[...]oments of insight and harmony. Oriented towards the future.

All i am doing today, like derrida, can be seen as a grafting (ghalameh zadan) or extension, supplement or prosthesis, an outgrowth from somewhere else, earlier on.

I will attach to the story of maulwürfe like the shit on his head.

Recalling and reinventing Shakespeare, the idea is not to bring it from past to present, something that is already disjointed in time towards the future. I push the characters of King Lear to a future. The deconstructive reading of the play has to do with the opening of the future itself. It is utterly important that you do something unpredictable for yourself. If you are in the business of hate, love suddenly, changing tracks brings the unexplainable to the trajectory. Going in discipline is like riding a train on rails, i am not saying to go off the track and crash or stop, but to change track experimentally and to change gear. The tracks are built for us to move in the field of thought, they don't cover the whole surface, by moving along them we can witness the new to emerge from our interdisciplinary run.

Derrida shows, reminds, that we can never do anything systematically.

Monstrosity in the story Yal-o Ejdeha by Shamlu. Monsters of the deep..

my aim was to show the monstrosity of all the characters in King Lear not just Edmond. Edmond is the artist of the self. Shakespeare makes unacceptable characters. King Lear play is intolerable itself, an encounter with the opening of the future itself. Instead of giving in to the normalizing and legitimating representations which identity, recognize, and reduce everything too quickly, why not rather be interested in theoretical monsters, in monstrosities which announce themselves in theoretical reading.

The proper significance is simply and categorically deferred forever, insistent strangeness of the force of deferral, (effecting what derrida has called) the singularity of the here and now.

“explained” is “explained away.”

unreasonable is not concealed necessarily.

Duty to irresponsibility

any phantasmatic organization, whether collective or individual, is the invention of a drug, or of a rhetoric of drugs, be it aphrodisiac or not.
In talk, i respond to the how of a poem or text dictating a kind of addictive reading or desire in the reader.

The project of a text, the project of a theory

according to Freud, when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhabited again. Funeral speeches and related writings, are possibilities that structures the movement of identification. Mourning is the interiorization of the dead other, also its contrary. Politics is figured as first and foremost an organization of the time and space of mourning.

After him, it is all war and crumbling.

W[...]

[...]l possibilities and aesthetic imaginations of four theoretically-worked dispositions that Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh puts forward: insurgent, poetic, mystical, sectarian modes of consciousness, operating within multiple terrains of human and inhuman experiences of the middle east.
--> masks (the above mentioned four masks are accompanied by four “performative epitomes”): the exile, the animal, the shadow, the machine, (the monster, the thing, the contagion, the mirror image)

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

installation:
speculative objects (~/= anthropological objects) --to--> quasi objects
between research, social critique, speculative theory, and artistic production --> politics of representation

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

[*]insurgent:
resistance to modernism, and revolutionary agency
<== exhaustive disintegration of belief-structures in modernity
otherless individuation
eternal war
killer's freedom
(affective) overreaction


[*]poet:
will to chaos (--a type of consciousness that perceive the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn)
<== cataclysmic time of modernism (<-- great social disorder: prison, exile, censorship, etc. [==> Hedayat, Shamlu, Forough, Nima's tone of aggression --> a proto-sectarian space: secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, *the compartmentalized and esoteric iranian avant-garde with aesthetic devices of: unity, isolation, subversion])
fugitive postmodern map of escape from the grasp of the experience of the modernist phenomenon
|
responses to historical events of atrocity and transition
mystical, criminal, mercenary, revolutionary edifice
amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinker/writers)
conceptual axes/archetypes of: power, hostility, banishment, solitude, desire, sacrifice


[*]mystic:
sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material (=/= postmodernism's obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialism)
neomystial trajectories of new-wave iranian cinema filmic style --> hypnotic effect =/= audition, dialogue, narrative
& exile space


[*]sectarian:
will to extremity
(apocalyptic writing)
breakaway modality
نوچه پروری noche-parvary's effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, narration
(annihilatic temptation to) convert the text into a closed circle
(sect's threats of) forbidden power, moral ambiguity, collective density(/destiny)

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

[this project works with:]

[]
contributions/responses of:
•radical leaders (Jala Al Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Khomeini) --> ideological suspicion towards models of machinism and cosmopolitanism in the modern age
•intellectual forerunn[...]

