[...]yal friend/advisor of the king) and his genos (γένος, social group claiming common descent)]: to dishonor [=/= beauty, in Plato] }--> to disfigure; tied to the body, and in the case of the female body --> blush, as in the sensitive plant

aidos (~= moderation [provoked by the regard and expectations of the other]) =/= *excess* [--> in my lectures i usually don't respect/regard the expectations of the other]-->? that which separates me from the Homeric hero

(these are all about the regulation of the world)--> in a way also that which Mona demands
Mona need to analyse her question of (caused) violence and calamity:
•disposal the Promethean technai [τέχναι] (when she asks “who gave them the tool to kill?”)
•the logos [λόγος] of the arts and discursivity (when she demands conscience and justice [~ dike, another greek tool])

for Aristotle: aidos ==> clean ethics: pathos (an affection that involves the body)
> *the form of fear proper to free men* --> properties proper to truth

from aidos [linked to the Latin videre (to see)], to vergüenza [linked to the Greek horan (to see)], we remain in the space of the *gaze*

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

Veena on *how knowledge is secreted in relation to catastrophic events*

‘inordinate knowledge’ --> beyond the act of merely knowing
=/= pale intellectualized distracted archived knowledge --> it is the subject who has
to discover which aspects of knowledge matter to her and where her attachments lie

--Veena--> (with pale or excessive, it is not the form of knowledge, rather) it is the way in which knowledge enters the realms of the social

those who have to endure what they cannot ignore
pale --> bare --> dark --> filled with plenitude

different modes of knowing as means of navigating the catastrophic (=/= simply knowledge ledge about an object)

*reality does not have that frontal character*, (it is rather) like atmosphere, deeply embedded within context
[*]context: the weaver's loom that is discerned within the cloth it weaves

Donatelli --destruction--> small, recurring, repetitive crises that define everyday life itself or are grown within the everyday
*event of traumatic loss functions as:
•an event
•a figure of thought

20th century as the century of genocides : the story of collective violence from the point of view of victims and survivors <-- we must contest this story

•(Kleinman & Kleinman, Mookherjee:) victim stories ==> voyeurism
•(Fassin & Rechtman:) ubiquity of a trauma narrative substitutes critical engagement with the structural forces of inequality (or discrimination by a psychologizing of experience and of subjectivity)
•
•

category of the victim is not transpar[...]

[...]women) ==/==> victim
==> refugees, evacuee property, abducted persons

his fictionalized account of my responses to his questions inspired me to think
(your fictionalized account of my response to your question inspires me to think)

[to] rake the fallen leaves of language and literature to recreate experiences...

(usually) “treason” ==> massacres and violation of human rights by governmental forces

(one is forced to see events in other countiries in the light of issues pertaining to)  transitional justice and the global form of truth

unknown dead imagined as hungry and thirsty ghosts
*the living cannot offer the dead solace because the unknown dead cannot be placed within the grid of genealogical knowledge necessary to make them into benign ancestors*
-the difference between kin and strangers, ancestors and ghosts

**hospitality being offered to the stranger could also become a way of reincorporating the estranged kin**(? -iranian hospitality?)

the intertwined nature of bureaucratic power and ritual action

the dead are haphazardly buried that have to be then contained or transformed through shamanic knowledge and ritual manipulations? -Veena

modern bureaucratic procedures ==> tear apart the continuity of generational connections <-~ the work of ritual to restore connections is engaged

the different ways we come to know something =/= the experience of ‘carrying’ a knowledge


...unknown dead in a milieu in which ancestors and ghosts are not simply distant and abstract concepts but are felt with every sinew of the body, who come to haunt the descendants through dreams and apparitions =/= Ta'zieh: ancestors in contexts in which the relation to the dead is commemorated primarily through national rituals

(in the Jeju uprising/massacre case that Veena studies) ‘victim': the qualifying condition for genealogical connections to be maintained in imagining kinship as constitutive of the relations between the living and the dead [=/= victim: an appeal to the authority of subjective experience, or the knowledge produced by the State about the dead as victim or traitor]

bureaucrats (victim or traitor?) and shaman (ancestor or ghost?) --> entanglement of different ways of knowing and classifying

(for the survivorss of Jeju after 70 years) inordinate character of knowledge appears in this world as the unbearable burden of not being able to convert your dead kin into ancestors consigning them to a ghostly existence

--> so that the ancestors can rest peacefully in death and less in terms of the discourse of transnational justice or human rights


reputation of a woman --> the marriage prospects of girls --> ideas of purity and honor --Veena--> “poisonous knowledge” secreted by the large-scale ab[...]

[...]/> *the living cannot offer the dead solace because the unknown dead cannot be placed within the grid of genealogical knowledge necessary to make them into benign ancestors*
-the difference between kin and strangers, ancestors and ghosts

**hospitality being offered to the stranger could also become a way of reincorporating the estranged kin**(? -iranian hospitality?)

the intertwined nature of bureaucratic power and ritual action

the dead are haphazardly buried that have to be then contained or transformed through shamanic knowledge and ritual manipulations? -Veena

modern bureaucratic procedures ==> tear apart the continuity of generational connections <-~ the work of ritual to restore connections is engaged

the different ways we come to know something =/= the experience of ‘carrying’ a knowledge


...unknown dead in a milieu in which ancestors and ghosts are not simply distant and abstract concepts but are felt with every sinew of the body, who come to haunt the descendants through dreams and apparitions =/= Ta'zieh: ancestors in contexts in which the relation to the dead is commemorated primarily through national rituals

