Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism 1438456123, 9781438456126

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INSURGENT, POET, MYSTIC, SECTARIAN

SUNY series in Global Modernity —————— Arif Dirlik, editor

INSURGENT, POET, MYSTIC, SECTARIAN The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism

JASON BAHBAK MOHAGHEGH

Cover art: The Sectarian, photographic collage by RLS, used with permission. Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2015 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Eileen Nizer Marketing, Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mohaghegh, Jason Bahbak, [date]. Insurgent, poet, mystic, sectarian : the four masks of an eastern postmodernism / Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh. pages cm. — (SUNY series in global modernity) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5611-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4384-5612-6 (ebook) 1. Postmodernism (Literature) 2. Persian literature—Western influences. I. Title. PN98.P67M64 2015 808'.9113—dc23

2014020304 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my father, Hamid Mohaghegh . . .

Contents

Introduction: Modernity—Age of Extremity

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Part I. Insurgent Chapter 1 Theorizing the Insurgent: Otherless Subjectivity, Radical Coldness, and the East-West Matrix

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Chapter 2 Images of Resistance: Media, Modernity, and the Machine Within Iranian Revolutionary Ideology

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Part II. Poet Chapter 3 The Poetics of Urban Violence: The Night Raid, the Martyred Body, and the Execution Spectacle 117 Chapter 4 Will to Chaos: Iranian Avant-Garde Literature and Western Thought

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Part III. Mystic Chapter 5 Vision, Disappearance, and the Soundscape: New-Wave Iranian Cinema and the Postmodern Pack

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Part IV. Sectarian Chapter 6 Sectarianism I: And They Shall Dream of the Enemy

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Chapter 7 Sectarianism II: Final Delineations of the Sect

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Notes

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Index

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Introduction

Modernity—Age of Extremity

It is in this way, perhaps, that I discovered from the beginning the shadow of the devil lay waiting in ambush for me. —Ahmad Shamlu, “In the Struggle with Silence”

Beneath the heavy tides of a mythology titled “the modern age,” and with its hired executioner “Western civilization” always close at hand, the socalled peripheries have succeeded in constructing four faces (or perhaps four masks) to combat the otherwise smooth procession of a death wish. These four existential prototypes—the insurgent, the poet, the mystic, and the sectarian—have served such “Eastern” or “Middle Eastern” adversaries well in their attempt to sabotage and dispute the moment. In the same fashion that they have rotated throughout the past century from one fixture of this subjectivity-constellation to another, so will this text slide between such hostile and relaxed patterns, trying on its different uniforms and attires, before finding itself at the threshold of another epochal rift.1 To decode the greater fictive duel between the East and the West in our time, this book explores the precise ways in which Middle Eastern thought has staged its own distinctive experiment to reverse, dethrone, or supersede the question of modernity. It therefore tracks some of the most compelling responses, engagements, and challenges offered primarily by Iranian (though alongside Arab, Turkish, North African, Armenian, Afghani, Chechen, and Kurdish) thinkers and artists of the last several decades, investigating their profound reinventions of individual and collective identity in the wake of these new transformative currents of the contemporary era. To this end, the book extends its focus across several volatile dimensions of the Middle Eastern experience, including voices

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from the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, newwave cinema, and radical-extremist thought. Each section, in turn, discloses its own unique vantage of interpretation and confrontation with the ascent of the modern period and its relationship to the immediate realities of those who presumably fall outside its right of self-consciousness. The outcome is a fascinating coalition of cultural and intellectual figures contributing to a charged debate on issues of the post-historical instant, catastrophic resistance, and the creative imagination in states of siege. In terms of methodology, the book manuscript is divided into the aforementioned four sections—the insurgent, the poet, the mystic, and the sectarian—with corresponding theoretical-scholarly expositions included therein. Accordingly, the text provides a general theoretical overview of these four subjective stances while also disentangling the particular views of various radical leaders, intellectual forerunners, literary icons, and artistic visionaries from the Middle Eastern front. First, the opening section (on the insurgent) undertakes the topic of revolutionary extremism, incorporating selections from the Syrian author Adonis and then examining the essential writings of major Iranian ideologues of the twentieth century—namely, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Ali Shari’ati, and Ayatollah Khomeini—surrounding issues of technology, representation, globalization, colonialism, and the conflict between so-called first world and third world political forces. These ideological authorities, above all else, exhibited an overwhelming suspicion toward the inflamed trends of the modern age, isolating an insidious connection between such historical shifts and increasing patterns of imperialist domination; they believed that such values were inseparable from corrosive systems of power and hegemony, and thus looked to devise their own resistance-based approach to the reigning models of machinism and cosmopolitanism. Second, as a vital counterpoint, the book then turns its critical gaze toward the Iranian literary vanguard and its renegotiation of “the poet” as located within an antimodernist movement of unmatched importance for the future (of writing and world). In this instance, the section first explores the prospect of “poetic violence” and its apocalyptic tendencies before then following the textual innovations of Sadeq Hedayat, Ahmad Shamlu, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, and Reza Baraheni toward their most grueling repercussions, wondering after the impact of modernity on both traditional and avant-garde forms of expression. The consensus of the poets would prove a double-edged one: namely, that the declared East had been plunged into a catastrophic epoch that nevertheless inadvertently freed its artistic frontline to reformulate itself as a “will to chaos.” More precisely, these

Introduction

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authors would perceive not just society but also language, thought, and the body as continually under bombardment, thrown into a time of unrest and disaster; and yet somehow this travesty had yielded a reenergized atmosphere in which the literary voice could regain its unparalleled status. Third, the book channels its concentration toward the area of aesthetic mysticism, exemplified by the rise of Iranian new-wave cinema (Amir Naderi, Forugh Farrokhzad), upholding this cultural site’s intense practice of a countercurrent to modernity in its own right, one of ritualistic abandonment and enclosure that stands with the more overshadowed, unspoken, and outsider elements of the reality-grid. In essence, these mystic filmmakers have selected the more subtle strategy of withdrawal toward the untouched pockets of the historical spectrum, using mysterious combinations of chanting and image to articulate their circles’ aim of disappearance. They thereby situate themselves in the obscure elsewheres of the auditory and visual landscape. And last, this text speculates on the enigmatic genesis of a fourth persona—that of the sectarian—whose full ambitions remain half-shrouded to the uninitiated (still pending before a low-hanging future), and yet some of whose elaborate philosophies, rites, and methodologies can be partially extracted. This sectarian guise is perhaps the most ominous opponent yet to be considered, for it convenes the powers and tactics of the other three masks while adding its own fearless postmodern thrust. These four thriving compartments of ideology, literature, mysticism/ cinema, and sectarianism have aligned themselves across vastly different conceptual axes, as each proceeds to offer its own drastic reinterpretation of time, space, being, death, subversion, pain, transcendence, victory, and blood. When placed in captivating dialogue with one another, we see how the several dynamic strands of Middle Eastern society in the past centuries have provided a multilayered set of narratives in reaction to the pressures of this temporal cauldron. Neither is it an insular conversation that one develops here, for the book also looks to contrast the impressions of these so-called Eastern figures with the most incisive Western thinkers of modernity (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard) so as to instantiate a more global vision that crosses the East-West divide.2 Furthermore, this far-reaching intellectual and cultural record of ideas has had an outstanding effect on the controversies and events of the Middle Eastern present, as new protests and movements in the region borrow from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their predecessors. Whether looking to political, poetic, spiritual, or aesthetic sources for inspiration, the current generation of Middle Eastern youth are continually informed

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by these striking emanations of the past, all of which echo the same necessary paradox: to somehow seize on the transitional momentum of the modern age while forever contesting and reorienting its trajectory. Epistemic traction. It is at this pivotal nexus that the book concludes its search. The postcolonial narrative at large now stands as a shattered totality, thrown from one side of modernity’s pendulum to another, and yet it is within this fracture that a new viewpoint might wrest itself loose from the grip of impossibility. For it is here that an Eastern subjectivity can no longer be self-regulating, no longer what it was, now something else entirely, and equipped to redefine what lies in store.

