Journal of Al-Qadisiya University Vol.22 No. 2 2019 21 Iran Archived: A Defence of Foucault against his Detractors Prof. Areej M.J. Al-Khafaji (Ph.D.) Department of English/College of Arts/Al-Qadisiya University email: dr_areej1972@yahoo.com Abstract What would motivate a first-rank poststructuralist philosopher to engage suddenly with journalism? Generally speaking, journalism is associated with superficial intellectual productions, making alliance to it unappealing to professional philosophers. Then, what would make a well-acknowledged French philosopher of language like Michel Foucault take his 1978-79 Iran-adventure which cost him his reputation and left him severely wounded by harsh critiques so that, from June 1979 until his untimely death in 1984, he avoided talking publically about Iran. The liberal intellectual milieu, outside and inside France, blamed him for supporting the rise of wilayat-al-faqih (the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist) in Iran. Re- reading Foucault's Iranian Writings forty years after their first publication, this paper argues that Foucault's focal interest in Iran was totally misunderstood. He had nothing to do with the Islamic government, rather he sought after a genuine understanding of the rudimental issues that united the majority of Iranian people. Working methodically through Foucault's fragmentary writings on Iran as 'historico-philosophic' archives, a new understanding of their technologies, knowledge, discourse, politics, and practices is sought. Key Words: Foucault, Iran, archive, power, bio-power, ethics, political spirituality, pastoral power Nothing is more important in the history of a people than the rare moments when it rises up collectively in order to bring down a regime that it no longer support. Foucault's open letter to Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, April 14, 1979. Introduction: What did Foucault say in his Iranian Writings? What did not he say, or better, what did he avoid saying? It is quite surprising that throughout his Iranian Writings, which thanks to Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson (2005) we can read their entire English version, 1 Foucault had never used the word revolution or he used it between quotation marks. He was mainly concerned with the rapid formation of a 'collective will' that worked out the political struggle of the Iranian 'populaire movement.' Hired as a special correspondent of the Corriere della sera in the fall of 1978, two major issues busied the readers' worry at that time: Carter's America and Iran in the last year of Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi's reign. Dedicatedly, he chose to be involved with the second issue and made it his own battle, but what did he support exactly in all his newspaper reports, opinion pieces, open letters, and interviews that were published between September 1978 and May 1979, the span of the Iranian event? For whom and about whom did he write these dispatches? Throughout his œuvre, Foucault was involved with politics, saying: "the very definition of an intellectual comprises a person who necessarily is entangled with the politics and major decisions of his society." During the 1970s, 'a new diagnosis of the present,' 2 was