(in the Jeju uprising/massacre case that Veena studies) ‘victim’: the qualifying condition for genealogical connections to be maintained in imagining kinship as constitutive of the relations between the living and the dead [=/= victim: an appeal to the authority of subjective experience, or the knowledge produced by the State about the dead as victim or traitor]

bureaucrats (victim or traitor?) and shaman (ancestor or ghost?) --> entanglement of different ways of knowing and classifying

(for the survivorss of Jeju after 70 years) inordinate character of knowledge appears in this world as the unbearable burden of not being able to convert your dead kin into ancestors consigning them to a ghostly existence

--> so that the ancestors can rest peacefully in death and less in terms of the discourse of transnational justice or human rights


reputation of a woman --> the marriage prospects of girls --> ideas of purity and honor --Veena--> “poisonous knowledge” secreted by the large-scale abduction of women (in India-Pakistan Partition)

-cultural understanding of sex as especially polluting for a woman

disclosure or a coming to know that a close relative had a hidden history tied to large historical event --> announcing an “otherness” to a close relative with whom one had inhabited a life.

Partition ==> distortion of everyday language itself and its bodying forth
bodily nature of language
poetry suffused with exquisite portraits of grief
the sense that kinship relations themselves have become lethal

(journalism's) trap of knowledge/ignorance (ruth/falsity) binary [asking for [...]

[...]d ghosts are not simply distant and abstract concepts but are felt with every sinew of the body, who come to haunt the descendants through dreams and apparitions =/= Ta'zieh: ancestors in contexts in which the relation to the dead is commemorated primarily through national rituals

(in the Jeju uprising/massacre case that Veena studies) ‘victim’: the qualifying condition for genealogical connections to be maintained in imagining kinship as constitutive of the relations between the living and the dead [=/= victim: an appeal to the authority of subjective experience, or the knowledge produced by the State about the dead as victim or traitor]

bureaucrats (victim or traitor?) and shaman (ancestor or ghost?) --> entanglement of different ways of knowing and classifying

(for the survivorss of Jeju after 70 years) inordinate character of knowledge appears in this world as the unbearable burden of not being able to convert your dead kin into ancestors consigning them to a ghostly existence

--> so that the ancestors can rest peacefully in death and less in terms of the discourse of transnational justice or human rights


reputation of a woman --> the marriage prospects of girls --> ideas of purity and honor --Veena--> “poisonous knowledge” secreted by the large-scale abduction of women (in India-Pakistan Partition)

-cultural understanding of sex as especially polluting for a woman

disclosure or a coming to know that a close relative had a hidden history tied to large historical event --> announcing an “otherness” to a close relative with whom one had inhabited a life.

Partition ==> distortion of everyday language itself and its bodying forth
bodily nature of language
poetry suffused with exquisite portraits of grief
the sense that kinship relations themselves have become lethal

(journalism's) trap of knowledge/ignorance (ruth/falsity) binary [asking for formal solutions to problems of indeterminacy because of the finitude of knowing subjects or veiling of objects] =/= (Veena trying to) attend to regions of knowledge that can turn us to change the questions we ask

(inordinate) knowledge is contended with locally, diurnally, repeatedly

Veena asking how is this knowledge [catastrophic event secrete knowledge in the everyday] endured or contested; concealed or revealed; and what are *rhythms* of these movements?

*inordinate knowledge*
-as citizens, how do we deal with the knowledge that torture is regularly practiced as part of the security apparatus of many democracies?
-what responsibility do we bear for these practices that are before our eyes--that we cannot but help know?
-As relational beings how do we reveal the extent of sexual violence or violent histories of our families to our children and to our grandchildren?

(?to[...]

[...]years) inordinate character of knowledge appears in this world as the unbearable burden of not being able to convert your dead kin into ancestors consigning them to a ghostly existence

--> so that the ancestors can rest peacefully in death and less in terms of the discourse of transnational justice or human rights


reputation of a woman --> the marriage prospects of girls --> ideas of purity and honor --Veena--> “poisonous knowledge” secreted by the large-scale abduction of women (in India-Pakistan Partition)

-cultural understanding of sex as especially polluting for a woman

disclosure or a coming to know that a close relative had a hidden history tied to large historical event --> announcing an “otherness” to a close relative with whom one had inhabited a life.

Partition ==> distortion of everyday language itself and its bodying forth
bodily nature of language
poetry suffused with exquisite portraits of grief
the sense that kinship relations themselves have become lethal

(journalism's) trap of knowledge/ignorance (ruth/falsity) binary [asking for formal solutions to problems of indeterminacy because of the finitude of knowing subjects or veiling of objects] =/= (Veena trying to) attend to regions of knowledge that can turn us to change the questions we ask

(inordinate) knowledge is contended with locally, diurnally, repeatedly

Veena asking how is this knowledge [catastrophic event secrete knowledge in the everyday] endured or contested; concealed or revealed; and what are *rhythms* of these movements?

*inordinate knowledge*
-as citizens, how do we deal with the knowledge that torture is regularly practiced as part of the security apparatus of many democracies?
-what responsibility do we bear for these practices that are before our eyes--that we cannot but help know?
-As relational beings how do we reveal the extent of sexual violence or violent histories of our families to our children and to our grandchildren?

