By Anthony
Alessandrini, Jadaliyya
My theoretical ethic is…“antistrategic”: to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal. A simple choice, a difficult job: for one must at the same time look closely, a bit beneath history, at what cleaves it and stirs it, and keep watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it. – Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?”[1]
In their
invaluable contributions to this series, Diren Valayden and Muriam Haleh Davis
note, rightly, that Michel Foucault had relatively little to say about
colonialism, in any direct way, throughout most of his body of work. I have
nothing to add to this more general point regarding the Eurocentrism of
Foucault’s work, except perhaps a proposal to place it within two larger
contexts. The first is the general (and continuing) lack of engagement with
postcolonial studies within French scholarship more generally; Achille Mbembe,
among others, has described this as a form of provincialism within French
thought from which we might, at last, begin to break away today. The second
context is the complex history, still being told, of the interconnections
between poststructuralist thought and French colonialism in North Africa, so
well analyzed by Muriam Haleh Davis in a previous article.
In my own
contribution to this discussion regarding Foucault and North Africa—which, to
my mind, also means thinking Foucault together with the revolutions and popular
revolts of the past several years—I propose to revisit the body of work that
addresses Foucault’s occasional writings on Iran and the Iranian Revolution, a
period referred to by hostile critics as Foucault’s “Iranian adventure.” The
key text here is Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson’s 2005 book Foucault and the
Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Afary and Anderson’s
book provided the first complete English translation of Foucault’s journalistic
writings and interviews on Iran from 1978 and 1979, as well as responses
(mostly hostile) from other French commentators. As for Afary and Anderson’s
own analysis of Foucault’s writings on Iran, the subtitle “the seductions of
Islamism” reveals a great deal about their larger approach. Babak Rahimi,
reviewing the book, sums it up nicely: “the book misleadingly presents Foucault
as an educated (but stupid) white man who was naively seduced by the
obscurantist features of Khomeini and Islamism.”[2]
Space does
not permit me to pursue anything like a full reading of the book here; in any
case, Jonathan Rée, Richard Lynch, and, especially, Rahimi have provided
thorough critiques of Afary and Anderson’s simplified and partial readings of
Foucault’s work, as well as of the authors’ own deep-seated Eurocentric
attitude towards what they interchangeably describe as “Islam” and
“Islamism.”[3] Overall, however, their book’s general attitude towards
Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution has taken hold to such an extent
that when Slavoj Zizek makes reference to these writings in In Defense of Lost
Causes, he feels unconstrained in referring simply to Foucault’s “mistake” on
Iran, and in subsequently comparing Foucault’s relationship to the Iranian
Revolution to Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazi Party (thereby echoing
Afary and Anderson’s tendency to equate “Islamism” with fascism).[4]
I will
return to this question of Foucault’s “mistake” regarding the Iranian
Revolution, and how a different reading of his writings on Iran can,
paradoxically, teach us something about approaching the revolutions of North
Africa today. But in fact, the full lesson for us lies not only in Foucault’s
writings, but also in their reception by his critics. We might begin with the particular
tone of the dismissals of Foucault on Iran inspired by Afary and Anderson’s
book. It is also a tone I find in a more recent book (one that deserves a more
thorough analysis than I can provide here), Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory
and the Specter of Capital, which presents itself as a broadside against the
limitations of postcolonial theory, although Chibber’s specific target is the
Subaltern Studies school, and even more specifically, the work of Partha
Chatterjee. What is so striking about the tone of such books is their
dismissive attitude towards the theorists and texts upon which they lavish
their attention, combined with a sense of ill-disguised glee when they find
“errors” that support their dismissiveness. Reading such books is a strange
experience, since these authors have clearly spent years undertaking a close
study of texts that they often appear to abhor (as Rée puts it, “Although Afary
and Anderson have spent ten years working on their book, it has not been a
labor of love”[5]). Not surprisingly, the readings that they produce, in
addition to being consistently hostile, can most charitably be described as
selective, since their goal is not to enlighten these texts, but to dismiss
them.
