The Reception of Foucault’s Ideas through Translations in the Reformist Period

Like people, ideas and theories travel from person to person, from situation to situation, and from one period to another. The question that arises is whether traveling theory stays as it is or it undergoes some changes as a result of its move. Drawing on the historiography of translation, we investigated one of the most important philosophical discourses of the twentieth century in the West and Iran, namely Foucault’s discourse. We tried to discover which part of Foucault’s work or ideas was the focus of translators in the Reformist period, stretching from 1997 to 2004. To this end, all Persian translations of Foucault’s works, together with Persian translations about Foucault and original writings in periodicals were selected and their common themes were extracted. The findings of this study show that translators were the main actors in importing Foucault’s ideas to Iran. Also, criticizing power relationship was the main theme in the analyzed corpus. Given the fact that Foucault took a controversial stance on the Islamic revolution in the early years of the Islamic Revolution, this study addresses another question related to the issue of Foucault’s reception. Indeed, the paper examines whether translators of Foucault’s works translated his works regardless of his stance on the revolution. For this purpose, all translated and original texts as well as articles in periodicals (1997-2004) were analyzed. The main themes were extracted and tagged according to Foucault’s thought on power. The results indicate that translators were the main actors in this discourse, and Foucault’s thought served as a tool for translators to criticize social phenomena, and the critique of power has been the most frequent concept in all Foucault-related publications (i.e., translations, writings, and magazines).