(?to make) responses in terms of the cultural repertoire of one's own society relating to the care of the dead

the necessity of embracing a mismatch between harm and healing, between not knowing and shading your eyes from what you cannot but help know [-acceptance of a certain degree of ignorance as essential for life]

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

Ahmed, Sedgwick+Frank @apass
installation of an automatic “anti-” (for example antibiologism, as the unshifting tenet of ‘theory’ --> *routinized antiessentialism*) ==> loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm***

immersed in a precritical understanding of the body
the idea of biological construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naive (in feminism --> an avowed interest in the body + a[...]

[...]>
both ritual and capital --involve--> exchange relations ==> unpredictable forms of movement (across domains)

•(show of being halal) recitation of kalma with the first bird and the last, assuming comprehensive coverage for the ones who fall between
•Skylard slaughterhouse building hospitals and temples
--> emotional, ritual, commercial traffic across sacred and profane

consumption of neighboring species


*cruelty as play*
(a less cultivated form of pleaser?)

deadended bird
ceased-but-not-killed mouse
not dead, not killed, but not quite a being either

the power to turn animals into things, as of they were never anything else

recognition of playful actually --Singh--> ethics of immanent obligation

([*]collaboration: interrupt each other's train of thought)


(dramatization of) agonistic intimacy : a relationship of proximity and violence between neighboring social groups (the body of neighboring species)
--Taussig--> ritual violence (the most stunning prop is the human: the all too profane body with its various appendages, fluids, undulating surfaces, folds, exists, entrances)
--Veena--> sacrificial violence : dramatization of one's own inevitable death (there is a certain anxiety around violence that is integral to *the imagination of an ethical life* in Hindu texts and practices)
--Sina--> gamer video of zoo

condition of viscerality
a condition of being ransomed to death

Venna --> a major theological transformation (a critique of violence) in a nonmessianic nonsoteriological sense رستگاری شناختی in South Asia took place with the Mahabharata

*cruelty =/= violence*

•the feeling of noncruilty expressed in the unpredictable attachments, at times across species (companionship) in the Mahabharata (Veena) [in Attar? in Kelile and Demne?]
•companionable thinking (Cavell)
•commission species (Haraway)
--✕--> Singh's agonistic intimacy:
1. companionship may also involve forms of mutual violence
2. violence inevitability (in affinity or animus) does not remove a consideration of the mode of violence from the sphere of the ethical --> we must make space for the consideration of:
◦cruelty
◦differential vulnerability
3. certain forms of companionable noncruilty may also breed accompanying forms of cruelty
4. within conditions of death and cruelty *it is not always clear what noncruilty might be*


a bird cursing (presently taking root that will someday come to fruition) a human who is stubbornly injuring when need not, or تو نیکی می‌کن و در دجله انداز
(myth) asks us to think about cycles of violence
how an act never exists in isolation
ch[...]

[...] into things, as of they were never anything else

recognition of playful actually --Singh--> ethics of immanent obligation

([*]collaboration: interrupt each other's train of thought)


(dramatization of) agonistic intimacy : a relationship of proximity and violence between neighboring social groups (the body of neighboring species)
--Taussig--> ritual violence (the most stunning prop is the human: the all too profane body with its various appendages, fluids, undulating surfaces, folds, exists, entrances)
--Veena--> sacrificial violence : dramatization of one's own inevitable death (there is a certain anxiety around violence that is integral to *the imagination of an ethical life* in Hindu texts and practices)
--Sina--> gamer video of zoo

condition of viscerality
a condition of being ransomed to death

Venna --> a major theological transformation (a critique of violence) in a nonmessianic nonsoteriological sense رستگاری شناختی in South Asia took place with the Mahabharata

*cruelty =/= violence*

•the feeling of noncruilty expressed in the unpredictable attachments, at times across species (companionship) in the Mahabharata (Veena) [in Attar? in Kelile and Demne?]
•companionable thinking (Cavell)
•commission species (Haraway)
--✕--> Singh's agonistic intimacy:
1. companionship may also involve forms of mutual violence
2. violence inevitability (in affinity or animus) does not remove a consideration of the mode of violence from the sphere of the ethical --> we must make space for the consideration of:
◦cruelty
◦differential vulnerability
3. certain forms of companionable noncruilty may also breed accompanying forms of cruelty
4. within conditions of death and cruelty *it is not always clear what noncruilty might be*


a bird cursing (presently taking root that will someday come to fruition) a human who is stubbornly injuring when need not, or تو نیکی می‌کن و در دجله انداز
(myth) asks us to think about cycles of violence
how an act never exists in isolation
chaos theory, the effect might come later

informal epic subplots narrated in improvised forms


which ritual laments are available for massive ecological shifts
...the death of others
...scene of loss (~/= milieu)
}<--Singh-- virtue, piety, self-fashioning do not help to work through this (@apass)


devastation ==> cohabitation (of species that were apart before)


Kelile and Demne --> agonistics can be comic (even if repercussions of tragic) --> mood of violence


“everything has to die”
question of routinized ritual or commercial production of killable bodies and of things cea[...]

[...]sently taking root that will someday come to fruition) a human who is stubbornly injuring when need not, or تو نیکی می‌کن و در دجله انداز
(myth) asks us to think about cycles of violence
how an act never exists in isolation
chaos theory, the effect might come later

informal epic subplots narrated in improvised forms


which ritual laments are available for massive ecological shifts
...the death of others
...scene of loss (~/= milieu)
}<--Singh-- virtue, piety, self-fashioning do not help to work through this (@apass)


devastation ==> cohabitation (of species that were apart before)


Kelile and Demne --> agonistics can be comic (even if repercussions of tragic) --> mood of violence


“everything has to die”
question of routinized ritual or commercial production of killable bodies and of things ceasing to matter

animals don't die in villages, they could only be killed

anthropology of ethics
what is to kill?
what is to kill well?
what is to ber killed?
what is to be killable?

can we speak of a quality of death?

