[...]ich 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]<[...]