Mithridatic Approaches: Insurgent Extremism and Poetic Extremism Modernity is an extremist epoch (already positioning itself at the radical edge of time and destiny), and thus produces extremist formations in turn. These paradigms of extremist thought have resided primarily within two realms of the modern imagination: the insurgent and the poetic. Both practice for the arrival of some pretended reckoning-hour, awaiting the breaking point of reality itself, and so both offer apocalyptic notifications of the end of all known things. In the first instance, that of insurgent extremism, one witnesses the rise of revolutionary idealism, utopian elixirs, and rebel factions charged with an overwhelming historical purpose. In the second instance, that of poetic extremism, one finds the emergent magic of the avant-garde, its arch-militant manifestos, dangerous philosophies, and anticultural visionaries electrified by the challenge of constructing improbability itself. Note that these extremist movements within the modern continuum not only generate vastly different subjectivities at their respective helms—those of the resistance-fighter/ideological dictator and the artistic forerunner/experimental thinker—but also vastly different methodologies and constellations of desire. There is an intellectual, structural, and existential gap separating these interior and exterior currents of extremity in our age, as one takes aim in the heart of the disturbance and the other withdraws into more secretive lairs, and yet both indulge in fatalistic images at the expense of all that breathes. Mithridatism—the gradual ingestion of lethal substances so as to gain immunity—is the only thing that binds these circles. More perilous than the literal task, this mithridatism is one of an existential-representational nature. What was once the subterranean practice of pirates, alchemists,

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cult leaders, shamans, guerrilla columns, spies, and paranoid kings has now become the practical strategy of the era, of the human or post-human confrontation with what stands. It is now the very logic of encounter. What does it mean, then, that this archaic protective tactic has assumed a forceful reign over the actions and reactions of our contemporary icons, whether critical or creative in temperament—and, far more importantly, toward what strange checkpoint does it gravitate? To begin with, mithridatism itself has a precise thought-origin, for it always emanates from two assumptions of inevitability, anticipation, and projection: (1) that one is following an unstoppable arc toward some impending destruction; and (2) that one is not ready to handle the phenomenon that waits in ambush. These dueling sentiments of eventual siege and unpreparedness so thicken the air of desperation, urgency, vulnerability, and dread before the forthcoming event that one turns to a most unnatural measure: the internalization of toxicity. One could not devise a more counter-instinctive procedure of self-fortification—to assimilate the poisonous—and yet this seemingly lunatic deed has become the dominant intimation of both our ideological and literary apparatus (those of belonging and those of desertion). And rightfully so, for the will to endure is directly proportional to an epistemic fear of what lies ahead: exposure, inhalation, survival. Whether one reads through the rhetoric-laden treatises of Middle Eastern political groups in the past century or whether one skates the more peripheral fringes of radical philosophy, literature, and poetry in the contemporary period, one observes this same tendency of warning, this same decadent view of the all-obliterated (always sooner than later), and the same mithridatic remedy of swallowing partial glances of the extinction of society, actuality, and being itself. What are these continual depictions, signals, and omens of the vanishing if not a careful form of training? What are these incremental doses of simulated havoc building toward if not a formula of continuation? It is the very duration of the species at apparent stake in these preludes, our preservation hanging in the balance of an ability to withstand the ever-nearing plague. An ancient model of defense, then, becomes relevant once more at the height of a turbulent present: that tenacity requires affliction, and existence thrives in the wound. Inasmuch as insurgent figures like the Ayatollah Khomeini uphold the voice of constant admonition in statements such as “those who are against us are like cancer tumors that need to be removed surgically; otherwise they will corrupt everything,”3 so too did new-wave writers of

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the region carve out their own rhythm of dire predictions. One need only look to the compositions of Ahmad Shamlu for such grave expectancy: “Against the leaden background of the dawn / the horseman remains waiting in silence / the long mane of his steed / unsettled by wind. / O, Lord! O, Lord! / Horsemen are not supposed to remain in stillness, / when the event is forthcoming.”4 Or even beyond this, one can turn to the Palestinian-Druze poet Samih al-Qasim for a more flagrant attestation: “Light the fire so I can see my tears / On the night of the massacre, / So I can see your sister’s corpse / Whose heart is a bird ripped up by foreign tongues, / By foreign winds. / Light the fire so I can see your sister’s corpse.”5 In the absence of mercy, compassion, or sanctuary, why must we engage such mithridatic torments and commands? Why must we fasten our reeling gazes to the objects of damage and derangement, and why light lanterns to behold the sister’s corpse or extend our focus to the sinister immobility of the horseman? The extremists tell us not to look away, for here thought and expression have taken the shape of a meteorological device, forecasting seasons of pestilence and mutilation. This backdrop notwithstanding, one must return to the massive gulf of differentiation between insurgent (radical-political) and poetic (aesthetic-philosophical) strands of extremism and mithridatism. Both are fanatical in their cataclysmic insistence, and both are fanatical in their responses to the evolving storm, but with mutually exclusive reasons for entertaining such doom-filled pathways. No doubt, there are myriad examples of intersection between these spheres—for instance, when a charismatic authority undertakes a poetic articulation or a poetic voice becomes committed to an ideological program—and these are most often nefarious affairs of collusion, but in this case one must treat such modalities autonomously and even at their more distant points along the spectrum. One must chart the crucial variances between these sectors, one after another, until the seven impasses grow intensely clear. 1. Insurgent extremism is guided by a universalizing principle that nevertheless functions through severe dialectical tension—that is, always speaking in dualistic terms that situate the new alliance against the tyrannical regime, and with it the sequential stages of the enemy age (in which we live) and the miraculous age (to transpire afterward). These are its flowing narratives of condemnation and idealization, curse and promise, a progressive mythology born in two parts (though always arching toward the dream of total-

Introduction

ity): the first of struggle, deposition, and massacre (the poison) and the second of redemption, stability, and justice (the healing). Together, these dependent axes induce a precise effect: to successfully enrage the inhabitants of the current moment while alluding to the far-off shadow of some reward of teleological culmination. In this deterministic rise-and-fall matrix, imprisonment or extermination camps can only fuel the cause since it draws attention to the necessary penalty that wins final salvation. One therefore accepts the temporary mithridatic cost of revolutionary sacrifice (the immense discomfort of the one who waits and starves in jungles, deserts, or dark undergrounds), risking oneself before immediate trials of ascetic suffering and spent mortality as an offering to the imminent collective, a reciprocal gift instructed by a terminology of the “I” forever becoming “we” and a transaction of the traded “this” for the pictured “beyond.” The martyred body of the follower is hence the mithridatic injunction to self-imposed agony as a state of vigilance before the approaching test; the individual grotesque leads into the sacred whole; the one convulses now, so that everyone might triumph when it counts (resurrection-axiom). Poetic extremism, on the other hand, faces the great chance of a non-redemptive aftermath to whatever disaster lies in wait; it admits that the reaching of the epochal limit might not result in some windfall or ascent. Rather, one does not take the venom of this transitional slit into one’s throat for the sake of victory (there is nothing to be gained from this), but rather only to cross into the next layer of temporal experience. If anything, the poetic extremist remains honest before the prospect that, if not exacerbating the violence of the age, throwing us down the corridor into an even deeper nightmare, this event might at least strand us in a non-status, a groundless posture of suspension for which barrenness, stagnation, and the desolate take hold. After all, there are only so many chances at insurrectionary resettings-to-zero before the zero-condition engulfs for all time, only so many rounds that one can summon nothingness before it decides to remain and settle. For this reason, the “it” is supreme here—intonations of “I” and “we” have no place before the

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displaced throne of “it,” the incursion of that non-negotiable force that steals whatever it wants, whenever it wants—for this wrenches the human question downward and kneeling before a phenomenon that runs of its own unrelated volition. This is why poetic extremism employs the mithridatic approach—dispensing fragmented verses, aphorisms, and engravings of the atrocity—without any moral guarantee (it may not serve us well), for there is no compensatory wish (nothing owed) in the wake of that which is essentially unlike ourselves (without essence). Radical foreignness holds no debt to our story. Instead, such aesthetic reproductions of the still-unseen devastation-at-hand, glanced only through partial intuition, speculation, or prolepsis, serve another ingenious function altogether: neither counseling nor fortune-telling, neither a manual nor an alarm, and without a trace of exemption for any player involved, it is more an invitation and unleashing of the malevolence itself (to seduce obliteration), accelerating its thirst and clearing its path, since it comes anyway (wrath demands it). It does not matter, and there is nothing to be done, though one escapes an otherwise total passivity through the one prism of velocity. Mithridatism of such a caliber, then, allows the author-thinker this lone recourse: to inject increased speed into the invasion of extremity, to rush the threat, and thus ripen the target of epochal cruelty. 2. Insurgent extremism follows an inclination toward purging, especially after it has won: the attempted erasure of memory (i.e., the alternative reality), the suppression of evidence of the now-defeated enemy, the unmentioned name of the prior time, so that nothing cycles backward. Here one finds the timidity looming behind all disapprovals. Neurotic suffocation of the past. Poetic extremism follows an inclination toward forgetting and return, especially when it has lost: the deliberate amnesic gulf that leads to recurrence, though never recognizing the visitation as sameness, each inscription just another reminder to mislay the experience. Here one pulls the levers of the most subduing traits: of the tangential, the minute, the rebounding (taking custody over the pit of mind). Pathological relinquishment of the elapsed.