(Veena, Cavell, Harraway's) ‘companion’ is not a resolution to ethical quandaries of human-animal relations


culpability of homicide <--> veneration of sacrifice

life =/= zoo =/= bios

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

retro: (a postmodern sensibility firmly rooted in the present) appropriating [use + exploit, pick + mix] the aesthetics (aspects) of the past while not longing for its return =/= nostalgia: a mode of resistance against the present

retro: a mode of reading, an attitude towards the past without emotional attachment

ironic consumption...


... =/= how adults might perceive the political context

dissident discourse
(audience looking for) counter regime messages

*nostalgia + nationalism within a postcolonial Europe*
Europe's repressed imperial history --> longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> postsocialist nostalgia (in television [--> cultural memory])

past: retro comedy

comedy: retrospective representation

(comedy does not?) antagonize its audience ~= build a memory conflict
[*]comedy: strive for reconciliation (by focusing on the everyday life of its colorful characters)

the good soldier Svejk --> good-natured side of czech national identity

self-congratulatory narrative <-- (when you think you are always) morally on the right side
@apass

(tv series) forging resistance-based (national or individual) memory


the way in which a society understands its own past --> throug[...]

[...] (esteragh-e sam’) on the angels in the lower reaches of heaven to acquire limited knowledge of the future

the little mischievous spirits (nafs) that make up a self



**wonders of children

children are born free of sin and have the ability to communicate without reason (aghl) and therefore carry the threat of being easily led astray


8 year-old Maryam, channeling communication between the jinn and her family
a time that she would look into the palms of her hand (to see what the jinn would have her see)
she instructed the jinn that he could enter her father's body, with his permission, jinn wanted to taste human food

her father and brothers would listen carefully to her descriptions
(authoritative figure of the father becomes the pupil of his little daughter hearing her words of advice)--alterity



“in the middle east, the child is seen as the crucial generational link in the family unit, the key to its continuation, the living person that ties the present to the past and to the future” (Ferena 1005)

“in the indian case ...the child is seen as already being full person in domains to which the mother does not have access” (Veena Das 1989)


...healer or magician may utilize a child to bring into presence or communicate with the spiritual being
(***the presence of child in Ma'rekeh-Giri معرکه گیری?***)

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

ecstatic identifications with...


one could legitimately dream of the prophet, but one could never call him forth
both these paths escape jinn, having a dynamic if disruptive presence within human world, alongside the presence of angels and saints

there can be no other experience of the prophet other than through the record of his words and deeds??!!!



the daily struggle to presence the prophet


علما olama =/= بچه bache
face-to-face =/= via-jinn

face-to-face learning from the olama (the authoritative transmitters) versus a faceless and voiceless jinn with his child serving as its ventriloquist (arusak gardan)

activating competing bodies of knowledge and sets of relations
(in the hope that one of them will pay off)


insistence on a modicum [minimum amount] of consistency

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

...enmeshed within a certain unintentional malevolence existing alongside generosity.
-malevolence is something that holds out the possibility of harm rather than actively intending it
-generosity is the willingness to concede to others rather than a nobility of character


(also the dilemma of introducing the jinn to your child)
“exposing” his children to their disruptive yet generative powers
[...]

[...] to that: who could be oulia اولیا Arahant [further ones] today? queer or nonhuman)
*participated in the world historical “isms” (--> ajayeb)
--Singh--> narrating a conceptual life, vita

*uncertainties of reception* (in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya)

singularity of trajectory of Attar's saints =/= my random sampling of themes

anthropology: to write about anything that exists or imagined

can we talk affirmatively of a postmodern ethnography of ajayeb? =/= “totalizing vision” of culture

recovery of a human voice as a moral imperative (--> Hoda)

(?your history as a) telos of increasingly self-awareness

-Derrida's philosophical style tending to negative transcendence (différance: an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’)
-Deleuze's tradition of affirmative immanence

(Singh > Deleuze > Strauss:) structure is composed of “pre-individual singularities” ~ nomadic distribution of potential --immanent--> contradictions, accidents, mutations

pure/impure
suspicious/inauspicious
life/death

heretic --> reorder and obliterate the partitioning of categories that compose the structural order of religion [--> Veena on Sikhism and Hinduism: symbolism of Sikhism understood in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the rulers, the caste system, and the orders of renunciation --> investment of the virtues of all three *in a single body of faith* and conduct]

heterodox sects
rebellious thinkers
--> negation of the organizing conceptual order

(social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability

...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality

(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic --> death: disarticulation --> must be undone by inhabiting the liminality : ritually rejoining the flow of life

similarities of ritual mourner and ascetic: transcending the categories of the social and the cosmic

incorporation of the liminal undead (preta) with ritually incorporated ancestors (pitri) [job of the mourner]

(crucial task of the) ritual: conveying the dead from the threshold of liminality into an ancestral flow of life

emphasis on the system is (always?) at the cost of the event
(eternal investment of the artists in foregrounding of the event rather than the structure --> rapture with structure as caste, tradition, state, norm, system, etc. at the cost of missing the practical kinship transcribed into the social contract, leadership, and laws of encounter)
[...]

