, Michel Foucault (right) spoke with philosopher and journalist Maurice Clavel (1920-1979), during a demonstration in front of a Renault factory, in the western Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt.

Michel Foucault's writings on the Islamic Revolution in Iran now appear in book form. The volume's four editors have compiled all of the texts related to the "reportages of ideas" that Foucault produced on the subject, from September 1978 to February 1979. They have supplemented them with several other documents, articles and responses drawn from the debates these writings sparked at the time, as well as with the "workshop" behind these analyses, including fragments, letters and interview notebooks. By bringing the philosopher's archives to light, the editors allow us to reassess texts and political positions that they believe have been overlooked or misunderstood.

It is true that Foucault's two trips to Iran, in September and November 1978, and his conclusions on the subject, which he published in Le Monde in an article entitled "Useless to Revolt?" in May 1979, focused solely on the uprising that led to the shah's ouster and said nothing about what followed: the rapid establishment of the new regime and the Islamic Republic of Iran's first institutions. It is true that Foucault was only interested in "the strategy of the uprising" and logically refused to respond to critics who raised concerns about its consequences. Foucault used the Iranian experiment as a laboratory for his own intellectual experiment: a living refutation of the classical revolutionary tradition and of the link between revolution and the refounding of the state.