[...], obscure, versatile (thinker/writers)
conceptual axes/archetypes of: power, hostility, banishment, solitude, desire, sacrifice


[*]mystic:
sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material (=/= postmodernism's obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialism)
neomystial trajectories of new-wave iranian cinema filmic style --> hypnotic effect =/= audition, dialogue, narrative
& exile space


[*]sectarian:
will to extremity
(apocalyptic writing)
breakaway modality
نوچه پروری noche-parvary's effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, narration
(annihilatic temptation to) convert the text into a closed circle
(sect's threats of) forbidden power, moral ambiguity, collective density(/destiny)

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

[this project works with:]

[]
contributions/responses of:
•radical leaders (Jala Al Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Khomeini) --> ideological suspicion towards models of machinism and cosmopolitanism in the modern age
•intellectual forerunners (--> sectarian)
•literary icons (textual innovations of Hedayat, Shamlu, Akhavan, Baraheni) --> *poetic violence* and its apocalyptic tendencies --> that the declared east is plunged into a catastrophic epoch ==freed==> a “will to chaos”
•artistic visionaries (Naderi, Forough, iranian new-wave cinema neomystical) --> strategies of withdrawal, aims of disappearance, situated in obscure elsewheres of auditory and visual landscape
}--> #ideology #literature #mysticism #sectarianism
(from the middle eastern front) to (the issues of):
◦post-historical instant
◦catastrophic resistance
◦creative imagination
 }--> issues of:
◾technology
◾representation
◾globalization
◾colonialism
  +}--> drastic reinterpretations of:
◽time and being
◽death
◽pain
◽transcendence
◽victory
◽blood

~~(modernity is an extremist epoch)==> mithridatic approaches
anticultural visionaries
extreme --> resistance-fighter/ideological dictator, artistic forerunner/experimental thinker, different constellations of desire
***mithridatism مهردارو mehr-daru: *internalization of toxicity* (the gradual ingestion of lethal substances so as to gain immunity) --> an archaic protective tactic, an ancient model of defense, (subterranean practice of pirates, alchemists, cult leaders, shamans, guerrilla columns, spies, paranoid kings's *logic of encounter*)
(poetic extremism -->) mithridatic: dispensing fragmented verses, aphorisms, and engravings of the atrocity; invitation and unleashing of the malevolence itself, to seduce obliteration;
-affliction, existence thriving [...]

[...]of time as pure circle (from medieval mysticism)
=/=
deconstruction's uncanny
psychoanalysis's trauma

[a technique i use in my lecture-performances, i work reverentially = reverie + reference] --> could be helpful for Eszter

*(colorfulness ==> entanglement)*


the ligature (خط پيوند)
the outliner
unimagined destiny


(little freedom called) curiosity =/= alertness (<-- freedom of nerves)


(my problem with the) discourse of the trace (=/= heritage, tradition studies)
“let's leave a trace” --> you create your own kind of starting from yourself. you have no ancestors and your roots are in your footsteps
(it is never my concern how to leave a trace. rather, reading the fubar that is left by others for me to read)


(contemporary colonialism is tentacular)

contemporary colonialism with its *clash of civilizations rhetoric* [~=>? multiculturalism] =/= ancient warlords and dynasties (--Foucault showing the difference between a medieval monarch’s beheading of a subject and the self-regulating disciplinary apparatus of the modern state) }<-- they don't get it: Middle Eastern response of Adonis, Darwish, Shamlu, Hedayat, and others. that is, to perceive modernity as the manifold extension of an eternal atrocity

the problem is those who have no patience for either concepts of “the world” or “the historical”

(eastern insurgent has been:)
•technically innovative
•epistemologically and ideologically distinctive
•existentially grounded in the waters of ‘what has always been’

