Mehdi Pârsâ is the most prolific Persian translator of Jacques Derrida, having rendered eight of his works into Persian. He holds a first PhD in philosophy from Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran, where his dissertation examined Derrida’s reading of Plato and Hegel, and a second PhD from the Universität Bonn’s Institut für Philosophie, with a thesis on the problem of ontology and epistemology in contemporary European philosophy. He is the author of Derrida and Philosophy (2014), Derrida and Media (2012), A Reading of Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense (2022), and, most recently, Machinic Ontology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) — a book that marks his decisive turn from commentator on Derrida to metaphysician in his own right.

An unlikely encounter

There is something almost providential about the way a French Jewish philosopher’s most notoriously untranslatable idea found a second life in the seminaries and university corridors of the Islamic Republic. Jacques Derrida, who spent a career unsettling the metaphysical certainties of the West, has become, since the 1990s, one of the most quietly influential thinkers in Iranian academic life — not because his thought was easy, but precisely because it was not.

A study by Rouhollah Hosseini and Somayeh Ahmadi of the University of Tehran, published in Recherches en Langue et Littérature Françaises, traces this itinerary. Derrida’s prose is famously resistant even to native French readers, and his signature term “déconstruction” itself refuses translation — German, English, and Italian all simply absorbed the French word, not using the word واسازی (vāsāzi, deconstruction) opposed to ( بازسازی) bâz-sâzi, reconstruction). Yet in a country whose intellectual class Hosseini and Ahmadi describe as still finding its bearings vis-à-vis Western modernity, this most hermetic of philosophers became something like a household name in the seminar room. Their explanation is sociological as much as philosophical: deconstruction offered Iranian readers a set of tools for taking apart the authority of the foreign texts being imported — a way of criticizing the West using a thoroughly Western method.

Derrida’s name entered Iranian discourse not through direct translation but by relay — first through English, only belatedly through French. Bâbak Ahmadi’s Modernity and Critical Thought and Rezâ Barâheni’s Waking Dream introduced fragments of Derridean vocabulary in the 1990s as refracted echoes rather than scholarship proper. It was only in 2004, with Payâm Yazdândjou’s Persian rendering of Positions, that Derrida acquired a direct textual presence in Persian.

Pârsâ’s own itinerary condenses this larger pattern: a Tehran doctorate on Derrida’s reading of Plato and Hegel, followed by a second, in Bonn, on the wider question of European ontology and epistemology — moving from secondhand Persian-language reception to firsthand philosophical training in the tradition Derrida was reading against.........

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