Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi. Foucault in Iran

French intellectuals often tend to be more politicized than their academic counterparts elsewhere in northern Europe; and some might have conceived of the Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979 as another outburst of political energy similar to that which they had witnessed and, perhaps, participated in themselves in France in May 1968. A decade later and far away, different voices, both secular and religious, intellectuals, students, and trade unionists, had come together—with the difference that the Iranian Revolution turned out to be not only far more massive but also, apparently, more effective, in manifold and unexpected ways. The events in Iran strongly preoccupied the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984), who then went on to write about them in some thirteen essays during Iran’s revolutionary period. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi’s Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment is not a systematic account of the Iranian Revolution, nor an account of a European author with a broad conceptual and analytical profile and intellectual curiosity. Instead it intimately weaves elements from the two and brings them into conversation with one another. This would not have been achieved without previous immersion in both, brought to fruition after years of introspection and reexamination.

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