Mohaghegh making a link between Hassan Sabbah and Ahmad Shamlu:
•Sabbah: leader of the Ismaili assassins and keeper of their Nizari fortress at Alamut: that he was said to have never left his inner quarters [the library, courtyard, or bedchamber] for thirty-five years except twice to stand on the rooftop and look out beyond the mountain --> this is the worldview of the eternalist at work. He participated in ‘change,’ manipulated them toward fatally constructive ends even, but did not honor these developments as a journey of any substantial kind.
[flash forward a thousand years...]
•Shamlu: same attitude: when he was asked to comment on his country's most recent uprisings offered the following metaphor: he said to think of the event as when a man who is sleeping on one side of his body for most of the night begins to ache and so rolls over to his other side and continues sleeping --> the movement is not sufficient as to prove impressive


(Mohaghegh stresses in postmodern Middle Eastern thought:) the prominence, variability, and magnification of the willing subject


-Foucault's early outright support for the Iranian Revolution of 1979
-Baudrillard's theoretical flirtation w[...]

[...]rlords and dynasties (--Foucault showing the difference between a medieval monarch’s beheading of a subject and the self-regulating disciplinary apparatus of the modern state) }<-- they don't get it: Middle Eastern response of Adonis, Darwish, Shamlu, Hedayat, and others. that is, to perceive modernity as the manifold extension of an eternal atrocity

the problem is those who have no patience for either concepts of “the world” or “the historical”

(eastern insurgent has been:)
•technically innovative
•epistemologically and ideologically distinctive
•existentially grounded in the waters of ‘what has always been’

Mohaghegh making a link between Hassan Sabbah and Ahmad Shamlu:
•Sabbah: leader of the Ismaili assassins and keeper of their Nizari fortress at Alamut: that he was said to have never left his inner quarters [the library, courtyard, or bedchamber] for thirty-five years except twice to stand on the rooftop and look out beyond the mountain --> this is the worldview of the eternalist at work. He participated in ‘change,’ manipulated them toward fatally constructive ends even, but did not honor these developments as a journey of any substantial kind.
[flash forward a thousand years...]
•Shamlu: same attitude: when he was asked to comment on his country's most recent uprisings offered the following metaphor: he said to think of the event as when a man who is sleeping on one side of his body for most of the night begins to ache and so rolls over to his other side and continues sleeping --> the movement is not sufficient as to prove impressive


(Mohaghegh stresses in postmodern Middle Eastern thought:) the prominence, variability, and magnification of the willing subject


-Foucault's early outright support for the Iranian Revolution of 1979
-Baudrillard's theoretical flirtation with Islamic terrorism
-Badiou and Zizek's dazzled looks toward the Arab Spring
}--> they mistake fireworks for explosions, and ill-equipped for such far-off archaeological digs


internal saboteur

heritage of deconstruction:
•parody
•parasitism
•mimicry

Rumi points to those madmen who would wash their wounds in blood
... we are no longer interested in the face of the other but only the other's defacement

the destruction that cleanses
the rabidness that is a precipice

(what i am learning from Shahrzad, i wish and my work has been always about the ways of learning: ****to buy my people time to think and breathe in other directions****)


an eastern step: to make language peripatetic (salek سالک wandering from place to place on foot [why not make it to the Wonderland's Alice?]) ==> (a non-regimented) textuality within a body that charges --> *uncivil incarnation*


[...]

[...]tic (infinitesimal becomings)
•present as close an interpretation of the unthinkable strangeness of reality as possible
•on an ongoing desertion of the real

Adorno: “works that make socially univocal discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as themselves” @Laura's judgment on the fascist body (--> can consumption be resistance? @Laura: becoming fascist body ==> ? )

the medium of film-making in present-day iran attempts solely to bring the crypto-vantage of the everyday into obscurity-ridden view (to leave less clear --> my pre-2012 videos ‘Vagabond,’ ‘Constant Prince,’ and ‘city of domes’), allowing for a critical distance on the part of the spectator to examine one's own being-in-the-world in raw, blurred form (the truth is haze itself --> Hoda)

exoticization of the local --> reduce it to a nativist enterprise

(Mohaghegh > Tomlinson:) the everyday culture has ingested foreign elements from exogenous sources, with the various elementss gradually brcoming “naturalized” within it =/= image of pure, internally homogenous, authentic, indigenous culture


Sharjah art foundation of the Emirate's *postcultural imagination*


literary front
Hedayat, Yushij, Shamlu, Forough

Hedayat's The Blind Owl variants of a “will to chaos”

middle eastern avant-garde's vision of the writing-act --sketching--> a fugitive postmodern map of escape from its grasp