[...]>
-Derrida's philosophical style tending to negative transcendence (différance: an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’)
-Deleuze's tradition of affirmative immanence

(Singh > Deleuze > Strauss:) structure is composed of “pre-individual singularities” ~ nomadic distribution of potential --immanent--> contradictions, accidents, mutations

pure/impure
suspicious/inauspicious
life/death

heretic --> reorder and obliterate the partitioning of categories that compose the structural order of religion [--> Veena on Sikhism and Hinduism: symbolism of Sikhism understood in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the rulers, the caste system, and the orders of renunciation --> investment of the virtues of all three *in a single body of faith* and conduct]

heterodox sects
rebellious thinkers
--> negation of the organizing conceptual order

(social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability

...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality

(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic --> death: disarticulation --> must be undone by inhabiting the liminality : ritually rejoining the flow of life

similarities of ritual mourner and ascetic: transcending the categories of the social and the cosmic

incorporation of the liminal undead (preta) with ritually incorporated ancestors (pitri) [job of the mourner]

(crucial task of the) ritual: conveying the dead from the threshold of liminality into an ancestral flow of life

emphasis on the system is (always?) at the cost of the event
(eternal investment of the artists in foregrounding of the event rather than the structure --> rapture with structure as caste, tradition, state, norm, system, etc. at the cost of missing the practical kinship transcribed into the social contract, leadership, and laws of encounter)

***modernity is composed (neither by continuities nor rupture then, but) by transfigurations***
(Singh + Veena)

critical event
critical structure

[*]event: institute a new modality of historical action which is not inscribed in the inventory of that situation
(for Furet: French revolution is an event par excellence) --Veena--> event: moments when new modes of action come into being which which redefines traditional categories (such as: codes of purity and honor, the meaning of martyrdom, construction of a heroic life, etc.)

foregrounding the event as analytic category (without disappearing the question of structure):
-sati of Roop [...]

[...] (social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability

...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality

(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic --> death: disarticulation --> must be undone by inhabiting the liminality : ritually rejoining the flow of life

similarities of ritual mourner and ascetic: transcending the categories of the social and the cosmic

incorporation of the liminal undead (preta) with ritually incorporated ancestors (pitri) [job of the mourner]

(crucial task of the) ritual: conveying the dead from the threshold of liminality into an ancestral flow of life

emphasis on the system is (always?) at the cost of the event
(eternal investment of the artists in foregrounding of the event rather than the structure --> rapture with structure as caste, tradition, state, norm, system, etc. at the cost of missing the practical kinship transcribed into the social contract, leadership, and laws of encounter)

***modernity is composed (neither by continuities nor rupture then, but) by transfigurations***
(Singh + Veena)

critical event
critical structure

[*]event: institute a new modality of historical action which is not inscribed in the inventory of that situation
(for Furet: French revolution is an event par excellence) --Veena--> event: moments when new modes of action come into being which which redefines traditional categories (such as: codes of purity and honor, the meaning of martyrdom, construction of a heroic life, etc.)

foregrounding the event as analytic category (without disappearing the question of structure):
-sati of Roop Kanvar
-Sikh militancy
-collective violence during the partition of India and Pakistan

not only the state (tries to institutionalize collective memory), but also minor communities (in the process of their emergence) try to control and fix memory in much the same manner [not total of course] (--> something i am learning in north of Norway with the sami)

there is always *ambiguity* in the way even the most passionate public presentations of militant nationalist discourse is framed (--> there is ***noise in reference to violence*** @Mona)

event ==> shift the configuration of analysis (and not annulling the structure's analytical possibilities)

event: (a new set of) circumstances for which rules are not set in place

in the case of Bhopal intoxication --> gradual creation of an expert discourse which sought to dissolve the concrete and existential reality of suffering victims

in the case of such-large suffering event coordinations gradually come to be defined around it --> question of s[...]

[...]ncy
-collective violence during the partition of India and Pakistan

not only the state (tries to institutionalize collective memory), but also minor communities (in the process of their emergence) try to control and fix memory in much the same manner [not total of course] (--> something i am learning in north of Norway with the sami)

there is always *ambiguity* in the way even the most passionate public presentations of militant nationalist discourse is framed (--> there is ***noise in reference to violence*** @Mona)

event ==> shift the configuration of analysis (and not annulling the structure's analytical possibilities)

event: (a new set of) circumstances for which rules are not set in place

in the case of Bhopal intoxication --> gradual creation of an expert discourse which sought to dissolve the concrete and existential reality of suffering victims

in the case of such-large suffering event coordinations gradually come to be defined around it --> question of structure

(**modernity is an event**)

pain and suffering are not simply individual experiences ... they may also be experiences which are created and distributed by the social order

Veena's *anthropology of pain*
how institutions (in the domain of religion, and modern: bureaucracy, law, medicine) maintain and signal their legitimacy in the face of massive human suffering?
-manufacture of pain
-theology of suffering

the discovery of the event, as a question for anthropology, is precisely that: *event exceeds structure*
(exess ==> reimagining the networks that compose our lives)

Veena --> Bhopal industrial disaster: neither social relations nor locally available knowledge were sufficient to apprehend the event. it is at this point that people had to actively search for new knowledge, for new kinds of social actors that might help them address the question of what was happening to their bodies --> they had to reconstruct social relations to include the existence of international legal systems and governmental bureaucracies in their image of society***

toxic potency (==> difference, collective violence [such as the partition of India and Pakistan =/=], stable violence [such as a village caste dispute],,,)

poles of life and death that separates different kinds of collective violence --> the sexual and reproductive violence witnessed in the Partition connot be understood by taking social relations as model
(Veena)

...distance that arises out of forms of proximity

Veena 3 books:
•Structure and Cognition --> illuminates certain recurring patterns
•Critical Event --> paints a kind of national lanscape
•Life and Words --> turn to an art of an anthropological portraiture

...healing properties of the every[...]

