[...] 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
who possesses a penis? --> masturbatory jouissance
*the one who possesses the phallus = the one desired* [~ phallus = desire ‘of’ the other =/= desiring the other]. phallus is the signifier of jouissance within Elen's performance
Elen's retribution of the boy who symbolically ‘have’ the phallus --> (we are back to) castration
**Elen's true woman-power lies with giving up her phallic identification. (the image of innovation in her work: she is still busy with ‘inovative creativity,’ inherently a phallic function). this is a hope, the symbolic phallus ins her work (and in anyone's work) is often in the place of *the lack of the signifier in the Other* (that can never be filled?)

infantile sexuality

jouissance: enjoyment from indirect pleasure (for example enjoyment of organizing pleasure)
Lacan --> pleasure makes us guilty + without guilt there is no pleasure


*chaotic topology of imagination*( --> more like a pile of sugar =/= Freudian topology of consciousness/unconsciousness)--> erasing the boundary between interiority and exteriority
--> (once-unitary) subject ==> an oblique network }--> that is us, iranians
--> schizoid view of nomadological thought

separate methodologies of blurring and fragmentation:
1- shadow
2- mirror image

Hedayat's shadow (his palpable aesthetic-existential operation--in The Blind Owl) [=/= Kafka's metamorphoses]: skeletal transfiguration of a conceivably human form into a *shadow collectivity* [=/= camouflage]


anticipation of oblivion
Hoda, Foad,

(maybe interesting for Hoda:) bitching ~= concerted methodology of confrontation and provocation


to write on chaos
to write as chaos
to write chaos***


[an iranian topology of imagination:]
subjectivity --> deception
literature --> rage
chaos --> annihilation



deserter

textual encounter --> the method by which a chaotic imaginary is uncovered and set loose:
1. lure consciousness into desertion
2. perceive textual artifacts as forces of immanent contagion
3. identify the text as a carrier of shadow-becoming
4. text conceive the setting of inhuman

deserter (position) --> unearthing --> chaotic imagination

...a fractal exteriority that alters and generates vivid, intensified hierarchies of instinct, desire, and knowing*



*exhaustion
damaged allegory of man


*evacuation --> surrender to fugitive trajectory
takes place on amorphous dust

wrenched
shadow-scapes

enterence <--> ejection

•misadventurism of the wanderer
•rogue thought

influx
disintegration
fever
velocity

the deserter mind is made to synchronize the internalization of waste and unrest and to ravage itself

spatiality of the the nowhere

intentionally sets out to become lost

vagrant: drifter در به در
اوباش
self that personified the dejected

self-eclipsing vagrant that becomes the outside itself



arc of necessity


the super-power of holding objects suspending in the air --> an intruder topology where everything is held suspend...

{ false subjectivity = hiding place }<-- chaotic imagination overruns it

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

Glissant

constrictions of the ‘forced poetics’ of writing (in plastic arts)

grandiose concept of the writer (of writing as an ordering process)

world meant as raw material for a book

Glissant's thoroughgoing exploration of models of disorder/chaos --> (his subversive epitome of) *opacite/opacity* --> realm of the intuitive and indeterminate as a corrective response to the systematizing pressures of assimilation and deculturation
==> to create a more immediate, oral, corporeal language
-inadequate process of attempting to note down, chronicle or relate the experience of opacity

chaos + opacity + resistance (in Glissant)
primordial act of defiance lajbazi

negation = heroic (=/= pedestrian)

Glissant's anonymous and pedestrian form of resistance --> knowledge of camouflaged reality

“The one with whom the poet is enchanted, that he names with each breath. But for whom words are inadequate.”

...in the unexpected expanse of global relating

“a poetics not of the tree but of vegetation”
[poetics of the decentered subject]
epitomise (pure) revolt (--> tree grows to reveal human configurations, fierce and solitary revolt against the plantation system)

modest forms of resistance
fragmentation of fiction --to--> polyphonic quiltwork of stories

[system of imagery]
(Glissant's) insistence on marine symbolism
transforming, restorative power of water
harsh bitter truth of the sea <--> inscrutable, ambiguous nature of the experience

preoccupation with the need to create a literary language --> specificity of lived experience


*narrateur enfant*

narrator distorting and simplifying my experience

“burning with a silent and stubborn multitude”

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

Mishra


[the evidence of Europe's advantages -->] an expression of europe in terms of a 19th century progress, which has been be increasingly hard to refute:
place of West in the avant-garde of progress <== manifold achievements of technology, constitutional government, secular state and modern administration <== (a separate and
distinct ‘nation-state’ <==) American and French revolutions
}--> unable to assess by Muslims? ~~?--> the tale of the bewildered Asian:
•dast-e gheyb دست غیب divinely ordained dispensation
•dast-e taghdir دست تقدیر mysterious workings of fate
•charkh-e ruzegar چرخ روزگار cyclical rise and fall of political fortune
•uncreative dynastic rulers
(=/= organized human energy and action)

