Traces of a Revolution: Reopening the Moment of Contingency in 1979 Iran

What would it mean to understand the Islamic revolution as more than a given, enclosed sequence of events? What might happen if we consider these events as continuous precipitations, within the boundaries of the nation-state, but also for the greater region, and in the world itself? Such a thought-image would be reminiscent of a Borgesian past in which fragments are never entirely lost; traces are not effaced but continue to mark the present. In his erudite analysis of Iran's revolution as well as a much-needed exploration of Michel Foucault's position of critical reticence, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi guides us to consider these questions by resurfacing the embryonic possibilities that inhered in the revolutionary moment of 1979, beyond the myth of the "stolen revolution." Foucault in Iran begins with a discussion of Foucault's indictment from both French intellectuals and scholars of Iran who followed and perpetuated a teleological conception of history. In an attempt to understand this moment of defiance, the study traverses a number of issues that faced both Foucault and our understanding of Iran: chapter 1, "Thinking the Unthinkable; The Revolutionary Movement in Iran"; chapter 2, "How Did Foucault Make Sense of the Iranian Revolution"; chapter 3, "Misrepresenting the Revolution, Misreading Foucault"; chapter 4, "The Reign of Terror, Women's Issues, and Feminist Politics"; chapter 5: "Was ist Aufklärung? The Iranian Revolution as a Moment of Enlightenment"; "Conclusion: Writing the History of the Present." By revisiting this significant historical unfolding, Ghamari-Tabrizi conducts a critical historiographical narration of the revolutionary movement to repair much of the epistemic violence committed by dismissive critics and to highlight the contingency of historical change. His provocative historical account reopens the affective space-time of the revolution, not to simply reflect on its failures but to think of them as historical possibilities that continue to reverberate in the Iranian ethos and in our larger political present. This timely work attempts to reach beyond a reinforcement of Iran's contemporary geopolitical status (by offering a historical narrative untethered from the force of its historical present) and to shift our attention to the theoretical significance of the Iranian Revolution. Equally important is his account of Foucault, whose engagement with Iran has been largely dismissed by both scholars of Foucault and Iranian history, alike. Thus Ghamari-Tabrizi introduces a new historiography "in which trajectories, ideas, relationships, and other eventful contingencies are understood as elements in a condition of historical possibilities" (fi, 7).

Ghamari-Tabrizi begins with a reflection on the difficult task of separating his own narrative of events as a participant in the revolution from the revolution as its own temporal unfolding.¹ While most historical accounts of the Iranian Revolution cast the heavy weight of postrevolutionary atrocities back onto the powerful moments prior to the revolution, Ghamari-Tabrizi's striking account addresses these horrors while also recapturing the moment of historical possibility that was of interest to Foucault at the time. Against contemporary conditions in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the revolutionary moment of 1979—its impasse, contingency, and novelty—is routinely seen as having been swallowed by a reign of terror that retroactively subjected the Islamic revolution to a theocratic inevitability. This common assumption is linked to the binary entrapment, which reduces the revolution to a struggle between Islamic forces and secularists. With this sensibility in mind, we are invited to appreciate the "conceptual significance" of the Iranian Revolution concurrently as a "phenomenon of history," as well "as a phenomenon that defies it" (fi, 6). And for this, we turn to Foucault, who saw in Iran a moment of history in action, outside the purview of a Western teleological schema.

As an intellectual who sought to actively engage with his own present, Foucault's approach was that "one must stay close to events, to experience them, be willing to be effected and affected by them."² With this in mind, Foucault avoided prescriptive intellectualism...