[...]how institutions (in the domain of religion, and modern: bureaucracy, law, medicine) maintain and signal their legitimacy in the face of massive human suffering?
-manufacture of pain
-theology of suffering

the discovery of the event, as a question for anthropology, is precisely that: *event exceeds structure*
(exess ==> reimagining the networks that compose our lives)

Veena --> Bhopal industrial disaster: neither social relations nor locally available knowledge were sufficient to apprehend the event. it is at this point that people had to actively search for new knowledge, for new kinds of social actors that might help them address the question of what was happening to their bodies --> they had to reconstruct social relations to include the existence of international legal systems and governmental bureaucracies in their image of society***

toxic potency (==> difference, collective violence [such as the partition of India and Pakistan =/=], stable violence [such as a village caste dispute],,,)

poles of life and death that separates different kinds of collective violence --> the sexual and reproductive violence witnessed in the Partition connot be understood by taking social relations as model
(Veena)

...distance that arises out of forms of proximity

Veena 3 books:
•Structure and Cognition --> illuminates certain recurring patterns
•Critical Event --> paints a kind of national lanscape
•Life and Words --> turn to an art of an anthropological portraiture

...healing properties of the everyday
...everyday life generates its own forms of toxicity

(Singh's) art of portraiture
of individuals, of milieu,

*singularity (of a portraiture) may express something both local and global*

Veena --> how would we conceptualize the moments of potentially violent uncertainty?
-Benjamin: invocations of the uncanny
-Derrida: the spectral
-Veena: eventedness of the everyday (--> skepticism)

Cavell (on Hollywood cinema and other sites where the drama of separation and union is played out) --> how philosophers have typically focused on skepticism [longstanding western philosophical question and doubt about existence] with respect to material objects and the external world
...existence of the finite neighbour (seemingly known other) --> may become unknowable

--> *Veena discovers the concept of skepticism for anthropology (as a discipline centrally concerned with the varying conditions of human relatedness and otherness)*

[i have been trying dicover skepticism unsystematically in artistic practices those that have strong concerns of social justice and suffering, but i never named it as such. @Hoda, Xiri's emphasis on the threatening nature of liminality (demand for equality or freedom) =/= *[...]

[...]new knowledge, for new kinds of social actors that might help them address the question of what was happening to their bodies --> they had to reconstruct social relations to include the existence of international legal systems and governmental bureaucracies in their image of society***

toxic potency (==> difference, collective violence [such as the partition of India and Pakistan =/=], stable violence [such as a village caste dispute],,,)

poles of life and death that separates different kinds of collective violence --> the sexual and reproductive violence witnessed in the Partition connot be understood by taking social relations as model
(Veena)

...distance that arises out of forms of proximity

Veena 3 books:
•Structure and Cognition --> illuminates certain recurring patterns
•Critical Event --> paints a kind of national lanscape
•Life and Words --> turn to an art of an anthropological portraiture

...healing properties of the everyday
...everyday life generates its own forms of toxicity

(Singh's) art of portraiture
of individuals, of milieu,

*singularity (of a portraiture) may express something both local and global*

Veena --> how would we conceptualize the moments of potentially violent uncertainty?
-Benjamin: invocations of the uncanny
-Derrida: the spectral
-Veena: eventedness of the everyday (--> skepticism)

Cavell (on Hollywood cinema and other sites where the drama of separation and union is played out) --> how philosophers have typically focused on skepticism [longstanding western philosophical question and doubt about existence] with respect to material objects and the external world
...existence of the finite neighbour (seemingly known other) --> may become unknowable

--> *Veena discovers the concept of skepticism for anthropology (as a discipline centrally concerned with the varying conditions of human relatedness and otherness)*

[i have been trying dicover skepticism unsystematically in artistic practices those that have strong concerns of social justice and suffering, but i never named it as such. @Hoda, Xiri's emphasis on the threatening nature of liminality (demand for equality or freedom) =/= **to take the possibility of unsettlement or chaos as founding concern**]
--> skepticism (may) suggests a differnt route of inquiry

(Veena -2007:) “the intimacy between skepticism and the ordinary is revealed in the present work on several sites, as in the panic rumors that circulate and produce the picture of the other as phantasmal from whom all human subjectivity has been evacuated, or when violence in the register of literary is seen as transfiguring life into something else, call it a form of death, or of making oneself, as it were, into a ghost”

[violence ==> ghosts]
[...]

