[...]f 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
[...]