[...] absolutely nonviolent, a value infinitely small but never zero; infinidecimals
degree of violence = 1/x {while “true”: x+1}


(Augustine:)
(Because of the arbitrariness of being:) “to love" = "I want you to be”
[we need to be witnessed:]
because “we have not made ourselves,” we “stand in need of confirmation. We are strangers; we stand in need of being welcomed”

*strangers and exchangers (sarraf)


this is an artistic concern with foreign-policy


[Arendt:] (in 20th century) shifts in the terms in which we locate the ethics and values of responsibility
citizen --> refugee
[demand for clear ethical responsiveness]
*citizen: an entity assumed to occupy the secured interior zones of polity (who generates the affect and discourse of care, concern, responsibility, and rights;)
*refugee: foreign and shifting body with no home base--has become the exemplary locus for any possible cosmopolitan ethics

you feel like a foreign body until you finally get a job, love, being greeted,
(you may remain foreign until the other claims your body: the police, the lover, the employer, some microorganism that make you sick, and so on.)


(Nietzsche's view of) the friend as the future***
Holderlin asking “Wo aber sind die Freunde?” (a central complaint of ethical proportions and political consequence), (that they have not come to the place from which the poet is greeting) scattered or not yet in existence --> nature of future friendship. (is he keeping the friend necessarily remote? out of political reach? Avital's asking, accusing Holderlin of singularization)
-Graeco-Roman model of friendship
-(is there a specific Iranian model of friendship? --?--> Tarof)
-political model of friendship (based on reciprocity)

Greco-Roman --> Mediterranean World
-the “swimming-pool and spa” of the Greeks and Romans?
-wherein the cultural preferences, ideas and sensitivities of these peoples were dominant
-their urbanites and cosmopolitan elites
-mutual knowledge

politics of friendship in Kelileo Demne:
undiscovered treasures...
constantly warning of fall on the asymmetry
nonreciprocity
Kelile-o Demne is about communal forms of fragile human existence
a project of (asserted) nonalienation
-destinal velocities (the Turtle, the storks, etc.)
fictioning totality of nature, therefore, state
States of security, nature of illusion,


finite essence of friendship

(is muslim paradice and general idea of akherat in the way of finitude of friendship? what would friendship for a mojud-e okhravi mean?)
octo-paradisic systems



animal husbandry
[husband: conserve, husband, economize, economise, spouse, mate,]
[husbandry: the practice of cultivating the land or raising stock]

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

the national geography documentary crew and the editors fabulating a nature story which comes to hang around in my family's lunch table culture. the iranian mother and eating your children story of the lions. the multi species contingencies. my family culturenaturally hanged on the story of the wild nature, wildness. what does it mean for my family in their specific temporal location in tehran history? the disappearance of Gonjecshk [Sparrows being replaced by Starlings], parks [numerous stories of devastation], and the anthropocentric state logic [condition of the zoos, hostility towards domestic dogs, etc.]?
-and as is the case with my family, they are so good at changing the subject, and all i have perhaps tried to performe is the ways we can stay with the subject of discussion around our lunch tables, to stay with this particular story and not that. (althought i have been changing the subject constantly myself...)
-the absence (minimum presence) of animal in my family, and the ways the animal story circulate and live there. what is the animal holding in my family?
-stories or fables that permit wonder, or allow perhaps to approach crows or cats as creatures who could be capable of contingent cooperation or multispecies companionship. [i am referring to the video of the wild animal taking care of the baby pet, the popular video in social media that triggered the discussion about wild and domesticity during the lunch between my family members. an object that captured the dialectic of desire and disgust in my human family's response to the animal.]--> this is what I call cosmology: beings that depends on their placing within a particular cosmology. cosmology is very much alive --- [animals fitting in the visual rhetoric of web-based digital media is itself to be investigated... social relations, social animal, contemporary cosmology]
-the minimum relationship with feral cats, and rats, and pigeons (and their material environment.) and ambiguity towards them. evoking responses of affection, disgust, fear, and indifference.
-relationships between people, animals and place**** [a place as complex as Tehran's urban environment with its politics, televised operations, its ‘wilderness,’ and technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate its landscape.] --> are we having a Historical change? in epistemic principles --> what is inside and what is outside [keep in mind the historical moment in iran's political isolation. is this reflecting the exclusion of feral animals of everyday life?]
-my family was able to talk differently and find other expressions about violence in the landscape of tehran by applying the animal story (to the head and heart.) [this is also Kelile o Demneh.] the video was a heart-breaker. it had a healing moment, and their resistance to its originality as a tale of friendship is meaningful, the violence is solid and a-priori to companionship, and it supported the story of kinship instead of friendship. This story also promoted the Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis, that the wild-being is devoid of intentions and is like a timepiece with regular motions, that the animal is object and not subject, beast-machine.
-my mother's relationship to the lions eating their offspring, octopus eating their mate, or cats licking their genitals and dogs filth scavenging--polluters of domestic space, cockroaches “belonging” to an stratum below civilized life, the “out of place” and abject owl, species sexual dispositions and different coupling, suggest difficulty in an anthropocentric expectation of alterity. animals simultaneously despised and admired --- the idea of eating your (so-called) “loved-one” (not a suitable object for affection) refutes cross-species identification according to anthropocentric standards. [windows of opportunity for cross-species bonding, domestic-wanna-be-feral story, myth of mental intention and animal flesh, irreducible heterogeneous ontologies and involvement of human-animal in multiple agencies, normal stories of becoming human, ]
-which animals are regarded as transgressive and ambiguous in Tehran? and which aren't?
-resisting any openness to the idea of feral animal that was expressed in my family, a meaningful discomfort, actually entails the fear of finding that we are not so different from animals, within the violent landscape of contemporary tehran.
-dust. fixation on clearing the dust out