[...]) may express something both local and global*

Veena --> how would we conceptualize the moments of potentially violent uncertainty?
-Benjamin: invocations of the uncanny
-Derrida: the spectral
-Veena: eventedness of the everyday (--> skepticism)

Cavell (on Hollywood cinema and other sites where the drama of separation and union is played out) --> how philosophers have typically focused on skepticism [longstanding western philosophical question and doubt about existence] with respect to material objects and the external world
...existence of the finite neighbour (seemingly known other) --> may become unknowable

--> *Veena discovers the concept of skepticism for anthropology (as a discipline centrally concerned with the varying conditions of human relatedness and otherness)*

[i have been trying dicover skepticism unsystematically in artistic practices those that have strong concerns of social justice and suffering, but i never named it as such. @Hoda, Xiri's emphasis on the threatening nature of liminality (demand for equality or freedom) =/= **to take the possibility of unsettlement or chaos as founding concern**]
--> skepticism (may) suggests a differnt route of inquiry

(Veena -2007:) “the intimacy between skepticism and the ordinary is revealed in the present work on several sites, as in the panic rumors that circulate and produce the picture of the other as phantasmal from whom all human subjectivity has been evacuated, or when violence in the register of literary is seen as transfiguring life into something else, call it a form of death, or of making oneself, as it were, into a ghost”

[violence ==> ghosts]

skeptical problematic --> shifting potency of words : energies that words may gather, and the ways these energies may give or deny life

speech =/= voice
==> ***silence is not necessarily life-denying or that it necessarily indicates a lack or an inability to mourn***

[victims of violence telling stories]
words imbued with spectral quality (yet animated by some other voice)

there is a deep moral energy in the *refusal to represent some violations of the human body* [=/= forensic architecture project's imperative of detailed representation of violation, explicit acknowledging traumatic memory]
--> ***living with poisonous knowledge*** (a different acknowledgement of traumatic memory) --> absorption exercises of remaking a world

--{on ‘forensic architecture’ (an aesthetics developed by Weizman): Keenan asks: if the excruciating citizon videos (showing police violence for instance) could not convince a jury how can forms of aesthetic critique based on research and visual evidence [= post-conceptual art] be anymore effective on the general poblic? (<== ‘evidence =/= proof’)
-age of testimony (-public truth-)
-citizon pho[...]

[...] information* @Ali
(Keenan:) ideological and formal continuities that run from the geometrically precise drawing of human cargo slave ships [==> public delegitimization ==> collapse of slavery], or infrared images of boats carrying humans across the mediterranean today.
(artist's claim of) “the failure to see” (or “how could they not see the injustice”) (==> “I make them see” ~ violence of slowing down brutality videos, zooming, saturating, freeze-framing, obssesing with the visual details, etc.) --✕--> what we “see” is structured by other factors (race, etc.)
-recourse اعاده
(we can always do aggressive) counter reading --> counter forensic: the technical rhetorical work making evidence speek : “voice + image = task of persuasion” --claiming--> public truth and rights
•(Thrall and Keenan:) alternative modes other than using images (visual evidence, fundamentally a peaceful way of wanting ‘change’): using force(?)
•forensic ~ advocacy ~= configuration of claims and evidence --> claiming is always claiming rights [=/= commitments]}

Keenan: rights are something we claim (=/= something we have) --through-->
1. advocacy
2. forensics


(Spivak's question: can the subaltern speak?) --> (Veena suggests forms of attentiveness to) myriad fluctuations between yes and no (=/= Derrida's notion of absence of voice)

we come to recognize the expressiveness of our interlocutor (in its different and difficult forms)
[...working for the expressivity of others, and not yours]

(Veena research in Sultanpuri:) *theatrical performances of violence created a subjectivity that would not be carried forward in time*

-to what extent subjects posses the knowledge they enact? (~ do we know what we do?) --?--> question of structure and cognition (~ the extent to which we know the structures that we are part of, and what vulnerabilities and events this leaves us open to)

(let's stop throwing easy) political and moral posturing about neoliberalism

...there are only particular regions of the past that we potentially or actually have access to. we do not know in advance which regions of the past life might lead us to, or express through us --Veena--> we are not necessarily *cognizant of the structure*, but may still express *fragments of myth* --> ***nonagentive invocation of politics*** @Hoda (Veena example: right after Sultanpuri carnage, women were sitting in front of their burnt houses in a position of stillness letting their body grow dirty, sorrowfully embodying pollution and dirt, like Draupadi in Mahabharata proclaiming her violation through public expression of her pollution. but the women did not device a strategy to carry a tactic of everyday life into the realm of the political. it was as if the past has turned this face towards them--not that they had translated this past story into a present t[...]

[...]nd evidence --> claiming is always claiming rights [=/= commitments]}

Keenan: rights are something we claim (=/= something we have) --through-->
1. advocacy
2. forensics


(Spivak's question: can the subaltern speak?) --> (Veena suggests forms of attentiveness to) myriad fluctuations between yes and no (=/= Derrida's notion of absence of voice)

we come to recognize the expressiveness of our interlocutor (in its different and difficult forms)
[...working for the expressivity of others, and not yours]

(Veena research in Sultanpuri:) *theatrical performances of violence created a subjectivity that would not be carried forward in time*

-to what extent subjects posses the knowledge they enact? (~ do we know what we do?) --?--> question of structure and cognition (~ the extent to which we know the structures that we are part of, and what vulnerabilities and events this leaves us open to)

(let's stop throwing easy) political and moral posturing about neoliberalism

...there are only particular regions of the past that we potentially or actually have access to. we do not know in advance which regions of the past life might lead us to, or express through us --Veena--> we are not necessarily *cognizant of the structure*, but may still express *fragments of myth* --> ***nonagentive invocation of politics*** @Hoda (Veena example: right after Sultanpuri carnage, women were sitting in front of their burnt houses in a position of stillness letting their body grow dirty, sorrowfully embodying pollution and dirt, like Draupadi in Mahabharata proclaiming her violation through public expression of her pollution. but the women did not device a strategy to carry a tactic of everyday life into the realm of the political. it was as if the past has turned this face towards them--not that they had translated this past story into a present tactic of resistance --> living fring fragments of a myth)

more like a conceptual signpost =/= extended argument


two signature issues of politics:
•sovereignty --> the state
•associational life --> the social contract

