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Political enthusiasm
Partisan feeling and democracy's enchantments
Andrew Poe
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Political enthusiasm
Partisan feeling and democracy's enchantments
Andrew Poe
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About This Book
Enthusiasm has long been perceived as a fundamental danger to democratic politics, with many regarding it as a source of instability and irrationalism. Such views can make enthusiasm appear as a direct threat to the reason and order on which democracy is thought to rely. But such a desire for a sober and moderate democratic politics is perilously misleading and ignores the emotional basis on which democracy thrives.Enthusiasm in democracy works to help political actors identify and foster radical changes. We feel enthusiasm at precisely those moments of new beginnings, when politics takes on new shapes and structures. Being clear about how we experience enthusiasm, and how we recognize it, is thus crucial for democracy, which depends on the sharing of power and the alteration of rule.This book traces the shifting understanding of enthusiasm in modern Western political thought. Poe explores how political actors use enthusiasm to motivate allegiances, how we have come to think on the dangers of enthusiasm in democratic politics, and how else we might think about enthusiasm today. From its inception, democracy has relied on a constant affective energy of renewal. By tracing the way this crucial emotional energy is made manifest in political actions â from ancient times to the present â this book sheds light on the way enthusiasm has been understood by political scientists, philosophers, and political activists, as well as its implications for future democratic politics.
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1
Igniting politics: from enthusiasm to fanaticism
The fury flies from face to face, and the disease is no sooner seen than caught ⊠Such force has society in ill as well as in good passions, and so much stronger any affection is for being social and communicative.
â Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708)
New political spirits
From October 10â19, 1977, the Kanun-e nevisandagan-e Iran â the left oppositional group, known in English as the Writersâ Association of Iran â hosted a series of poetry readings. Every evening, beginning around 8 p.m., authors and poets and students and workers and all manner of ordinary Iranians gathered as an audience at the Goethe Institute and German Cultural Center, on what was then Pahlavi Avenue. This was arguably the finest street in central Tehran, designed to display the potency of the Shahâs regime. Tree-lined and pristine, this street, with its vast shades of green, miraculous life, stood in resistance against the desert. The first of these readings at the German Cultural Center was so overcrowded, with thousands of people having turned out to listen on a rainy evening, that the audience spilled into the surrounding neighborhood. Sounds and voices echoed through the crowd, spilling around street corners and over buildings and walls. By one witnessâs account, this moment might best be described as the âpeak of emotional communionâ in Iran, so excited were the people gathered. These communions are now referred to as the âdah sabâ (the ten nights).1
What began during these ten nights are now often referred to historically as the spiritual beginning of the Iranian revolution. These readings proved a significant event for the Iranian people, beginning a social and political movement that would eventually cast them upon the stage of world politics in a spectacle of mass participation. The fervor that manifested in the ten nights seemed to have unified a diverse constellation of political actors, all set on a fundamental transformation. The early moments of the revolution in Iran were unique, seemingly combining leftist organizational methods of protest with religious intensity as a bulwark. Against the forces of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and the logics of Western domination, the Shiite revolution was to provide a substantive alternative to the modalities of liberalism and communism that then set the political landscape. With a new incarnation of political spirituality as the driving force, this revolution appeared as though a new form of emancipation might be possible, and one that could both resist the hyper-individualism of Western democracies, as well as the bureaucratic vacancies of Soviet communism.
The history of Iran that runs from October 1977 to April 1979 might not be so easily recognizable today. What Iran became through this revolution was not necessarily what the Iranian people might have imagined possible, or even desirable. As Melinda Cooper reminds us, âIn early 1979, a tenuous coalition of Iranian Marxists, leftists, and Shiite clerics brought down the secular oligarchy of the American-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, instituting in its place the equally authoritarian and theocratic rule of Khomeini.â2 What was dreamt of in âthe ten nightsâ was more than a new government, more than a liberation from the Shah; what was dreamt of was, as Michel Foucault reflected, âthe introduction of a spiritual dimension into political life, in order that it (political life) would not be, as always, the obstacle to spirituality, but rather its receptacle, its opportunity, and its ferment.â3 Before the revolution became a violently oppressive force, there was a latent promise that the orbit of that revolution might be a new spirit for cooperation, one as yet all but impossible in Iran or anywhere in the modern world.
History has not confirmed this thesis. While Iran has become a source of anti-imperialism and anti-Western capitalism, once led primarily by left-leaning Marxist student groups and various Islamic Mujahedin, it has often done so through repressive statist tactics. While the revolution itself may have begun in response to the forces of capitalism and modern Western Christianity, the transition to the new regime seems to have internalized this violence, becoming equally brutal.4 This turn in the trajectory of the revolution, away from once-emancipatory futures, has cast a pall over those who saw promise in the early moments of a political turning. Foucault, in particular, has long been haunted by what he named his âenthusiasmâ for the Iranian revolution.5
Foucault arrived in Iran amid much political turmoil. Early September 1978 was a moment of extreme political tension in Tehran, especially between the Confederation of the Iranian Studentsâ National Union and other protests groups in conflict with the Shah. In the midst of these conflicting voices, a dangerous spark flashed at the end of the Ramadan feast that year. In response to swelling crowds of protestors, the Shah â seeming to fear a decline of the power of the state â declared martial law. The specific order called for the killing of all protestors that refused to disband. As one report explains, âA massive demonstration on Jaleh Square in Tehran was violently crushed, and between 2,000 and 4,000 demonstrators were killed. This massacre seriously reduced the chances for reconciliation, and henceforth the popular rallying call was for the shahâs departure, rather than for reforms.â6 It was in the midst of such tumult that Foucault arrived to report on the growing unrest.7
While many in the liberal West saw the growing violence in Iran as unnerving, Foucaultâs reporting for the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera took a more nuanced view. Less in the events, and more in the live forces of opposition, Foucault found a manifestation of a renewed political spirit. In what he described as the âspirit to resistâ â to resist the Shah, to resist capitalism, to resist Americanism, to resist imperialism, to resist colonialism â Foucault uncovered what he thought of as a new form of politics, commingling traces of the Islamic tradition, Marxist critique, and Enlightenment publicity. In Tehran, in 1978, Foucault believed he had found a form of what he named âpolitical enthusiasmâ â a new spiritual politics, formed by igniting shared resistance.
