I’m Keanu Heydari. I study history and theology.

Historians routinely flatten analogy and homology into near-synonymy, but the two concepts make claims of fundamentally different kinds, and recovering the distinction changes what a historical argument can demonstrate and how far it can travel beyond the case at hand.

I reconstruct my early graduate training as an uneven education in subordinating theory to evidence.

Sartre’s 1961 anecdote about rejecting Le Grabuge as a title for Les Temps modernes is no incidental aside but a compact demonstration of retotalization, showing how class position crystallizes in an act of naming and how refusing that name remade disposition into disciplined engagement.

Leonard D’Cruz asks whether Foucault’s radical historicism truly escapes transcendental philosophy or smuggles it back in through the historical a priori, omnipresent power, and subjectivation, arguing that naming this tension strengthens historicist critique rather than defeating it.

Ciaran Cronin argues that Bourdieu offers a more actionable account of power than Foucault, but his critique demands a normative framework neither thinker claims to provide and misreads Foucault as foreclosing resistance; the two are better combined than opposed.

Royalist nostalgia in the Iranian diaspora and hawkish U.S. Iran policy operate as mutually reinforcing formations, each lending the other moral warrant and institutional durability; a genealogical reading exposes the contingency and silences that sustain this co-produced longing.