The origins of this book go back to my Master's degree. It was there that I first posed hazily a question that has occupied me ever since. What is the relation of history and event: what unites long stretches of incremental change with sudden political ruptures? Although a seemingly simple question, it took a long time to condense into this pure form. Initially, I posed it in terms of a somewhat misplaced attempt to apply Alain Badiou's idea of the event to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. I say somewhat, because it is not implausible to suggest that the revolution could support a Badiouian notion of political change. Unlike the classical Marxist image of history tending towards its secular, communist telos, the revolution's amalgam of Islamic, anti-imperialist and Marxist currents painted a more complex picture of the direction history was heading in. Furthermore, one of its influential ideologues, Ali Shariati, a thinker deeply influenced by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, advocated a utopian rebirth for Shia Islam that at a stretch could be positioned as a theory of the event. At the same time, I was also sympathetic to reasons for not considering the Iranian Revolution through a Badiouian lens. The most widely participated-in revolution in human history soon degenerated into a vehicle for reaction. By 1982 Khomeini had crushed alternative currents within the revolution, the factory shoras had been dissolved, and women's freedom was left greatly diminished. If the Iranian Revolution was an event, its promise seemed more fleeting than even Badiou's theory could account for (in The Rebirth of History, Badiou (2012a: 37) declares the revolution an ‘obscure paradoxicality … heralding the end of the clear days of revolutions’).

Despite these difficulties in applying grand theory to the idiosyncrasies of real political history, Badiou's notion of the event still appeared to reflect a sea change in how we conceive of historical change. In place of progressive notions of historical development was a new focus on unpredictable ruptures, revolutionary flashes and revolts, all of which seemed to offer little more than a contingent possibility that the political order can be refashioned.