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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 <-- (Hobbes’) theological assumption of an omnipotence god] (--✕--> Singh's very nice criticism:) “Agamben's transcendentally negative dialectical concept of sovereingnty entails a totalizing elevation of Varuna (the terrible) in such a way as to wholly eliminate the potentialities, threats, and possibilities of Mitra --> in its contemporary political philosophy most iranians tend this way (in everyday life and forms)
•how might we imagine a political theology that enfolds more ambivalent potentialities? ****
•

(Agamben swinging between the heightened extremes of redemption and catastrophe [@Lenna] =/= ) Singh's bipolar concept, reconceptualization (of Dumezil arguing, *force* and *contract* together constitute sovereignty):
[*]Romulus (& Varuna) --> warrior ambitions --> terrible and violent aspect of sovereignty; Varuna (--Foucault-->) as punitive power and force morph into a range of disciplinary mechanisms [*in a way Foucault's entire carrier can be understood as a way of engaging Varuna in different forms]
[*]Numa (& Mitra) --> peaceful elder --> embody contract, the friendlier, pact-making aspect of sovereignty (==> rule of law), producer of welfare and health and productive economy


khoshunat + refah خشونت و رفاه
we have to engage paradoxes of state power: capacity and incapacity (--> my point: the state in Iran is ambiguous.)
#workshop: Studying State Power---in Tehran we must explore theoretical alternatives to the concept of force: consent, contract, Singh's bipolar theory of force and contract, varying ideas of the “magic” of the state, Foucault's governmentality --> contemporary anthropology of the state, we examine varying pictures of state incapacity
•requirements: willingness to engage challenging concepts and texts, weekly online comment, class presentations and participation
•aims: a final essay: to make a coherent argument drawing on anthropological and theoretical literatures on state power
•axis: i work with Singh: that “there is no one correct answer we hope that students will come away with a better sense of the paradoxical coordinates of power such as violence and welfare, central to the making and unmaking of global modernity”
•reading: we will gradually build up towards the more difficult texts and ideas.
•note: You will not necessarily receive a better grade for any external research or new information you bring in but on how well you relate to the texts and ideas we have discussed in class. two student presentations. often a quieter, more considered response will be more highly valued.


[Singh seeks to signal] a wider range of forces (of which “repression” sarkub سرکوب would be one) and forms of contract (modes of give and take that are not exactly captured by the idea of “compassion” rahm رحم) [=/= VOA or BBC's dangerous notion of “informing” iranians’ political awareness]
-these two forms exist as potential tendencies of power, two forms among others that **power over life may take**
*tendencies* are not static or ahistorical [- Foad's “tendencies” (to destiny)] --> tendencies may morph and take new shapes --> they can also turn toxic when they are disappointed --> we oscillate from redemption to catastrophe =/= [this is the kind of political act/project we need:] “with Mitra and Varuna (~ region of structural-potential tendencies) we are not giving up hope, but the project becomes more specific: to track the particular degrees of force (many of which may be morally objectionable) and the modes of contract that are available in a polity” -Singh
...gestured to tendencies of thought

@iranian friends
to inhabit Mitra and Varuna is to not give up all political hopes and criticism (=/= dialectical political logic ==> a final purifying battle [~ Mehdi's totall earthquake offering a “higher” synthesis to his Tehran in a destructive scenario])

*** the locus of disappointment (& hope) [for iranian] ***

a concept can:
•shift or reverse the locus of our hopes and disappointments
•gives us coordinates along which to pay closer attention


nondialectical thought =/= law of noncontradiction : you are either for or against (Islam, state, ...)


a kind of life-force that an older generation of social science would have called “agency”:
“she is fearless and has an amazing ability to bring people together”, i was drawn to the vitality that she embody --> Singh understands her life not simply as a unidirectional story of “empowerment” or “agency” [a story many iranians are caught in] but as a *fluctuation between forms of strength and vulnerability*
(condition of life itself:) our particular strengths and vulnerabilities variably express themselves
...pushing a family from a position of relative strength into near destitution


how do we conceptualize relations between potentially hostile neighboring groups? (Singh 2011)


[agonistics and'>& intimacies] --how--> they may traverse different intensities ~~~~> ***differences internal to a life***

agon (contest) --Singh--> agonistic intimacy: a way to understand the co-presence of modes of conflict and cohabitation, (*co-presence of violence and wellness*,) to leave open the possibility of a shared and contested future


jinn: a category of spirit shared by popular hinduism and islam
who, usually turns out, is a lifelong conpanion
*a relation that can be life-giving may also become life-denying
jinn and other minor spirits may also harbor the possibility of madness


[varying thresholds of life]
thinking of the dead, the unborn, spirits, and those participants among living --> what kind of conception of life this requires? --> (Deleuze > Singh's) ***varying thresholds of life*** (=/= Agamben's “bare life” [--✕--> Singh's starting point: how one thinks about life or vitality not just as bare life]) --> as a way of engaging ancestors (such as Ehsan's little girl ghost [#Ehsan's brilliant storytelling gives the “unbeliever” goosebumps from the intensities, the “incredible feeling of an unknown Nature-affect” that he embodies]), spirits, the undead, and the unborn who subsist alongside the living
*threshold:
•to denote points of passage accross phases of life
•refering to varying degrees of intensity (that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensities of Ehsan's ghost-girl, to the cannibal mice, Tehran's earthquake synthesis of affect, , ,]--(these [Tehran's range of moods and intensities] are)--> waxing and waning گام‌های ماه *intensities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)


the social =? “our” version of the transcendent/immanent metaphysical
how many dimensions is “our” metaphysical composed of (in Tehran)?


(Durkheim starts:) religion = an engagement with a vital animating principle, “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force [...] none possesses it entirely and all share in it”
-spirits, demons, jinns, gods of every rank are the *concrete forms* that capture this energy, this *potentiality*
(later Durkheim reduces this remarkable promising formulation in his signiture from the metaphysical: “the moral authority of society”, ‘religion ==> solidarity انسجام’ }=/= innumerable anthropologists have shown how religion does not necessarily “reawaken solidarity”)

(instead of “the social” lets get interested in more than one dimension of life, lets think, with Singh and Deleuze, of) *vast continuum of human and nonhuman life*


“Baba, I have been troubl[...]