Introduction

3. Insurgent extremism yields a survivor laden with trauma, guilt, and revenge, and so pacifies its demons through the demarcation of killing fields. Thus, one finds the glaring stories of abuse, bloodletting, and replicated hate that often subsume the ensuing totalitarian phase of revolutionary movements. Poetic extremism yields a survivor who can boast the disappearance of the psyche, and yet the sight of whom implants trauma, guilt, and revenge in others (to make the crowds wicked). Thus, one instills an obsessive mandate in the populace: to engineer new techniques of punishment, unique institutions of backlash, in order to contain the one who has since become impersonal. They did not simply build the insane asylum: rather, the madman made them build it for him—just as a concentration on the prison’s production of the discourse of criminality diverts acknowledgment from the original visceral impulse that necessitated such cages (archetypes of victimhood only deny inventive credit). In such instances, the formless precedes the form. 4. Insurgent extremism is weighed down by the absolutism of the moment—that everything wrests itself before this particular threshold of the instant, that it cures a derailed and contaminated lineage, that this one incident supersedes all others and thus vindicates prior misfortune. There is no stomach for inexorability, only iron terminus. Poetic extremism is freed by its doubt over the gathering moment, never certain that this in fact constitutes the definitive boundary, the authentic passage, yet instead suspects that this occasion might also prove an impostor traversal, a decoy for the more pivotal episode still resting in concealment/occultation. There is an acquired taste for eternal deceit, for the killing of Chronos, admiring testimonies of false eclipse. 5. Insurgent extremism showcases a Cassandra complex, wherein one aches over the untimely message, where the burden of the unfulfilled declaration gnaws away at its carrier (a fault line in the mind). One therefore needs to prove right the foretold, imposing its realization at all costs.

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Poetic extremism operates through pseudoprophetic insinuation, where the other is drawn forward and submerged in the manipulative utterance, (mis)leading the reader into a tragic materialization of the page. It happens because they are persuaded to guarantee its happening, whether through their curiosity, fascination, or horror. 6. Insurgent extremism views the mithridatic process as an immunization of self (to render oneself invincible). Such is the repertoire of the ordinance, the henchman, and the oath keeper. Poetic extremism views the mithridatic process as an immunization of space (to arrange the atmosphere). Such is the repertoire of the felony, the capillary, and the ricochet. 7. Insurgent extremism understands mithridatism as a notion of purity—the elimination of the negative (pain, exploitation, and death itself). Poetic extremism understands mithridatism not as a negation of the negative (vileness, depravity, torture), but as the cultivation of a distorted sensitivity toward and purchasing of such anguish: at first, the enrichment of a true coldness, hardened before the corrosive, and then the hyper-conversion of this coldness into rapture, passion, ecstasy, pandemonium (palimpsestic alteration). Such are the delicate rules by which the two preeminent vanguards of modern society launch their respective games, both manufacturing/ consuming the pollution of our time in an effort to weather and surpass the worst that we have fathomed.

Cyclopean Approaches: Mystical Extremism and Sectarian Extremism Mysticism and sectarianism follow their own cyclopean protocols of extremity: they can be termed cyclopean in the sense that they are geared toward the immensification of the narrowest vision. The lone socket in which all else must drown: the blockaded sightedness that nevertheless

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expands to conquer the entirety (gigantic singularity). And this cyclopean organ, with the perfect diameter of an oracle or explosive device, is itself the house of many paradoxes: that of wisdom and rage (these three brothers were said to have primordial understanding, having monitored the building of creation itself—yet this brings no consolation, no spiritual composure, only chronic infuriation, such that they remain at once eternal and impatient); that of boundlessness and confinement (they are gargantuan, immortal, and among the rarest exceptions to be released from the underworld after the great defeat of the chthonic orders, and yet brought back to the surface to dwell among/away from men and the new gods in hard labor on a faraway island, discharged from one hell only to find another imprisonment); that of precision and enormity (they alone can swing the hammers that form mountains, bedrock, ocean floors, tectonic plates, seismic chasms, yet there is such insane detail even within their most jagged strokes, a punishing symbiosis of the miniscule and the colossal); that of nature and technology (they are the initial inventors of the earth’s wild proportions, yet now are condemned to serve as apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects); that of betrayal and devotion (they are traitors to the new line of anthropomorphic gods, having fought against their false ascent, and thus still fiercely loyal to the old titanic codes, even in their captivity and forced collusion, forever scarred by the robbery perpetrated against the elder deities, able to picture the drainage ditches into which the others are now outcast, such that each episode of mastication and uproar is hurled like a psychic bomb intended to free this discarded confederation). The fellowship holds, and with it images of righteous vengeance. Thus we have our password (Cyclops) to show us through to the next concepts of this text (mystical and sectarian extremism). Named for a visionary-solitary race that turned its defect into an impressive weapon, an irreproducible species famous for its isolationism, monumentality, bad temper, masonry, and blacksmithing (the din of massive forges), we see how yet another ancient teratogenic concept provides a far-reaching parallel to two outstanding teratological formations in modernity. 1. Mystical extremism is a rarely witnessed phenomenon, but one of supremely beautiful menace if ever realized to its fullest extent. We have seen the murderous effects of ideological and religious fanaticism a thousand times before, campaigns and systems that trample over whole

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populations, but perhaps nothing would shake the historical continuum and throw it into greater jeopardy than this one prospect: the radicalization of the mystic. Why would this prove the case, though, especially when our principal image of the mystic comprises a distant, peaceful figure of serenity and introspection? The answer lies precisely in this same loaded description: that this someone, ever sinking into more cavernous lairs of inner contemplation/evacuation, has not much lingering use for the outer world. This is someone who has sold a once-valued individuality to the bottomless well of non-being, not as some amateur nihilist but rather with a sixth sense for the disappearance of realities, having gained a perfect attunement to the nothing. One should not underestimate the athleticism of this stillness (it has such twisted implications), for what if one day, whether by chance or will, a light switch was turned in the thought of the mystic to externalize that same meditative daze? What if some ill-born enthusiasm took hold to transfer this personal, self-contained oblivion onto a universal plane, to bring the unbound darkness and silence of the mystical recess to everyone? The answer is obvious: the only plausible realization for such a whim would be the total annihilation of existence. This is how the mystic becomes a doomsday being. A single mood-shift whereby interiority feels the need to stretch out into exteriority, to convert its own minor swaying into a major program, and guided by the troubling lightness of a principle that there is no beyond, only one universe, and yet that it remains an illusory event: one part shadow, one part mist, one part smoke and mirrors, but all insignificant in the final evaluation. Yes, an extended drop might come easy to those who practice such descent within themselves at every turn, nothing more than the lengthening of an original blanket that warms them each day and night, the evolution and saturation of a chasm that they know all too well, invite willingly into their clearances, and that gathers like clockwork with each shutting/opening of the cyclopean eye. One can only warn of this grand capacity: beware those who do not see the slightest harm in bleak cavities, but rather a self-quitting enlightenment, who savor

