78 Philosophical Frames
did frame it in specific situations. Chief among the insights he produced
is that “liberation” cannot engender real liberty without a certain level of
what can be termed “discursive control” by the people of the regimes of
governmentality produced by such liberation.
In this framework, “the enigma of revolt” in the Iranian revolution-
ary events of late 1978 was a crucial discovery for someone exploring the
manner in which the revolt was being lived:
[The revolution] was dreamt of as being as much religious as
political ... [staying] close to those old dreams which the West
had known at another time, when it wanted to inscribe the
figures of spirituality on the earth of politics ... What else but
religion could provide support for the distress and then the
revolt of a population which had been traumatized by “devel-
opment,” “reform,” “urbanization,” and all the other failures of
the regime.^44The active role Foucault assigns to religion is related to his insights into
how the discourses surrounding the formation of modern subjects use
religion as a backdrop to force potentially transgressive dimensions of the
person into modern disciplinary matrices. If the struggle for our selves
constitutes a politics of our selves, the key campaign in that struggle,
according to Foucault, will be a new mode of fashioning an “ethical way
of being a self.”^45
f Foucault’s well known work on early Christianity aims to reveal I
how the religious subject is constituted, his writings on the Iranian
Revolution (based on his visits to the country in the fall and winter of
1978) help us question how the new Iranian religious subject was self-
created and managed to end the thousand-year reign of the shahs. His
general interest was to examine how religion creates forms of subjection
by developing new power relations; the Iranian Revolution was particu-
larly interesting to him because of the transformation of subjectivity it
brought about. Thus he wished to examine “different ways of governing
oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false—that is what
I would call political spirituality.”^46
As Gramsci before him learned by dealing with the Catholic church
in Italy, Foucault’s work on early Christianity taught him—as he wrote