The idea that a new politics had formed in the Iranian revolution in September 1978 was not a popular one. Indeed, Foucault was accused of a sort of ârevolutionary conservatismâ â what one critic described as a call for
a complete revolution of progressive modernism ⊠Reading the prophetic, futural philosophy of the later Heidegger back into the Shiite eschatology of the twelfth Imam, Foucault describes the political ideal of divine law as a kind of groundless ground, âsomething very old and also very far into the future,â a âlight that is capable of illuminating the law from the inside.â8
While after the revolution, many historians have come to see this âgroundless groundâ as the opening of a power vacuum that allowed for precisely the violent repressions for which the Iranian revolution would so often be condemned, Foucaultâs interest was in the moments before history could judge â before there was a difference between the witness and the judge, when no one yet knew what would result. Paying attention to this moment, Foucault insisted, would help us to better understand the affective forces of the political. How does revolution appear when it begins? What affective pathways need to be opened in order for a political revolution to initiate? The âgroundless groundâ that looks so obvious from the ideological stance of the historical judge was far from clear in the spirit of the crowds of protestors who resisted what they perceived as the malformed politics of a corrupt regime.
As many, including Foucault himself, have noted, this stance echoes Kantâs reflection on the French Revolution. As Kant famously exclaims:
The recent revolution of a people which is rich in spirit may well either fail or succeed, accumulate misery and atrocity, it nevertheless arouses in the heart of all spectators (who are not themselves caught up in it) a taking of sides according to desires which border on enthusiasm and which, since its very expression was not without danger, can only have been caused by a moral disposition within the human race.9
This admiration for a spirit, an admiration and adoration that almost âborders on enthusiasm,â has been read as Kantâs political spectatorship â a politics of sympathy based on the ideals perceived in anotherâs actions. As one critic explains it, âWhat matters is not the miserable reality that followed the upheavals, the bloody confrontations, the new oppressive measures, and so on, but the enthusiasm that the events in Iran stimulated in the external (Western) observer, confirming his hope in the possibility of a new form of spiritualized political collective.â10 The difficulty here is whether we should judge Foucault for supporting what obviously became such a violent politics, or if there is more to be learned from what he hoped for, even despite what happened in the unrest of revolution. Foucault reveals an important desire to think through the possibility of a new political spirituality that would release the West from its own intellectual exhaustion. Paying close attention to that release, how it gets mobilized, and the dangers political actors face in doing so, become the main terms on which to evaluate this âpolitical enthusiasm.â
Answers to the question: âWhat do we mean by enthusiasm?â
In 1775, Christoph Martin Wieland, then editor of Der Teutsche Merkur, perhaps the most prominent literary journal of the German Enlightenment, proposed an essay contest on the question of what we might mean by enthusiasm.11 While essay contests were a common means of editors to propel scholarly and public debate on issues of social significance, Wieland was especially worried about the place of enthusiasm in social and political life, and this question was of great significance to him. The purpose of this contest, he argued, was to address the growing concern that Enlightenment philosophy could not distinguish itself from ideology and partisan subjective reflection. Nowhere, according to Wieland, was this mental confusion more obvious, or the stakes of such confusion higher, than in the conceptual distinction between SchwÀrmerei and Enthusiasmus, fanaticism and enthusiasm.
SchwÀrmerei has its origins in biological classification, originally used to refer to swarms of bees. The word was meant to imitate the sound of swarming insects, the shhhhhh and buzz of their motions and communications mixed together.
Enthusiasmus, by contrast, derives â as in English â from the Greek áŒÎœÎžÎżÏ
ÏÎčαÏÎŒĂłÏ, which is best read as âbeing possessed by a god.â12 Enthusiasm is defined in common English usage as ârapturous intensity of feeling in favour of a person, principle, cause, etc.; passionate eagerness in any pursuit, proceeding from an intense conviction of the worthiness of the object.â13 Also, less commonly, we might now read enthusiasm as inspiration, a spirit within, being possessed by a demon or a god. Enthusiasm has been linked to poetic imaginaries, as well as religious fantasy. And, more recently, the affect has come to signify both an irrationalism and a frivolity.
If we consider enthusiasmâs long history, the term was originally used to describe priestly behavior in ancient Greece, especially the perceived heightened condition of consciousness during religious practices.14 Enthusiasm was what witnesses were said to perceive happening to priests and ...