Introduction

the white bones of renunciation, and who drink voluntarily and smiling from the same laced glass they offer to their company. The emptiness is not a punishment, but a return; what was once purely esoteric—the blankness, the desiccation, the hollow—now swells to lay itself bare before the street (watch for when the monks come down from their hills). After all, are we so utterly confident that the mystic’s dominion will remain forever detached from the centralized zones of our everydayness, or that such unique processes of cooling, depletion, and disintegration might not someday strive to touch the rest? Given the increasing scarcity of unowned spaces in modernity—the mountains, forests, deserts, islands, and caves are being rapidly confiscated—there are fewer sites for hermeticism, elevation, seclusion, hiding, or recession from the world of humans. The outcome, then, is the punctured solitude of one who would have perhaps been content to stay alone but now finds provocation to stare back at the interruption, gather their robes, and begin walking toward (to bring fiasco). This broken focus has but one remedy: to show the way to those who have dared stand in the way. Mystical extremism: the blueprint for a pacifistic war-machine (not to fight for something but rather for the void of something), and without the logic of judgment, but instead that of the gift, the embrace, and the inclusive calming of the others. 2. Sectarian extremism permits no cynical watcher. There is no undercutting of its aura, just flashes of iconic presence and the experiential suggestion of the overwhelming. Here one must not avoid the prospect of becoming subsumed by the volatile climate of an environment (one of daring initiatives and remarkable personalities). Neutrality is an ill-suited passport in comprehending an arena steeped in patterns of emulation, devotion, adoration, compulsion, and captivation. It is another existential-affective methodology at work among the sectarians, the inflection of an intimate vow along far more distressing lines than even an avant-garde movement, mystical circle, or revolutionary underground (for it is all at once). It is predicated on a reciprocal vitalism, intensity, and continual expenditure; it

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is an excessive community where the players must remain mesmerized, enchanted, and vigilant. Let us be bolder in our conclusions: that this sectarian outworld does thrive on full charismatic authority, not pseudo-autonomous passivity; it requires ecstatic projection, not scholarly detachment; it affirms and condemns, always operating at the edges of the spectrum, between paroxysms of rapture and vitriol, rather than surrendering to pale modalities of doubt and critique. One thinks back to the schools of antiquity and medieval specialists—the monastic hideaways, craftsman’s guilds, and theological orders where walking, training, improvisation, and obscure midnight evocations generated severe loyalties to whatever intellectual-artistic sects one selected. The catchword here is relentlessness, above all else. This, no doubt, represents an alternative standard of knowledge to the one endorsed by modernity and its present institutions: far from the impersonal systematicity of the classroom, held together by a named expert who is supported by a scaffolding of invisible subjugations, here there stands at the forefront a figure who must summon whatever eloquence and ingenuity will win the crowd (style should not be underestimated). It is a highly performative site, where power does lurk but is determined in an almost apparitional or spectral forum in which the teacher must rise to the occasion of trading in virtual conjurations and entrancements. How does one make the memory, the shadow, or the ancestor speak across generations? Yes, the sectarian extremists must fight tirelessly for their following—they are not automatically granted listeners by some socioeconomic, bureaucratic machinery that assembles readymade students before them. Rather, the leaders are required to build no less than a province of limitless persuasion and intrigue. Their lessons must take place in an enigmatic and convulsive air. They must bring to tears, combining thought and sensation in the spectacle of a weeping audience. Thus, we are faced with a matrix of study whose main currency is awe and hypnotic exchange. In the aftermath of a catastrophic twentieth century, one stained by genocidal inclinations, many of the visionaries of Western thought have since emphasized a desperate need to inject ambiguity and doubt into our collective imaginations (poststructuralism, postmodernism). One can rightly understand this ethical tactic as a necessary warning against

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the temptations to absolutism that have plagued the modern age. But at what point does suspicion (of the riotous, the militant, and the deranged) become its own paralyzing descent into paranoia? Must one then always fear the incendiary, to anxiously evade the domain of all provocations, at the outer chance that one might stumble into an irreversible fanaticism? Is the perpetually skeptical or uncaring stare unconditionally superior to the spellbound or even manipulated one? If this latter danger might make one pathological, then the former just leaves one pathetic. This juxtaposition is an invaluable one. In the sectarian’s grip, one is not asked only to read the works of past visionaries: rather, one is taught to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absurd temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text. It is in this way that one grows responsible to the transmission of a guarded code across the centuries, one that might shoulder a prophetic, messianic, or even apocalyptic significance via what is clearly a master-disciple relationship. This has its own serious detriments, to be sure, as do all excursions into the otherworldly or the eternal, but it does entrust the student with an unparalleled secret. And this is the key to what replenishes an otherwise archaic tradition, lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas a palpable and resurgent quality. Knowing is a high-stakes transaction here, as the memorization and interpretation of each concept is nothing less than a tightrope across which one’s own identity, future, and self-consciousness hangs in the balance. It is the exercise of a will to knowledge that demands supreme concentration, diligence, curiosity, and excitation. It escalates rather than wears down, constantly surpassing further degrees of ignition, completing each stage as indispensable to the ever-sharpening frenzy of this one pursuit: to become the echo of a profound legacy. In the self-descriptions of sectarian figures, there is a fatalistic resonance everywhere—the recitation of a clamoring group that now races to the end of all things. Whereas modernity’s students often relegate their gaze to eclipsed historical archetypes, equating analysis with the necrotic recombing of dead worlds and thus bowing before the retrograde edifices of the canon, or even worse caught between the dueling logics of boredom and professional opportunism, the sectarian scribes are treated as the carriers of a still-ascendant ethos, guardians of an immemorial conversation now arcing toward its untarnished futural destiny. Both might be grand illusions in the final stride. But which is more interesting? It is since obsolete to speak of legitimate and authentic knowledges versus superstitious and mythic doctrines (this is the declaration of Western theory itself). So we ask again: Which phantom-sphere is more arresting,

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more aesthetically and philosophically attractive in its contours, appearances, and orchestrations? Which archive remains on fire throughout? Is this not what matters most in the wake of the inescapable artificiality of all structures of language and thought? In an epoch that runs entirely on hollow spectacles of meaning and simulations of depth, is the surfacedemonstration of the sectarian not at least somehow more illuminating? Furthermore, in the midst of our current era, which approach actually harbors the greater conservatism? In essence, which is a more emancipatory rationale for participation? Here we should challenge the monolithic certainties of secularism: for worship, in its near-theatrical inclusion of the convinced, might just have a broader claim to individual freedom than the rigid disciplinary epistemologies that rest beneath the surface of the self-titled liberal arts and social sciences. Strangely enough, this renovated classical arrangement of the sect, partaking of both reason and impulse in high doses, is based less on hierarchy than on fluidity (often lightning-fast in the travel of a single notion or theme); it mandates an ongoing electrification, thus explaining the unusually charged debates that one detects among the practitioners. Their words, defying monotonality, are emblems of the unquenched mind. For in such far-reaching postures, each idea makes one a potential witness to a revelatory moment; more than this, the idea (and its recipient) are instantaneously situated at the nexus of both inception and fulfillment, as the past, the present, and the beyond forge a dialogic ring. This is why sectarian writings can attain such an exceptional versatility and scope, adapting old tales to new territories of experience, reaching back into the supposed miracles of an ancient landscape in order to frame a contemporary event or formation. Is it so hard to imagine, then, that an exceedingly well-versed fever-dream could serve as the foundation for extremist brilliance, for an intellectual-bodily gesture of the most dynamic, expansive, and innovative proportions? Last, the sectarian typology of communication/education must convey and incite the student to undertake a crucial decision. It asks unceasingly: To what configuration does one belong? Where does one stand, and to what lengths will one go to uphold that standpoint? Hence, one advances toward a vivid, defiant standstill between self and world: to become violently imperiled by one’s affiliation, and yet all the more steadfast for it. For the acceptance of an orientation is also the birthplace of a refusal (of all other ways), itself a procedure that calls forward into action; it asks for the far-going epitomization of each insight; it asks that the principle be executed, incarnated, and embodied at each bend. The more

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abstract, the more visceral, energetic, and impassioned: the weak cult of modern individuality (a formula of alienation, insularity, indifference) versus the magnetic power of the sectarian voice. It is a vortex of thought and belief that riles, animates, gathers, and inspires its practitioners to endure beyond all rational expectation (we are told of arguments of esoteric details that stray into the morning hours). Evermore ardent. Is this template, then, not itself an undeniable crossroads between countervailing definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices versus the freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing? Is modern apathy, however conceivably safer in its lack of orthodoxy, truly preferable to an obsessional quest? Perhaps on some remote plane of calculation, but surely not in terms of immediate force. For there is no contesting this startling realization: that delirium is a far more potent criterion in the struggle to gauge one’s place in the existential game. No, in the midst of those who have become enlivened, those who adamantly claw for their right to survive, maybe some should think twice about whether to pride themselves on the goal of becoming tranquil, extinguished, civilized. Maybe they should interrogate this trajectory further—the downward spiral of their fury, its own slower version of a cult of death too often ascribed to others—and thereby ask whether it is truly worthwhile to evade the compulsive, dazzled eye of the sectarian.

