[...]active assemblages causing paranoia) ==> to be able to do something else ~=> to become someone else]
[how to learn your way out of philosophy as philosopher ~= *to apprehend what you know* in a creative way]

loving relatedness --> responding to the wholeness of the other person (relating to a small child or to a psychiatrically ill adult, and so on)

}--> (which is fundamentally) a parental disposition [and the offspring might represent a miscarriage of the parent's wish]
-the problem is that you cannot always know the precise ego-capacities of the other person
-your interventions could be ill-timed or ill-attuned ==> disintegrating effect


questions regarding the processes of feedbacking in apass: to help the other person (not to become aware of truth about themselves or their work, rather) to construct figures about themselves and their relationships with others, figures which could provide the basis for rapid ego-growth and personality-integration. but sometimes it is too fast, the ego regresses, and it becomes an experience of developing psychosis

pathological defense:
•delusions
•hallucinations
•depersonalization
•

skilfully dosed and skilfully timed increments in psychotherapeutic participation [such as premature interpretations demanded usually in feedback sessions] ==> opposite effects (rather than an integrating effect upon the artist researcher)


the schizophrenic patient's individuality resides partly in his symptoms
(Searles > Szalita-Pemow)


?gratifications in the ‘crazy’ symbiotic mode of relatedness (despite the anxiety- and frustration-engendering aspects that it offers)

earlier struggle between child and parent to drive each other crazy --> evolving transference of the patient-therapist relationship --> to crack each other


the economy *feelings of confusion and unreality* for iranians, in public political realm of state and individual symbiosis, as well as intersubjective early childhood and parent symbiosis --> the ways it enters cultural imaginary and artistic expressiveness --> *how and why iranian artists often try to make their audience crazy* [-and myself included, check Sina lecture's chaotic verbalizations of delusional materials --> jouissance of disorganization]
-(in my lectures) am i externalizing my psychosis? [~ romantic]

(mother repeatedly commanding the child ‘Now, think!’ [~ to perceive the secret] ==>) threatened, mistrustful, isolated self ==> finding hidden meanings + sarcastic response [~=> unnerving the other]

small children exposed to unfamiliar and complex situations ==> often experience of ‘you are crazy!’


modern culture of obsessive-compulsive character traits as orderliness, competitiveness, intellectualization ==> obsessive-compulsive type of basic personality structure (is made very common among artists, people who are busy one way or another with analysis and psyche of the other) ==> **reaction formation** (which is one of the major defense mechanisms of the obsessive-compulsive) ~= long-repressed desires **to dismember the personality-structure of other persons**
[obsessive-compulsive personality type is very common in expertise societies: tavahosh-e takhasos, clean (+ “contaminated” things), one is deeply immersed in research, mental control, not wasting time, adherence to routines/rituals, washers, checkers, impairment in formulating an organizational strategy, etc. ==> cognitive inhibition, or violent disinhibition]

wishes to foster personality-disintegration in other persons + genuine and powerful interests in helping them <-- how is this possible?!
-Searles suggests that the desires to drive the other person crazy are a part of (the limitlessly varied personality-constellation of) emotionally healthy human beings


feelings of infantile satisfaction & omnipotent-mother fantasies

recrudescence of symbiotic techniques

the [same] sensation of being driven utterly mad by the impossible object [patient, economy, system, self, world, love object, etc.] --> symbiotic relatedness (development of symbiotic reciprocal dependency)

(@apass, the tale we say in artistic research environment:) critical feedback = 'making ill’ of one another, is an effective forms of opening up anxieties which can be interpreted and worked through ==> to become independent (integration) and to leave
}=/={ to acknowlede our highly immature and ‘sick’ but deeply gratifying symbiotic mode of relatedness with the other (disintegration) (in Searles's terms: our efforts in keeping the other person crazy)

*how can we develop *untherapeutic techniques* of critical relatedness?
*how can we face our own conflict between desires to help (the student to become better integrated, that is more mature and healthy) and desires to destroy (the student in the state of poor integration)? --> schizophrenic conditions of artistic feedback

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

مماس
schizophrenia: (a general understanding of all) content-thought disorder (=/= form of thought)
*the disease of cognitive abnormality : abnormal sequential thinking*
*tangential thinking*
•disorganised thinking ==> disorganised speech
•mood disorders
•dementia
•mania
•clanging (situationally inappropriate association of words based upon sound rather than concepts)
•echolalia (unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person)
•[*]tangentiality: deviation from relevancy; wandering train of thought, lack of focus, never returning to the initial topic --> *topic maintenance*
◦self-centered social responses
◦attention to one's own speech is overcome during the occurrence of cognition ==> evasive vocalized content


(language use”)
referential (for the sake of context)
poetic (for the sake of message)
emotive (for the sake of addresser)
conative (for the sake of addressee)
pathic (for the sake of interaction)
metalingual (for the sake of itself)

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

-the concept of “wearing” from Alberti (prehispanic South America)
-the concept of “mask” from Mohaghegh (postmodern Middle East)
-the concept of “style” from Archer (post-industrial Britain)
[these theories are very helpful for me and import-rich for reimagining subjectivity. Alberti committed to anthropology, Mohaghegh to the philosophical, Archer to sociology]

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

slave: a person attached by law and by custom to the identity of another individual --> ‘social death’ of slavery (as legal nonperson ==> alienation) [in academic literature comparative study of slavery], slavery as a substitute for death in war
--shift--> (the concept that) slaves might influence the tastes, the language, the actions, and even the ideas of their masters

acknowledgement of presence =/= significance in relation to history

(A. Lee on) the African dimension of the genesis of the Babi religion
((oral sources for) the recovery of) subaltern histories in Iran [erased from historical memory]
--> deep resentment of “the presence in Iran of an ‘Other’ that does not conform to the imagined Iranian Self”
unblemished national selfhood
purity fetishism of... <== *purity deeply rooted in religion* [?]

