Madness as Response-Ability Against State Terror: A Case Study from Iranian Revolution

In this chapter, we engage with different forms of atrocities committed against imprisoned dissidents in post-revolutionary Iran. This is just a sample of state violence at large against its own people, from whom it seeks legitimacy and validation. This time, legitimacy is sort by a theocratic state. Through a case study, we demonstrate how madness can be both a product of and a response to state violence, namely, imprisonment and torture. Kazemi interviewed more than 30 former political prisoners who survived torture and imprisonment in the 1980s in Iran, and, now, live in exile, as part of the Iranian diaspora. Their testimonies demonstrate how human resilience can overcome the harshest of circumstances, sustain psychological harm, witness the madness and death of friends, and yet manage to carry it all to a harbor. By a harbor, we mean their own memoirs, silence, suicide, drawings, and even witnessing via “madness.” We investigate the processes and social relations involved in how some prisoners went “mad” and some remained “sane.” Using the Transnational Disability Model (Kazemi, Critical Disability Discourse Journal, 31–63: 2017), we defetishize their disability by demonstrating how madness and sanity can be deliberately created (i.e., socially organized and imposed) from within extremely brutal institutions. Also, we ponder the ways in which madness could be the bodymind’s “response” (Sakhi, Ethics and the resistant subject Levinas, Foucault, Marx. York University. Toronto: 2014) to power/violence or a “survival strategy” in the context of asymmetrical power relations (e.g., patriarchy, theocracy). As racialized activists-scholars from the global south, we strive in this chapter to re-articulate disabled-dissident subject’s “response-abilities” in the form of “madness.”