[...]s/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

(some figurative ‘violence of language’ =/= [Austin, Derrida, Butler ==>] i am talking about paying attention[...]