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

(issues) politics of liberation:
•that liberal democracy requires common basis for culture and society
•identity politics:
◦“the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression” (Eisenstein)
◦invites people to stay in, to look inward, to obsess over the body and the self, to surround themselves with a moral forcefield to protect their worldview
◦a particular identity is opposing all people who belong to a particular identity
◦naming and claiming lived experience, and the authority arising from that
◦[no more?] sexual orientation (that it is now only about disrupting the mainstream)
◦(in the context of cultural negotiations) *strategic essentialism*: (despise strong differences in members of) minorities to temporarily “essentialize” themselves (forward their group identity) in a simplified way to achieve certain goals, to use hegemonic discourses to reform the understanding of “universal” goals
◦class-based politics are identity politics
◦to bring people together based on a shared aspect of their identity --> fail to examine differences among themselves

*solidarity does not require identification, but a willful act of alliance*

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

سپردن کتاب به حرق و غسل
ضعیفه دانا

(for Attar:)
حال =/= حفظ
کار =/= قال
عیان =/= بیان
اسرار =/= تکرار
علم لدنی =/= علم کسبی
جوشیدن =/= کوشیدن
حال + کار ==> سخن
حفظ + قال ==> سخن

قرآن و اخبار  و لغت و نحو  و تصریف

اهل طریقت --> زبان خود (را میخواهد)
اهل شریعت --> اخبار (کفایت میکند)
imperative عطار  --> وظیفه ساختن
(for Attar:) از دل --به--> (<--؟--) صحرا


باز شدن در سخن ==> شطح =/= سواد مفتی
}== حرکت اسرار
[شطح: بیرون شدن از کناره ی  رودخانه, deviation]

نظایرات عجیب
مضمرات غیب
سر به جوشش ==> زبان به سخن

دل --> زبان --> رو ؟
(arabic/european) -->  (عجمی)

راستی =/= صحت
  |       |
(عبارت =/= نیت)


معاملت در رضا پسندیده است =/= معاملت در  صبر
رضا: چنان که دارد چنان باشد (هیچ)

شطح بایزید:
خانه --> خداوند خانه --> *هیچ*

بایزید: بیچاره بایزید، سی سال است تا من بایزید را می طلبم و نام و نشان او را نمی یابم. (id)

describable موصوفی: چیزی که وصفش می توان کرد

بازدید = دیده شدن     /آفتاب صفت
دانستن = اعتقاد داشتن   /زمین شکل
یادداشت = ذکر       /آب نهاد

ماضی استمراری ~~--> ی

فعل متحرک در جمله (بی جایگاهی فعل) ==> خودجوشی و خود انگیختگی اندیشه و کنش کلامی


نوآوری innovation ==> “جهان خود” (your world) [~ آفرینش هنری، سبک خود، etc.]
=/= نحو: پیوند ارگانیک با جهان دیگران
=/= ابداع: poiesis

(we are interested in strange because we are strange ourselves?)
غریب با غریب الف گیرد (؟)
         |      |
      خود   ذکر غریب


شعر -  شرع -  عرش
  |      |     |
؟   قانون  جهان منظم

ajayeb (شگفتی رویداد نامتعارف) ==> تبدیل شدن سوژه به ابژه tabdil shodan-e suje be obje

Kelile Demne (indian style) --> story within story
=/=
Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya --> list


نوشتم باد، آنچه دید.

...از بهر حق عداوت کرد(ن)

غیب --> غریب --> غرایب --> عجایب --> نامه

نفاق =/=؟ contradiction
   |          |
(در خود)     (split)

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

amoral, amorphous or polymorphous
to reside under the mark of ambiguity
[to be careful with the figure of trickster -->] trickster represents an archetype of transformation (rebirth?) and a symbol of life, [with] humor, irony (and self-irony), as well as the confrontation between the comic and the tragic --> situates the trickster between the *world's balance and unbalance*

(migration or) migrant: (~= fugitive:) individuals who are reborn existentially precisely through the act of the escape, in order to trick their persecutors ==> survive
[=/= the juggler: Nicolas]