[in] moments of great social disorder
==> secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, a type of consciousness that perceives the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn

(how an eastern or third world vanguard characterize itself in the heart of major historical tremors:) [listen to their *tone of aggression*:]
Nima: “with my poetry i have driven people into a great conflict; good or bad, they have fallen in confusion; i myself am sitting in a corner, watching them: i have flooded the nest of ants”
Forough: “all those who are involved in creative work have as their motive ... a sort of need to confront and struggle with annihilation”
Shamlu: “the children of the depths,” “the children of the storm,” “the horsemen,” “the bold ones,”

--> definition of the poetic world as a protosectarian space
رابطه مریدی مرادی
دار و دسته
قبيله

(Ali, to a subculture of) persecuted and endangered

==> peripheral narative (marginal leadership) become a force of intrigue and seduction (among iranian youth)

-how did poetry respond to historical events of atrocity and transition
-did the poets understand themselves as resembling a mystical, criminal, mercenary, or revolutionary edifice?

amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinkers and writers launching an intellectual-existential offensive against the [...]

[...]nson:) the everyday culture has ingested foreign elements from exogenous sources, with the various elementss gradually brcoming “naturalized” within it =/= image of pure, internally homogenous, authentic, indigenous culture


Sharjah art foundation of the Emirate's *postcultural imagination*


literary front
Hedayat, Yushij, Shamlu, Forough

Hedayat's The Blind Owl variants of a “will to chaos”

middle eastern avant-garde's vision of the writing-act --sketching--> a fugitive postmodern map of escape from its grasp

[in] moments of great social disorder
==> secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, a type of consciousness that perceives the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn

(how an eastern or third world vanguard characterize itself in the heart of major historical tremors:) [listen to their *tone of aggression*:]
Nima: “with my poetry i have driven people into a great conflict; good or bad, they have fallen in confusion; i myself am sitting in a corner, watching them: i have flooded the nest of ants”
Forough: “all those who are involved in creative work have as their motive ... a sort of need to confront and struggle with annihilation”
Shamlu: “the children of the depths,” “the children of the storm,” “the horsemen,” “the bold ones,”

--> definition of the poetic world as a protosectarian space
رابطه مریدی مرادی
دار و دسته
قبيله

(Ali, to a subculture of) persecuted and endangered

==> peripheral narative (marginal leadership) become a force of intrigue and seduction (among iranian youth)

-how did poetry respond to historical events of atrocity and transition
-did the poets understand themselves as resembling a mystical, criminal, mercenary, or revolutionary edifice?

amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinkers and writers launching an intellectual-existential offensive against the disenchantment of the modern age)
along archetypes:
•power
•hostility
•banishment
•solitude
•desire
•sacrifice


contradictory experiences of the modern cityscape of the middle east --> at once a site of:
•autocracy and insurgency
•concealment and detection
•connectivity and alienation
•integration and crumbling
•gesticulation and idleness


Setareh's topics:
experiences of upheaval, hysteria, sabotage, collective suffering
--> Sana's topics:
existential-spatial understanding of questions of cruelty, betrayal, torment, annihilation


(poets finding themselves consumed with) the distinctive emergence of “the martyr”:

[-]Akhavan writing/witnessing at the time of reterritorialization of urban space during Mossadegh era: the[...]

[...] wisdom, sage, diplomatic response of an interlocutor, truth-telling, equal dialogue, negotiation]
poet's expertise and sensitivity: the storyteller's intimate relation to impermanence and destruction (--> Ali, Sana, Hoda, Setareh)

[-]Baraheni's depiction of the spatial domination of the city by Pahlavi regime from 1952 to 1979 --> SAVAK responded to and fueled a striking development in the political consciousness of the urban centers ==> labyrinthine evolution of the rebel form
hie poem “An Epic in Reverse” (Akhavanian reversal) neighborhoods of stigma, filth, and backwardness --> hybrid of animality and criminality
(Mohaghegh asking:) what is the author's recourse once stranded behind those iron bars, and now acquainted with the gleaming tools and instruments of the guards and royal executioners? for Baraheni, the answer seems to rest within a literary turn toward the arsenal of vulgarity, where language is forced to howl and curse again, to match the shock treatment and flagellation (شلاق shalagh) ==>
1. to unveil the degradation and depravity of power, to show it as unbeautiful and disgusting in its most bude form
2. to wage some reciprocal hate against power, to maximize the rawness of what is happening