[the state is supposed to be a proxy for people to appropriate power (of death?!), rather than laying absolute claim over it]
-how such claim is contested or reformulated in iran?

the figure of the abducted and rescued woman --> sign of authority --> sign of state

having a politics =/=? do politics ~ political act
*agonistic impulse of politics* (often, if not prophetic, a heroic mode of action in terms of escaping the ordinary rather than descend into it [--> Marx]. such as: Antigone's spectacular defiant voice celebrated in philosophical and political thought, stable locus of redemption. usually a rebellion in some sort, craving a socially progressive agonistics --> French Revolution)
[...]

[...]repartitioning of categories ==> rearrangement of hierarchies ==> opposing and heretical sects and religions

-art's (ethnographic?) proximity to life
-political postures and stands

(nobody has, neither state nor communities) monopoly on ethical pronouncement [~ declaration of good and evil]

(political) postures are not unimportant, they allow us to take a stand --> perspective
--or--> evocatively ambiguous formulation on... =/= [*]politic: spirit of resentment on behalf of the victim (Setareh, Hoda, Ali ; also @Sina not to deny the possibility of victimhood) --> *how possibilities of life close down and where other possibilities open up under the weight of patriarchal norms*

question at Hoda:
-how dose she involve a relocation of her protagonists (the sorrowful women) within the domestic, even if the domestic shifts?
-how an understanding of power after Foucault (that power does not come from above, that power is not something that has to be identified) influences her mode of thinking about the condition of her women? [the boundaries of patriarchy are not clear]

sometimes recovery from violence does not come from national imaginary and public rituals of mourning and reparation, Veena shows how a certain kind of silence, the refusal to let toxicity circulate, involves everyday spiritual exercises in *digesting the poison in the acts of attending to the ordinary* --> survivors affirming the possibility of life by removing it from the circulation of words gone wild... (--Hoda's lullabies songs of private injuries?)
-silence is never simply a silence
-to be able to affirm certain kinds of silence (is key to a political anthropology)

different rhythms of conflict and cohabitation

questions
-life-giving and life-denying rhythms of ordinary life
-how (a revolutionary) event is grown from the everyday, and must return to it

Singh: progress of ethnographic knowledge --> a sort of movement that include the ***emergence of new answers to earlier questions*** ~= new routes of inquiry
[=/= progress in the sense of a telos of increasing self-awareness]

intellectual vita (can't be all heroic and saintly, tales of adventures and achievements, as in the way Manning presented herself,) rather it can gather up it share of victories and wounds

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

everyday life: a life lived on the level of:
•surging affects
•impacts suffered or barely avoided
spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things
(Stewart:) “ideologies happen. power snaps into place. structures grow entrenched. identities take place. ways of knowing become habitual at the drop of a hat. but it's ordinary affects that give things the quality of a something to inhabit and animate”


*ordinary r[...]

[...] /> •disputation (jadal)
•argument (bahs)
•disputation (monazereh)
•debate + polemic
•building mosques
•

tradition and ethics of debate and disputation


Carl Schmitt --> political theology
*politics discovers its modernity by repressing the theological foundations of its concept and practice*

theology was always about worldly politics <--> religious transcendence }==> run analysis both ways:
•transcendental coming into play (in some instances)
•worldly life coming into play (in some instances) [immanent quality]

--Singh--> self-making & self-perfecting

}--Naveeda--> religious argumentation : expressive of ongoing striving

**one works on oneself by revisiting and reinhabiting theological conundrums (through words and practice)** [same in artists as well?]


perceived eagerness for debate among lay muslims --> (anxiety over) disputation ==>
•indulgence in abstract thinking
•undermine the tenacity of individual faith
•reduce the hold of the daily obligations of ritual worship
•lead to a diminishing attachment to worldly life or stakes in the social


Veena, Cavell > skepticism:
•philosophical efforts at securing one's knowledge of the world unmediated by sense experience (<-- classical)
•human disappointment with our earthly condition of being distinct and separate from others (<-- social)
•efforts to secure unmediated knowledge of others (<-- social)
•

[Veena (giving historicity and ethnigraphic precision)-->] skepticism ==>
•renders other vulnerable to suspicion
•unsettle social relations
•produce the conditions of possibility for suffering and violence


skepticism <--> aspiration

aspiration =/= clear vision of ends

Pakistan:
•idemtifies itself as an ideological state (Islam) [==Naveeda==> (the possibility of) some experimentation within its apparatus : ***articulation and dispersal of ideology is not linear or cumulative*** it flows in directions other than from the top down]
•inherits the colonial administrative structure + imperatives of government (postcolonial state)

(Sina -->) to be ideological about X : driven to ascertain and adjudicate the others relation to X
(certainly as an achievement)

in islamic ideological states (like Pakistan and Iran) you are allowed to experiment on what is it to be a Muslim
(+ skepticism with respect to those who strive)
•skepticism transforms into an *impersonal force* (that can emerge anywhere and strike anyone) [<-- disembodied aspect of skepticism]


discourse of spiritual diagnosis
(takes place through an evaluation of one's physiology)

Deleuze's sym[...]