REVOLUTION IN SPIRITLESS TIMES - AN ESSAY ON FOUCAULT,MICHEL INQUIRIES INTO THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION

Michel Foucault's reports and commentaries on the Iranian Revolution in 1978/1979 were born in an attempt to verify empirically the emergence of ideas among the ordinary people and the effect of ideas on people's everyday life in modern times of political unrest and rebellion. This attempt has been described as ‘infantile leftism’. This article seeks to show that Foucault's understanding of the facts of this Revolution was largely built on the ideas of his political philosophy: the bipolarity of his concept of power, his ideas on mediation, and his hermeneutics of technologies of the self as related to change. Foucault's position on this Revolution remains nonetheless ambiguous. This essay traces Foucault's ambiguity on Iranian matters in his flamboyant concept of Power, his positive Orientalism, and in his most fascinating attempt to understand that something new happened there. In spite of the ambiguity, it is the aim of this essay to show that Foucault's writings on Iran belong to the first, and probably the most coherent, attempts to theorise a model of revolution ‘in our times’. © 1991, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.