this is one pattern of exchange.

(another interference:)
*In Pinocchio we have the excellent cooperation between the cat and the fox, who are forming a cunning and successful participatory alliance to trick Pinocchio: the hybrid-robot who doesn't understand his own potentialities and wants to be so-called human, the animal-betrayer. the fact that he can be tricked by the cat/fox is what making him human.
•and Geppetto, oh my god, (he is Yunnos/Jonah?) working on a project inside the fish, colloquial activity and asceticism registered with the fish interiority. Geppetto-pop is refound or saved? by the non-truth seeking robot! --> breaking his self-surveillance as a characterization of pictorial objectivism, a form of moral self-control of natural-philosophical style.
•i rather go with the animal style, the con of Gorb-e nar-e & Rubah-e makar, they are opaque and transparent at the same time
•the signifying animal, machine, and human in Pinocchio story is ridiculous!
•towards responding to “opacity” (opacity is complicated philosophical ethical issue regarding animality and humanity) --> refraction. with opacity what is at stake is our “material understanding of our connection with other animals” (Marks, touch 39)


(we are talking about) Fables of Animal Subjectivity [Kenney]

apparatuses of subject formation

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

THE prey and THE visible (both are categories of forest life survival stories. also have high stakes in iranian culture, thought, and philosophy)
--> what is important for a living self?

(bab-e) hekayat-e dusti-e kabutar o zagh o mush o bakhe o aahu o ...
بابِ / حکایت دوستی کبوتر و زاغ و موش و باخه و آهو و ...
[everyone?]
[the story of the friendship of these animals; the quality, properties, and pitfalls of relation]
•what is (re)activating the *imaginary friend*? (is it really fully on shut-down?) ---> trap to abstract thought? ---> this ‘abstract thought’ is dangerous for “sadness” to get lost in it, but it is amazing for “joy”
•how much we need sadness?

why jackal is so persistent and play-full (full of “plays”) in Kelile o Demne's bestiary?


bird people
,
fox people

,


arbab-e اربابِ --> dar bab-e در بابِ
(let's do this conversion, we are not “arbab”/master of the story nor ethics or anything else, we like to create “dar bab-e”: doors/openings into different possible path ways)
(it is about teller not fully understanding the story)



‘shekar’ [شکار prey] and ‘ashkar’ [آشکار visible], two entities in play, like the game of stone-paper-scissors, a link in our shared literature that relates the perceptible to the subject of hunt. in a discourse of friendship and enmity, the visible anticipating itself as target for violence, becomes meaningful when we approach it in a game-theoretic-semiotic linkage, relating and tying together issues of voyeurism, surveillance, violence, media and mediation, and predation in poetic itineraries.

[business] friendliness, تعارف Tarof and greetings [and its artificial inseminations] (sometimes) is it covering up or masking really predatory behaviors(?)


and in Kelile o Demne,

کلیله و دمنه Kelile o Demne (i am becoming more convinced that) is (all) about the phenomenology of *friendship and the *contract


Sa'di is the theoretician of friendship (“mojaverat” مجاورت) and Kelileo Demne is the theoretician of “sherarat” (شرارت villainy, felony) saying that the closeness of different subjects is catastrophic [--> proper differences between kinds and subjects.] Sa'di is writing golestan گلستان and bustan بوستان at the time of the Mongols threat---it is the news of the Mongols coming and we know about the velocities of news can penetrate within the thick walls of any city. Sa'di is theorizing proximity based on “mohabat” (محبت love, Liebe and kindness), he assembles a setting of ‘garden’ for the coming of Mongols army. Kelileo Demne's project is pessimist pragmatism, mobilizing ethics in a milieu of violence and power.



