[...]omething to inhabit and animate”


*ordinary registers intensity* (regularly, intermittently, urgently, as a slight shudder)

(one can be) ***confused but attuned***

“we dream of getting by, getting on track, getting away from it all, getting real, having an edge, beating the system, being ourselves, checking out” -Stewart

(socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states, public feelings are not simply “good” pr “bad” but always) both powerful and mixed

the talk, once set in motion, expands into a بیشه thicket of stories and social maneuverings
(a scene in a restaurant becomes) maze of inspirations and experiments ♥
-“her brother's stories are shell-shocked and they have no endings. they leave you hanging”

singularity of the event ==> a “we” of all sorts opens in the room

chance event ==>
•a layer of conflict
•a daydream to things


...tuned in to some little something somewhere


“in a video that blankly records an arresting image, young embodiments of a mainstream in the making come face to face with an otherness that compels a closer look. the order of representation gives way to a more violently affective contact”
Stewart

force of things --> what counts as an event

a politics of being/feeling conected
a politics of ways of watching
a politics of waiting for something to happen
a politics of difference (of habit and dull routine)


childhood coming back [to you] as shocks of beauty

graphic stories prompted by the seemingly simple work of remembering:
•kinship ties
•married names
•stories of alcoholism
•stories of accidents
•stories of violence
•stories of cancers


[*]potential: fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an emergent assemblage of disparate forms and realms of life; a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence --engenders--> attachments or system of investment...

(people are) collecting found objects snatched off the literal or metaphorical side of the road

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

Yazid: the archetypal tyrant of islamic memory

...a shift from thinking of Urdu as exclusively Muslim to thinking of Muslims as the custodians of a shared heritage that Hindus have forgotten, but have the potential to reclaim
-Anand --> how do we understand the islamicness of urdu poetry?

spread of [...] poetry far beyond the bounds of exclusively muslim identity

sufism as an everyday mode of speaking of and speaking to the self (not as an esoteric practice, or as institutionally bounded)
-it gives you a language to explore their interiority
-(traditions of self-scrutiny and self-reflection,) a poetry of self-knowledge + rebellion against social convention [+ frenzied violence (vahshat) --> Majnun: an intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “mazhab of love” a dominant strand of sufi theology, ethics, and political thought in the Balkans to Bengal complex]

earlier mode of understanding X as irreligious
discourses that recognize X as islamic


Anand --> *indic nature of islam*
-islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality

many, besides muslims, have ongoing relations to islamic sacred objects
•embrace of the divine
•efflorescence of relations with nonhumans (snakes and cats)

(Naveeda on) Anand's mournful tone --> forces of restoration = forces of destruction

importance of shadows for an understanding of sensory experience, aesthetics, and divine order

(Naveeda asks for an) alternative approach to the islamic tradition besides the trope of light --Anand--> imagining a lived islam from the perspective of shadows

shadows as the (relational and individual) self
*ruin: draw visitors by making itself the inner rendered as the outer --> a traversal of one's inner self, otherwise hidden to oneself



perspective from the shadow --allows--> to think about tradition paradoxically (about *affective inheritances* in the constitution, transmission, and transformations of the islamic tradition)

Anand --> ****islam as identity =/= islam as inheritance****
islam as inheritance --Spadola--> like a river (#meander)

Anand --> *how older forms of knowing and being coexist and are constantly in conversation and contestation with more modern form*

...to reimagine the very definition and coherence of “discourse”

*(Foucauldian) archaeological work*: full of ruptures, disagreements, and reworkings ranging across an array of texts and conversations from contemporary to colonial records to hadith to eighteenth-century poetry

question of coherence = question of finding a grammar

difficult intellectual commitment to both contingency and coherence

(you can witnessed in Tehran a lot of anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian)

[our challenge:] *to make ourselves literate* able to read what is currently illegible to us



Kant's notion of hospitality = translation of the sanskrit upanishads into persian by the mughal prince and philosopher Dara Shukoh (1615-1659)
--Ganeri--> hospitality towards texts and ideas?