Mohaghegh's proposal: *to lie our way into the lie*

-how and where is my unreal located in my work on bestiaries?
past --> forsaken ancients
outside --> time of disappearance

seduction: immersion in style


our guardian: the thief

(learning from Mohaghegh and Cinderella to be/operate for each other) between:
orchestrator (influence, innovation, experimentation --> laboratory)
partner (equivalence, benefit, reciprocity --> alliance)
slave (captivity, labor, devotion, service, worship --> bondage)
--or--> l.a.b. stands for: laboratory, alliance, bondage {bondage should be part of every (artistic or knowledge-intensive) practice}

the question/problem of: incompatibility of past and present, there and here

object of event or journey (expedition, venture,)

story of the “archive of...” : collection of savored differences

the unreal is not always imaginative or speculative
it is sometimes:
a drive (suffering, passion,)
a password (encryption)
a device (machine, guide,)
accidental and chosen

the character’s wisdom, impulse, cunning, courage (endangerment), innocence (purity), violence (rage, atrocity)

intelligence: diabolical perception

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

(to achieve) the perfect secret: a secret that when revealed remains a secret (a riddle, a puzzle ~= monster: confrontation of the raw unnamable)
future liar --> to resurrect (in the form of fable or rumor):
•fake archive (=/= real witness)
•buried forged artifacts in some gamble
•
--> future out of sync (hyperbolic commons) ==> (an aesthetic of) temporal deviation [=/= messianic time of revolution, historical time of modernity, chronological time of capitalism,] --> (the task of) **thinking untimely**:
•forgetting
•erasure
•recreative
(Artaud's vampiric schizophrenic untimeliness...)

(Sina + Mohaghegh's) *existential radicalism*

night: underground of time
where other things can happen
a phenomena where people encounter mercilessly anonymous indifferent impersonal inhuman nature of the universe
(Mohaghegh's work on the renditions of nocturnality)

(carnaval's) multiple forms [prototype after prototype] --> formfullness =/= (deconstruction's) formlessness

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

ordering ==> violence, exclusion, injustice, sacrifice =/= ~=> residue (of ordering --Serres--> its excluded inessential, peripheral, parasitic) *thermal exciter*
•the anthologizing, selecting, and ordering act @Marialena
•with the discourse of parasite we are at including and inclusion

now our relationship to knowledge is to be more extravagant and parasitic =/= economic and fast

every time we write (sometimes referring the reader to the dictionary) we are also reviving language

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

criminal's relation to the dark (fugitive, dealer, prowler ولگرد) =/= wanderer's relation to the dark (nomad, sojourner, sleepwalker)

Mohaghegh --on--> sub-identities whose survival relies upon a certain exact mastery of night's formulas + learning its conceptual-experiential relations to: time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, enigma, solitude, sensation, vision, secrecy, monstrosity, the body

night
•[where one] fathoms otherwise
•the time-space of the visionary, the imaginary, the unreal, the unknown, the elsewhere, the outside, the emergent
•[where one] letting fall those droplets of mad and dangerous consciousness
•[where] governing categories of human existence are suspended ==> alternative classifications (banned libraries, archives, catalogs, arrangements)
•
•
=/= light --promises--> a certain stability of Being

those with a pathological need to rule
those with a diabolical impulse to abandon (subvert, reinvent)
those with nothing to lose (desperation)
those with everything to gain (quest)

time of weeping
(mourn, “this should never have happened”) creation as error; being as error


solipsistic cruelty: no longer recognizes itself in anything else nor anything else within itself


[Mohaghegh, prototype harbour, night harbors:]
return of the full moon --> metamorphosis --> werewolf
return of the nightmare --> fright --> dreamer
return of the sacred --> resurrection --> redeemer
return of the curse --> vengeance --> enemy
return of the tides --> migration --> sailor
return of the banished --> hatred --> exile
return of the ancient --> power --> idol
return of the text --> evocation --> messenger
return of the threat --> intimidation --> extortionist
return of the dead --> disappearance --> ghost
return of desire --> obsession --> stalker
return of pain --> infection --> virus
return of the discarded --> waste --> vagrant
return of glory --> vindication --> fighter
return of the scene --> concealment --> criminal
return of dust --> mortality --> creation
return of instinct --> animality --> creature
point of no return --> irreversibility --> lost cause


masochistic skepticism
sadistic truth
(Mohaghegh's) *deception theory*


death of God + death of the Human + death of the Real ==> limitless epochal existential era of lying

existential forgery
ingenuity
deceit
treacherous play
fictive double-crossing
elaboration


(thief's, runaway's, insomniac's, hysteric's, sorcerer's, and other night-traveler's) sensorial orchestrations of the dark intervals

morphologies of the night-traveler:
•the old boat-passengers once placed under enforced isolation
•the exiles displaced from occupied homelands
•the marauding sectarian factions who patrolled city streets each night (darkness = ideology)
•the slaughtered minorities traversed into non-being
•night-revelers عیاش
•

militant storyteller
phantom ancestors
phantom offsprings


nightclub: a place of nocturnal survival

club manager
lighthouse-keeper

(catastrophic imagination --> fable of) slum = the true face of the city

persecuted, transient, unrescued

(wunderkammer) a cabinet of curiosities (~/?= pandora's box) of subjects, objects, atmospheres, associates, body parts

ontocidal: decimation of Being, both individual and universal


medieval islamic world renders us countless templates linking night to sacred and profane realms: stories of augury, mantic beings, and vatic utterances in circulation from all sides

