Foucault, Fanon, Intellectuals, Revolutions

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]

‘A Little Feu de Joie’

by Adam Shatz, London Review of Books

• Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences by James Buchan
  John Murray, 482 pp, £25.00, November 2012, ISBN 978 1 84854 066 8

At the end of the Second World War, an anonymous pamphlet surfaced in the seminaries of Qom, the bastion of Shia learning. The Unveiling of Secrets accused Iran’s monarchy of treason: ‘In your European hats, you strolled the boulevards, ogling the naked girls, and thought yourselves fine fellows, unaware that foreigners were carting off the country’s patrimony and resources.’ Iran, it proposed, should be ruled by an assembly of religious jurists headed by a wise man. In such a state, there would be no need for elections or a parliament, or even a standing army: a religious militia (basij) would ensure obedience to the law.