Genealogy of Persian Satire in the History of Iran after Islam

In this paper, using the theoretical method of Paul Michel Foucault, paleontology and genealogy, we study the history of Persian satire. We also show how humor is arranged in the face of various discourses, and applied the dominant and marginal discourses. The paleontology of the discourses governing the historical community is analyzed and, in Foucault's view, it is the genealogy of real history, and in this way it examines the hidden parts of history. According to genealogy, power uses discourses to make the universe meaningful. In the continuation of Foucault's long-standing work, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, with their discursive approach, give color to the meaningfulness of the world. The literary forms of each period are the birth of episteme and the discourses governing that historical period, and in fact, the production knowledge of each discourse is to overcome other discourses. For the analysis of power and power relations, the history of Iran is divided into three episteme of the sacred period, episteme of the semi-eternal period, and human episteme (material), and then the dominant discourses in each episteme are identified and analyzed through the method of Laclau and Mouffe's discourse analysis, which is a more advanced and more effective form of Foucault’s discourse. In the end, we show that satire, in its current sense, includes a reductive view of invective and facetiousness did not prevail in the past Persian literature. In the past, it was only invective, facetiousness, and irony and the ultimate goal was to ridicule and destroy, not to correct. Correction means improving the status of each discourse and preventing its collapse, and is one of the components which, with the definition of satire, gradually entered Persian literature. We see a prominent example of this type of comic in the satire after the Islamic Revolution, especially in Golagha's satire.