Visionary Distance: The Emerging Site of an Eastern-Outsider Turn Let us continue this introduction with an even more pointed conversation about the underpinnings of modernity itself, conducted through the lens of a critical rant, and the eventual relation of the third world subject to this particular epoch and its potential overthrow. Some must build the raft. To do this, one must go beyond even the postcolonial aftermath. For what would it mean for the so-called third world subject to be enveloped in the truly convulsive potentials of the third, to take up the dishonorable term and confiscate the electrical charge of its hate, its infinite uncertainties and contortions? And could it endure? No more. Our contemporary reality no longer treads so easily into the modern, and neither do its most eminent theorists. No doubt, many have turned their backs on what is already the unsung requiem of this time-slot, its hallowed quest for a redress never to be granted, and the

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unfulfilled promise of its self-devouring enterprise. The writing is on the wall, an inscription palpable through the endless alleyways of obscurity in which it hides: this order of consciousness ceases its reign here. An Eastern postmodern turn would speak beyond what is, with marred pronunciation and misplaced inflection, eluding the winded language of an age now condemned to fade. Above all else, the post-struck haze in which Western culture finds itself entrenched shows something: that even in its highest hours, this reality-principle has been the symptom of a plague, an open gash that tells the tale of where we stand. Modernity has spread itself across subjectivity like a rampant contagion. But there are those who have withstood its full infection, those whose forced distance has somehow held them from complete exposure. Overshadowed and undertheorized, these third figures stand as an aberration of an already aberrant scheme, an inadvertent event that modernity never could have anticipated let alone commissioned, but it is within that jagged deviation that a new possibility resides. Perhaps they are the voice of a strange immunity. The Eastern postmodernist arrives at the doorstep of the Western philosophical outlook as a foreigner, though not so foreign to itself, appearing virtuous yet soon exposed as an outsider come to wreak unforeseen havoc on the steel borders in which a pseudo-humanist West circumscribe its thoughts. For its accent does more than merely reflect a certain unfamiliarity with a privileged semantic heritage; it implicitly suggests an occluded alternative, another idiom resting in the recesses of a concealed nonidentity, a shrouded resource . . . one that has never been but could turn up at any instant. It intimates something waiting in the wings, an untold secret whose foreclosure remains in temporary abeyance, suspended but not gone: the one curbed dimension that persists as a haunting reminder that the whole is not apparent. In this way, it straddles the within and the beyond all at once. It sounds like a movement toward some unshackled futurity (this is not quite the case), but first there must occur an evocation of the third’s past, not for its sake but for yours, for such an encounter with this morphology demands a basis of self-reflexivity above all else. Thus, the question poses itself: Do you recall what was done to it, the profanity of such sacred crimes, how you carved yourself into it, branding its flesh with epistemologies of supremacy, for within these scattered passages you will find yourself compelled to remember, to reminisce with the merciless, and in the effusion of those tainted recollections to offer testimony against yourself. Denial will fail you here, no matter how layered with

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delusion, no matter how enveloped in protestations of the immaculate or the neutral, for there can be no distinction between performance and complicity, the assassin and the spectator, the one who wields the knife and the one who watches it happen; from all sides the interrogation will break through, penetrating to the inner circle and suffusing accountability in every direction, implicating all actors in the desolation of the farce. One is hard pressed to find a truth that does not have a dead body beneath it. And so it is with the story of your constrictive tropes as well, for in order to solidify the sovereignty of Enlightenment Man, such that you could revel in the pathologies of being all too human, another had to pay the price of inhumanity. Thus, the third ones became all that you would renounce in yourself, though never fully relinquishing its traces— the indecent, unrefined savage whose raw delirium stood as an offense to your elegance but somehow still enchanting a disenchanted earth. To the absolutism of your hyper-sublated presence, they would become that wondrous commingling of excess and absence, a purposelessness that served no use-value amidst the ascendancy of the Spirit but left standing nonetheless for those rare occasions of nostalgia when you would crave a mirror into your presumed beginnings, glancing backward at the fever of a brief sojourn in the procession of your greatness, crystallizing your twisted fantasia in their wild eyes. Amid the exportation of the cogito abroad, sent out to ravish the dark territories with the unparalleled obscenity of the subject-object dichotomy, the third ones soon found themselves the global instantiation of madness, the world turned asylum, with modernity as self-appointed warden of a dementia unleashed by its own hands. The tortures of colonial domination therefore offered that perfect opportunity for the first world to achieve the mutual exercise of the death drive and the pleasure principle, placating the lethal rage of the id while quenching the insatiate rapacity of the libidinal appetite, ravenous destruction and carnal lust, murder and voyeurism, drawn into parasitic simultaneity, all facets of modernity’s fractured psyche now standing triumphant, coterminously gratified in an act of termination, consecrating their indulgence on the tattered corpse of the third ones. Abandoned to ontological vacancy, dispossessed of sublimity and excised from the world-historical process, barred from teleology and logic in one fatal strike, excommunicated from the cult of reason and consigned to a never-ending allegory of loss and primal innocence, weighed down by the restraints of irrational desire and hence held hostage within the no-man’s-land of an eternal immaturity, thus were the third ones disarmed. After all this, after having suffered so much devastation, after having borne the disdain by which you anchored

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it to a centuries-long primitivity, is it any wonder that they now sit poised to withstand the collapse of modernity far better than those of you who once tied your dreams to it? Yes, something happened in the shadows of that unremitting violence: a shift, break, or tearing loose. When the tacticians of resistance metamorphosed into the purveyors of a new orthodoxy, when radicalism proceeded to manufacture its own monstrosity of the One, when the necessity of dissociation became an alibi for the insularity of a quasitheological elitism, when anthems of irreverence slowly coalesced to form their own brand of white noise, when echoes of insurrection subsided into the numbing monotonality of the everyday, when dissonance began to resonate a tragic harmony of the malcontented, when heresy turned self-righteous, when defiance turned to decadence, when infinity found its way back to totality and difference became nothing more than an incantation of the same, when the margin sedimented its own center, when the victim’s cry began to sound all too much like the executioner’s laugh, the third ones reemerged, calling themselves to arms, a self-sanctioned transfiguration beyond the ruins of an as yet unconfessed fall into mediocrity. Some must be the casualty of their becoming, turning the hunter into the hunted. And yet, still the third ones do not speak to you (no address is made). In the wake of this earned departure, no economy of utterances will take place, for all conversation brings entrapment, a casual exchange of words rapidly converting itself into a technique of assimilation. Having exorcised themselves of the tattered desire to imitate the original violation, they discontinue the cycle of mimicry, now fugitives from the panoptical gaze in all its manifestations . . . whether unidirectionally concentrated in the watchtower or diffused into the operation of the undifferentiated mass. Born at midnight, the third ones cannot be drawn backward into another twilight of the idols, but rather cling to their estrangement with all the fury they can summon. Entirely unresponsive, seeking no reconciliation. Whatever steps are taken (and there will be a reckoning), there is no search for vindication here, whatever indictments and allegations they might silently embody, for no retaliatory impulse will cause them to adulterate the indifference with which they behold the first world’s incessant lamentations. Once relegated to an image of historical paralysis, said to be arrested both within and without, abiding the double-slashes of exoticization and nullification, interminably condemned to receive and transmit the signal of the epistemic master-code as unreflective functionaries of the fraud, now the third ones stand redefined, remote to their

