[...]at might take in or shake up the other without harm

historical comfort zones ...and ...the ongoing torment of worldlessness

(Avital,) are the mourners of authority masking another loss for which “authority” would be a cover?

Greek way of handling:
domestic affairs --> persuasion
foreign affairs --> force and violence


*authority of the Father
ontological proof of God's existence (Kojeve contends) rests on the metaphysical placement of divine authority as the authority of the Father, who is seen as cause*
--> paternal authority in power and political authority --> as author of a work who exerts authority over the ‘Oeuvre’

father/judge/Pir: the principal figure holding together political and ethical qualities of existence ~ imago (in psychoanalysis is an idealized image of someone--usually a parent--formed in childhood), firm but benevolent caretaking, funding sources of divine authority, hierarchical hold, categorical imperative, a secure ground from which commands can be issued, “Achtung!”,
-authority subsists on borrowed transcendence
-authority produces effects of respectful adherence
-softening the space of committed citizenry (ground for political relatedness)
-is it possible to keep authority separate from respect? what this seclusion assures?

(Pir's authority nearing the) sublime regions of human relatedness

Kojeve > What accounts for the unconditional surrender of human reactivity?
legitimate principle of coercion

God is always the God of our ancestors --> character of “tradition”

where violence begins or what gets counted as violence?

the discourse of effacement (امحاء emha’, self-effacement: withdrawing into the background, making yourself inconspicuous)

is there an authority outside inequality? responsible asymmetry, the egological space, tropes of domination?

%this is anout the quality of asymmetry----(are we still in the realm of the human?)

Levinas tactics is spectacular, he runs down patriarchy and meets the majestic escalade of the absolute other, he doesn't escape internment (toghif توقیف)
[patriarchy: when it is “of course” obvious who is the mother]

(where do we go with helplessness directed by the destruction of the world?)

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[Sennett] on authority, trust and cooperation

...in both a subtle and a coherent social structure

inequality makes a profound difference in the lives of children

“earned authority” manages the everyday experience of inequality


cultures in which the *dramaturgical display of yourself* is foregrounded =/= diplomacy as model for social relationships

facebook, an engineered social network organized for display =/= communication



in capitalism, in firms people at the top has more power but less authority, and that is a problem.
in reverse, Lear loses its power but keeps his authority, his lag on administrative change.

authority is a bound, a volunteriy obidience and care-giving
parent-children: something the child needs desperitly, they need direction, they need people not only as guids but as witnesses of what they are doing.


the destructive charismatic authoiry in politics
tests if he/she can keep himself together

the charisma of the user on facebook (marat, jonathan, etc., but both are also very good at face to face communication)

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Sennett

we don't know how to use material objects and machines well

craftsmanship: the quest to make physical things well
•how the head and hand are connected
•doing something well for its own sake --> skill (not honoured in modern society)
==> free the craftsman (Sennett)


in many social relations we do not know exactly what we need from others – or what they ought to want from us

cooperation as a craft --> skill of understanding and responding to one another

urban design is a craft in peril (dar khatar)
•too much urban design ==> homogeneous and rigid
•modern built forms ==> only a faint imprint of personal and shared experience

Sennett --> (better understanding of) ‘material craftsmanship + social cooperation’ ==> cities better made

‘homo faber project’: the ancient idea of Man as his or her own maker, man as a maker of life through concrete practices
•limits on desire and will
•the experience of other people's needs (which cannot be reconciled with our own)
+ to recognize and honour what lies beyond us (and before us)

social relations & physical environment

issues of practical skill, tool, meaning, value


***the rebellious child (in me)


United States has become an intensely tribal society
*tribalism* [= adverse to getting along with those who differ, solidarity with others like yourself, & “thinking you know what other people are like without knowing them"], in the form of nationalism, destroyed Europe during the first half of the 20th century
--✕--> complex societies:
•workers flowing across borders
•different ethnicities, races and religions
•diverging ways of sexual and family life

“The ‘self’ is a composite of sentiments, affiliations and behaviours which seldom fit neatly together; any call for tribal unity will reduce this personal complexity.”
-Sennett

