[...]estion of what happens for the immediate circulation/navigation of the self at the center of that room, the imprint or reverberation that a lone concept holds on this hanging form, the way it inscribes and inflects an inescapable existential spasm (like a serum), is of the highest order for our project.


*on Levinas
Levinas's concept of otherness --> its theoretical production is articulated from the ditch of the historical self in modernity (part of the Western philosophical tradition) [...] entrenched within an enlightenment discourse that cannot conceive of a self without mediation through a formulated other =/= *otherless subjectivity*
-Levinas's principle goal is to repair the totalitarian self and not to explore the otherworldly powers of the other --proving--> ***something that might fix the master***
==> self is to be redeemed by otherness, made well by otherness, made sane by otherness ==Mohaghegh==> the other is never entitled to just walk away and seek its own external dominion
the other possesses (the talent of) infinity ==> ther other's responsibility is to dispense that infinity ==> ethics (not permitting the other leaving the situation)
***why is the other never allowed the right to isolation, solitude, hermeticism, anticommunalism, or misanthropy?***


it has become frustrating for me to chase these sublime phantoms (of the impossible, the unthinkable, the unknowable) drifting into incessant negative theologies... --?--> self always sees itself as that which it is not =/= (ontological differential of) the earthly dehumanized Eastern subject, the one with a staunch existential verifiability, the one whose trachea or fingertips might be severed by five bullets around the corner, the one who plays with mortal stakes and states of emergency on daily basis, the one of famine, war, or occupation


rapid evacuation
agility
velocity
dexterity
third world subjectivity must transmit itself through the affective matrix of radical coldness

Nietzsche and Sartre locating their own becoming-frigid within the realm of otherless individuation, neither hesitate to look at Eastern corridors


insurgent becomes the writer of (Manning's) impersonal event


touchstone of a rare immunity and a weapon

to evoke the anxiety of the audience (-Hoda?)


“kill him” --> shortening of language to mirror the contradiction of being : most horrifying manifestation of formalized coldness. not just the license to kill, but the mechanistic invocation of the license


the ‘what has always been’
eternal war
همیشه اینجوری بوده --> proposition of the insurgent stoicism یاغی رواقى [~ a self-without-other: has experienced firsthand the detriment of othering, @Foad]

(the rant, the taunt متلک, the insult فحش, the battle cry)

axis of eternity, middle eastern recourse to an original circularity of things
a concept 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 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*


*killer's freedom*

freedom
-Heidegger: (massive difference between) a self-automating freedom that one attains via a borrowed sacred (handed-over, Frankenstein) and a hard-won-freedom attained through the rending-apart of a closed world (through the intractable سرپيچی)
-Sartre: a self-conscious authorship of the world, condemned to a certain responsibility before the event of one's own existence [--> the problem occurs when someone made it their task, duty, or entertainment to compel the other to experience such freedom]
-Nietzsche: ‘freedom = exclusive gift of the enemy’ ~ ‘respect-for-life = euphemism for death’ [life (if it has worth) is meant to be disrespected, contested, and hounded] --> ‘insurgent = warrior’(<-- the substance remains the same)


Adonis: “don't come closer, the wound is nearer than you / don't come closer, the wound is more beautiful than you” (@Hoda, Ali )

ancillary فرعى کمکى, تابع, مستخدم بومى --> کلفت
avarice حرص


affective overreaction <~=-> radical coldness


**literal**
western inability to understand the turbulant reaction abroad --> loss of the power of the literal (--> *democracy depends and works with the literal*:)
literal has given way in the west to the transference of image, language, and thought to a purely representational or metaphoric domain (to talk about things, but not speak the event itself)
“one cannot grow angered over a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing (or a dance), then one also cannot experience captivation with a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing” (Mohaghegh)
[yet the literal is sneaky in that is always decontex[...]