Azadeh Thiriez-Arjangi Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #341.1

Do you interpret the Islamic Republic as a “reign of ideology”: are you drawing on the Ricœurian distinction between ideology (integration, dissimulation, distortion) and utopia, or are you reformulating it from the Iranian case itself?

ATA: The first thing I should tell you is that yes, you’re right: I use the categories of Ricœurian thought to interpret the Iranian political situation. And I should also admit that I may answer your question in a somewhat oblique way.

In reality, when I speak of a “reign of ideology,” this is an interpretation built up over a long period through Ricœur’s conceptual categories. What I mean by this is that I didn’t start out by reading his writings on ideology straightaway. What interested me at first were rather his texts on totalitarianism and, more broadly, on political evil.

It should be noted that Ricœur did not develop a systematic theory of totalitarianism. But he devoted several fundamental analyses to it, from “The Political Paradox,” published in 1957 following the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in Budapest in 1956, to his readings of Hannah Arendt, notably in “From Philosophy to the Political” and “Power and Violence.”

His reading of Arendt is now well known. It allows us to understand that totalitarianism is not merely an extreme concentration of power. It rests on an unprecedented form of domination, one that seeks to render human beings superfluous and to destroy the very conditions of their belonging to a common world. At the same time, the distinction Arendt draws between power and violence, which Ricœur takes up for himself, shows that genuine power arises from the capacity to act together, whereas violence appears when this power-in-common breaks down or disappears.

His work on ideology, moreover, provides particularly fruitful conceptual tools for analyzing how a regime seeks to legitimize its domination and impose a totalizing representation of reality.

Later, I read two other fundamental texts by Ricœur, and I grafted them, in a sense, onto my earlier analyses drawn from his work on totalitarianism and political evil. These two texts were “Science and Ideology,” published in 1974 in the Revue philosophique de Louvain, and “Ideology and Utopia: Two Expressions of the Social Imaginary,” published in 1984 in the journal Autres Temps.

These readings put me on the track of an interpretation of the Islamic Republic as a religious totalitarian regime, and I have arguments to defend this position. But I know that not everyone necessarily agrees with this characterization. I’m thinking in particular of the discussions I’ve had with Hamit Bozarslan, for whom the nature of this regime is rather authoritarian.

The question of ideology in Ricœur interested me precisely because the way the philosopher approaches it gave me a rigorous conceptual tool with which to defend my philosophical position on the totalitarian nature of the regime.

The fact that a totalitarianism can arise in a society still deeply marked by premodern structures and imaginaries remains debatable. But Ágnes Heller’s work is very interesting from this point of view.

Heller insists that this is a properly modern political invention, but she shows, on the other hand, that a modern totalitarianism can perfectly well graft itself onto a religious imaginary inherited from the premodern world and use that imaginary to build an entirely new system of domination.

It is in this way that she offers a very interesting analysis of the totalitarianism of the Khomeinist revolution. She does not see in Khomeinism a simple return to a traditional or religious order, but rather the transformation of a religious doctrine into a totalizing political project, sustained by modern forms of organization, mobilization, and domination. In her text titled “An Imaginary Preface to the 1984 Edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Heller thus places Khomeini’s Iran among the new possible manifestations of totalitarian thought, in this case in the form of a religious doctrine. She had described what many people overlooked.

In the Iranian case, this analysis is all the more interesting given that the modernization and industrialization efforts undertaken before the Islamic Revolution, notably under the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had provoked strong resistance. The White Revolution, launched in 1963, sparked opposition from part of the clergy and certain traditional sectors whose social and political influence it threatened.

This revealed a deep tension within Iranian society around modernity, its pace, and the manner in which it was carried out. This idea of a premodern imaginary that can be reactivated and reorganized within an entirely modern project of domination struck me as very fruitful in Heller’s work. The regime born of the Khomeinist revolution does not, in this sense, constitute a pure and simple return to the past. It represents, rather, a modern form of totalitarianism that transforms religious tradition into a totalizing political ideology. But I want to make clear that what truly led me to Ágnes Heller were my readings of Ricœur, along with all the difficulties those readings raised in my interpretation of the nature of the Islamic Republic’s regime. I was specifically looking for a way out of these difficulties, a way to resolve the conceptual problems I was running into, and it was in this process that I encountered Heller’s work.

In what sense do you speak of an “eclipse of utopia” rather than simply its absence — is it utopian imagination itself that is confiscated by religious power?

ATA: In Ricœur, ideology and utopia each unfold according to three levels of functioning. These levels correspond to one another, but they do not constitute a stable equilibrium or a perfectly symmetrical regulation. And this is precisely what I find very interesting.

Ideology can first fulfill an integrative function. It can also serve to legitimize a social order and a system of authority. Its third level of functioning rests on an enterprise of distortion and concealment of reality. Utopia, for its part, opens the field of the possible and allows the imagination to conceive of another way of living together. It can also call into question existing systems of legitimation and reveal the gap between the claims of authority and citizens’ belief in its legitimacy. Utopia can also tip over into escapism, chimera, and the unrealizable.

In short, what is healthy in ideology can prevent utopia from completely detaching itself from reality and becoming mere escapism. Conversely, the critical power of utopia prevents ideology from closing in on itself, becoming rigid, and petrifying. It is a dialectical tension, always fragile.

It is from this point that I use the expression “the eclipse of utopia.” I am trying precisely to show how the Islamic Republic, through its ideology, set out to destroy every horizon capable of allowing a population — the Iranian nation, if you will — to dream otherwise. Now, a society deprived of utopia is not merely a society deprived of dreams: it also loses part of its critical capacity, its power to imagine the present differently and to project itself toward the future. This can also partly explain a form of paralysis observed in societies subjected to and dominated by totalitarian ideologies. Iran was no exception.

We must never forget that Iraq’s invasion of Iran also greatly contributed to advancing the ideology, to the point that, if a utopia remained possible, it could only be one inherent to that very ideology. The more the political-religious ideology of the Islamic Republic imposed itself as a totalizing representation of reality, the more the space of the possible shrank. The utopian dimension, which should allow any society to project itself forward, gradually faded away.

That is what I call “the eclipse of utopia”: utopia was no longer able to play its role of contestation and openness, because it was crushed by the closure, rigidity, and violence of the Islamic Republic’s ideology.