[-]Shamlu's (dead-end) sightings of public execution and secret police night-raids of 1979-81
(Mohaghegh describing islamic state of iran through Shamlu:) a new iteration of revolutionary terror, millenarian clerical establishment that foresees self-congrave a feverish certainty across every corridor of urban reality (=/= conservative disposition of an ordained Shah seeking to keep his domination,) the vengefull return of a long-suppressed counterabsolutism that has been waiting anxiously for its chance to unleash and envelop a national identity in its now-seething ideology
-bringing the celestial abstractions of a faith crashing down into tangible existence --> they must ***sew, lash, and brand their righteous-ecstatic modalities into awesome materiality***
the vocabulary of: the prophetic, the messianic, the inspired, the sacred
}--> *Shamlu's avant-gardism had always led him to experiment with rotating styles of folkloric ballads, rebel anthems, existential meditations, doomsday rants, elegiac oration, children's lullabies --into--> (a singular blast of an) account of a devastated urban space that moves somewhere between legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, and war cry [--> Shamlu responding to an islamic revolutionary ideology that had enlisted its own alchemy of proclamation, lethal consortiums of drives that fuse the most savage, the most medieval, the most modern, and the most postmodern]
•being coming completely seized beneath the density of revelatory vision
•the ultra-alertness and insomnia of pure anticipation : a calculus of assurance that ‘they are coming’ --> omen


Pasdaran: the unpredictable and insa[...]

[...]ms to rest within a literary turn toward the arsenal of vulgarity, where language is forced to howl and curse again, to match the shock treatment and flagellation (شلاق shalagh) ==>
1. to unveil the degradation and depravity of power, to show it as unbeautiful and disgusting in its most bude form
2. to wage some reciprocal hate against power, to maximize the rawness of what is happening

[-]Shamlu's (dead-end) sightings of public execution and secret police night-raids of 1979-81
(Mohaghegh describing islamic state of iran through Shamlu:) a new iteration of revolutionary terror, millenarian clerical establishment that foresees self-congrave a feverish certainty across every corridor of urban reality (=/= conservative disposition of an ordained Shah seeking to keep his domination,) the vengefull return of a long-suppressed counterabsolutism that has been waiting anxiously for its chance to unleash and envelop a national identity in its now-seething ideology
-bringing the celestial abstractions of a faith crashing down into tangible existence --> they must ***sew, lash, and brand their righteous-ecstatic modalities into awesome materiality***
the vocabulary of: the prophetic, the messianic, the inspired, the sacred
}--> *Shamlu's avant-gardism had always led him to experiment with rotating styles of folkloric ballads, rebel anthems, existential meditations, doomsday rants, elegiac oration, children's lullabies --into--> (a singular blast of an) account of a devastated urban space that moves somewhere between legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, and war cry [--> Shamlu responding to an islamic revolutionary ideology that had enlisted its own alchemy of proclamation, lethal consortiums of drives that fuse the most savage, the most medieval, the most modern, and the most postmodern]
•being coming completely seized beneath the density of revelatory vision
•the ultra-alertness and insomnia of pure anticipation : a calculus of assurance that ‘they are coming’ --> omen


Pasdaran: the unpredictable and insatiate arc of extremity of a paramilitart coalition
=/=
SAVAK: formulaic technocracy of a scientific approach to persecution, extraction, and confession

Pahlavi monarchy: the administrator of urban violence was part amateur, part pseudo-scholar, part civil servant, part serial killer
=/=
Ayatollah theodracy: the administrator of urban violence was part vigilante, part crusader, part cult member, part thug

--> poet must epitomize the last unequivocal administrator of urban violence


does writing have a redemptive (=/=? reparative) function?

the author would necessarily venture to rescue something profound (from the state of dejection)

poet's keyword: *conflagration* حريق, fire --> a middle eastern aesthetics

most iranian writers of the n[...]