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prior assumed passivity. Having severed the strings of the puppet master, neither pure nor practical, the third ones are no longer the automata we once recognized with that steady air of condescension. No longer bowing, no longer the wretched of the earth, in breach of the master-slave contract, their subservience supplanted by infiltrative models, they are the living record of that one saving grace of existence, that one timeless rule that makes everything worthwhile: that the empires disintegrate. Know this, yours is no exception . . . already on borrowed time, your legacy finds itself ever so gradually spiraling into obsolescence. In the first world, we still carry the fresh wounds of a betrayal, a shattered covenant, the catastrophe of a redemptive synthesis pledged and sworn to us long ago by philosophy’s most hypnotic wind-sellers, but still waiting faithfully for it to turn right . . . somehow . . . clutching its cracked shards close to us as it all comes crashing down. But we can no longer avert the concession that is demanded of us: that for all the frenzy of neurotic diagnoses leveled against our entangled condition, for all our thrashing within the iron cage, for all our grave insights—however piercing, however wrought in ferocity—we have failed . . . leaving us to bemoan our servility, to lay prostrate before the altar of an inevitable captivity. But it may not be over (a chance could remain), though we must search beyond ourselves to uncover it beneath the ashes. Thus, we are beset with the imperative to traverse the recesses of our current illiteracy and read the elsewhere, braving those serrated letterings and scrawls that rake the eyes of their false sanctity, partaking of a dialect that will draw blood from the ears of those literary deaf-mutes to whom we have fastened our hopes for far too long. In a time when first world philosophy’s best combatants have nothing better to offer us than resignation to the most infantilizing and self-contained forms of play, the dejection of surrender masquerading itself as autonomy, the third ones dare to resuscitate the ethos of a way out (perhaps because they were never let in). Letting their scarred hands guide us, their lacerations assuring a gateway beyond the stranglehold of alienation and reification, beyond the submission to lowness and deterministic enslavement, beyond the ever-adjoining jailhouses of objectivity and intentionality, we come upon that which the self-hating winners of the game never quite understood. At once masochistic and melancholic, philosophy has long been in search of the lapse, the gap, the liminal, though it soon found such aspirations to be something toward which one ceaselessly strives but never quite reaches, leaving only the injury of an unsutured inadequacy, the lack and the impasse, an unrequited love of sorts for which all that survives is the

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taunting avowal of inaccessibility. But perhaps what was constituted as the unattainable in your sphere of imagination, only to be approximated now and again as a fleeting retreat into romantic hallucination, or even worse within the counterfeit alterity of the textual, is where someone else lives. Perhaps there is another, one whose subjugation made a different creature out of it, one for whom all mythologies of power and technologies of regimentation fall toward irrelevance, one who plays by no rules and who has impossibility in its veins. If, as you have been so prone to project into your more outlandish daydreams of the East, we have long committed ourselves to erratic wanderings in the desert, then you might come to fathom how the wasteland of this epoch was far easier to endure at our end of the treachery—little more than the translation of a familiar topography into an ontological modality, such that barrenness comes to you as an affliction, to us quite ordinary. Once halted and stalled in a state of non-temporality, not even worthy of time, the third ones now finds themselves propelled into a space where interiority and exteriority, presence and absence, are no longer locked in an imperishable antagonism. Herein lies the extravagant paradox of proximity and distance wherein the third ones are at once materially embedded in the workings of a global division of labor and yet forever skirting the fringes of its discursive hegemony, coerced to the outskirts of its civilizational taxonomies, but in due course left to dance along the edges in a way that precludes indoctrination. For if anything, the circumstances of imperial force do not infringe on their becoming, such that the intersection between base and superstructure descends into instability, the physical violence no longer infusing itself fluidly within the domain of consciousness so as to ensure a derivative subjectivity. Neither the architectonics of the law, the narcotizing ideologies of the state, nor the phantom valences of the commodity-form through which capital secretes itself can extort an unfaltering obedience from the third ones, now irreducible to the category of empiricized labor, now having overcome the frailty expected of them. Neither the damnation of the so-called despotism of the Oriental way-oflife, nor the invasiveness of glaring class antinomies could bend it to its non-will. Rather, the warped singularity of the production-consumption machine here is incommensurate with the task of existential homogenization, leaving the third ones outside the interstices of a great imbalance, at once compelled to work within the confines of imperial conquest while enabled to think beyond its frayed imagination. Dodging the straits of all traumatic obligation, evading the narrow corridors of a disjointed yet cyclical mind, the third ones have taken up the injunction toward nomadic

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thinking long before you had a name for it; they are driven by an abrasive restlessness that neither embraces nor entertains the grand narratives that have swarmed since the zero-degree of your subject-constitution; their militancy is intuitively actualized and sustained through a more elusive engagement with their immediate world. This third consciousness cannot be “one-dimensional Man.” The third is the faint whisper of the “no” and the “no more.” Following the coarse trajectory of this undercurrent takes us straight into the nexus of modernity’s breakdown, wrenching the deception into transparency. For amid this peculiar transversal of persecution and expulsion, identity is thrown into an inexplicable drift (a crisis of the real); it enters into those many arenas of the uneven where the assumed is vigilantly challenged, normality released toward disarray, indeterminacy subtly unraveling those chains of self-referential metaphors whereby the artificial becomes set in stone as the natural. Burning down parameters of meaning and laying bare the fictive absurdity of positivism’s most insidious designation . . . the thing-in-itself . . . the third ones enjoin themselves to a vicious struggle with the mandates of intelligibility. Once construed as the paragons of dormancy, a cheap dialectical negation stagnating in the catatonics of the helplessly fixed-in-place, how ironic that it is now these same wearers of stigma, enraptured in disbelief, who could rise from behind the curtains as the apotheosis of the unruly. It is here that some versions of postcolonial theory meet their recurring demise as a slave morality par excellence, oedipally consumed with trembling justifications of their worth to the most bankrupt masterdiscourse, invariably deferring even in feigned critique, and always pronouncing their resentment in the father’s tongue so as to ventriloquize an undeserving patriarchy. It is not here then, but rather far from here, that the third ones pick up the pieces, cultivating agency within the continuum of a contorted theft. Whereas those still choked by the specters of a withering lineage writhe within the prism of ancestral devotion, mutilated by a genealogy of false oaths, these authors explode text and life into the most stark rootlessness, forfeiting the paternal referent. The third ones will not wail the elegy of the conquered. Beyond the pretense to clarity in an aimless world, beyond systematic concoctions of legitimacy, beyond rhetorics of the universal that always seem to conceal the falling of a blade, the linear visions they presume and the institutions of control they engender, the third ones decide to speak again. In their own words, on their own terms, they forsake the quiescence of subalternity (counter-epochal shrieking). They invoke the brutality of

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their experience not to tranquilize but to agitate, internalizing doubt in varying incarnations of uncertainty, defending themselves against the solace of essentialist articulations. Once written out as a dispensable residuum, the shame of a disowned antiquity, the third ones now mobilize the abuse of their deportation not toward retribution but toward forgetting (a turning away). Listening close, we hear this species account for their own variability, attesting to that sudden drop toward a poetic moment when “night and day are one.”6 But the divergence does not come easy, allowing no exit but straight through the heart of the nihilistic, for it is within the uncharted expanse of this abysmal terrain, stretching out toward everywhere and nowhere with unmeasured strides, that the elements first convene to ravage the mind. Thus, they are unleashed into a space of the “untimely / in a land unknown / at a time yet not arrived,” “facing the horizon aflame,” stripped of all faith and expectation as “the measureless distance affords no hope.”7 As acrid determinations of the real deteriorate, a newfound hunger lashes against their already torn interiority, cannibalizing all remnants of a colonized Being and leaving them as “an anchorless boat, / conscious of its own eternal homelessness.”8 Now left breathless, soulless, they cast history to the wayside, having borne its wrong “like a gash / a lifelong / bleeding / like a gash / a lifelong / hurt pulsating / eyes opening to the earth in an outcry / and in wrath vanishing / such was the immense void / such was the tale of desecration.”9 They will not be accomplices to the epoch’s seductions, defecting from the scene as “the slaves pour poison / into the guests’ goblets / from antique decanters.”10 And it is here, where things cannot help but fall apart, where they are made to fall apart, that the third ones turn oblique (beyond your stares). Another calls out, this one “drowned in fear,” “weary from the torment of having desired” and yet crouched “above the narrow passing” where “the pulverized, desolate, drunk wind reels downward.” And so it plays out its fate once more.11 The trial of dissonance. Grammatological regimes hold no sway here, no longer able to consolidate the general and the particular into a matrix of instrumentalized equivalence, no longer able to stave off the onset of the discordant. As such, the third ones stand at the crossroads of infidelity and incarceration, to stray or to remain, to abide the throes of solitude or to drown as a silhouette of the modern crowds. The answer is clear enough though, for there can be no return across the tightrope. Add to this existential evacuation the enhanced concrete hazards of a