Thousand and One Nights
god's turbulent relation to obscurity

crescent moon

...brilliant speculative accomplishment of the Golden Age of Islamic Thought now a dark age of its own

معراج miraj (Mohaghegh's Dante's ascension)
sky-voyage of the Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Jerusalem and then upwards into heavenly spheres, filled with supernatural descriptive passages of guardian angels, paradisiac gardens, hell-bound valleys, meteorological orbits, fatal latitudes and meridians, and the gargantuan throne of God itself

night-journey: spiritual + corporeal --> prophetic night (of strange breathing apparatus <-- angelic wing)

angel's wing [that spans entire worlds] --reopens--> (the relational channel between) desire & fear
(descriptions of seeing an angel's body)
==> sarin, cyclosarin, tabun, soman
==> respiratory failure, diaphragm hyperactivity, fainting, pupil constriction, salivation, myoclonic jerks (muscle spasms), cardiac arrest
}--> synaptic breakdown ==> cholinergic crisis --> captive in a state of poisonous ventilation

buraq: a chimera of: animality + humanoid + gemological (multiplicies) + machinic + vegetal + spectral (virtues) =/= taxonomical purity of creation
•stretch the barometers of hybridity, androgeny, disproportionality
•zig-zagging, levitation, elliptical arcing
•like a horse, smaller than a mule and bigger than a donkey. Its face was like a human's face, and its ears were like the ears of an elephant...Its head was of ruby, its wings of pearl, its rump of coral, its ears of emerald, and its belly of red coral. Its eyes were like glittering stars, and its tail of pearl, and its reins of light
--> vehicle to traverse from geographical to cosmological space

journey-to-the-center or exile-to-the-edge

[title]
*the old-hag world*
being-in-the-world = old hag with an ugly face, practice of seduction, artifice, cosmetic embellishment, optical tricks, enhancements

the designer, the seamstress, the architect, the sculptor, the illusionist, the surgeon, the perfumer --> surat صورت =/=? facade

[infernal-geological finale]
I heard a voice, whose intensity caused me to tremble with fear…I said, “O Gabriel, what is this terrible sound?” He answered, “O Muhammad, know that on that day God created hell, a rock slipped from the edge of hell. Until tonight it's been falling down. It has reached the bottom of hell just now.
#darkness, zolmat, rock
•pit's conceptual trinity
•hearing/listening is closely linked to ominous experience (the bell's toll, the wolf's howl, the thunder's rumble)


some passive surrender to vague faith
any suggestion of intuitive-experiential awareness (gnosis)

subject caught-between

sitophobia --> the fear of eating anything
aquaphobia --> the fear of drowning everywhere

between lamenter and euphoriac

islamic insistence on the concealed (unseen face of God) ==> profuse dissension, variance, discord, agitation (infinite faces)

lohe mahfuz
the guarded tablet
quantification
institutionalized record
universal finitude

1. artifacts of hell
◦camphor --> link between the demonic and the aromachological (mastery of the psychological effects of fragrance)
◦chain --> experience of ligatures, cords, shackles
◦nail --> impalement potential
◦stones --> crushing effect
◦drink boiling water (hamim) and filth (ghislin)
◦devils force-feeding them Zaqqum
◦demons were placing fiery bits of corpses into their mouths
◦ichor was dripping from their tongues --Mohaghegh--> ichor interestingly refers both to the mythic substance that runs in the veins of pagan gods and the putrid discharge that oozes from fresh wounds
◦hell-dweller: scorpion, ideal killing-machine, back-biter, poisoned tips
--> ***nonstop leaking of the inward outward***
2. body parts of hell
3. topographies of hell

Mohammad's night-journey's hellscape, vivid orchestration of space
[...]in one direction, a “river of bile, blood, worms, and fire[...] boiling together, putrid and revolting” alongside another “black and rippled with fire[...] growling at itself with clamour and terror”

experimental cuisine (demand a certain oblique consciousness from the participant)

angel physiognomy (multi body, collective chant) ~= underworld scorpions
atonal angelic larynx ==> non-harmonic, anarchic, cacophonous image of the heavens (--Mohaghegh--> divinity as noise)
•prophetic listener (body became organs of hearing, schizophrenic audition of شش جهت six directions)

wind of barrenness
rih al ‘aqim (from the species of criminal wind bad-e dabur, God sends it to destroy things)
•blows throughout the placeless realm
•particular condition of absence (in taxonomies of ruin and chasm)
•their moon-like faces
•innumerable

[*]veil: transcendent invisibility, receptacle of competing backstories (of shame, conspiracy, superiority, covert, elite)

galleries of self-covering demonic beings

Gabriel: angel of revelation (oversees:)
•khasf خسف sinking into the ground
•maskh مسخ disfiguration of features


astigmatism (a type of refractive error, retinal tearing)
cartographical layerings



(Mohaghegh reading a Babylonian nocturnal prayer)

(old) god [divinity cults of ancient worlds]: signposts of an extra-human imaginary ==> consciousness trespass beyond itself

in the face of the night's obscurity (when the all-seeing shuts its eyes)
pastoral life turns murderous (at dark)

signaling the absence of fairness...
blurring of omniscience...
delay of verdict...
aimlessness of quest

•blindness to fill the void of divination
•wandering, detour, or stillness to fill the void of odyssey


Sin
moon-god
•enigma (“he whose heart cannot be read”) --> epistemic
•futurity (remote: “could see farther than all the gods”) --> temporal

somnolence خواب و بيدارى
==> branches of nonsense pervade (disbanding of the herd)

(cypress سرو) tree
inspector of cosmological space


in theo-terrestrial plane:
1. alluvion: the wash or flow of water against a shore --> inundation
2. alluvium: a deposit of clay, silt, sand, and gravel left by flowing streams in a river valley or delta --> detritus [residuum alone is left to control the universe?]