*for an intellectual tradition to have the ability to show hospitality to an intellectual stranger*

-Shakry
what does it mean to think through psychoanalysis and islam together, not as a “problem,” but as a creative encounter of ethical engagement?
-how arabic intellectual world showed profound hospitality to Freudian thought
-how iranians showed profound hospitality to western philosophies --witness--> self-confident and enriching ethical encounter with a foreign system of knowledge

گورکانی pre-colonial mughal empire, inheritor of long and unbroken traditions of islamic and indic thought, (from a place of power, privilege, integration) welcomed the upanishads into dialogue with the conceptual world of tasavof

economic, military, and discursive powers of European imperialism ==> epistemological and ontological havoc they wreak on muslim forms of life

•to move back and forth between al-Ghazali (1058-1111) and Freud (1856-1939) <-- without any sense of swimming against the *gushing streams of empty homogeneous time*
•bringing the upanishads, from several hundred years BCE, into conversation with the Quran <-- unconstrained by the *teleology of linear historical time*
--> (my lecture-performances: being) inhabited a world of multiple temporalities {=/= teleology ==> linear time of progress, moving ever forward--teleology of time is central to modernity & question of the self}

many post-colonial projects shares that sense of a break from the past, which must now be recovered --✕--> sense of rupture and alienation was not (and is not) the only way in which the colonized responded to the colonizer

Shakry --> *plenitude of time and the persistence of traditions* + productive conceptual dialogue (~= ajayeb studies)
•to engage with the ethico-philosophical questions

intellectual and religious elite across the colonial Middle East and South Asia lived within a plenitude of time in which Freud and Ibn Arabi, separated by centuries, could productively speak to each other unconstrained by the borders of “tradition” and “modernity,” “religious” and “secular”
(Shakry > Anand)

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

(Mufti > Weber:) inescapability of calculation and instrumental rationality in a capitalist society ==> fundamental transformation of religious belief and practice in the transition to the modern social order
•“steel-hard shell” (stahlhartes Gehäuse), “iron cage” --provides--> range of possibilities for social action and social imagination

***modern intellectualist form of romantic irrationalism*** [in contemporary art within Europe --> #fables of: novelty, innovation, departure]
redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science --> craving spheres of the irrational (spheres that intellectualism has not yet touched) are now raised into consciousness and put under its lens
}= a method of emancipation from intellectualism

intensive social transformation in the postcolonial world
conditions of neoliberal global capitalism

[we have to see] disenchantment, necessarily open-ended and incomplete =/= self-consciously formulated projects of re-enchantment

[i have to be carefull with my] allusive evocation of the passing of secularity into obsolescence

my work with computre programming and database --> practices of calculability: a hallmark of the secularization thesis

subtraction stories: accounts of the emergence of modernity-secularity as merely the falling away of extraneous elements (leaving a core of foundational human experience and its self-understanding)

(Mufti > Asad --clarifying--> the ways in which) ***the very category of religious experience as a distinct and delimited domain of social and cultural life emerges out of transitions to modernity***

islamism: a return of islam, either uncontaminated by, or having shaken itself free of, the liberal thought and practice of the modern west

jargon of authenticity: (a form of thinking, to understand crisis in terms of) loss and attempted recuperation of past social and cultural forms

emergent postsecular common sense ==>{islamist practices = an expression of religious consciousness =/= the inroads of secularism ~= Western imperialism}

(?what is made to disappear from view altogether in) conceptualizing the interaction of secular and religious imaginations and spaces in modern Muslim societies

[*]enlightenment: an encompassing logic of bourgeois modernity, within and against which different social groups struggle in widely different ways (it is not something to be selected or rejected at the great salad bar of modern life)

*dialectical perception* --> revivalist claims (of whatever) are products of the very cultural logics they disavow and disown
==Mufti==> *islamist thought and practice cannot sustain their claim to be uncontaminated by the modern imperial process*


precolonial poetic traditions in the persianate sphere (influenced by persian)

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

systematic observation of the moon and its light ==drive==> development of science
studying soft moonlight =/= short-lived and blinding sensation of a flash of lightning

moon:
boundary of the terrestrial domain
bediator between this world and the next

moonlight ==>
•reflections about the interstellar order of space
•boundaries of terrestrial captivity زندان تن
•*semi-clear blurred shadows that suggest a strange and nonhuman world*


moon changes constantly --> mood changes to the moon [luna in Latin --> laune in german: launisch moody = to be ruled by changeable moods, lunatism = a form of sleep-walking by moonlight or possessed by demon]

reddish
orange
gold
yellow
white


the moon changes its course frequently because it is not able to master the cold

when moon light...
upon moon lands...


