Political Spiritualities

This chapter analyzes the tensions, intermittences, and transformations that characterize Foucault’s definition of the notion of political spirituality. Through an analysis of his reportages published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera during the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979, it aims to demonstrate that the refusal to interpret that event in ideological terms is strictly tied to the effort to understand it as a spiritual experience. The revolution thus emerges as an event – both spiritual and political – that redefines the relations between truth, power and subjectivity. Ultimately, I suggest that, while the notion of political spirituality fades from Foucault’s work, the tension it refers to survives in other spiritualities, that is, in other – no less political – ways of giving form to life, truth and resistance.