[...] modern, and the most postmodern]
•being coming completely seized beneath the density of revelatory vision
•the ultra-alertness and insomnia of pure anticipation : a calculus of assurance that ‘they are coming’ --> omen


Pasdaran: the unpredictable and insatiate arc of extremity of a paramilitart coalition
=/=
SAVAK: formulaic technocracy of a scientific approach to persecution, extraction, and confession

Pahlavi monarchy: the administrator of urban violence was part amateur, part pseudo-scholar, part civil servant, part serial killer
=/=
Ayatollah theodracy: the administrator of urban violence was part vigilante, part crusader, part cult member, part thug

--> poet must epitomize the last unequivocal administrator of urban violence


does writing have a redemptive (=/=? reparative) function?

the author would necessarily venture to rescue something profound (from the state of dejection)

poet's keyword: *conflagration* حريق, fire --> a middle eastern aesthetics

most iranian writers of the new poetry movement have eviscerated, melted, flooded, iced over, or burned down a city at some point in their artistic career (--> Shamlu's Yal-o Ejdeha یل و اژدها)

cumulative angers

towards a harmful eloquence شيوايى --> Shamlu


pay attention to the hyper-subjective positioning (=/= hospitality, cosmopolitanism, transindivualism) of the “I” of the iranian poet:

*Akhavan: “It is I, your nightly guest, a forlorn gypsy. It is I, an afflicted stone that has been kicked around. It is I, the lowly insult of creation, an untuned melody.”
منم من، میهمان هر شبت، لولی وش مغموم /  منم من، سنگ تیپاخورده ی رنجور /  منم، دشنام پست آفرینش، نغمه ی ناجور

*Baraheni: “I am the rotten well of history ... Throw your matches down so that I can set the whole world aflame. I am an underground man. My fire alone shall appear on the face of the earth.”

*Shamlu: “It is time that I spit out the entirety of my damnation in an endless uproar / I am the first and last dawn / I am Abel standing on the platform of contempt / I am the honor of the universe, having lashed myself and endured it / Such that the black fire of my agony / shames even Hell for its insignificant holdings.”


--> with the maladjusted eyes if the iranian poet... we are at a far distance from western thought, one that seeks a renovated cosmopolitanism as remedy to the injustices of the cityscape in modernity


Mohaghegh's style of writing [when he talks about Hedayat and iranian avant-garde chaotic atmosphere --> (at once) binds and separates the East-West axis] --he--> abandoning transcendent abstractions and restoring it to th[...]

[...]function?

the author would necessarily venture to rescue something profound (from the state of dejection)

poet's keyword: *conflagration* حريق, fire --> a middle eastern aesthetics

most iranian writers of the new poetry movement have eviscerated, melted, flooded, iced over, or burned down a city at some point in their artistic career (--> Shamlu's Yal-o Ejdeha یل و اژدها)

cumulative angers

towards a harmful eloquence شيوايى --> Shamlu


pay attention to the hyper-subjective positioning (=/= hospitality, cosmopolitanism, transindivualism) of the “I” of the iranian poet:

*Akhavan: “It is I, your nightly guest, a forlorn gypsy. It is I, an afflicted stone that has been kicked around. It is I, the lowly insult of creation, an untuned melody.”
منم من، میهمان هر شبت، لولی وش مغموم /  منم من، سنگ تیپاخورده ی رنجور /  منم، دشنام پست آفرینش، نغمه ی ناجور

*Baraheni: “I am the rotten well of history ... Throw your matches down so that I can set the whole world aflame. I am an underground man. My fire alone shall appear on the face of the earth.”

*Shamlu: “It is time that I spit out the entirety of my damnation in an endless uproar / I am the first and last dawn / I am Abel standing on the platform of contempt / I am the honor of the universe, having lashed myself and endured it / Such that the black fire of my agony / shames even Hell for its insignificant holdings.”