Ishtar
guardian of prostitutes
surrounded in myth by death and disaster
goddess of contradictory connotations and forces (fair play & enmity, etc,)


Lillith (derived from the Akkadian lilitu: evening creature, specter, or monster)
kidnapping sleeping children

(according to the Babylonian cosmology) night requires (non-identitarian) gods capable of abomination (backstabing)
-recognized by their tangible outlines as actual constellations in the night sky
-related to the more expansive domains of animality, vehicles, and objects
-emanate from a perceptual faculty closer to the child's imagination of cloud-shapes (=/= archetypal meaning)


Tiamat
primordial goddess of the salt sea, darkness, chaos, and creation
from the time of permanent nightfall
a destroyer-deity and yet whose sliced body parts form the heavens and earth
represented as unconscious, reckless annihilation and yet also holding diabolical intelligence
bathed in eternal blackness and yet known as “the glistening one”


Girra
dystopian potentials of technological invention
figure of wicked logos (undoing words)
(leader of the terrible)


non-metaphysical and equally nonhumanist devotion to the artificer (apparatus)

cosmic ballistics: scientific field of mechanics concerned with the launching, propulsion, flight, and effect of projectiles (trajectory and impact)


nocturnality and contagion

snakes and dragons of constellations

paradox (the beast)
instrumentality (the builder)
unleashing (the despoiler)


death-spell
نابودی gesture of *extispicy: ancient Mesopotamian practice of reading animal organs (often a sheep's liver) spattered upon a wall's surface
-a discipline involved less with knowing than with watching



The Egyptian Book of the Dead
philosophy of night, dusk, shadow

egyptian night-deities
-with astounding narrative-theoretical flexibility
-some slither, hunch, fly, or remain seated
-not residing on Olympian heights but rather in the subterranean below
star-covered nude woman
cow arching over the earth
--> night does rule from transcendent distances but rather envelops (or swallows) whole the existent into its gut (or uterus) [<-- digestion?]
[metaphysics:] (away from) patriarchal gaze --into--> maternal stomach

Khonsu
•bloodthirsty (eating the organs of royal opponents)
•merciful --> [its creative epithets:] traveler, embracer, pathfinder, defender, “He Who Lives on Hearts”
one who resembles his own waning moon

Nephthys
tied to the night of the soul's traversal
sepulchral
(endow pharaohs) with the vision for “that which is hidden by moonlight”

Apep =/= Ra (the light-god)
giant sea-snake said to lurk again in the primordial gloom
evil lizard, *world encircler*
•defeating Apep: basematerial outputs (spit) --to--> elemental properties (fire) --to--> man-made weaponries (lance, knife) --to--> fetishistic physiologies (the left foot) --to--> sympathetic magic (tearing apart of effigies


(sectarian logic?)
desire for clear reactional materiality [=/= sadistic or paranoiac serial killings]

teratological and semi-demonological turn
interjecting thingness, fiendishness, and monstrosity into our midst

night: indefinite definite ~=> nihilistic force of closure

(from) orthodoxy --to--> dramaturgy


(Mohaghegh's theory of) fanatical sovereignty in pagan thought --> ultimate keeping & violation of the law ~= obsessive form & apocalyptic formlessness
(reconciling) *the toxic dialectics of presence & absence* behind every theo-political order : gods walk among us in immanent ambush, hiding in night's open view (of many faces, masks, tongues, robes, tastes, proportions, and gestures), adopt infinite visages, apparels, pseudonyms, and dialects [=/= monochrome trappings of daily identity]


Ahriman =/= fire-god
omnimalevolent side
first destructive spirit
twins of the primeval choice
==> crises of perception
dwelling in non-being
shape-stealer
self-cutting (cooking of his own paranormal tissue)

earthly creation = ruse, net, and temporary prison (a decorative window-dressing to lure the false god away)

a sunless place

mortal transactions (of civilizational, philosophical, religious, and moral trials)


night-raid
nocturnal fierceness
asceticism of the warrior
asceticism of the night-watchman


(Goda riding with the) exponential disinformation of legend

learn to talk with night <-- not indicative of a knowing subject
--> to become both hypnotized & hypnotic whisper

language of mood (subtle movements of):
•temperature drops
•intermittent gusts of air and wind
•snapping of tree branches
•shooting comets of sky


Bronze Age eschatologies

queen of riddles
cosmic idolater
her language never argues, only propositions



dark thoughts

evanescing moon

...guerilla leader who fled into the mountains and froze to death beneath the night sky

thoughts of
•obvious separation (from family, lovers)
•potential victory and loss (fatalistic struggle)
•futility of human experience amid insects and animals creeping in his midst (transfigured)