This brings
us to the sense of glee. Here I will risk a simplification of my own, for I
believe that the tone of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution shares something
with a number of texts produced in the last few years, whose overall mission
has been to ask, impatiently: Can we please be done with the “posties”?—that
is, those thinkers variously described in such texts as poststructuralists,
postcolonialists, or postmodernists. Dismissing Foucault’s writings on Iran, or
postcolonial theory, or the work of the Subaltern Studies Group, is in such
cases carried out in the name of a return to ideas or principles that are
alleged to be under attack or endangered by such “posty” thinkers. For Afary
and Anderson, these principles include secularism, modernity, democracy, and
feminism (the latter is understood to encompass the first three principles—that
is, feminism for them must be by its nature secular); Chibber would endorse
these, and would include the enlightenment and class analysis. Their
understanding of the subjects about which their theoretical opponents
write—whether it is the Iranian Revolution or postcolonial Indian
historiography—are, needless to say, framed by their allegiance to these
principles. The glee found in these books, then, results from a sense of a job
well done; having exposed the errors of the posties, they can happily return to
what Chibber describes in his Preface as “more pressing subjects.”[6]
It is
striking to me that in these attacks upon “posty” figures such as Foucault, a
figure often mobilized as an ally is Frantz Fanon. Both Afary and Anderson and
Chibber, in their respective books, reach for claims regarding Fanon and his
work in order to bolster their own arguments. Afary and Anderson, in calling
for “a more porous, fluid, and hybrid interchange between the East and the West”
than they find in Foucault’s work (I cannot resist pointing out the
taken-for-grantedness of the categories “East” and “West” in such a
formulation), cite the work of Fanon as an alternative; later, describing the
forms of “Islamism” that they see Foucault as supposedly espousing, they
describe it as “far closer to fascism than to the socially progressive politics
of a Sandino, a Fanon, a Lumumba, a Mandela, or even a Gandhi.”[7] Chibber, on
the other hand, arrays Fanon against postcolonial theorists by grouping him in
with “important leader[s] in the anticolonial tradition” such as Ho Chi Minh
and Che Guevara, and posits him, together with Cabral and Nkrumah, as
inheritors of “the socialism of Lenin or Marx.”[8] The fact that Fanon can be
placed among such a diverse company (from Gandhi to Ho Chi Minh to Lenin), and
for such varied reasons, suggests something very disturbing about such
appropriations. In such instances, it seems, there is no need to actually read
and engage with Fanon’s work; rather, he can simply be invoked as the
“authentic” voice of Third World revolution against one’s theoretical foes,
especially when such a foe is a white European thinker such as Foucault.
Elsewhere, I
have written at some length about the productive possibilities in thinking
Fanon and Foucault together, and about some of the surprising parallels between
them and their work. This connection might begin from the fact that they were
almost exact contemporaries, continuing through some striking similarities in
their intellectual and political itineraries: for example, they nearly crossed
paths at the University of Tunis, where Fanon was a lecturer from 1959 to 1960
and Foucault from 1966 to 1968 (this was of course after Fanon’s untimely death
in 1961). But one unexpected connection between them might be made around the
“errors” that each made in their readings of the revolutions about which they
wrote in the midst of their unfolding. For Fanon certainly fell into “error”
more than once in his engagement with what he named and imagined as the African
Revolution. He was badly mistaken in believing that Guinea under Sekou Touré
would “crystallize the revolutionary potential” of its neighboring countries;
he was even more disastrously mistaken in backing an uprising in Angola that
was crushed by the Portuguese army, resulting in the deaths of twenty to thirty
thousand people; he failed to anticipate the forces arrayed against Patrice
Lumumba in the Congo before Lumumba’s assassination in January 1961.[9]
But even
listing the things that Fanon and Foucault, in their different contexts, got
“wrong” in their attempts to think through ongoing revolutions (not to mention
the many things that they got right) acts as a rebuke to critics such as Afary
and Anderson and Chibber who write with a nostalgia for the categories and
principles that they see as having preceded “posty” thinking. For what we find
in Fanon’s and Foucault’s respective engagements with ongoing revolutions in
Algeria and Iran is an attempt to write what Foucault famously called “the
history of the present” without relying upon already-existing categories to
define the new events unfolding before them.[10] And here, I think, is where
these writings hold such value for us today, in the midst of the
still-unfolding revolutions of North Africa (however one defines “North
Africa”—the category itself is one that Fanon contested as part of his critique
of the colonial division between “l’Afrique Blanche” and “l’Afrique Noire”).
Foucault makes this clear in one of his articles on Iran, published in late
November 1978:
I cannot write the history of the future, and I am also rather clumsy at foreseeing the past. However, I would like to try to grasp what is happening right now, because these days nothing is finished, and the dice are 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.[11]
Embedded in
such work is a deep sense of intellectual responsibility, coupled with a tone
of humility.[12] It is a very particular form of humility, however, one that
often seems to take the form of its opposite, since it involves insisting that
existing frameworks of understanding cannot be applied in any simple or
straightforward ways to unfolding revolutions. In Fanon, this can be readily
identified in his life-long “stretching,” to use his term, of psychoanalysis
and psychology, Marxism, existentialism, and other forms of analysis in order
to engage with the depredations of racism and colonialism, as well as the
revolutionary efforts to overthrow them.[13] Foucault expresses this in terms
of the need to respect the “singularity” of the revolts with which he engaged
throughout his own life and work; the quote with which I began suggests how
central this is to his body of work as a whole.