out of reach moon was an object of pure observation =/= Moghana’s moon

scorching missiles of Helios
allurement
cheerfulness
harmlessness


Lucretius on the nature of things
look upward yonder at the bright clear sky
and what it holds
the moon, the radiance of the splendour-sun

moon-dwellers

icaromenippus Lucian’s satire about the moon lamenting the lack of imagination of ancient astronomers

trans-lunar celestial spheres

great intellectual abstraction is necessary to explain the appearances in the sky

Plato creates an image if completely harmonious world structure which makes circular rotating movements by means of spindles


Aristotle’s design gave a mechanical explanation for celestial phenomena (both terrestrial & astral physics)

Copernicus (+ Kepler + Galilei) ==> anthropocentric view of the world (=/= catholics church)


ibn Heisam --> visible light originates only from the moon
moonlight to be studies

ketab al manazir

size of the angle of deflection is so small that moonlight cannot be explained as sunlight

in 1609 Galilei’s telescope had 20x magnification

(moon’s) traces and spots

rough and full cavities and prominences
“let us not thing it an offence to suppose that she is earth and that for this which appears to be her face, just as our earth has certain great guilds, so that earth yawns with great depths and clefs which contain water or murky air, the interior of these the light of the sun doe not plump or even touch but it fails and the reflection which it send back here is discontinuous”

moon and the face of the observer

“there are people who believe that they are seeing a mirror image of the oceans on earth, and others say they are the traces of the mountains and mountain ranges of our earth; there are also people who believe that what they see is a figure that has been cut out of the reflecting rays that fall upon the earth”

optical homogeneity of the regions of the moon

ibn Heisam --> the color of the body has the effect of darkening the light
*color is a result of density*
“you will not find any color without density, because a body that s extremely transparent is not dense and therefor it has no color. for this reason we maintain that the color of a body can be equated with its density”

eclipse of the moon --> “this color is dark, its nature is blackish and comparable to red”


da Vinci's report
1. vapours rise from the moon, after the manner of clouds and are interposed between the moon and our eyes
2. moon composes of more or less transparent parts
3. moon = carrying thickness or density [refractive <-- this is easily how I modeled my moon for the WIELS exhibition]
3. moon ~= mirror (<== large amount of water on the moon)

Galilei
lunar waterlands (in Kepler’s dream journey Somnium https://frostydrew.org/papers.dc/papers/paper-somnium/)
Kepler saw (in the moon craters) large circular buildings that moon
s inhabitants (endymionians) had erect to drain the swamps

science and cartography of th physical features of the moon
Hevelius
W. Gilbert


moon’s waxing phase --> earth that is in brightlight reflects light back (one third of the sunlight that reaches it) to the dark side of the moon

“what if the atmosphere had really withdrawn to this dark face? and if air, why not water? would not this be enough to infuse life into the whole continent? why should noy vegetation flourish on its plains, fish in its seas, animals in its forests, and man in every one of its zones that were capable of sustaining life? to these interesting questions, what a satisfaction it would be to be able to answer positively one wat or another! for thousands of difficult problems a mere glimpse at this hemisphere would be enough to furnish a satisfactory reply. how glorious it would be to contemplate a real, on which the eye of man has never yet rested!” (Jules Verne, All Around the Moon)

the side of the moon facing earth is being gradually eroded by earth’s gravitation

Pythagoreans <-- one of the first recorded visions of an inhabitable moon on which animas and plants flourish, larger and more beautiful than on earth <== *it makes to sense to create a planet that is uninhabited*
“[...] for she would then appear to have come into existence vainly and to no purpose, neither brining forth fruit nor providing fir men of some kind an origin, an abode, and a means of life, the purpose for which this earth of ours came into being” (Plutarch, On the Face of the Moon)

metaphors for the silence of the space --> perennial question of humankind

the black sea sparkle with lustrous fires, like the ceiling of a vast hall of ebony encrusted with flashing diamonds
with what a soft sweet light every star glowed
no matter what its magnitude, the stream that flowed from it looked calm and holy
not twinkling
no scintillation
no nictitation
disturbed their pure and lambent gleam

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

night dreams (after WIELS's exhibition)
starting with the story of the jinn studying origin of species --> bestiaries
mix of reports fr[...]