*night <--tied--> wondering*
*night <--tied--> uprising*
*night <--tied--> possession + dispossession*
*night <--tied--> countdown* شمارش معکوس
*night <--tied--> disappearance*
*night <--tied--> abdication*
*night <--tied--> dismay* جبن
*night <--tied--> obscenity* جبن

***night --to--> bring the mind elsewhere***

Mirza Kuchak Khan
Jangali

...once the leader of the jungle movement; now the jungle will confiscate him


(tactics of the willed unknown)
inspiration <--> madness
horoscope <--> puppetry


sensitivity to lower-grade intimation ==> gaining of subtle lunatic powers (in the arts as well #feedback):
•slight paranoiac ability
•slight manic ability
•slight delusional ability
•slight schizophrenic ability
•slight obsessive ability
•slight melancholic ability


when dreams replace sleep
when the dead pass into the deep of the night
when night's deep appears in those who have disappeared
Blanchot

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

Mohaghegh on Blasim's The Madman of Freedom Square
the story of two foreigners known as ‘the blondes’, identical twins of fair hair and complexion who come each morning (their place of origin and purpose unknown) to roam down the main street of a neighborhood called the ‘Darkness District’. This quarter of the capital city is thus named for being the only sector still lacking electricity, and our nar- rator describes the residents there as physically gaunt and existentially worn down. This is an unwell place, and so the sudden arrival of the blondes represents a contrast, a radical anomaly and an enchantment-in-waiting for a zone that otherwise wants nothing more than to lay down and give up forever. We are told that the ambiguity of their circadian walk has an immediate transformative effect on the district; though these figures never speak, they cast gentle glances upon the inhabitants on either side of the street, and this courtesy soon bears miraculous fruit as the wishes of each person, young and old, man and woman, find themselves granted. By day and by night, the Dark- ness District escapes its former wretchedness to become an increasingly scenic area, with the government finally bringing electrical power and the locals planting flow- ers and showing acts of kindness to one another…all in honour of their two strange visitors (with whom we read that everyone has grown enamoured). They even build a stone monument in veneration to these silent newcomers. But then one morning the blondes do not materialize, as a violent coup is underway that sets the district on fire with bombs and missiles; amid the fighting, our narrator is flung against a wall, his life then saved by one of the blondes (their statue since demolished), and awakens in a mental asylum railing about the speechless aliens who rescued him (and the others)—only to find that no one has any memory of such beings or any trust in his recol- lections of them; he later finds himself strapped with a detonative suicide vest (the final light-bracketed image).

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

Morton on Weber --> sociology is itself (the logistics of) disenchanted in exploring disenchantment

charisma-based society ~=> disenchanted bureaucratic society

charisma: (paranormal) force field that surrounds and penetrate us with *healing + destructive* consequences
(<-- this is super ok as long as that force field is not curated by wannabe spiritual philosopher human)

bestiary: paranormal excluded by religion

agricultural societies monopolized charisma (--> king) --> logistical functioning of the world of agriculture ==> global warming

neolithic privatization of enchantment ==> monotheism

Holocene --> strategy of survival at any cost

(Morton echoing the cliche of artists wanna do magic:) “art is demonic”: it emanates (not designed) from beyond sense that the artist is not in charge of, dangerous causative flicker
~ ‘art = charisma’ [= cause & effect]
--Morton--> (bad idea of) art ==> charismatic causality

force-like animal magnetism

magic = causality + illusion

appearance and essence are two different sides of Mobius strip

(pre-neolithic -->) *we live in a world of tricksters* (raindrops are tricksters,,,)

incomprehensible charisma of kitsch

(the objects in my room contain a palpable enjoyment that is without me, found objects that spray charismatic causality [without devotion or trust])

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

(Zizek's) Lacan four discourses via porn actress facial stages:
1- ecstatic state --> overwhelmed
2- serious --> hard work, instrumental control
3- boredom --> ignorance, indifference
4- mocking --> is this all you can do, smile


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

body...
how to feed it
when to fast
how to soothe
moisturize
let go
heal
you can't grasp your body once and for all --> one can only bear witness and offer testimony (<--Avital-- this is why writing is so often bound up with illness, “writer = invalid”)

cultural phantasms of bodily mutation

the body never stays put long enough to form self-identity --(this is why)--> our ancestors used to fast-forward and just lose it [transcending the body]


in Dostoevsky
body is variously insulted and humiliated --> subjected to injury (an injury capable of language and disclosure)
--> idiocy offered a delicate conflagration of soma + psyche

illness: the stealth master (the teacher whose lesson is unremittingly opaque yet purposeful)

(when you get hurt -->) body: “Honey, I’m home, I am your home.”

your body fighting for you
healing without cure

illness --Avital--> essentially related to the experience of injustice ~= your Geworfenheit
• illness visits you at will and does what it wants to your body (stinging surfaces you didn’t know you had)
•illness gives access to the devotional mode of surrender (abandoning to itself something other than the self)
•illness brings with it an alternative system of ecstasy and meaning
•*illness: an inescapable condition of being*
-