cultural arrogance

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

paranoia (=/= schizophrenia), an instinct (for the original hostility of the world, name of the world is ‘conflict’ =/= instinctual needs for acceptance and for the assignment of a place)
para + nous (~ out of mind, beside the mind) --> part of the everyday life : when you think you are “somebody” or you have “agency” you are on a small dose of paranoid delusion. {do we always need some dose of paranoia to form critical relations with our current condition?
according to Lacan: *Knowledge (connaissance) itself is paranoiac* --> psychoanalytic treatment = inducing controlled paranoia into the human subject***
*preconditions of all human knowledge is the “paranoiac alienation of the ego”* (ego: a [paranoiac] construction formed by identification with the specular image in the mirror stage)}
==> high thoughts and abstract thinkers, especially when they believe “nobody understands them”
==> also promotes you to go to forbidden zones, attack sacrosanctities, breaking taboos, take the side of the miserable and the marginalized, that there is something wrong about The World
==> always dissatisfied with the ‘current situation,’ impulse to correct the current situation (... our condition, our situation), and assuming a defensive stance, (in worse case) with a sense of mission, with deep feelings of powerlessness (and depression, sometimes victimization)
}<==> their own psychological security (~ defense against failure and loss; a fact of relevance for obligation)

it is all about ['having’ or owning a] *perception of reality* (==> belief)
to recognize the intentional in the accidental/coincidental
(a paranoid response to intentionality?)
==> imaginary friend or imaginary enemy
#complain

sisyphus phenomena --> the idea that one is condemned (by the “system”) to do senseless absurd meaningless labor

(Maze Runner film opening sign:) “we are running out of time. you have seen what is happening out there.” ==> insurgent

four types of paranoia:
1. erotic شهوانى (--> what the opposite sex wants from them)
2. persecutory توبیخی (--> under intensive evaluative scrutiny)
3. litigious دعوایی (--> conspiracy)
4. exalted متعالی (--> grandeur)

*attribution error: social perceivers has to overattribute lack of trustworthiness to others
*overperception of causal linking: paranoid perceiver has to interpret others’ action in a disproportional self-referential way ==> they are the target of others’ thoughts and actions
*conspiracy: paranoid perceiver has to overattribute social coherence and coordination to others’ actions

from dysphoric to euphoric self-consciousness

the direct link(?) between socioeconomic status and development of paranoia
(physically:) high blood pressure & hardening of the arterial walls (& drug abuse) ==> decline in brain circulation ==> paranoid reaction


still paranoia has a better prognosis (تشخيص قبلى) than schizophrenia
(paranoia is a limited schizophrenia --> we should open up our paranoiac relating onto the schizophrenic, which is much more interesting)

state of deafness --> paranoia

•in Freud: paranoia --> patient's infantile relation to his father
•for Cameron: one cannot take the role assigned to him by the society ==> hypothetical relationships with other --> paranoia
•Bose: break between the ego and its object, a bond of identity
•Otto Rank: myth of the birth of the hero --> world appears as a whole, or womb (a cosmological projection)
•Lacan: foreclosure, Verwerfung (=/= repression [==> neurosis]): the exclusion of the father, (the fundamental signifier of the Name-of-the-Father is the object of foreclosure) ==> a hole in the symbolic order --but--> sooner or later foreclosed Name-of-the-Father reappears in the real and the subject is unable to assimilate it : *collision with the inassimilable signifier* ==> entry into psychosis ~=> delusion ~-> paranoia

(Heidegger + Manning + Alex's register of good thinking: “doing philosophy is better than knowing philosophy” ...)
[*]'to do philosophy’ --> imaginary register --> knowledge of the ego*
[*]'to know philosophy’ --> symbolic register --> knowledge of the subject*
(in Lacan) connaissance (Knowledge) belongs to the imaginary register =/= savoir (knowing) belongs to the symbolic register (--> you can track down the egocentrism of the philosopher:)
[*]connaissance (Knowledge)-->{self-knowledge of the subject in the imaginary order. based on misrecognition, a fantasy of self-mastery and unity, constitutive of the ego. it has the same structure as paranoia (involving the delusion of absolute knowledge and mastery)}
=/=
[*]savoir (knowing)-->{articulation of signifiers in the subject's symbolic universe, the signifying chain}

i use (sometimes associative) speech in collective research life as a progressive revelation of symbolic knowledge to the subject, where knowledge is the jouissance of the Other =/= “absolute knowledge”

[what ever we say about the symbolic is utterly important: because from the anthropological work of Strauss on the exchange of gifts that regulate kinship relations, emergence of symbolic structures was conceptualized as an essential feature of the human transition from nature to culture, to Saussure's theory of the sign: exchanges of signifiers, to Lacanian psychoanalysis: the impose of symbolic structures on sexuality]


defense: reaction of the ego to certain interior stimuli (and not the external) <-- Freud
(in Lacan:) *defense: permanent symbolic structures of subjectivity =/= *resistance: transitory imaginary responses to intrusions of the symbolic (on the side of the object)

the neurotic and the pervert defend themselves in their *desire* =/= psychotic defends himself in their *projection*

“to desire” is a defense mechanism (against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance?)

(>this is all about) the psychotic relation to reality and the relation of the subject to his speech


*unreal is transparent (for the paranoid)*
-hermeneutics of suspicion (<-- Nietzsche's perspectivism: all texts are but autobiographic memoirs)
[...]