Indeed,
against the Foucault who is so often caricatured as a simple pessimist
regarding the possibilities for revolutionary social change, we find throughout
his work an insistence on close attention to the particular forms of revolt
that again and again arise in history. This is an ethos captured in “Useless to
Revolt?,” an article written in May 1979, often described as his “last word” on
the Iranian Revolution:
People do
revolt; that is a fact. And that is how subjectivity…is brought into history,
breathing life into it. A convict risks his life to protest unjust punishments;
a madman can no longer bear being confined and humiliated; a people refuses the
regime that oppresses it. That doesn’t make the first innocent, doesn’t cure
the second, and doesn’t ensure for the third the tomorrow it was promised.
Moreover, no one is obliged to stand in solidarity with them….It is enough that
they exist and that they have against them everything that is dead set on
shutting them up for there to be a reason to listen to them and to see what
they mean to say.[14]
The second
half of this quote is particularly noteworthy, since it provides a strong
response to those (like Afary and Anderson) who suggest that Foucault is
somehow an “advocate” for the Iranian Revolution and, thus, for “Islamism.” To
attend to the coming of particular kinds of subjectivity into history is not to
advocate for those particular forms of subjectivity. But it is to insist that a
full respect for the singularity of such moments demands new forms of thinking.
This is true even in those moments when the position of the analyst moves from
documentation to ethical response. Afary and Anderson take Foucault to task for
his refusal to denounce “Islamic government” in and of itself. But an open
letter to Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, written in April 1979, shows that
Foucault’s critique of power delves deeper than they might care to go, striking
at the very nature of traditional notions of “government” in and of itself
(something he does throughout his work): “Concerning the expression ‘Islamic
government,’ why cast immediate suspicion on the adjective ‘Islamic’? The word
‘government’ suffices, in itself, to awaken vigilance.”[15]
In short,
the great lesson that Foucault and Fanon have to teach those of us working to
understand the unfolding revolutions of North Africa is simply: revolutions
change things, and among the things that they change, or should change, are the
categories through which we view such changes. New subjectivities and new
singularities demand new frameworks, both of understanding and of solidarity.
Afary and Anderson, reading “Useless to Revolt?” as the culmination of
Foucault’s writings on Iran, can only conclude that what they describe as
“Foucault’s support for the new wave of Islamic uprisings that started in Iran
in 1978” was part of “his aim…to set out a new theory of revolution that could
be widely embraced.” Consequently, they see this alleged project as “an utter
failure,” since “it gained him no followers.”[16] This is a strange—one might
even say perverse—standard of “success” for revolutionary thought. Far from
using the Iranian Revolution as an opportunity to develop new frameworks of
analysis, the Revolution, for Afary and Anderson, does nothing but affirm those
things that they already believe to be true. Not finding a single, “correct,”
“new theory of revolution” in Foucault’s work, they offer no response but a
simple return to older theories.
Revolutionary
times demand better than nostalgia for older, and ostensibly simpler, forms of
analysis. In an article published soon after the climactic events of February
1979, Foucault provides a brilliant caricature of one version of the history
that might be told using already-existing categories of what a revolution looks
like (or should look like) to describe the unfolding events in Iran:
On February 11, 1979, the Iranian Revolution took place. I have the impression that I will read this sentence in tomorrow’s newspapers and in the history books of the future….This long succession of festivities and mourning, these millions of men in the street invoking Allah…it was difficult for us to call all this a “revolution.” Today, we feel as though we are in a more familiar world….History just placed on the bottom of the page the red seal that authenticates a revolution….The first act is going to begin: that of the struggle of the classes, of the armed vanguards, and of the party that organizes the masses, and so forth.
Is this so certain?[17]
In this
traditional mode of analysis, the true singularity of the popular uprisings in
Iran, over a series of months and years, is thus subsumed into the same old
narrative. And when things do not follow the necessary pattern, they can be
attributed to a failed or inauthentic revolution; those seen to have promoted
them can then be declared to have been in error. The nostalgia for older ways
of seeing and doing things can then safely be asserted, and we can all happily
return to Chibber’s “more pressing subjects.”