(Dostoevsky's Myshkin) suffers a sacred illness

[your?] heritage -->
backed up by literature
backed up by philosophy
claimed by mythology


*epilepsy* (has a place in the history of thought) --> the Idiot's illness
•between psyche & soma
•between the *theory of trauma* (which focuses the history of the subject) & the *theory of fantasy* (which refers to transference and countertransference)
•the only illness to have its own mythological figure -->
•madness
•visionary excess

herald of epilepsy: Hercules, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoléon, Lord Byron, Pascal, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, etc.


foolishness
drunkards
maniacs
the pathologically resentful
the envious
a rapist
a crowd of cheaters
classic neurotics
subjects of delusional rantings
subjects of criminal intent


conscious =/= unconscious =/= drive

contract to his illness
manipulations of care

the sick often find someone who is even sicker to take care of (<-- the case with the Prince)


(according to Nancy -->) literature has always tried to produce the body (which philosophy suppresses)

any discussion of the body risks engaging a double bind (a psychosis):
•failure to produce a discourse on the body
•failure not to produce discourse on the body
--Nancy--> *the sick body* (in a frenzied state of belated, compensatory awakening) --demands--> a reading (interpretive and diagnostic strategies) that often culminate in *an excess of discourse* ==> opens up the space of necessary obscurity by which our bodies come to us

Nancy --> The body does not know; but it is not ignorant either. Quite simply, it is elsewhere. It is from elsewhere, another place, another regime, another register [not an “obscure” knowledge, or a “pre-conceptual” knowledge, or a “global,” “immanent,” or “immediate” knowledge]
•philosophy calls “body” presupposes the determination of something like an
authority of “immediate knowledge,” a contradiction in terms, which inevitably becomes “mediated” (as “sensation,” “perception,” synaesthesia, and as immense reconstitutions of a presupposed “representation”)

the site of nonknowledge that the body traverses --Nancy--> *is related to thought* <-- the body thinks (in a sense) beyond giving or making sense
==> *thought is itself a body*

-Heidegger was the one who unhitched “thought” from philosophical operations and gave it weighs in as body ==> Nancy

in Dostoevsky --> the body commended by *illness* bears a memory trace of the *sacred* (+ finitude of all bodies)

“God is dead = God no longer has a body” ==Nancy==> bodies (bereft of trickle-down symbolicity) will have to be:
•pumped up
•prosthetically amplified
•steroid-enhanced
•“built”
•buffed
•bionically ensured
•drugged
•“medicated”
•cloned
•remade
==> the technobody or replicant will be made to substitute for the lost body of the divine trait

last night he dreamed of (apocalypse technological dominion:) spread of the railroad and the distribution of connectors installed by new technologies as instigators of the unsacrificeable...

(in literature) apocalypse = vehicle (a technological momentum)

the unnamed God has vanished together with this unnameable thing...

Myshkin’s illness still binds him to the sacred --> this body retains and persists in making sense, the illness continues to produce sense

...poverty, hunger, deportation, torture, deprivation, ugliness, horror --> bodies sacrificed to nothing


[*]sacrifice: a body's passage to a limit where it becomes the body of a community

(after Christ -->) body is nothing but a wound =/= illness

(when it persists) pain ==> I'm not well, I'm in trouble, therefore I am.

jouissance: a pain that succeeds <-- a place where being, utterly exposed, is external to itself


[*]body: surplus of objectivity

our body acts as a traumatic place (that causes a series of failures)

(idiot's seizure) epilepsy
Then suddenly something seemed torn asunder before him; his soul was flooded with intense inner light. The moment lasted perhaps half a second, yet he clearly and consciously remembered the beginning, the first sound of the fearful scream which broke of itself from his breast and which he could not have checked by any effort. Then his consciousness was instantly extinguished and complete darkness followed.

(going to fetal position)
seizure: an enactment of a wish to return to the womb
epilepsy --Sutterman--> sadomasochistic phantasms that feature the self as murdered child

breaking a prized vase
delivering rants in place of conversation

Dostoevsky's idiot:
•repugnant
•uncanny
•a kind of Bataillean reversal (at bottom is unmistakably Christian)
•provokes love

according to Dostoevsky: *idiot ==provoke==> love*

Faust had reported that two souls inhabit his body [==> switching body types] {--> two sick bodies} (hallucinated + internalized)
1. the ailing body --> you can get rid off with drugs (dealt with Mephistopheles)
2. the abandoned body --> inglorious corpse

body doubles reflecting one another (---> go to mirror)

Avital --✕--> movements [such] as Positive Action, Positive Choices, and the marks of similar tags of empowerment that issue from the hope that we know what we’re doing, that we can take charge and act up and affirm our bodies, our selves, that we can now stop being victims and relinquish passivity.

torturer <--> healer

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

شطح shath: literary technique (san'at adabi صنعت ادبی)
(jCzF0RD-a_M)
shath: contradictory speech (kofr + iman)

del-bari (dressing up and going out[?]) =/= gush be harf kasi dadan (listening)
گوش به حرف کسی دادن =/= دلبری

خجسته khojaste: thinking all the time that everyone is saying hello to you

Hafez = connected pockets of meaning =/= Ferdosi's organized pockets of meaning =/= bestiary's listed pockets of meaning

