[...]stern aesthetics

most iranian writers of the new poetry movement have eviscerated, melted, flooded, iced over, or burned down a city at some point in their artistic career (--> Shamlu's Yal-o Ejdeha یل و اژدها)

cumulative angers

towards a harmful eloquence شيوايى --> Shamlu


pay attention to the hyper-subjective positioning (=/= hospitality, cosmopolitanism, transindivualism) of the “I” of the iranian poet:

*Akhavan: “It is I, your nightly guest, a forlorn gypsy. It is I, an afflicted stone that has been kicked around. It is I, the lowly insult of creation, an untuned melody.”
منم من، میهمان هر شبت، لولی وش مغموم /  منم من، سنگ تیپاخورده ی رنجور /  منم، دشنام پست آفرینش، نغمه ی ناجور

*Baraheni: “I am the rotten well of history ... Throw your matches down so that I can set the whole world aflame. I am an underground man. My fire alone shall appear on the face of the earth.”

*Shamlu: “It is time that I spit out the entirety of my damnation in an endless uproar / I am the first and last dawn / I am Abel standing on the platform of contempt / I am the honor of the universe, having lashed myself and endured it / Such that the black fire of my agony / shames even Hell for its insignificant holdings.”


--> with the maladjusted eyes if the iranian poet... we are at a far distance from western thought, one that seeks a renovated cosmopolitanism as remedy to the injustices of the cityscape in modernity


Mohaghegh's style of writing [when he talks about Hedayat and iranian avant-garde chaotic atmosphere --> (at once) binds and separates the East-West axis] --he--> abandoning transcendent abstractions and restoring it to the language of annihilative venture

*chaos as mask*
chaos = (one of many) eastern poetic mask

chaotic experience (in the service of a lasting nonstate) =/= essence, Being, structure, historical definitions, temporal-spatial specificity

Mohaghegh puts Hedayat's inventiveness in traction with continental philosophy:
•Schopenhauer: existence = reckless collision of transience and nonsensibility <== *dramatic dissociation of the aesthetic from the historical* (<-- Sana's current stance, for Sana the world is will and representation):
history: will's vicious reign over existence
art: space of escape (from the profanity of history, a rare fleeting opportunity to reimagine existence as it potentially could have been but never will be (~=? fiction --> is that why science fiction for iranians does not have the same signification?) [=/= redemptive corrective to the barbarism of the will, =/= weapon by which one might attempt to overthrew the will]
•Hegel: (paradigm of a) complete collapse of subjectivity with history. reason is sovereign of the world
*Dasein: work within the preconceived framework (barriers) of historical consciousness in order to modify its stance within the world
•Marx: the intention of restoring humanity to its actual historicity, positivism + humanism, epochal advancement, *dialectical materialism*: placing subjectivity in a state of subservience to a larger “historical reality”
•Althusser --> *interpellation: power first manifactures a conception of the self that it can later subjugate through the surveillance techniques of the institution
*subjectivity exists solely within the revolutionary progression of the prevailing modes of production*
•Adorno: the discourse of individuality within modernity operates as an accomplice to techniques of reification and the overall obfuscation of the culture industry ~= *assimilation/execution of myth by instrumental reason* -->{ art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants ~ antinomy: art is defined by relation to what it is not (separating itself from what it has developed out of)
(Adorno + Frankfurt School:) **subjectivity thrives in the decisive act of interpretation, one through which the ideological saturation of society finds itself unmasked and history is restored to its contestatory complexitoes**
•Sartre: existential liberation + historical “engagement” + artistic subjectivity --> writing = a praxis-based motioning toward futurity [~=? accelerationism]

Adorno/Sartre --> ***واجب indispensable search for a writing act tied to revolutionary desire, negational change, futural hope, pseudosalvatinoal intentionality*** [=/= Hedayat, Nietzsche]

==> invalidating mimesis as a legitimate conceptual category (!?*)

through an account of self and world as *mythopoetic entities* (~= willed immateriality) --> *chaos-consciousness* (interlacing experience + thought + desire) effectively disbands the Marxian hierarchy of true and false consciousness by virtue of its dissolution of all paradigms of historical “reality”

nowhere-zone between desolation and the everything --> experiential anarchy ==> the poet/artist (~= X-Men: Apocalypse film supervillain character watching the news of last millennia on TV) stands as the incarnation of history's redemption, saving it from itself, and therein bringing into perfect totality the fusion of the self, the aesthetic, and historical Being

historicity of the object
historicity of the subject

critical reason =/= instrumental reason

‘aesthetic depiction of reality =/= objective truth of its operation’ --> journalism
(“[*]artist: a creativity independent and existentially self-sufficient entity standing somewhere beyond the matrices of historical circumstance” =/=) Adorno:
1. artwork can struggle to engage directly with the moment ==> find itself invariably entrapped by the artificial presentations and camouflages of the obscenity it challenges ==> “permit the monstrosity of modern society to emerge in full clarity from the phenomena masking it” [--> an epic ==> freezing the dialectic in a rigid back-and-forth of monolithic polarizations and exaggerated narratives of good and evil]
2. delusion of art's distance from the everyday [--> to resurrect the archaic phantom of sovereignty amid a world of unavoidable mechanistic interconnections]
}==> artwork attests to a *fictive template of freedom* clinging to the *delusion of its righteous self-determination* ==> ***a mimetic intercourse between art and historical life*** [<-- this is most desired from artists today]

Adorno's premises (--> “progress”):
•unabashed use of the universalizing abstraction of “humanity”
•detrimental reconfirmation of a world-historical process inagurated by the alliance of enlightenment epistemology and the commodity form
}==> Adorno's paranoiac tone (of infection, contamination, threat) ==> rhetoric of false and true consciousness ==> proclivity (تمايل طبيعى به چيز بد) for perpetual judgment and truth-seeking
--(enlightenment pathology)--> grand theories of degradation and decline about whenever Adorno delves into critique of the world [--> habit of most of my friends and artists...] ==> (purist theology of negation) ***reverse-messianicism*** (~= “he can do nothing” هیچ کاری نمیشه کرد، همیشه همینجوری بوده)
}=/= chaotic engagement (with the questions of art, history, self)

Adorno's dedication to the Marxian perception of historical Being as an intrinsically teleological functioning ==> his intense cynicism
=/= Schopenhauer's pessimism
=/= Nietzschean intervention of *treating history as metaphorical illusion*, [*]history: a hallow significatory edifice that nevertheless manufactures meaning, directionality, and causality (for an otherwise anarchic world) --> iranian chaoticism [and why Nietzsche is so widely read in Iran], for Nietzschean: “art [--> eruptive potentiality of the will to truth] =/= history [--> desolation of the will to power]” --> the disparity between art and historical reality becomes the very source of chaos-consciousness saliency

ferocious risk of greatness & the asphyxiating decadence of mediocrity

(Ali's) peotic-becoming aestheticized existence
irresolute =/= reactive =/= dismissive


continental philosophy's approach to the associations of three spheres: history[==>], art, subjectivity --✕--> chaotic nonstate: clash between a hypersubjectivized aesthetic & the barriers of historical Being (--> annihilation of both “I” and the historical)

Benjamin's subjectivity must defend itself against the profane rotations of the historical (--> apocalyptic battle)
Benjaminian “angel of[...]