Like
Foucault, Fanon asserted his sometimes savage irony against this nostalgic
viewpoint, the very opposite of a revolutionary attention to singularity.
Halfway through The Wretched of the Earth, the revolutionary struggle for
decolonization that he documents has reached a point of deep confusion and
uncertainty. At this point, even the division between colonizer and colonized
cannot be trusted, since, in Fanon’s words, “some blacks can be whiter than the
whites,” and, similarly, there are Europeans who have gone over to the “native”
side. In this context, Fanon suggests, there can be no single, simple form of
analysis, only a responsibility to the singularity of what is beginning to
emerge, even though such realizations are “galling, painful, and sickening.” He
represents the bewilderment of this situation with one of his many moments of
irony: “and yet everything used to be so simple before: the bad people were on
one side, and the good on the other.”[18] It is this nostalgia for a “simpler”
time, and a simpler set of categories, that he, like Foucault, insistently
refuses.
There is a
lesson here, for those attempting to understand the unfolding revolutions of
Tunisia, of Egypt, of Libya, and elsewhere throughout the region, even in the
midst of developments that are too often “galling, painful, and sickening.”
Their unfolding realities demand new categories of thought and new forms of
analysis—precisely the opposite of the nostalgia for older categories espoused
by those who stand against the “posties” (although in many cases, their
political sympathies may in fact lie with these revolutions). Resisting the
rush to judge the “errors” of Foucault and Fanon in their engagements with the
Iranian and Algerian Revolutions in no way involves letting them off the hook
for the consequences of some of their decisions and formulations. But it does
involve admitting that intellectuals inserting themselves into struggles
wherein “the dice are still being rolled” (as against simply using these
struggles as testing grounds for one’s already-held beliefs) inevitably risk
such mistakes.
True
responsibility to the singularity of unfolding revolutions also involves asking
difficult questions. The first question to ask might not be: Did such and such
a revolution succeed or fail? but rather: What is the current state of this
revolution, and how do we understand and respond to it? This includes the
Iranian Revolution itself; given the power of the Green Revolution and the continuing
popular movements in Iran, it may be premature to even say that the Iranian
Revolution is over, never mind to adjudicate which analysis was “correct” or
“in error.” We might more usefully include it among the revolutions of our age
to whose singularity, following Foucault, we owe our respect.
NOTES
[1] Michel
Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?” in Michel Foucault, Volume 3: Power, ed. James
D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 453. Foucault’s article first appeared
in Le Monde in May 1979.
[2] Babak
Rahimi, Review of Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian
Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. H-Gender-MidEast (October
2006): 3.
[3] For an
excellent consideration of Foucault’s writings on Iran within the larger scope
of his later work, see Corey McCall, “Ambivalent Modernities: Foucault’s
Iranian Writings Reconsidered,” Foucault Studies 15 (2013), 27-51.
[4] Slavoj
Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2009), 117.
[5] Jonathan
Rée, “The Treason of the Clerics,” The Nation (28 July 2005).
[6] Vivek
Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (New York: Verso,
2013), xi.
[7] Afary
and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 21, 169.
[8] Chibber,
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 153, 290.
[9] See
David Macey, Frantz Fanon (New York: Picador, 2000), 383, 391, 435.
[10] For his
discussion of writing “the history of the present,” see Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Vintage, 1977, p. 30-31.
[11] Michel
Foucault, “The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt,” in Afary and Anderson,
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 220. This article first appeared in
Corriere della serra in November 1978.
[12] It is
noteworthy that the most recent work of David Scott, a thinker influenced by
both Fanon and Foucault, invokes these same two principles: humility and
responsibility. Scott’s book, which is a careful reconsideration of the rise
and downfall of the Grenada Revolution of 1979-1983—a period roughly
contemporary to Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution—provides another
important intertext for analysts of the ongoing revolutions of today, albeit
one beyond the bounds of this article. See David Scott, Omens of Adversity:
Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
[13] See,
for example, his famous statement regarding class analysis in the colonial
context: “In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure.
The cause is the effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white
because you are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly
stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue.” Frantz Fanon, The
Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), p. 5.
[14]
Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?” 452.
[15] Michel
Foucault, “Open Letter to Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan,” in Afary and
Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 261. It was first published in
Le Nouvel Observateur in April 1979.
[16] Afary
and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 133.
[17] Michel
Foucault, “A Powder Keg Called Islam,” in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the
Iranian Revolution, 239. This article first appeared in Corriere della serra in
February 1979.
[18] Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth, 93-94.
