ABSTRACT
Foucault’s writings on the Islamic revolution in Iran have not received the critical attention they deserve.1 Published in Italian and French periodicals between the autumn of 1978 and the spring of 1979, they may be seen as exercises in modern history or, as Foucault himself called it, ‘journalism of ideas’; as such, they form an interesting complement to his other forays into cultural history, which deal with temporally more remote, but specifically European, events and institutions. By and large, however, these articles have been either passed over in a slightly embarrassed silence, or taken as proof that Foucault’s enthusiasm for oppositional movements led him to applaud uncritically dictatorial regimes. Both attitudes are mistaken: these journalistic writings indeed have a rather problematic status within Foucault’s work as a whole, but not for any such obvious reasons. No apologies are made here for trying, in a perhaps rather un-Foucauldian manner, to locate them in his œuvre. Further, not being a specialist on either Foucault or the Iranian revolution, I hope to avoid the two opposing risks of burying difficulties under apologetic exegesis and of merely pointing out alleged ‘factual errors’ at the expense of more interesting theoretical questions.
