TEHRAN – A Persian translation of French philosopher and literary critic Michel Foucault’s book “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences” has recently been published by Mahi Publications in Tehran. 

The book has been translated into Persian by Fatemeh Valiani. 

With vast erudition, Foucault cuts across disciplines and reaches back into the seventeenth century to show how classical systems of knowledge, which linked all of nature within a great chain of being and analogies between the stars in the heavens and the features in a human face, gave way to the modern sciences of biology, philology and political economy. 

The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of the received truths.

In the work that established him as the most important French thinker since Sartre, Michel Foucault offers startling evidence that “man”, man as a subject of scientific knowledge, is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in culture.

Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, in 1926. He lectured in universities throughout the world; served as a director at the Institut Francais in Hamburg, Germany and at the Institut de Philosophi at the Faculte des Lettres in the University of Clermont-Ferrand, France; and wrote frequently for French newspapers and reviews. At the time of his death in 1984, he held a chair at France’s most prestigious institutions, the College de France.

Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. 

His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism and critical theory.

Photo: Front cover of the Persian translation of Michel Foucault’s book “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences”.

RM/MMS/YAW