.

Uh-oh, wingnut attack!!

David Frum, former speech writer for President Bush (and the man who coined the phrase “axis of evil”, not to mention ardent proponent of the Iraqi war) has been given a book by Foucault… and loves it!

The book he was given was as you might guess, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, which we have had cause to discuss on this blog already. And of course the reason he loves it is that he can use it to trash Foucault:

In the late 1970s, Michel Foucault succumbed to a bizarre infatuation with the Iranian Islamic revolution…

Foucault, a man utterly devoid of religious feeling…

…a homosexual who reveled in the brutalities of San Francisco’s sado-masochistic bar scene…

For Foucault, sexual pleasure was intimately bound to rituals of domination and outright acts of brutality…

[Foucault] decided in 1978 that the Khomeini revolution offered mankind’s best hope for personal liberation…

The mistake Foucault made about Khomeini is integral to Foucault’s own thinking – and calls into question much about Foucault’s own work…

More comments on Iran

It’s quite interesting how Ignatieff dismisses Foucault’s support for the Iranian revolution with just labelling him as radical and praises Jahanbegloo’s attempts to bring the liberal, pragmatic thinkers such as Rorty and Heller.
<snip>
A recurring theme these days is that the lines between the right and the left, when it comes to Iran, has become so blurry that they has almost become meaningless.
The left has started to challenge the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy in a similar fashion to the right. This is what living in the American paradigm does to one’s intellect, I suspect.

(From here.)

Full text: What are the Iranians Dreaming About?

Here is the full text of Foucault’s article “What are the Iranians Dreaming About?” (DE 245) from J. Afary and K. B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (University of Chicago, 2005), pp. 203-209. Translated by Karen de Bruin and Kevin B. Anderson.

Afary and Anderson on Iran

Readers of this blog may like to know that Afary and Anderson, who recently published Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (previously discussed here) have published a longish article in the Nation about their trip to Iran in 2005.

They get in a few digs at how popular their talks were (“A lecture on “Foucault and Feminism” at Alzahra Women’s University elicited enthusiastic responses, including one from a high university official clad from head to toe in a black chador”) but most of the article is a political analysis of Iran and review of some books about it.

Two reviews of Foucault in Iran

The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for the years to come, and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start out from a position of hatred. –Foucault

Two reviews of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution by Afary and Anderson that present a somewhat different take on the book. In general, reactions were positive to this book, which takes quite a critical line on Foucault and his political naivete in going to Iran during the revolution, not to mention his white male sexist attitudes.

However, these reviews offer a more critical reinterpretation of the book.

Foucault in Iran

Before Afary and Anderson published their book analyzing Foucault’s travel to and writings on Iran, they published a piece in New Politics which condenses some of their material.

This is available online.

Zizek on Foucault in Tehran

A transcript of a talk Zizek gave last year in London:

“Just like Heidegger with Nazis, Foucault has been heavily criticized for supposed lapse, error in his thought, over his engagement with Iranian revolution. But again, my thought here is that – just like Heidegger – he did the right thing, only again, in wrong direction.”

Neil Smith, revolution and Iran

Neil Smith has an editorial in EPD:

Another revolution is possible: Foucault, ethics, and politics
It is time to think about revolution again. After the failures of the Russian revolution signaled by Stalin’s defensive slogan, “socialism in one country” (every bit as oxymoronic as “capitalism in one firm”), the 1960s reawakened a sense of revolution from something of a slumber.