The aim of this essay is to provide an analysis of Foucault's use of the notion of revolution in the reports he wrote for "Il Corriere della Sera" during his two trips to Iran in September and November 1978. Foucault critically frames the historical and philosophical concept of revolution, in order to oppose it to the spreading revolts against the Shah, which embody the simple and negative opening of the possibility of a transformation in history. Yet is it possible to reactivate the notion of revolution in a nonrestrictive sense in order to think about the role and the possibility of political revolts and freedom today

SZEGI, JÓZSEF

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VIII. Talajbiológiai Tudományos Ülés

The aim of this essay is to provide an analysis of Foucault’s use of the notion of revolution in the reports he wrote for Il Corriere della Sera during his two trips to Iran in September and November 1978. Foucault critically frames the historical and philosophical concept of revolution, in order to oppose it to the spreading revolts against the Shah, which embody the simple and negative opening of the possibility of a transformation in history. Yet is it possible to reactivate the notion of revolution in a non-restrictive sense in order to think about the role and the possibility of political revolts and freedom today?Arianna Sforzini, ‘Revolution: Making a Break in History’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 163-69 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-15_20

Sforzini, Arianna

ICI Berlin Repository

  https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-15_20  Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F.E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, CulturalInquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin, 2019), pp.163–69ARIANNA SFORZINI  RevolutionMaking a Break in HistoryCITE AS:Arianna Sforzini, ‘Revolution: Making a Break in History’, inRe-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey andArnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin,2019), pp. 163–69 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-15_20>RIGHTS STATEMENT:© by the author(s)This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.ABSTRACT: The aim of this essay is to provide an analysis of Fou-cault’s use of the notion of revolution in the reports he wrote forIl Corriere della Sera during his two trips to Iran in Septemberand November 1978. Foucault critically frames the historical andphilosophical concept of revolution, in order to oppose it to thespreading revolts against the Shah, which embody the simple andnegative opening of the possibility of a transformation in history.Yet is it possible to reactivate the notion of revolution in a non-restrictive sense in order to think about the role and the possibilityof political revolts and freedom today?The ICI Berlin Repository is amulti-disciplinary open access archive for the dissemination of scientific research documents related to the ICI Berlin, whetherthey are originally published by ICI Berlin or elsewhere. Unless noted otherwise, the documents are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.o International License, which means that you are free to share and adapt the material, provided you give appropriate credit, indicate anychanges, and distribute under the same license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ for further details. In particular, you should indicateall the information contained in the cite-as section above.RevolutionMaking a Break in HistoryARIANNA SFORZINI‘Revolution’ is a central concept in Western contempor-ary philosophy. Since Kant, and then Hegel andMarx, theterm revolution has taken on a double meaning: (1) theembodiment of freedom in history, the sign of the open-ness of historical times, the ability to change, following thefree practical human nature, and to progress towards thebetter; (2) the achievement of history itself— for example,a proletarian revolution in Marxist thought, which will ac-complish the destruction of the old world and create thenew communist era. Revolution is a capital turning pointin the history of humanity, realizing human freedom andpushing it to its limits.WhenKant, in his essayTheConflictof the Faculties (1798), reflects on the revolution that canbe considered the beginning of the contemporary world— the French Revolution — he transforms it, in its purerevolutionary form, regardless of its historical context, re-sults, or consequences, into a decisive moral and political164 REVOLUTIONsign. Is there any concretemoment in history that could in-dicate, reliably, that humanity as a whole advances towardsimprovement? Is there any historical event that proves pro-gress in themoral world? For Kant, the French Revolutionis this sign of progress, not as a specific political transform-ation but as a public event, filling the hearts of spectatorswith enthusiasm, sympathetic participation, and faith inthe realization of justice. Revolution is the actualization offreedom, and the utopia of its achievement beyond all timeand history.Thepresent contribution aims at analysing this doublemeaning of the revolution as an ‘operational value in his-tory’1 through a particular group of articles Michel Fou-cault wrote and which have been more vigorously criti-cized than any other part of hisœuvre: the reporting he didfor Il Corriere della Sera during his two journeys to Iran inSeptember andNovember 1978. In these articles, Foucaultdescribes the revolts against the Shah’s regime and suggeststo read them against a certain understanding of the notionof revolution, through a fascinating and, at the same time,highly ambiguous concept: that of a ‘political spirituality’.2I shall briefly analyse this notion, exploring its link to theWestern notion of revolution. I shall then argue that, des-pite Foucault’s rejection of this notion, revolution is stilla very important concept to reactivate in order to think1 Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at theCollège de France, 1982–1983, trans. by G. Burchell (London: PalgraveMacmillan, 2010), p. 20.2 Michel Foucault, ‘À quoi rêvent les Iraniens?’ [1978], in Dits et écrits,ed. by Daniel Defert, François Ewald and Jacques Lagrange, 2 vols(Paris: Gallimard, 2001), ii: 1976–1988, text no. 245, p. 694: ‘Quelsens, pour les hommes qui habitent [la terre d’Iran], à rechercherau prix même de leur vie cette chose dont nous avons, nous autres,oublié la possibilité depuis la Renaissance et les grandes crises duchristianisme: une spiritualité politique.’ARIANNA SFORZINI 165about the role and the possibility of political revolts andfreedom today.The Foucault Archive at the Bibliothèque nationalein Paris contains the complete set of documents Foucaultgathered during and after his Iranian journeys. 3 I wasmostimpressed by a journal of sorts Foucault kept while in Iran,full of historical, political, and personal notes about thecountry he was discovering. It shows a true journalisticspirit; the reader can feel Foucault’s pleasure in discoveringa country on the verge of a major political transformationandhis desire to understand this historical turningpoint byanalysing the economic, geopolitical, and cultural situationin Iran. He is not a philosopher looking at history from thesuperior standpoint of abstract reason, but a witness and areporter giving voice to the historical fractures and forceshe encounters on the ground.Foucault is definitely fascinated by what could becalled the ‘negative character’ of the Iranian revolt againstReza Pahlavi: it was a popular uprising, originated in aseemingly spontaneous way; there weren’t, at the begin-ning, any main ideological directions, political parties, orinstitutions to guide it; and still, the revolt wasmassive, un-divided, and capable of a major disruption of the politicalorder. Foucault saw the rise of an entire unarmed people,united by the only aim of ‘saying no to the Shah’. Before thereturn of Khomeini, the Shiite Islamic voices went alongwith the strong Marxist movement in Iran and other op-position forces. The religious state was a political utopiareconnecting with an idealized past, and Foucault couldn’timagine in 1978 that the revolt he was witnessing could re-sult in an oppressive clerical regime. Most importantly, in3 Michel Foucault Archives, Bibliothèque nationale de France, boîtes50–50bis (NAF 28730).166 REVOLUTIONhis articles, he refuses to speak of an Iranian ‘Revolution’:this concept is for him ideologically charged, meaning ahistorical violent riot led and used by a political party,group, or class. One can say that Khomeini transformedthe Iranian revolt into a revolution, but what Foucault firstsawwas a ‘soulèvement’: the simple and negative opening ofthe possibility of a transformation in history; a disruptionof the concrete political situation making room for some-thing new to arise.Revolution organizes itself according to a temporaleconomy: conditions, promises, necessities; itresides thus in history, makes its bed in it, andultimately lies in it. The uprising [le soulèvement],breaking the order of time, raises men uprightagainst their land and their humanity.4Did Foucault underestimate the power of the Islamicclergy? Definitely. But was Khomeini’s regime really theonly possible outcome of the revolt against the Shah? Yetmore importantly, even after the religious and despoticturn in Iran, Foucault claimed the relevance of a notionhe first used in his Iranian reportage: that of a ‘politicalspirituality’. It is clearly an ambiguous expression, onewhich resulted at the end of the 1970s in amassive critiqueof the French philosopher, accusing him to have indirectlylegitimated the Khomeinist regime. Actually, Foucaultwas far from imagining the theocratic outcome of theIranian revolt. What he did see, however, was the massive4 ‘La révolution s’organise selon toute une économie intérieure au temps:des conditions, des promesses, des nécessités; elle loge donc dansl’histoire, y fait son lit et finalement s’y couche. Le soulèvement,coupant le temps, dresse les hommes à la verticale de leur terre et deleur humanité.’ (‘Vivre autrement le temps’ [1979], in Dits et écrits, II:text no. 267, pp. 788–90 (p. 790) [my translation]).ARIANNA SFORZINI 167potential of a revolt rooted in a religious and existentialdimension.The importance of Foucault’s articles lies in the in-sights they provide into the essential role Islam and its‘political spirituality’ — Islam as a ‘political force’5 —was and arguably is to play in the contemporary geopolit-ical world. Foucault sees in the Iranian revolts and in therevolutionary energy unleashed by their mobilization ofIslamic religion a new form of opposition to state power,that is to say: to amodernWestern political order, its army,its police, its embassies. The Iranian revolt is, in Foucault’seyes, a ‘counter-behaviour’ to the governmentality of themodern state. As such, it can serve as a privileged plat-form for political observation and experimentation. TheWestern-style ‘modernization’ coveted by the Shah and byUnited States policy towards Iran is actually an attempt toreproduce Eurocentric models of state organization. Andthe revolts against these attempts are for Foucault ‘perhapsthe first great insurrection against global systems, the formof revolt that is the most modern and the most insane’.6In Iran, religion proves to be a force that is able to opposethe existential and political constraints of the very modernstate whose history Foucault had so tirelessly reconstruc-ted in order to find news ways to criticize it.Foucault is aware that Islam risks becoming ‘a giganticpowder-keg’ on a global scale.7 His statements are clearlyrelevant today, in light of what has since happened in the5 Michel Foucault, ‘Foucault’s Response to Atoussa H.’ [1978], trans. byKaren deBruin andKevinB.Anderson, in JanetAfary andKevinB.An-derson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductionsof Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 210.6 Michel Foucault, ‘The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt’ [1978],trans. by Karen de Bruin and Kevin B. Anderson, in Afary and Ander-son, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, pp. 220–23 (p. 222).7 Michel Foucault, ‘A Powder Keg Called Islam’ [1979], trans. by Karen168 REVOLUTIONMiddle East and in Europe: the rise of religious radicalism,the increasing numbers of migrants fleeing conflicts in Is-lamic countries, the West’s difficulties in intervening andimposing its control and its security strategies. Foucaultinterrogates the field of ethical-political subjectivation fora Europe (a European way of conceiving of the state) thatis in decline and aWest which is globalizing the world, yetfinds itself called into question by this very process of glob-alization. Through his reflections on the particular case ofIran, he raises the general question: beyond the Europeanidentity crisis, how, and by means of what poles and rela-tions, do we create political subjectivities?Paradoxically enough, Foucault deploys a massive setof knowledge about Iranian history and Islamic religion inorder to develop a strictly Eurocentric reflection on revoltand revolution. Foucault said the Iranian revolt was not,at its beginning, a revolution, as it was not dominated byan ideology. And yet, it was a concrete example of whatrevolution has meant in Western thought since Kant andthe French Revolution: the opening of new possibilitiesin time and history, demanding a form of philosophicaldiscourse which is no longer the ahistorical investigationof the universal conditions of human thought but the re-sponse to actual political needs. Foucault’s various analysesof Kant’s 1784 essay ‘An Answer to the Question: Whatis Enlightenment’ prove this point: revolution has been,for the contemporary Western world, the actual evidencethat history is an open process, through which it has torethink and test its forms of discourse, thought, and exist-ence. Could Iran and its ‘revolt/revolution’ play the samede Bruin and Kevin B. Anderson, in Afary and Anderson, Foucault andthe Iranian Revolution, pp. 239–41 (p. 241).ARIANNA SFORZINI 169role of critique for 1970s and 1980s Europe, andmaybe fortoday’s world?Foucault’s controversial concept of ‘political spiritual-ity’must not be thought as a sort of apologetic of a politicalpower built on religion. Rather, it conveys the importantidea that a true political movement cannot exist unless it isbuilt on an existential transformation — that is the senseof the notion of ‘spirituality’ used by Foucault later, in the1980s, to indicate the exercises of the self. In all likeli-hood, Foucault stresses the fact that religion is (and hasbeen inWestern history) amassive political force also stra-tegically, against the French doctrine of laicism as a sortof ‘anaesthetization’ of the political sphere. The real ques-tion Foucault poses to the present moment would thenbe: are political spirituality and revolution possible out-side ideological dogmas? Which political energy can bedeployed today that is rooted in existential practices andstrong enough to be the motor of historical change?  Arianna Sforzini, ‘Revolution: Making a Breakin History’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. byChristoph F. E.Holzhey andArndWedemeyer, Cul-tural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin, 2019), pp.163–69 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-15_20>REFERENCESAfary, Janet, and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution:Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2005)Foucault, Michel, Dits et écrits, ed. by Daniel Defert, François Ewald, andJacques Lagrange, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 2001)Boîtes 50–50bis, Archives Foucault, Bibliothèque nationale de France(NAF 28730)TheGovernment of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, trans. by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan,2010)‘Il mitico capo della rivolta dell’Iran (Le chef mythique de la révolte del’Iran)’, inDits et écrits, ii: 1976–1988, text no. 253, pp. 713–16 (firstpubl. in Corriere della sera, 103.279 [26 November 1978], pp. 1–2), in English as ‘The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt’, trans.by Karen de Bruin and Kevin B. Anderson, in Afary and Anderson,Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, pp. 220–23‘Una polveriera chiamata islam (Une poudriere appelée islam)’, inDits etécrits, ii: 1976–1988, text no. 261, pp. 759–61 (first publ. inCorrieredella sera, 104.36 [13 February 1979], p. 1), in English as ‘A PowderKeg Called Islam’, trans. by Karen de Bruin and Kevin B. Anderson,inAfary andAnderson,Foucault and the IranianRevolution, pp. 239–41‘Réponse de Michel Foucault à une lectrice iranienne’, in Dits et écrits, ii:1976–1988, text no. 251, p. 708 (first publ. in Nouvel Observateur,731 [13November 1978], p. 26), in English as ‘Foucault’s Responseto Atoussa H.’, trans. by Karen de Bruin and Kevin B. Anderson, inAfary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, p. 210‘Vivre autrement le temps’, in Dits et écrits, ii: 1976–1988, text no. 267,pp. 788–90 (first publ. in Nouvel Observateur, 755 [30 April 1979],p. 88)R-1‘À quoi rêvent les Iraniens?’, in Dits et écrits, ii: 1976–1988, text no. 245,pp. 688–94 (first publ. in Nouvel Observateur, 727 [16 October1978], pp. 48–49)Kant, Immanuel, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment, ed. andtrans. by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996), pp. 11–22The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. by Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor,inReligion and RationalTheology, ed. by AllenW.Wood andGeorgedi Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.233–327R-2

VIII. Talajbiológiai Tudományos Ülés

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