Dr.Rahimi May

Crisis & Critique, vol. 5, issue 2, 2018

This article concerns the philosophico-political archive of May '68 in France, dating from the beginning of the 1970s until the 40th anniversary of 2008. Through a comparative analysis of the texts of Badiou, Rancière, Daney and Deleuze, I question the difficulty of thinking the singularity of a militant subjectivity, caught between a Marxist hegemonic language and the wavering of its political grammar. I examine certain games of writing and legibility of this difficulty, by considering testimonial registers and philosophical analyses along with problems encountered by militant cinema of the 1968 years. Finally, I turn towards another "archive" of events, one characterized by anomie, traced by Maud Mannoni alongside a psychotic patient in May '68, to interrogate from the standpoint of such an "other scene" the hyperbolization of historico-political indentifications that, in May '68, had shaken strands of the universal instituted in the State and its sovereignty, the nation and its community, society and its exchanges, as well as the instituted figures of the individuality, or the normative constructions of the "person" and the attributes that our juridico-moral metaphysics bestow on it. We are thus confronted with a mode of effectiveness of historical signifiers that have given to a type of revolutionary subjectivity both its militant intensity and an extension of its universe of reference. These have also given rise to its "impolitical" side, that is to say the least prone to reappropriation, or the least to be grasped by the work of historical knowledge, and memory.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and The Middle East, 2009

n the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution-the revolution that for some two hundred years has defined the term-Robert Darnton posed an excellent question: what was so revolutionary about the French Revolution? 1 This question is neither small nor simple, though Darnton deftly deals with it and provides an answer, to which I return below. For now, any answer would do well to bear in mind a pointed, amusing, and almost certainly mythical anecdote: Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai, when asked in the early 1970s by a diplomat (or politician) about the importance of France's revolution, responded that it was (much) too early to tell. 2 Although only thirty years have passed since the events/process in Iran, ascertaining either their true import or their impact seems unlikely and should be approached with caution and without hyperbole. In the annals and study of revolution, at least since the twentieth century, cases are abundant and agreement somewhat scarce; 3 one person's social revolution is another person's rebellion is another's act of resistance. Once one moves beyond the "Big Three"-France (1789), Russia (1917), and China (1949)-relatively few cases garner much consensus. 4 If one With great admiration and appreciation for Robert Darnton, Valentine Moghadam, and Misagh Parsa, whose work inspired this essay, and thanks as ever to Helen Cordes.

2015

The Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 shocked the world and set in motion a search for its causes, form, function and result. Most of the resulting analyses tend to locate the origins of the revolution in the errors of the shah and of various Americans, although some emphasize socioeconomic explanations for the upheaval. The roots of Iranian Revolution in the Shia creed stand as a rachis in sense-making; yet, its sociopolitical aspect carries no less importance. Moreover, enough time has now passed to permit a greater range of investigations. These are only some of the reasons why it became a byword. This study will venture a comparison between 4 different scholars who talks and writes on the Iranian Islamic Revolution and, in cooperation, it aims to give a kind of indicative abstract of the Iranian revolution in the light of several other additional works.

According to Ramazani, the Iranian Revolution had substantial domestic, regional, and global consequences, the long-term result of which would have a great deal to do with Iran’s ability to stabilize the Revolution to meet the practical needs of its people. The Revolution polarized domestic politics, exemplified by the clash between traditionalist theocrats and secular modernists. Tensions with Iraq magnified following the Revolution, eventually erupting in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. The Revolution damaged diplomatic and economic relations with the United States, most blatantly through the discontinuation of the Shah’s immense foreign import expenditures, dwindling oil production, the hostage crisis, and the resulting imposition of sanctions. How the Revolution would deal with these problems, as well as class, ethnic, and ideological struggles, would determine the prospects for survival of the new regime.

The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events. In ordinary times, the state, be it monarchical or democratic elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists-kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But in revolutions, the masses break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside the established representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime. Whether this is good or bad we leave to the judgment of moralists…. The history of revolution is for us first of all the forcible entry of the masses into the political arena.

Third World Quarterly, 1988

Studies of the Iranian revolution of 1977-79 have gone through at least three overlapping phases. In the first phase, influenced strongly by the political and emotional immediacy of the revolution itself, many of the critiques and battle cries of the opposition against the ...

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 523, Affirmative ActionRevisited (Sep., 1992), pp. 226-227, 1992

The Iranian revolution of 1978-79 has had an unintended salutary result-a virtual flood of works in English of extraordinarily fine quality on modern Iranian history and politics by Iranian scholars now living abroad, works that would probably never otherwise have been written. H. E. Chehabi's book is one of these. The book deals with the history of the Liberation Movement of Iran (Nehzat-e azadi-ye Iran), the political organization that, with its forerunner organizations, Chehabi credits with the responsibility for laying the political and ideological foundations for the Revolution.