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totalitarian dawn “punctured by the chorus of twelve bullets,” such that the third ones find themselves stalked through “a tortuous dead end and veering chill” by those who would “fuel the fire / with the kindling of anthems and poetry.”12 Much is asked in the face of such an affair, and yet they will not shield themselves from the scandal of mortality; rather they leave terror to do its worst in this unsublimated surplus of the nothing, confronting finality without recourse to mediation. Not a transient flirtation with the danger-zones of thought but an instance of complete immersion in the possibility of the end, the pure risk of oblivion, the insistence of a wager enacting itself in every passing second, such that “the bloody doorway / and the blood-spattered carpet alone / stand witness that / barefoot / we have walked upon a trail of swords.”13 Such is the composition of this episode, enjoining more than sacrilege or sacrifice in one untamed motion of the test. The travesty of colonial subjectivity dies here, and for good, this dangerous individuation coming at the cost of something fatal: turning privation into ecstasy, the other is succeeded by those who have chosen the third road beyond.

Chapter Outlines Chapter 1 reflects on the multiple rings of speculation surrounding the figure of the insurgent in this century, using selected verses from the Syrian poet Adonis so as to think briefly about the reverberations that such gestures might hold. For certain, these energetic currents of debate about redefining radical thought and revolutionary action have led to a crossroads, one that will seriously impact the ongoing struggles of Middle Eastern society, the fragile relation between East and West, and the perseverance of third world cultures in a postmodern theater of operation. Chapter 2 collects the most telling thoughts of leading Iranian radical thinkers from the Islamic front in the twentieth century and interprets their various stances on questions of representation, technology, global imperialism, and the third world’s ability to restore balance between the demands of cultural tradition and the onset of a dramatic global shift. By coalescing these interrelated figures—including Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Ali Shari’ati, and the Ayatollah Khomeini—one is given a widespread overview of the charges toward a so-called Eastern identity that culminated in an event of unrivaled proportion: the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

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Chapter 3 explores Persian new poetry within the throes of urban violence in the twentieth century, showcasing a series of urbicidal episodes (the killing of a city) that would turn the capital into a breeding ground of sadistic tendencies and mass hysteria. Against a backdrop of public executions, martyred bodies, torture chambers, and secret-police night raids, the chapter isolates three renowned Iranian poets—Ahmad Shamlu, Reza Baraheni, and Mehdi Akhavan-Sales—as they narrate graphic instances of sociopolitical violence. In the end, these poetic documents reveal a view of modernity as a state of permanent collapse, and the modern city itself nothing less than a transformative zone of both catastrophic and liberating spectacles. Chapter 4 proceeds to establish a meeting ground between the most celebrated originator of Iranian modernist literature—Sadeq Hedayat— and various Western critics and philosophers of modernity (Nietzsche, Adorno, Heidegger, Benjamin). Above all else, it theorizes the monumental importance of Hedayat’s masterpiece The Blind Owl as a “will to chaos” that at once corresponds with Western avant-garde trends in surrealism, minimalism, absurdism, and existentialism while deviating from them toward new horizons of textual expression. Ultimately, Hedayat’s vision of the writing-act is upheld as a novel experience of the modernist phenomenon that also sketches a fugitive map of escape from its grasp. Chapter 5 observes the emergence of new-wave Iranian cinema as yet another potential antidote to the modern dilemma, one that reformulates the very nature of visual-auditory perception by experimenting with apparitional, aerial, incidental, and imperceptible forms of looking and hearing. Moreover, it looks to this filmic enterprise as a reinstallment of mystical paradigms of desertion (the dissolution of sociopolitical reality), a distancing-act that refuses acknowledgment of the very discourse of the present, and thus a constant tactic of elusion, evasion, and unknowing that provides its own cunning solution to the entrapments of the era (temporal-sensorial exile). Particularly, the chapter tracks an evocative interior portal between modernity, image, space, and sound by interpreting two of the most stellar examples of this recent artistic form: Amir Naderi’s The Runner and Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black. In the final stride, these filmmakers take one into a sphere of neo-mystical transmutation, haunting, and vanishing that restores the capacity of the artwork to eclipse the totalizing regime of modernity. Chapters 6 and 7 theorize the various principles of “sectarianism” as a future model for the postcolonial/postmodern imagination of the

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Middle East. Accordingly, poets and literary icons of the entire region are brought to the forefront to shed light on this rising designation and its significance for questions of subjectivity, conflict, and the dream of the enemy.

Part I

INSURGENT

Chapter 1

Theorizing the Insurgent Otherless Subjectivity, Radical Coldness, and the East-West Matrix

He erases his face Rapture advances Time advances

he discovers his face A temptation wears you in her first dawn Where do you chronicle life and how? —Adonis, “Singular in a Plural Form”

An overarching view of the Middle East in the twentieth century and beyond, if even just selecting certain illuminating pockets of ideas and movements, provides one with an unexpected prototype for returning to the debate over the postcolonial or the third world. With that said, one wonders whether the myriad strategies of the postmodern and the postcolonial could be combined to forge an incredible category of some kind, a conceptual corrugation amid standing notions of the revolutionary, the radical, and the subversive that leads beyond the political (as we know it). We might call this endangering subjectivity the next insurgent.1 Whereas the traditional revolutionary is very much the product of modernity itself, another version of insurgent action that we are perhaps already witnessing in the contemporary Middle East would mark the slipping away of an age that (for the postcolonial world) never even cemented itself in the first place. Since this work will in part endeavor to discern the intricacies of insurgent, poetic, mystical, and sectarian ideas and their ensuing philosophical-aesthetic implications for the life span of modernity, we can begin by exploring the varying dimensions of an insurgent mode of consciousness as it operates within multiple terrains of the human and inhuman experience of the Middle East, charting its trajectory in the exodus from arenas of political resistance to a broader form of aesthetic imagination and then even beyond the realm of the artwork and into a more radicalized form of subjective anarchy. Furthermore,

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the argument toward which the narrative thus far has oriented itself is quite simply that the experience of a certain third world existence, again defined here not as a geographical fixity but as an ulterior ontological possibility, has opened the floodgates for a subject position that not only observes and endures the segmentation of the world around it but deliberately wills itself toward a perpetually insurrectional mode of becoming. It is a reversal of Hegel in that it posits that the true is anything but the whole, though some have suggested that the dialectic is more open-ended than we may think (we will see otherwise). Putting this debate aside, the prognosis here is that the insurgent holds part of the key to resistance in modernity, leading one to ponder what might happen were insurgent divisiveness to become the overriding trend of an antiepoch. With such a paradox in mind, the underlying goal of this section marks an attempt to articulate the possibility of an insurgent profile that is not beholden to ideology, modernity, or the political itself. The intent is always to formulate a conception of revolutionary agency independent of any call to an ordered world, one that subverts the machinations of power without the drive to supplant them by an alternative system. This prospect has been entertained before, of course, but here and now it appears with a theoretical modulation: namely that it reconfigures revolutionary action away from all visions of collectivity by recasting it into the parameters of an exclusively subjective phenomenon. An insurgent politics, by this definition, is therefore commensurable with a politics of the self, but a reconstituted self that partakes of an ethos somewhere beyond dialectics, beyond the absolutism of all truths, and beyond the most basic need to camouflage the obscurity of the world behind narratives of explanation. Consequently, the project of an insurgent consciousness derails all claims to a discourse of the real while once again making salient a space to revive the idea of subjectivity subsequent to the creative paralysis engendered in the wake of a poststructuralist death of the subject. It reinstates the will by investing subjectivity with an existential intimation free from many of the totalitarian trappings of the past, stripped of the desire to subordinate the continuum of time and space to any one monolithic vision; rather, it leaves things to thrash, to grow reckless, to supplant the meaninglessness of certain boundaries with the free reign of an experiential charge and imperishable restlessness. The insurgent thereby clears the path for a reimagining of political struggle precisely by waging its measures outside of the political unconscious. For it is in this way that subjectivity can pose a different insolence to centers of power, the endowment of an instinctive challenge through which a

