Editing Openai/69651dc1-e168-8006-b56e-a23c6fb285ab (section)

=== Assistant: Your surprise is very understandable—and yes, the tweet is referring to something real, but it compresses a complex epi… ===
Your surprise is very understandable—and yes, the tweet is referring to something real, but it compresses a complex episode into a polemical slogan.

Here is the careful version.

==== In 1978–1979, Michel Foucault wrote a series of journalistic dispatches for Corriere della Sera about the unfolding Iranian Revolution. These texts were written before the Islamic Republic fully revealed itself as a theocratic, repressive state. ====

Foucault was not “cheering the ayatollahs” in the simple sense suggested by the tweet. Rather, he was fascinated—arguably dangerously so—by what he perceived as a new kind of revolutionary energy.

==== ### ====

Foucault believed he was witnessing something historically unusual: a mass movement not grounded in Marxism, nationalism, or liberalism, but in religious motivation.

He called this a form of political spirituality—a revolt animated by meaning, sacrifice, and collective ethical transformation rather than class struggle or economic interest.

This deeply resonated with his lifelong critique of:
* Western rationalism
* Enlightenment universalism
* Technocratic governance

To Foucault, modern Western politics had become spiritually empty.

===== Like much of the Western Left at the time, Foucault strongly opposed: =====
* U.S. interventionism
* The Shah’s regime (seen as Western-backed, brutal, and modernizing from above)

Islamic resistance appeared—wrongly, as it turned out—as an indigenous, bottom-up rejection of imperial power.

This is where campism (the logic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”) later accusations come from.

===== Foucault initially viewed Ruhollah Khomeini less as a future theocrat and more as a symbolic focal point for popular revolt—almost a Gandhi-like figure of refusal. =====

This was a serious misjudgment.

==== After 1979: ====
* Clerical power consolidated
* Women were violently repressed
* Dissidents, leftists, and minorities were executed or silenced

At this point, Foucault stopped writing about Iran altogether.

He never issued a full mea culpa, but:
* He acknowledged the dangers of political spirituality
* He withdrew from the topic
* He refused to defend the regime

This silence itself has been widely criticized.

==== No—but he romanticized a movement whose internal logic he profoundly misunderstood. ====

Better description:
* He was anti-liberal and anti-imperialist first
* He underestimated how religious power behaves once it governs
* He overestimated the emancipatory potential of non-Western traditions

==== This episode has become a case study in: ====
* The Left’s recurring temptation to excuse illiberal movements if they oppose Western power
* The danger of aestheticizing revolt
* The limits of critique when it loses contact with lived consequences (especially for women and minorities)

The tweet you read is polemical—but it points to a real and uncomfortable truth.

==== Foucault was: ====
* Brilliant at diagnosing Western power
* Weak at predicting what replaces it
* Seduced by intensity, rupture, and “difference”
* Blind to how sacred authority scales into coercion

Many of his sharpest critics today argue that Iran was the moment where post-1968 anti-Enlightenment romanticism met reality—and lost.

If you want, next we can:
* Look at what Foucault’s feminist contemporaries said at the time
* Compare this to today’s debates about “decolonial” or “anti-imperialist” alliances
* Or examine whether this episode exposes a structural flaw in parts of continental philosophy

Just tell me where you want to push the lens.