[...]hat jeopardized it internally and externally
...................................
*the formation of selves within contemporary Muslim societies:
(A) existence of multiple selves within an individual, which is context-dependent and intersubjective. the individual may espouse different self-representations at different moments, these are not viewed as inconsistent to the illusion of wholeness (Ewing 1997)
(B) the subject acts on herself in such a way as to make the norm constitute her as pious self. this is a self that is generated through its particular emergence from and interpenetration with, the norm. (Mahmood 2001)
(C) the self as the realm of presubjective possibilities. in Deleuze words “impersonal and pre-individual singularities” exists within a plane of immanence. “far from being individual or personal, singularities preside (take over and govern) over the genesis of individuals and persons; they are distributed in a ‘potential’ which admits neither Self not I, but which produces them by actualizing or realizing itself, although the figures of this actualization do not at all resemble the realized potential.” the actualizations are in link with his plane of immanence. (Deleuze 1990)
a given individual moves between these qualities without necessarily morphing into entirely different selves --> ***difference internal to being***
(that ‘difference’ is internal to being)
to betray the immediate norm (of this society) (to ensure a continued relationship with them)
but i am already moving to my next self
*ethics of listening
(1) gestures as cultural text (Clifford Geertz)
(2) codes to crack the regulative mechanisms of a society (Pierre Bourdieu)
(3) how thinking proceeds apace with gestures, how gestures gather thought, sounded and unsounded, and how voice is incorporative [tending to incorporate or include things] of these gestures
(Heidegger shows)
metaphysical relation: think ==> speech
(only when one speaks, does he think--not the other way around)
temporality of memory
(...it took them two years to remember to tell me this)
possession: is to be struck by any number of somatic illnesses or psychic effects of mysterious origins (Bown 1993)
mythopoetic (registers of Qur'an)
mythopoetic registers of everyday life
Jinn can trick the humans into looking at a copy of them (and then change form or into formlessness)
the copies of time-honored practice of embodying and transmitting the islamic tradition is now haunted by *modern anxieties*
Asb-e Imam-Hossein
it is in islamic tradition that being a muslim entails keeping up the illusory nature of everyday life while also participating in it. (not excessive withdrawal nor excessive attachment)
[why isis breaks this?]
...................................
[✕] technologies of the “here and now”
[✕] semiotic-tech of “elsewheres”
}-->
(separated in the past, *ontological difference*, a fiction) in West: (--> that is why Latour anthropologizes modernism)
*[philosophy]--signals--> here (in Europe and West), selves
*[anthropology]--signals--> elsewhere, others }--> a wannabe discourse on Others
}--> (ontological difference between anthropology & philosophy [in their mode of immersion in the metaphysical] is part of) colonial community, a form of ‘negation’ =/= my recent antagonism [the way i am studying is for *extension*{= extending but also standing in tension with, a lineage(=/= rupture)} rather than *negation*]: since i got into Olearius, 2017, I am developing recently a philosphpical-genealogical antagonism. (in Iran we are used to philosophy naturally inhabiting the otherness of Europe, among others, we never see them as anthropological objects, but they see us as such. *we don't think ethnographically about Others*)
}--> my aim is to mix this while i am “here” --> i say life (also power and ethics) comes to attention simultaneously anthropologically and philosophically from elsewhere and here [--> to reed something from the outside ~= reterritorialization (of concepts, interests, affects, percepts,)]--> when concepts are reterritorialized they illuminate the world differently
*we need better construction of past for building truly decolonial community* <-- is my antagonism needed for this?
anthropology: a mode of heightened attentiveness to life
(Singh)
Foucault, Benjamin, Derrida, Deleuze --> a loss of anthropologically generated theory
(more than once in a single day i find myself paused to wonder at) how thought moves
(long-standing philosophical between) dialectical and nondialectical genealogies of thought
-to be drawn to nondialectical is not the negation of dialectical, it is a way of thinking about the “meta"-physics (Singh)
philosophy reconciders this: ‘concepts come more explicitly to the surface as impressions grow into thoughts’ --> no! no!
how philosophy relates to and draws on nonphilosophy (is usually geographical*)
more differences:
•geographical: western/non-western
•naional: indian/french
•subdisciplinary: analytic/continental
(trajectories of Derrica, a tradition of) negative transcendence: différance, an absence that transcends “a” and “not a” [=/= (trajectories of Deleuze, a tradition of) affirmative immanence, the self-differentiating intensities of “a”, compresence of “a"]
some Deleuzian terms:
•assemblages
•deterritorization
•becoming
•multiplicities
•excess
•schizophrenia (~ nondialectical thought, a nondialectical expression of different polarities held together. use ‘split’ to create a philosophy, [the ‘split’ metaphore is] an argument for the dynamism and temporality of the structure =/= dialectical historism and the Freudian unconscious) -- schizophrenia marks an unresolved, nondialectical tension
}--> giving me a range of concepts with which to inhabit a plenitude of life --> we need to create/borrow/steal/appropriate a range of concepts with which to inhabit the plenitude of life (in Tehran) that exceeds all the time. (that which the political consciousness of contemporary Tehran fails to grasp.) ***between moments of (my) departure and return (to Iran) lay a whole world, full of life (and hope)***
Deleuze's hostility to dialectics
“we will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche's work if we do not see ‘against whom’ its principal concepts are directed”
[*]dialectics:
1- the idea of a power of the negative as a theoretical principle manifested in opposition and contradiction
2- the valorization of the “sad passions” as a practical principle --> “the unhappy consciousness is the subject of the whole dialectic” (Nietzsche)
3- the idea of positivity as a theoretical and practical product of negation itself
•Hegelian: a determinate negation, followed by a “higher” synthesis
•Badiou 2000, Jameson 2009, Zizek 200k, a counterwave of contemporary dialecticians
dialectics: a habit of thought--variably expressed in anthropology and philosophy and critical theory
postcolonial theory, critical theory, cultural studies <--(descendants of)-- negative dialectics =/= affirmative nondialectics
to notice (over time) in Tehran:
•relations involving intergenerational servitude and nonnegotiable indebtedness
•expressed relations of power
•other modes of spiritual and material relatedness (that would be lost if i were to tell a story that was only a variant of a master-slave dialectic)*
•ascetic qualities
•activist qualities
•*ways in which state power is implicated (behampichidan به هم پیچیدن) in the lives*
how do we piece together a world?
ajayeb.net =/= catalogue of ethnographic curiosities (<-- be very carefull with this kind, #wunderkammer)
encroachment tajavoz تجاوز
super important questions for Iranians:
•(the question of) *how we conceive of the state* and the hopes and disappointments that issue from those conceptions
•are there other ways to conceive sovereignty? [other than the Agambenian conception: the sovereign power exerts a near totalizing force over an abyss of “bare life" = state. (Agamben's) decisionist totalizing authority <-- (Schmitt's) secularized theological concepts[...]