foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Chapter 3
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The Vis its to Iran and the Controversies with
"Atoussa H." and Maxime Rodinson
On September 16, 1978, Foucault arrived in Iran for a ten-day visit, at a
time when the uprising was beginning to make headway. In addition to
the wave of anger inside the country, the September 8 massacre in Tehran
had also sparked a fifteen-thousand-strong anti-shah demonstration in Paris
("Quinze mille" 1978). Before 1978, Foucault had occasionally signed statements
against the Pahlavi regime. He was also acquainted with some of
the French and Iranian anti-shah activists in PaFis, including National Front
leader Ahmad Salamatian. The latter reported that his contacts with Foucault
went back as far as 1973 and that he had visited Foucault's home several times
over the years. Foucault had been extremely modest during their encounters
and took the time to listen carefully to what his Iranian interlocutors had to
say (personal communication from Ahmad Salamatian, December 12, 2002).
Also in 1978, the editors of Carriere della sera had asked Foucault to write regularly
for their publication, Italy's most respected daily newspaper. Foucault
called together a group of younger intellectuals to work with him, among
them his lover Thierry Voeltzel. Andre Glucksmann, and Alain Finkielkraut.
This group accepted his proposal to write reports on world events as a collective.
Besides Foucault's articles on Iran, the only other result of this initiative
was a November 1978 article by Finkielkraut on Carter's America, for which
Foucault wrote an introduction. Biographer David Macey has suggested that
Carriere della sera's owner, Rizzoli Publications, was also contemplating "subsequent
republication in book form" of these reports, something that never
materialized either. Be that as it may, the newspaper's editors treated Foucault's
articles as a major event. In a front-page statement accompanying his
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