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

indian ocean diaspora
indian ocean slave trade ==> atlantic slave trade and the new-world diaspora

Lee --> influence of African and afro-iranian people on other iranians and on persian society and culture

Ziba Khanum (d. 1932 Yazd)
the life of one enslaved African woman who lived in iran
(recovering what can be recovered of their industrial lives)

iranian history --> issues of:
•race
•gender
•religion
•elite social and economic networks
•nature of slavery
•value of subaltern history


the idea of (academioc study of) history: study of structures, institutions, abstractions ==> generalizing categories (such as slavery, freedom, modernization, etc.) =/= (biographical turn) towards biography of one woman

****(biography ~~>) *personal experience* =/= (category of) slavery: an abstraction that bunches together and confuses historical instances of displacement, isolation, dependence, unfree labor****
(--Cinderella-->)
personal experience =/= displacement
personal experience =/= isolation
personal experience =/= dependence
personal experience =/= unfree labor


19th century iran (--> estimations:)
•one/two million slaves exported into persian gulf (to Bandar Abbas in iran) from east-african/indian-ocean trade
•two-thirds of the slaves were african woman and girls, almost always destined for residence in wealthy households (as domestic servants and concubines)

1868 census conducted in Tehran: 2.6% of the civilian population of the city was designates as african slaves and/or “household servants”

categories of slave/servant in shii iran:
•nokar نوکر male servantkh
•khedmatkar خدمتکار female servant
•kaniz siah کنیز سیاه female black slave/servant
•khajeh خواجه male black slave/servant
•gholam siah غلام سیاه male black slave/servant

issues of:
•race
•religion
•assimilation --> *enslaved africans were not given (arabic) muslim names, but were assigned persian names as part of the process of assimilation into persian households* [Dade: persian for nanny, nursemaid]


Ziba Khanum
she is remembered by her great-grandchildren as their earliest ancestor
her descendants relate different stories of her origin as part of family lore
she was purchased in Zanzibar, others suggest Mombasa (--> as commodities slaves were classified by country of origin: habashis were regarded as the most beautiful, intelligent, expensive slaves, followed by bambasis, then nubis and zanjis [these term refere to the ports])

modern rationalization for Ziba's sexual relationshipto Haji Muhammad Ali:
•Haji took her a concubine wuth the permission of his wife
•because his wife was sick and could no longer serve him
•master married Ziba after his wife's death

there were no barriers (either legal, religious, moral) to a master taking a slave as his concubine
both *slavery* and *concubinage* were recognize and regulated by islamic law (shari'a)

umm-walad ام ولد mother of the son --> slave woman کنیز impregnated by her owner, thereby bearing a child
--Lee-> slave woman might, under these circmustances, have a strong incentive to bear a child by her master, in order to move toward the center of her master's household, to protect herself from sale, to free her child and herself, and to inherit part of the master's wealth (through her offspring) <-- the sexual aspects of the relationship were considered incidental ضمنی and carried no moral stigma or social shame [=/= children born to slave fathers were slaves]


gathering of men (were held regularly) as social occasions for business, entertainment, smoke opium, etc.

clandestine conversations were not unusual

shari'a was interpreted and administrated by shii clerics in Yazd, and there was always room for manipulation of the law


Ziba Khanum's situation illustrates the problem of applying western legal categories of “slave” and “free” to the lived experience of enslaved women in iran
(her legal status as a free woman had little consequence <-- she remained dependent of the family and lived in their household)

***limited value of “slave =/= free” --Lee--> when applied to the study of muslim world***
modern state ==> “slave =/= free” (presupposing a secular state that is able to guarantee the lives and properties of individuals who can claim its protection) }<-- societies that are constructed around the ideas of:
rights, citizenship, secular state =/=
   |            |           |
kinship, belonging, religious authority, hierarchies of dependence (<-- middle east)

19th century iran --> there was no ideal within the society of freedom from relationships (of kinship, household, belonging, community solidarity, wealthy patron)--with--> implications of dependence, obedience, obligation
•any such freedom would have left an individual *isolated* and *vulnerable*

****
all enslaved persons (and akk other persons) in 19th century iran necessarily were *embedded in muslim households* and moved along a continuum of whatever situation of power, respect, wealth, independence they might be able to *negotiate*
#Cinderella
****

women --> at the margins of wealth and power --> slave women most especailly (they moved toward the center by:)
1. performed valuable domestic duties
2. became the master's regular sexual partner
3. bore the master child

the goal of most women (slave or not) om 19th century iran --> to negotiate the most respected position (within the family that they found themselves attached to) <-- **the defining factor was gender, rather than slavery**
--> for example Ziba Khanum's free life after the death of her master was determined by *gender* more than her previous *slave status* or by *perceptions of race*


babi movement in 1844 iran
baha'i teachings of detachment and resignation in the face of adversity
Ghulam Ali by the end of hi life was the largest landowner in the vity and extremely influential in politics and business affairs [he had three kaniz: Fezzeh (silver), Zaffaron (saffron), Shireen (sweet)]


...complete disappearance of the african diaspora in iran (!!??)
[...]