--> with the maladjusted eyes if the iranian poet... we are at a far distance from western thought, one that seeks a renovated cosmopolitanism as remedy to the injustices of the cityscape in modernity


Mohaghegh's style of writing [when he talks about Hedayat and iranian avant-garde chaotic atmosphere --> (at once) binds and separates the East-Westes the East-West axis] --he--> abandoning transcendent abstractions and restoring it to the language of annihilative venture

*chaos as mask*
chaos = (one of many) eastern poetic mask

chaotic experience (in the service of a lasting nonstate) =/= essence, Being, structure, historical definitions, temporal-spatial specificity

Mohaghegh puts Hedayat's inventiveness in traction with continental philosophy:
•Schopenhauer: existence = reckless collision of transience and nonsensibility <== *dramatic dissociation of the aesthetic from the historical* (<-- Sana's current stance, for Sana the world is will and representation):
history: will's vicious reign over existence
art: space of escape (from the profanity of history, a rare fleeting opportunity to reimagine existence as it potentially could have been but never will be (~=? fiction --> is that why science fiction for iranians does not have the same signification?) [=/[...]

[...]/= citadel (of geography, civilization, culture)--> many fabricatoins of art happens in citadels in Europe


Pierre has always been busy with the question of synthesis


entitlement: way of intrusion in homogenous axes of existence


xxxxx 164

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

xxxxx 213

most of Mohaghegh's attacks are rhetorical

the (sacred?) boundaries of mysticism
(the boundaries of cities became mystic/sacred)

mystical channels

presenting worlds immersed in a kind of constructed a priori (arising from an amorphous collection of sound and image. @Hoda)

Mohaghegh working to isolate the rare technical and conceptual arsenal behind an ethnographically immagined space

initiatives toward the horizons of a mystical inquest

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

sect's threat

breakaway modality of a sectarian consciousness

hermeneutic arsenals

organic theoretical apparatuses

(its own) effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, and narration

Adonis, Samih al-Qasim, Ghada Samman, Nazim Hikmat, Ahmad Shamlu, Farrokhzad --> all tempted to (antihumanist) convert the text into a closed circle

forbidden power
moral ambiguity
collective destiny
will to extremity



shadow nears and targets
itself presumed source of all tension and unhappiness
while also spreading its influence over others
many are susceptible to its whisperings
thus he develops a perpetual alertness to its approach
schemes are everywhere
it seeks
to slip into (the sectarian's own) camp under disguise
penetrating the inner circles in dissimulated form and thus unspotted
no mediation
revenge in closeness
and even more than this,
shadow will attempt to escape accusation if possible
the spectacle



enemy's overhanging presence
--> continual motion
--> time is restless



tower, bastion, citadel, stronghold
operational apparitional center
phantasmatic points of references
a spiritual geoscape of concentration
it must appear formidable, immutable, and impenetrable
as a tangible headquarters encased amid far-flung mountains.
it drifts mainly as a figment in the nomadic mind
of the one who lives most of the nights as a marauder in enemy camps
roaming through its courtyards
speaking with the tower's white and black keepers
before receiving the next command
with it the facticity of another harsh assignment.
from tower's security standpoint
the world looks ripe for the taking.
the fortress holds, and with[...]

[...]th 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 from Hedayat'neyrangestan + Shamlu's ketab kuche + Marzolph's topology of persian folklore iranian stories + ajayeb stories --to--> ?

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

jin lamp
tree
scared face

book Skala:
royal fairy tales
baba jaga kostliva noha / bony legs


the first worm

death skeleton afraid of itself, of its own image
self-reflective

you are following, while being followed, and the one who follows you is being followed...

pop-up book
•endless doors (on top of each other)
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VTo8s/
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vp8Yb/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vw7qk/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VttgH/
•moon https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VV2CC/


•Philippines --> aesthetics of poverty [culture of material poverty --> poverty as scenic design and working philosophy] (==> the imperative to eliminate nonessentials =/= my philosophy)
•Iran --> aesthetics of ?
•(?what is) Instagram or TikTok people's appreciation of beauty =/= aesthetics of poverty's coupling expression with survival and change

the idea that becoming sensitive to the aesthetic qualities of local materials ==> increasing one's power of expression

theater director = aesthetic coordinator = sensitivity + selectivity

scenography in artistic research
my early interest in stage design {~ use of backdrops in capturing the essence of a play or story --> a way to *establish setting* [=/= scene] --> sense of (not necessarily authentic) history, calling f[...]