Foucault on the 1979 Iranian Revolution and "Revolt"

Given current events in Iran, Michel Foucault's thoughts on the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which produced the current Iranian regime, and the nature of revolt hold special relevance today.

In "Useless to Revolt?", Foucault addresses the nature of revolts in terms of their ability to interrupt the functioning of social systems and the inability of established authorities to eliminate their possibility entirely.

An excerpt:

Revolts belong to history. But, in a certain way, they escape from it. The impulse by which a single individual, a group, a minority, or an entire people says, “I will no longer obey,” and throws the risk of their life in the face of an authority they consider unjust seems to me to be something irreducible [to the rules of thought and action which define social systems]. Because no authority is capable of making it utterly impossible: Warsaw will always have its ghetto in revolt and its sewers crowded with rebels. And because the man who rebels is finally inexplicable; it takes a wrenching-away that interrupts the flow of history, and its long chains of reasons, for a man to be able, “really,” to prefer the risk of death to the certainty of having to obey.

All the forms of established or demanded freedom, all the rights that one asserts, even in regard to the seemingly least important things, no doubt have a last anchor point there, one more solid and closer to experience that “natural rights.” If societies persist and live, that is, if the powers that be are not “utterly absolute,” it is because, behind all the submissions and coercions, beyond the threats, the violence, and the intimidations, there is the possibility of that moment when life can no longer be bought, when the authorities can no longer do anything, and when, facing the gallows and the machine guns, people revolt.

In "What are the Iranians Dreaming About?", Foucault addresses the 1979 Iranian Revolution as "political will" determined to approach problems of government, e.g. domestic abuse of power and repression on behalf of the US and British installed neo-colonial regime, through an Islamic "political spirituality" rather than modern, 'scientific' Western modes of politics. He thereby seems to interpret the Revolution as an attempt to construct an alternative to western governmental systems and a method of resisting their colonization of world-society as it continues through 'globalization.' (For his thoughts on western "political rationality" see "Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason").

An excerpt, pardon the length:

I do not feel comfortable speaking of Islamic government as an "idea" or even as an "ideal." Rather, it impressed me as a form of "political will." It impressed me in its effort to politicize structures that are inseparably social and religious in response to current problems. It also impressed me in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.

In the short term, this political will raises two questions:

1. Is it sufficiently intense now, and is its determination clear enough to prevent an "Amini solution," which has in its favor (or against it, if one prefers) the fact that it is acceptable to the shah, that it is recommended by the foreign powers, that it aims at a Western-style parliamentary regime, and that it would undoubtedly privilege the Islamic religion?

2. Is this political will rooted deeply enough to become a permanent factor in the political life of Iran, or will it dissipate like a cloud when the sky of political reality will have finally cleared, and when we will be able to talk about programs, parties, a constitution, plans, and so forth?

Politicians might say that the answers to these two questions determine much of their tactics today.

With respect to this "political will," however, there are also two questions that concern me even more deeply.

One bears on Iran and its peculiar destiny. At the dawn of history, Persia invented the state and conferred its models on Islam. Its administrators staffed the caliphate. But from this same Islam, it derived a religion that gave to its people infinite resources to resist state power. In this will for an "Islamic government," should one see a reconciliation, a contradiction, or the threshold of something new?

The other question concerns this little corner of the earth whose land, both above and below the surface, has strategic importance at a global level. For the people who inhabit this land, what is the point of searching, even at the cost of their own lives, for this thing whose possibility we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity, a political spirituality. I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong.