[...]d, 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 history” ravaged of its innocence at the hands of progress and then restored by overriding strength of the historical materialist:
demonization of the monstrosity of the historical + celebratory poeticization of the subject
=/= Nietzsche and Hedayat's subjectivity [should] not to be held in a “derivative placement =/= the here and now” (one must imagine beyond طالع بینی <-- شخصیت فراسو نگر) --> (card reading) one must place under scrutiny the commensurate manner in which the historical is navigated, orchestrated, and then overcome [=/= alibi for some alternative discourse of literary-philosophical humanism or aesthetic transcendence]
[?what is Adrijana's card reading relation to] the desire to divorce history from any potential taxonomy of meaning or intelligibility --Hedayat--> “one is confined in a proud, deceptive consciousness... that rests upon the merciless, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance--hanging in dreams”


the poem i wrote in 2010 “our metaphor” https://archive.org/details/ourmetaphor is an example of (my Nietzschean and Hedayatian influence, to address) the indeterminacy and illogic necessarily associated with a chaotic world
(for Nietzsche:) positivism = historical subjectivity's fictive interiority --leads--> decadence of a will to truth, attributing to events a rational look by fixing them within universalizing patterns of signification
Nietzsche: “it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations” =/= fraud of the historical ==>
•Platonic idealism
•messianic grandiosity of the Hegelian world-historical process
•
•*rational historicism: a discursive phenomenon indispensably linked to enlightenment epistemology and its overriding drive for world-mastery*
}=/= explosiveness of a chaotic universe + experiential immediacy of this creative-destructive effusion نشد

Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (seemingly) a study of the pre-Socratic culture of Dionysian ecstasy --but--> a self-projected hallucination of antiquity ==> *theme of history as subjective dreamscape* (--> my way of working historical ajayeb is Nietzschean[?])
-in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche wages an archaeological assault against the composition and enforcement of moral and metaphysical (from religion to law, discussion of the ascetic ideal and the origin of ressentiment and slave morality)

misunderstanding of “the will”
Nietzsche's skepticism (is his a priori) --> the link between chaos and a certain poetic evocation

*monumental*: seeking out heroic episodes from the the past as examples of imminent قريب الوقوع greatness within the present and future (resurrecting examples of nobility) <-- an ethos behind which large-scale causes are mobilized (+ antiquarian ~=) [*]archive: a harmless reverence for that which has elapsed, leading largely to a compulsive preservation of faded events for no other purpose than that of ensuring their permanence in memory
=/= [*]critical: the courage for insurgency and disavowal of historical legacy*** ==> realization of an alternative counterfuture in the present
“He is blind to everything behind him, new sounds are muffled and meaningless though his perceptions were never so intimately felt in all their color, light and music, and he seems to grasp them with his five senses together . . . His whole case is most indefensible; it is narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to danger, deaf to warnings, a small living eddy in a dead sea of night and forgetfulness. And yet this condition, unhistorical and antihistorical throughout, is the cradle not only of unjust action, but of every just and justifiable action in the world.” --> sounds like one of my masks “the sleep-walker”

in Hedayat
nihilistic absurdist approach to both metaphysics and society
distancing himself from the symbolics of divine authority
forsaking empty promises of metaphysical longing
consciousness rushes to disguise and camouflage its own lack of purpose
حاجی آقا Haji Agha: “my existence is useless [...] hence the greatest and most noble poem in my life will mark the destruction of you and your kind”
--> streamsof betrayal, defilement, seclusion, degradation, anonymous deaths
(subversively, through a series of hallucinogenic contraptions) crash the unchained terrain of neo-fantasia into the claustrophobic region of socalled reality

این همه سودا است to return with fascinated sockets to the world-as-illusion
chaos in حکایت باخه و دو بط in Kelile Demne --> history: the myriad series of spectral constructs by which subjectivity comes to be constituted as an ordered entity

chaotic desire --> a temporary pact with radical aloneness --> Hoda
=/= homogenizing abstraction of “human”
(Foad, Hoda, Sartre's) exilic disposition, always alone, always apart

tranjective frenzy
to come down from the mountain and infest the back-alleys --> wtf!

deterritorialization one's owb footprints --> identitatian technologies

@Shervin commission the wanderer: a nameless eyeless character sitting on the outskirts of a wasteland in conversation with his own shadow --> (beyond time and space) as a gesture toward discarded worlds without clocks or maps --> *the will to aimlessness*
(Hedayat in The Blind Owl) “I had no idea in what direction I was going [...] I did not care whether or not I ever arrived at any palce”

Mikhail Bakhtin --> art for iranian artists = (carnivalesque) a site that grants the right to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking; *the right to not be taken literally*, not ‘to be oneself’ [...] the right to rip off masks, the right to rage at others with a primeval (almost cultic) rage--and finally, the right to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and prurient little secrets

Baudrillard: the real is no longer possible ==> illusion is no longer possible ==>{impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level = impossibility of staging illusion}--> hollows the inability of existence to escape its own fictive composition (=/= epistemologies of repair, reading, weaving, etc.)

(Hedayat's) techniques of stealing from the reader the most basic hermeneutic device of distinguishing between imaginary and the actual --> Hoda, Ali

***annihilation: ontological death ==> death of ontology***

زنده به گور buried alive, an unmediated experiential sensitivity to the randomness of existence

***chaotic imaginary =/= tyranny of historicity***
--> ahistorical figure, having traversed the borders of language, humanity, time, space, and reality --> Foad's poem (--> world as endless becoming or nightmaze) =/= historicized existential experience (folloing only two distinct path, of subject and object)

*philosophy = learnign how to kill* (=/= Socratic-Platonic versoin of “philosophy = learning how to die”)

Hedayat straying beyond signification, mortality, and ontological or phenomenological framing =/= my work with ajayeb

([why?] many artists do that) ***to make oneself unrecognizable***

consciousness: only a host of many someones

Nietzsche's transvaluation of historical limitations --> experience would no longer find itself entrapped by apparitions of objectivity and cohesion and could theretofore invite chance, risk, and endless experimentation
will to power --> a premediated calculable claim to mastery

Nietzsche: art as an active competitive exchange =/= Schopenhauer's mystical retreat: art to lure aside from the great road of suffering of humanity those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick, and to offer them a brief lustful moment--a little intoxication and madness (--> a view that many artists today hold)

Nietzsche + Hedayat + Aslani + Hoda's immediate acknowledgement of the world-as-unreal =/= obstacle of historicity =/= Sina: I am following a very different critique of historicity in ajayeb
بادیه نشین فلسفی Nietzsche + Hedayat (elicit repercussions for) subordination of history to a kind of literary-philosophical piracy or bedouinism =/= citadel (of geography, civilization, culture)--> many fabricatoins of art happens in citadels in Europe


Pierre has always been busy with the question of synthesis


entitlement: way of intrusion in homogenous axes of existence


xxxxx 164

...................................

xxxxx 213

most of Mohaghegh's attacks are rhetorical

the (sacred?) boundaries of mysticism
(the boundaries of cities became mystic/sacred)

mystical channels

presenting worlds immersed in a kind of constructed a priori (arising from an amorphous collection of sound and image. @Hoda)

Mohaghegh working to isolate the rare technical and conceptual arsenal behind an ethnographically immagined space

initiatives toward the horizons of a mystical inquest

...................................

sect's threat

breakaway modality of a sectarian consciousness

hermeneutic arsenals

organic theoretical apparatuses

(its own) effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, and narration

Adonis, Samih al-Qasim, Ghada Samman, Nazim Hikmat, Ahmad Shamlu, Farrokhzad --> all tempted to (antihumanist) convert the text into a closed circle

forbidden power
moral ambiguity
collective destiny
will to extremity



shadow nears and targets
itself presumed source of all tension and unhappiness
while also spreading its influence over others
many are susceptible to its whisperings
thus he develops a perpetual alertness to its approach
schemes are everywhere
it seeks
to slip into (the sectarian's own) camp under disguise
penetrating the inner circles in dissimulated form and thus unspotted
no mediation
revenge in closeness
and even more than this,
shadow will attempt to escape accusation if possible
the spectacle



enemy's overhanging presence
--> continual motion
--> time is restless



tower, bastion, citadel, stronghold
operational apparitional center
phantasmatic points of references
a spiritual geoscape of concentration
it must appear formidable, immutable, and impenetrable
as a tangible headquarters encased amid far-flung mountains.
it drifts mainly as a figment in the nomadic mind
of the one who lives most of the nights as a marauder in enemy camps
roaming through its courtyards
speaking with the tower's white and black keepers
before receiving the next command
with it the facticity of another harsh assignment.
from tower's security standpoint
the world looks ripe for the taking.
the fortress holds, and with it, the dream of the fortress.



the earth
closing on us
a deteriorating prism
tightness, entrapment
this cylinder
to a mutual obliteration
all inhabitants are squeezed together



to make another planet
another dream of the enemy:
1. extraplanetary construction
2. confinement of the unwanted
3. momentary infiltration of the lair
4. consumption of the planet
|
conceptual twists: (quadrangulation:)
[four desires - four attributes - four corresponding identify-formation]
1. the most accountable --> creation ~~> *labor* (to build it) --> carpenter خلق
2. the most disconnected --> banishment ~~> *renunciation* (to disown it) --> judge خلع
3. the most invested --> possession ~~> *stealth* (to invade it) --> trespasser خفيه
4. the most around/above/upon --> engulfing ~~> *hunger* (to eat it) --> glutton دله

the entire worlds are disponsable
to salivate and gorge on what is most detested
the torment of overlapping, of absolute possession and absolute dispossession



unreal
surrealism
anti-realism
hyper-realism
irrealism

inaccurate, misleading signs around each corner of the cityscape
deceptive and insidious facades
taken astray and stranded amid false omens
the misinformation of the world's existence
the minor syndicate versus the drone
stretching between the memorandum and the dispatch
always in a dual hermeneutics of suspicion and discovery

drinking from the fool's gold of confusion ill-advising codes



the sectarian's remedy:
vulgarization requires vulgarity
response to disgrace is to enter the disgrace
to inflict the profane occurence and encourage the contamination of language and sign
into the stint of atrocity
to go barefoot and dismembered
sectarian appears before the maker:
in blemished and tattered from
(to prove hardship)


xxxxx 254

...................................

one must fear those who say “we”

Mohaghegh's writing reminds of Avital

...following it into its lower webs of imagination

sect: an insider-outsider formation

*the sect redefines*

life, secrecy, ritual, fanaticism, martyrdom

(in a fragmented age -->) sectarianism = apocalyptic writing + insurgent practice ["+” : a lethal combination] ==> ***an abstract idea + its immediate execution (within the world)*** ["+” : collapsing the boundary between the emergence of the two]
**(its other names:)
•underground movements
•secret societies
•forbidden associations
•cult gathering
•*artistic circles*
•urgan gangs
•rebel cadres کادر
•terrorist units
•
**(its forms:) they banish themselves and plan their hostile-ecstatic return to the surface:
•revolutionary
•criminal
•religious
•mystical
•magical
•military
•*avant-garde*
•
**(its conceptual coridors:) each fuses the minimal (elitism) and the excessive (universality):
•delirium
•murdur
•hallucination
•whispering
•doom
•
}<=~ ***the self-chosen against the world***
(“we” is the electric compartment of the sect. the sectarian channels the alarming vibration of the “we"--the one who becomes many)


*evil: a force of liberation, beauty, complexity


Ali's microhostilities (on me, the way he tells)
*guided by dislike*

(*terminal Intimacy*: definite concept of friendship:) “they will all die for one another" = "they will all kill one another”


“the sect occasionally allows the opening of the closed circle, reforming as a stright line that penetrates the world of others” --> (a phantom) *imperative to entirity*

sectarian language: the author cages the reader (in each verse)

sectarian animism ==> paranoiac dialogues:
•language of things (communication with the inanimate)
•concert with sacred beasts (oracle, snakes, animal spirits, etc. **the uncooperative figures of nature**)
•warnings of extraterrestriality (those of faraway sentience)
•murmurings of superstition (man, fate, chance, fifth column[= the group who undermine a larger group from within])


hiding as mission --> dissimulation & hollowing

sectarian lives by code, but cannot be deciphered or analyzed* --methodological--> leaves one undetected (--> assassins who are inflexible, precise, and systematic to the highest degree, and traceless for this very reason)

...they remind of the ungovered body, the accidental, and death



xxxxx 280

...................................

(Mohaghegh's work on the middle east in his book) it is ***a theory that does not speak for ‘the East’(= a construction) but rather *an East*(= a radical illusion)***
-it offers careful insight into singular, distinctive episodes of thought and writing in the Middle East (and to explore their relevance across the topology of world thought at large)
-the fractal nature of his four separate subject-positions point to the *exceptional diversity and heterogeneous makeup of Middle Eastern cultural imaginaries*

...the insurgent carries a hundred masks within one, the poet a hundred more, the mystic a hundred more, and the sectarian a thousand
(@Geert)

[*]modernity: a self-naming historical epoch that redefines/fuses the exercise of power and knowledge and for which the enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, technology, humanism, ideology, simulation, and the domination of instrumental reason become the main pillars of subjectivity

Mohaghegh offers a list of secondary literature that forms the relevant archive from which his manuscript borrows, and **marks its axis of engagement with preexisting interventions**
#bibliography


Nietzsche's conception of chaos
“nature and mask determine phenomenal being, the phenomenon in its being, as chaos”
(Deleuze interprets Nietzsche's chaos as:) a philosophical overture toward “the pure unformed”
--> the subject is this free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their personality [~~> #write a short story for hayula]

*Eastern insurgent's participation in the chaotic event* --> there is no natural or pure ==> (a more) apocalyptic response ==> to became available
[--> to deal with sense as a predicate مسند or a property دارايى =/=? to deal with sense as an event]


community
(on Eastern postmodern gathering)
(alternative categories that express the potential for “relationality”: assemblage, alignment, circle, swarm, etc. that are based on multiple vantages of intersection and divergence =/=) *community*:
•tends to evoke an essentialist claim
•there is typically some centralized discourse of unity, some absolute principle that binds everyone
•functions as self-enclosed and exclusionary phenomenon
•breeds insularity and protectionism
=/= vulnerable, permeable, susceptible to transformation
=/= riot crowd (open fever and pulsation always searching out new formulations, *new exteriorities* to traverse ==> remains restless, agitated, insatiate)
•community eventually ofers abstract representation of their lived experience (**becoming symbolic**) =/= riot crowd remains material, visceral, a carnavalesque sensation, and therefore formless [--> Elen's response to apass offered “community"]
(with the intention of it lasting, *nothing deserves to stay “as is”* [?!])
*stale archetypes of the collective knowing subject (“they”)*

problem with ‘periphery’
***deadly and deathly delusion that there is a “within”***
-the periphery in its own removed site it circumscribes a sacred boundary
--> exilic consciousness
-interior sense of belonging: remaining an outsider event --> using treachery for the sake of vitality [~~>? Elen's *playful betrayal* (in apass environment) to emerge (and inflect) herself at will]

what makes the exile (=/= the knowing subject) more fascinating is that *it does not need to exist* (--> the ‘need to exist’ lies at the root of the knowing subject's violence)
the community is desperate to exist ==degenerates==> into totalitarian declaration of its rights; obsessed with constructing mythologies of presence (and being represented)
=/= the exile (the animal, the child, the shadow, the monster, the machine, the thing, the contagion) carries none of the anxiety of ontological authenticity. they come and go, as impersonal, nameless, metamorphosing creatures, never too long in the same place, always with some *new game* or *secret to pursue*

communities --> distinctly humanist : importing a kind of micro-universality --> ladem with oppressive suggestions of an inborn ethical obligation (originally from the enlightenment) ==became==> source of judgment ==> taxonomies of power ==> disenchantment, alienation, genocidal playback

Mohaghegh suggests the always social logic of community formation is toxic, “the death sentence to its mutability and actual freedom” --> to avoid the “trappings of a social framework, with its false codifications of ethical responsibility, and seek more elusive pathways of dialogue and juncture” (--> i am not sure about it, this could be also problematic)

...................................

[title]
**chaotic topology of imagination**

Ali's constant antagonism (in his work and in his speech acts)

Mohaghegh's use of “third-world authors”
they write the unnamable --&--> execute a vast becoming (of devastating scale and proportion)

to place these authors in immediate exchange with “western” thought --> to allow for a toxic, فرسایشی abrasive confrontation that reveals the outstanding distance from such conventions of knowing [--> my work is about this, to visist (visit + resist) these sites of critical encounter and embed them in my performative acts ==> to provide/produce a condition in which a non-antagonistic critical encounter between the “Western” order of knowing and the chaotic textualities of “Middle East” is possible]


epistemic warfare (~/= my ajayeb)


masks of an impersonal nightwalker consciousness

madness
hallucination
amnesia

becoming a faceless engraver

their explicit conceptual elements:
•burial --> blindness
•annihilation --> contagion
•shadow --> inhuman
•desertion --> deception
}--> chaotic experience


(according to Mohaghegh) this chaotic middle eastern elsewhere is not yet openly acknowledged by literature
-borderline illegible narratives
-emergent textualities

(my allegiance is with Mohaghegh's allegiance with) badlands of postcolonial site and its rogue arsenals [...] ==allows==> a fugitive, errant trajectory

(i have been tracing the locatable mimicries of middle east)


***chaotic textuality <--> <==> conflict***

actualization of a *will to cruelty*

to performance a fatal experience of the text


(literature as question =/=) literature as moral transaction [<-- chaos reminds us] --> Ali, Shabnam, Hoda, --Sina--> let's enjoy the pleasure of watching the text die* (_to rid literature of its survival instinct)

literature as a space of unbearable vulnerability --> perpetual sabotage --> each idea, each interpretation draws the text closer to (the hour of a) collapse

*contact with nothingness*

inscription of fatality

conceptual matrix of fatality:
•extremity --> breaking points
•excess --> an effusion, an unforming
•exhaustion (=/= fatigue)
the avatar of ecstasy
veiled secrecy of affirmation
}--> *archetype of cruelty*

--> [to speak of] (chaotic text as) *alchemy*: corrupt the order of things, become reborn in a polluted sensibility
(is this what i do?)

chaotic text must fashion a generative prism, unnatural admixtures, *contaminated alliances*

[let's] *unload texts toward corrosive depths [...] where they run their acids across one another* --> my work

transition from theory --to--> theft
transition from (the profession of the) reader --to--> smuggler

(strands of thought ranging:)
from cruelty --to--> fatality
from alchemy --to--> piracy

chaos --> anarchic potential, disquieting worlds

(Mohaghegh asking:)
*is chaos an affirmative or nihilistic experience of the world?
*is chaos primarily creative or destructive?
*is the expressive act (aesthetic or philosophical) a chaotic state?


*(east's) horizon fastened to the exteriority of Western thought*

experiential elsewhere

the so-called [*]cultural difference: an old game of declaring the world's disjointment
==> many people (including myself) ***to perceive their intellectual and poetic exercises as in partial alignment with the creative possibilities of their culture***
*partial cultural alignment* --> german discourse on integration


[chaos] manifesting and fading within countless spheres of speculation:
•Benjamin's temporal arabesque
•schizoid desire-production of Deleuzian nomadology
•Artaud's hysterical demand (-demand is always hysteric)
•fable of “chaos outside the system” (Schlegel's concept)
•active presence of an inhuman turn in Camus
•Serres's ‘genesis’ a quasi-mystical force of an immemorial nature
•Mohaghegh's ‘chaotic’ marks (no resurrection of a primitive world but rather) an extravagant departure from the history of being, an expressive wire being shaped as we speak

[*topologies of imagination / mode of consciousness / their specific poetic-philosophical mind:]
Europe/West --> possessive (when it is colonialist)
Europe/West --> schizophrenic
Sout East --> nomadic
Middle East --> chaotic


*chaotic writing*
(artistic research writing as it is practiced in apass [--> *closure of a whole system*] =/=) a *writing-toward-chaos* (--> Hoda =/= closure ~? catharsis تزکیه غیر روحانی)
the protocols of understanding are challenged and not left standing
no dynamics of meaning-formation solidified
no acculturation (~ integration) of the reader is embarked upon
no (de)codification successful
all techniques of truth-telling must fail
--> refusing the closure (of a whole [subject/person])
its own raw self-refracting (textual event) --> *forever refracting itself* (--> is refractive writing/thinking really useful for iranians today?)
-transparently nebulous vision of darkened vantages

[Reza, Setareh, Ehsan, Foad, Hoda's conceptual register and incorporating themes:]
annihilation, rage, ecstasy, madness, deception, apocalypse, desertion, contagion, eternity, the shadow

imperative to restlessness

writing-act as inherently antagonistic


borders of subjectivity:
•dominant ideologies of history
•conspiracies of identity


Foad's poem “farar”
textual experience as a prism of subversion, innovation, and becoming
•hardened instinct for ruin kharabat خرابات
•fusion of:
◦appearance & disappearance
◦tragedy & delirium
◦creation & destruction
•(unsteady condition of the writing-act [unpacks itself without origin] where) *nothingness & excess* tangle
bluring of possibility and impossibility
to compose an affective universe without recourse to the myth of origin (*?) ~= to express a singular voice without access to a name

his literary-poetic mosaics
tracking the chaotic imaginary

(subjectivity's) disassociation from the world --> Hedayat's The Blind Owl (<-- an overreactive consciousness?)
*one that owes nothing to what came before*
a consciousness once held hostage

*carving inward and then assuming a combatitive stance*


ever quickening its velocity, only then to exhaust its force and vanish as if exorcised into breathlessness (--> what is this body?) -->{ persistent injury --> chronic wearing-down ==> subjectivity is overcome : *acceptance of cruelty* (=/= death wish) : raising the stakes of existential experience by transmitting the authorial self beyond its own limits and toward its chaotic possibility (=/= death wish)


annihilation epitomized as instance of vicious travel*** --> ?!

thought-scarring affect


(radical modification of consciousness:)
•Kierkegaard: “I die death itself”
•Bataille: “he who does not ‘die’ from being merely a man will never be other than a man” ~~--> Rumi's bemirid بمیرید بمیرید
•Nietzschean call for an experience of the end: “from love of life, one should desire a different death: free, conscious, without accident, without ambush”
•Cioran's futurity that would “let all form become formless, and chaos shwallow the structure of the world in a gigantic maelstrom, that would be tremendous commotion and noise, terror, and explosion, and then let be eternal silence and total forgetfulness”
•Deleuze and Guattari's meditation on life overrun by “desiring machines for whom the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever”
•Benjamin's “destructive character” clearing away


an annihilative technique

writing-act and the *conceptual terrain of fatality*

an ecstatic mode
bringing consciousness to sleep


***rage = excess + shadow (~ blackout) }--to--> formlessness [example: Hedayat: author's misshapen hallucination, beggin for an end to subjectivity and existence to “surrender myself to the sleep of oblivion"]
*individous potentials* of the rage (<-- lure of the rage)
-(Sana's) angered disposition
(as a) performativity of ignition and collapse

**rage/anger is always (sees itself as) innocent**
rage proceeds as a state of innocence, a forward moving clearance, to become an agent of sheer delivery, to commit at will
innocence tries to remember ~ that which “remembers” has become foremost innocent. wants its members/phallus back
[rage components: innocence, forgetting, coldness]
--> impact without imprint (--we must always have an imprint of our impacts)

the text becomes existence itself (--> the monsterous consciousness of Hedayat's narrator in The Blind Owl)
every object, event, or image, is synthesized back into the empire of the narrator's own account***** [=/= my work, my storytelling]

...fastened itself to...

(...currents of)
chaos**~~
annihilation**~~
rage**~~

*shadow*
--> **to elicit the transfiguration toward an emergent literature of the inhuman**
•Hedayat's shadow
•Nietzsche use of the shadow as a guarantor of the overman: “how his shadow stands even now behind everyone” , “now light, now shadow of that which must come” , “i will complete it: for a shadow came to me--the most silent, the lightest of all things came to me! the beauty of the superman came to me as a shadow: what are the gods to me now”

tilted destiny

beyond the need for being


chaos experienced as a *deception*
Ali motioning to chaotic discord, his rhetoric of video editing: phantasmatic lawlessness --> surrender the text to a certain sorcery(!), schemes of a textual unreality
=/= restrictive epistemologies of truth
=/= technologies of regulation
convulsive discontinuity (=/= systematicity)
carries the will to execute fantasia
(yet transpiring morphologies that carve in) authoritarian injunctions of being-in-the-world [=/= experimentation]
--> (Ali's mirage:) suffocated prism of reality --> rebellion becomes instinctive
-narrating graphic instances of sociopolitical violence --view--> modernity as a state of permanent collapse

(for Ali :) literature/art = espionage عمل خرابکارانه در مواضع دشمن (=/= bribery)
(in order to say no to being) “passive witness to an overconstructed world” =/=
•Beckett: absurdism (with minimalist penteration)
•Nietzsche: intoxication (Dionysian assault against surface/depth binary)
•Adorno: fantasy (is the real act of knowledge)

[*]text:
•mimetic transposition of the ideal
•reflexive treatment of the world


the invention of transparent**
[who invented transparency?]


deception --?--> suggestion of the world as unreal [==>?! pragmatism]

lucid interchange of untruths
existential distortion

San'an + moridan (مریدان) --> authority of authenticity
annihilated consciousness of the disciple (morid)


(volatility of) lived dreamscapes <-- (always) staged imaginary

(illusions go on unarrested)

Hoda's visual techniques (in video) ~ her special effects (--> launches what?):
*unreality of the emergent world* (+ production of emergent illusion)
•hazing of self and world
•curved mirroring
•shape-shifting
•aerial, apparitional,
•فرّار evasive and amorphous
-=> seamless apparition
--> ***eradicated storytelling*** + “I” as a spectral outcast of consciousness
*Hoda works on the unsaid (--> the imperceptible)
*Sina works on the incomprehensible (-->? the incidental)

Hoda's insurgent imagination in her cinematic techniques (part of the intellectual-aesthetic facet of middle eastern subjectivity):
•into a terrain of necessary ambiguity
•demanding an interpretive participation of a disturbed audience
--> (Benjaminian) “public is an examiner but an absent-minded one”

(how can Hoda in her medium of film create points of departure from insurgent imagination? she constantly reconsitutes the insurgent imagination *یاغی yaghi* --> one of the most important postmodern masks of iranian contemporary art)


(Elen? no longer convinced of her own entitlement to a reality principle)
the imaginary and symbolic functions of the penis --> Elen has to study ‘phallus’
Lacan's phallus is a (privileged) signifier of lack and sexual difference --> both of them are initiator for Elen's performance in the first week of apass 2018
phallus anchors the chain of signification (the imaginary, the symbolic and the real) for her
is it about an Oedipus complex? in all her work she is identify with the imaginary phallus. (her staged “flaw” in doing so is camouflaging an Oedipus complex?)
==>? Elen: will to possession
w[...]