[...]



(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

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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

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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 (!!??)


Lee: how Ziba Khanum's life be represented and understood?
Spivak forcefully and poignantly demonstrates the appropriation of subaltern voice of the british imperialist “civilizing mission” by indian nationalists and marxist theorists in support of revolutionary ideologies --> the absent and silent subaltern can be represented in support of any position at all
Spivak suggests that a history of subaltern people (individual or conceived as a class) cannot be written at all + should not be attempted
~/=
Eve Troutt Powell --> *the danger of applying american abolitionist narratives and assumptions of atlantic slavery to very different situations in islamic realms*

(Lee making Spikvak's question specific -->) can Ziba Khanum ever speak? Lee's answer is no
we have no access to her thoughts or her inner life --but--> that does not mean her life is without meaning or value to history
*we must listen for the african voice in iran even when it cannot be heard*

siah siyah سیاه: afro-iranian children (descendants of african woman slaves served as domestic servants and concubines) who remained in iran, married local people, and could live normal lives as iranians (although they might be identified as black)
==> *some percentage of the iranian population is of african descent (especially among the wealthy clases who could afford slaves) <-- this heritage has never hardened into a clear ratial category within the society*

we must regard them as actors *even when we cannot see their choices*

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childhood Elias chap1

[*]childhood: idealized romantic construct, with denied legal rights, reflection of adults about themselves:
•nostalgia for an individual and collective past
•
=/= children vacillate between innocence & awareness, morality & immorality, cruelty & kindness, foolishness & wisdom, , , **children act as sophisticated consumers**
--Elias--> ***children make emotional, political, consumerist choices***

how adults construct childhood --> ***aesthetic social imagination***

how adults imagine children (in idealized forms ==> evocation of emotions) ==> give meaning to (individual and) collective realities

childhood --> worry + obligation =/= adultho[...]