(for Aristotle:) city = synoikismos(= coming together of people from diverse family tribes--each *oikos* having its own history, allegiances, property, family gods)
[some my german friends are making us all poor in not recognizing this, that similar people cannot bring a city into existence. city obliges people to think about and deal with others who have different
loyalties to (linguistic differences). Germany, lacking direct experience of others, because of lesser colonial encounters in its history, falls back on fearful fantasies with the new refugees coming. integration, a bad response to the problems of living with difference]


(Robert Putnam:) people who live in homogeneous local communities appear more sociably inclined towards and curious about others in the larger world : first- hand experience does not weaken stereotypes
-the case of Brussels: withdraw from neighbours who differ --> to hibernate

attitudes
actual behaviour

[*]cooperation: an exchange in which the participants benefit from the encounter
can be informal as well as formal: experience of mutual pleasure in a bar exchange gossip
difficult kind of cooperation: join people who:
•have separate or conflicting interests
•do not feel good about each other
•are unequal
•do not understand one another
•(different faith communities)
}==> responsiveness as an ethical disposition

rituals of civility
as small as ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ put abstract notions of mutual respect into practice

in the spirit of generosity, let's not write off the banker (or the Mullah) as a human being --> instead of “fuck you” how do we respond to our differences in a difficult social environment such as contemporary Iran --> what skills are needed for this hard cooperation? --Sennett--> dialogic

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what remains from christianity after its self-deconstruction? (Nancy)

(what theology doesn't know about itself?) recovered from the repressive power of religion

Nancy's “shattered love” is the stuff of Hafez

#love (and greeting?) doesn't belong to the realm of giveable things
Lacan's definition of love consists in giving what one does not have, (filling emptiness with emptiness) --> to give something i ‘would’ have? --> (giving that which is not a property, not even one's self,) to give behind or beyond any subject, any self? --> *the giving of the fact that i cannot possess myself* ==> ‘to give' = 'to give up’
***love: to share the impossibility of being a self***
----> (Nancy's) ‘body’ (of political thought): not as an organicity, but of community as the living to share precisely an impossibility of being-in-common (=/= ontologize the community, after the death of God, Rousseau: community of mankind as the foundation of politics --> “man” comes from the “contract” and not reverse)
----> “giving” the (Derridean) ‘gift’ cannot succeed if the giver knows about his/her gift; *unpresentable*
--✕--> politics and the political always implies fulfillment, law, closed space, *closure*

(Pir's) heaven of value

(Bergson's) supplementary soul

there is a nihilistic way in which we destroy

“everything is political” =/= everything is directly ontologically political ==> totalitarianism: everything belongs to law --> make law about anything (--> Plato's political theology: thought is founded on something; - @Varinia, “management of justice”)

national aestheticism

over-educated ~=? brainwashed

[in my lectures i am trying to teach something (Heidegger, Sa'di, etc.) in ‘a certain way,’ and that ‘certain way’ touches me and i hope touches my audience, even if one don't understand much of it at the time of lecture. i am trying to think by the outside, what comes from outside, being touched by it. right now in apass this outside consists of my (living) peers, getting their quantity of imposed ideas and try to work with that. to ‘take part']

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(how?) the exposure of violence becomes the origin of violence (@Mona)

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a preoccupation (of someone/yours) --into--> analytical solution/terms (for example ‘aesthetics’ and ‘gender’ for Strathern)

gift (produced to be seen) --> moments of performance --> *creating a context of display*

[*]gift: participate in and generate internal relations <--> commodities: participate in and generate external relations


you gain prestige in what you give


*there is a lot of ambiguity about what can be seen and what cannot be seen* (<-- this must be understood for any one who is invested in ‘showing’)
***--> the alternation between what you conceal and what you reveal (is[?] at the heart of thinking about creativity, about reproduction, about the perpetuation of society, about the perpetuation of relations)


exchange wealth between two clan groups
wealth
•has an aesthetic form
•has to be grown as well as exchanged
•must be accumulated privately and secretly
•must be revealed at the *moment of transfer*
•has to take a proper form ~ recognized by others as appropriate


[*]aesthetic = a proper form (at the moment of revelation) that other people have to respond
(--✕--> european notion of aesthetic = eliciting a sense of appreciation of beauty)


(my sister's wedding had/created) an appropriate form


**** exchange situations [shows, exhibitions, events, weddings, etc.] has to appear in a certain form, otherwise people will not recognize it, otherwise they fail to impress people ****
@Foad

-what are Tehran's contemporary contexts in which we can see exchanges working?

younger people are impressing one another in terms of consuming or participation in sports, or mobile phones, or whatever --> they create different kinds of relations (#telegram iran?)
(how among my freinds we impress one another?)
younger people, invest value in different things from what older people do


money does not have anything else but number

things that shine, things that glisten, things that sparkle --> a sense in which these objects *give off a presence* [@Janina] and people are affected by this

*quality of shininess* indicates the successful intervention of ancestral spirits --> a spiritual condition (acquainted with health)

they must display to be regarded as worthwhile

with mobile phones: what is going on here, what is their value, how are they circulating, how do people regard them?


(ibn ebn ابن) people belong because their fathers belonged and so forth + what they give away, the (gift) shells, can be regarded as female : items that have come into men's possessions (=/= Karin's gifts)
-so the shells are passive objects, women are/were (traditionally), classically regarded as objects in a similar way and were given the names of shells


***how to think about vocabulary:***
-i cannot start using economics of the market to describe what i am talking about
-in the vocabulary of gift exchange (Strathern) may be able to find the vocabulary of analysis (like an artist choosing the color)
-Strathern choice: the vocabulary of gift exchange might give her the vocabulary by which to start describing, is an *artificial choice*. the vocabulary of the gift economy gives her a lot of terms in which to understand. but those terms are only useful for the purposes of understanding that particular set of data, and if i then leave that data, and if i follow these objects as they move out of the highlands, and if they became, if they came into an art market, then absolutely what we would be dealing with is commodities[...] --> situated knowledges [#SK], #import function


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*literature = the question of reading* (=/= matter of novels and poems)

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what is the language of war?
(Keenan > Weizman:) we need to understand war as discourse --> *war = a threatened discourse*
-The language component of war exists in the gap between the level of destruction which is “possible” and the level of destruction which is “actually applied” in every given situation.

when war is no longer a means but an end in itself(?) -->? Hezbollah

deterrence: a means of controlling a person's behavior through negative motivational influences

“We are law-abiding, and we go wild.”


violence stripped of semiotics

The logic, the reason, of conflict is thus political ... for Clausewitz, politics is essentially logic, logos, discourse, people reasoning with one another, thinking and speaking, exchanging


@Luis, why conflict could be my concern? because it marks the breakdown of politics, when we can no longer have a conversation, engage in the game, where there is no possibility of further exchange, there is fighting

failure ==> use of force

Saskia Sassen called the attacks of September 11 “A Message From the Global South”
she wrote that the attacks bore witness to a failure in communication or to a “translation problem”
for her the language of September 11 attacks was clear
Sassen's dangerous and depraved rationalization of September 11: south is speaking in a language that needs no translation



the word ‘conflict’ (is coined as a discoursive necessity and) bears with itself an analysis of politics which sees it as a rational enterprise, a structured confrontation or conversation aimed at compromise or reconciliation, the exchange of demands and the negotiation of outcomes --> a Greek tradition : to protect politics from irrationality and persuasion, and that State's monopoly of law enforcement is the only legitimate violence --> (as a term) ‘conflict’ carries with itself a telos of consensus (etefagh-e ara اتفاق آرا Übereinstimmung), agreement ==> perfect understanding ~~--> (Greek -->) democracy's dream of overcoming internal opacities of mediation or signification, dream of a final unification, dream of a clear universal language

(Barthes’ fable of) the woodcutter[~= an agent of change] ==> language = act (without mediation or image, operating *an immediate transformation* ==> politic) :
If I am a woodcutter and I am led to name the tree which I am cutting down [j'abats], whatever the form of my sentence, I speak the tree, I do not speak about it. This means that my language is operative, linked to its object in a transitive way; between the tree and myself, there is nothing but my labor, that is to say, an act. This is a political language: it presents nature to me only to the extent that I am going to transform it, it is a language by which I act the object; the tree is not an image for me, it is simply the meaning of my action. But if I am not a woodcutter, I can no longer speak the tree, I can only speak of it, about it.
@apass @Femke

(Barthes:) political = operative (~ active, transformative, destructive) --> this is an important fable for artists

talking about ‘conflict’ is also like this, is a “political” speech, an “operative” language, it “presents” the object of my action to me, which is democracy, and not Colombia

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