---> the story of birds entrapped escape away with the cage
---> the story of cat and mouse project
---> bat and owl
---> scorpion and..


Shakespearean villain <== nature [<-- i prefer Ursula, evil corporally located]
modern villain <== power struggle


کلیله و دمنه Kelile Demne is full of disastrous laws of encounter and encounters of law
a sort of a metaphysics of presence (imposing and projecting to and with animals) that regulates the possibility of a pedagogical encounter
•no mediated forms of presence and so on
•nobody breaking the semiotic rules
•what subject-supposed-to-know
•what blocks cordial disposition and animal amity?
•what genital lickings are welcomed or unwelcomed and discouraged or abandoned? and so on


to read Kelile Demne not as something that works as legitimator

reading and greeting


to form (an) intention


all that anthropomorphism performs and withholds on and with animality

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

[Rickels]
(my) animal-findings and fairy-tale associations

if dogs communicate through their trainability cats redirect lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.

meeting the cat half-way

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

[Avital]

the greeting ‘hello’, the initiatory and inaugural moment of our encounter

the gift sabotaging the freedom of the subject to receive greeting or offering greeting
a gift that becomes a curse for the person,

who has the civic stability to refuse a greeting?
the finantialy challenged and the greeting



explore friendship as a crucial modeling of justice?

configuration of encounter

It doesn't always have to be science fiction, risking the wrong blend and watching the uncontrollable spill of consequences --> hook up friends

friendship, as Avital practices it, should often involve triangulation and the drama of departure?

I found myself (also) tempted to reduce her/him/you to sameness,

“meant to be,” relying on a kind of metaphysical latency.

invasion with little violation(?)

(In rhetoric:) citation = apostrophe [address to an absent or imaginary person, calling to the other]

(i am late. i am transed late. translation and trans-relations has everything to do with latency. )


Avital: For Bataille, friendship is part of the sovereign operation and is linked to reading.

apostrophe (citation) for Derrida is the possibility of postmortem discourse --> memory, acts of bringing back, recalling

can we take out no insurance policies to safeguard thinking or writing or building?

(Lyotard's) différend: a dispute or difference that cannot be resolved by the cognitive or linguistic resources we have at hand --(indicating rather)--> a rupture in the presentation of testimony (~ litigate)

something you could turn your tattooed back on


(#my work on [post-feminist] harem)
(companionship and sexuality and installations of community) --> The Inoperative Community [Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy]
(how to) create community wherever I go?
(establish relationships: humor, kindness, attention, reworking, “re-”, festivity, moderate arousal, silliness, playfulness, support,)
learning making a “fictive kin group in training” (how to learn to notice each other? how to learn to be in the same game?)
to insisted on community without relying on transcendence =/= communion
(community without illusions about itself)
a community that is self-annulling but rigorous (rigorously perverse)
(--the duties of the survivor)
-this is about creating convivial spaces (=/= urban design ideology)
(to set up around) work =/= (bodies of) knowledge
(let's make this an obligation:) to create an atmosphere in which interesting mistakes can get made
let's bring a huge amount of material what we get into trying to digest
--> [an effect of being in Europe ==>] is harem about having a space/time to claim as my own? [it can never be?] an actual space which i can dream of and re-create and hope toward? retrieving a mythic place of origin [that cannot be rebuilt]?
•*the harem girls my ancestors* --> Cinderella

=/= longstanding tradition of seeing the female experience as ‘inherently’ painful (as in the pathos of The Handmaids Tale TV series)

(#harem Manifesto)?

..telos of anything {in apass, my bow and arrow? (=/= a generalized claim) --> it was about knowing the energy of each other and trusting the honesty and coherence of directional postures and responsive movements. [#harem] (*) one's game might be geared to build success according to one's goals, but unless the game engages the other, it is worthless. (* it is about) learning how to wit. (*) my bow and arrow in use, my tropes and abstractions, what are they good for if others don't play/engage with them? to recontextualize ‘method’ and methodology. (*) “incommensurable tacit knowledges of diverse communities of practice” --> “communication” across irreducible difference (where “method” is not what matters most;) (game of) “situated partial connection” ==> subjects
(not always the human language is the medium) two-way conversation =/= naming (~= intention-laden and consciousness-ascribing linguistic practice) --> sometimes [...]