Taʿziyeh – The Story of Imam Hussein at Karbala (Iran)

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Taʿziyeh—the Shi’a passion drama commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein at Karbala—transcends the boundaries of theatre. It is a ritual technology of collective subjectivation, through which Shi’a communities have, for centuries, constituted themselves as ethical and spiritual bodies via public grief, narrative sacrifice, and the aesthetics of resistance.

From the Foucauldian lens, this performance is a form of “truth-telling” (parrhesia)—a dramatic revelation not only of what happened, but of what must be remembered. Hussein’s stand against tyranny is staged not merely as a historical event, but as a mirror of the self, inviting each participant to ask: Am I aligned with the ethics of courage, justice, and fidelity?

In The Care of the Self, Foucault emphasizes how certain ancient practices cultivated selves not through abstract moral codes, but through ritualized engagement with death, truth, and suffering. Taʿziyeh embodies this par excellence: it is the rehearsal of mourning that fashions the subject as one who lives in the legacy of sacrifice.

Here, actors do not “act” in the Western sense. The performers often weep genuinely. The boundaries between self and character, spectator and martyr, blur into a shared subjectivity. This is the Foucauldian limit-experience—a confrontation with the edge of the self that remakes it. One is not simply watching; one is undergoing a spiritual reconstitution through affect.

The theatre's layout supports this: the stage is circular, inviting panoptic intimacy—a topology of immersion. There is no "fourth wall." Time becomes cyclical; each Ashura is the same yet renewed, repeating the ethical demand: What kind of subject will you become in the face of injustice?

Even the antagonists in Taʿziyeh (e.g., Yazid’s soldiers) are played with stark face paint, separating them visually and morally. This aligns with Foucault’s view of dispositifs—the network of visual, discursive, and ritual practices that produce certain types of knowledge, emotion, and ethics.

In Taʿziyeh, truth is not deduced, but embodied through suffering, passed from voice to voice, heart to heart. The ritual mourners become truth-bearers, soul-makers. This is not a theatre of representation—it is a theatre of transformation, a technē tou biou, an art of living through pain.