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lone self might forego even the structural anchors of transgression and become something more of a rotational avatar. And so, this chapter devotes itself to a theoretical exposition of the relationship between a becoming-insurgent and the exhaustive disintegration of belief-structures in modernity. To do so, it engages with a vast diversity of philosophical articulations so as to render more acute commentaries on the potential dissolution of essence, temporality, intentionality, causality, hierarchy, identity, objectivity, truth, and the paradigmatic issue of Being. In their place, we will speak of chaotic departure, outsider mood, otherless individuation, radical coldness, eternal war, unresponsive reversal, killer’s freedom, and affective overreaction. Moreover, several lines and excerpts from the contemporary Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) will be interspersed throughout the chapter, left hanging as crucial signposts that introduce each conceptual nuance. These will be our first visionary indications of a Middle Eastern postmodernity.

Eastern Insurgency as Chaotic Departure I work your secret trade = I witness the unknowns of my state I pant like someone trying to make home of his exile I scatter—am diffused—my surfaces spread and I own none of them My insides reduced, no place in them for me to live2 The full importance of chaos will be evaluated later in this book as the main pedal of the Middle Eastern poetic imagination, and yet it also shows some vital traces in the insurgent mind-set under scrutiny here. In some respects, this rendition of the insurgent shares a vague precedent in Nietzsche’s work, whose attention to chaos is unequaled in continental thought, though Heidegger later perpetrates a philosophical injustice against his predecessor’s view in a somewhat reductionist and watereddown reading that robs it of a more incendiary projection. Briefly, Heidegger defines the chaotic through Nietzsche as “the world as a whole, the inexhaustible, urgent, and unmastered abundance of self-creation and self-destruction.”3 Nevertheless, the totalitarian stimulus underlying Heidegger’s own designation of knowing makes him unwilling to accept this as the source of any ontological liberation; and so, in a hermeneutic slight, he begins to impose a more hegemonic will to mastery on Nietzsche’s intentional slanting and tangents, particularly in his recasting of art as

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that which “ventures and wins chaos, the concealed, self-overflowing, unmastered superabundance of life.”4 Though he maintains the language of a venture, the rhetoric of eventual conquest also runs rampant in this meditation, for the Heideggerian lens can only perceive this chaotic event as some ill-peddled vitiation of Being (it outstretches and manhandles): “Every living being, and especially man, is surrounded, oppressed, and penetrated by chaos, the unmastered, overpowering element that tears everything away in its stream . . . [that] pulls and sucks the living itself into its own stream, there to exhaust its surge and flow. Life would then be sheer dissolution and annihilation.”5 The real problem, then, is that Heidegger still wants desperately to live, whereas the insurgent (especially in the Middle Eastern anticontext) has no such preservation reflex. Whereas Adonis invokes the scattering of himself across surfaces (as a kind of unknowing), Heidegger domesticates the chaotic emergence to serve a mode of authentic knowledge that “is not like a bridge that somehow subsequently connects two existent banks of a stream, but is itself a stream that in its flow first creates the banks and turns them toward each other in a more original way than a bridge ever could.”6 In this slithering metaphor, however, Heidegger has obviously undone both Adonis’s call to self-diffusion and the great Nietzschean tension that must never be reconciled by ascribing supremacy to the Apollinian, subjugating the Dionysian impulse beneath a representational and hyper-rational retreat from the void. Thus, the insurgent (as named here) is an attempt not to recuperate or restore what Heidegger has already stolen but rather to reimagine what Nietzsche had achieved as a point of chaotic departure on the colonial side of modernity. By far this example has come closest to the daring, self-disciplining realm of the Eastern revolutionary ethos, for it is in this station alone that subjectivity can deter the more grotesque manifestation of the will to power while simultaneously avoiding a hopeless concession to world-historical forces.7 Rather, something more complicated is at stake, a positionality whereby one holds no desire to tame the aforementioned stream of existence in all its confusion, rage, and resurgence, but at the same time forestalls any drowning within it. The balance here is admittedly a delicate one, a timeless push-and-pull always skirting that fine line between the poles of surrender and domination, but it can be negotiated if one maneuvers well enough, arriving at a province where the self-willed experience of the edge alone is allowed to guide forward. The argument in this piece is that the Middle Eastern insurgent can become that very tightrope walker (not all of them, never the every-

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one, but a select few), for a realization of the chaotic has increasingly pervaded the experiential stratosphere of what has long been called the third world (and now waits to be harnessed toward something unprecedented). Accordingly, Nietzsche’s remarkable contribution has never been so relevant than when Zarathustra uttered the words that “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”8 For this chaotic temperament is not the end but the non-essentializing skill of a revolutionary imagination now made integral to the operation of certain segments of the Eastern front. The first world has perhaps abandoned this possibility, for whatever reasons of contentment. The third world now has no choice but to embrace it as a conduit of its great discontent. Chaos is all that the history of modernity, a ghastly history of order, has left it. There have been further allusions to a principle of chaotic departure, and among these Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have come relatively close, though then falling rapidly away from the lever to an unseemly subjective turn in their celebration of “the multitude” and its rejuvenation of the “irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist” (one detects the slightly underhanded injection of Nietzschean tones into a school that would not tolerate the former, having never known lightness or joy).9 As their most eminent effort, Empire, vocalizes the necessary call for a return to the concept of immanence as the basis for an amorphous, transnational revolutionary clique that might counterbalance any tendencies toward transcendental solutions, a split-personality disorder emerges in the theorization of this counter-epochal model. On the one side, Hardt and Negri seek a demystifying antidote to Foucauldian ideas of biopolitics, governmentality, and the subordination of the body to technologies of regimentation by announcing the urgency for an “anarchic basis of philosophy.”10 Thus they dispense terminologies of “nomadism, desertion, and exodus”11 and rightly advocate for a modified sense of revolutionary orientation: “Whereas in the disciplinary era sabotage was the fundamental notion of resistance, in the era of imperial control it may be desertion. Whereas being-against in modernity often meant a direct and/ or dialectical opposition of forces, in postmodernity being-against might well be most effective in an oblique or diagonal stance. Battles against the Empire might be won through subtraction and defection.”12 And still, despite some fantastic Deleuzian improvisations, these very seeds of a chaotic politics find themselves betrayed later by a text that cannot swallow its own medicine, still held fast within an evolutionary perception of historicity despite a momentary digression into the idea of cyclicality, still reconfirming the all-presence of totalities that never were (however

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broken, extra-statist, and volatile) despite resuscitating arguments for the “alternatives within” and the need to distinguish between an imperial device that works well in itself but not for itself, and still shooting glances toward redemptive futurities that might allow humanity to “recognize a rupture of the system, a paradigm shift, an event.”13 As a consequence, even if empire as a conceptual category must in fact be treated differently, bringing us toward an unprecedented phenomenological territory, then Hardt and Negri’s continued investment in old idioms of resistance make their prescriptions terribly archaic vis-à-vis their lethal diagnoses. For one thing, there is a telling analytic insistence on the novelty of empire as trans-systemic reality, playing into the cult of newness endemic not coincidentally both to Western postmodernism and consumer capitalism, though in some unsuited way Hardt and Negri are also able to derive their creeds of revolutionary insurgency from writers who preceded the supposed upsurge of empire. In the end it seems inconsistent that proposals of resistance are afforded a comprehensive trans-historicality, jumping from Spinoza to Nietzsche to Foucault to even Saint Francis of Assisi for critical inspiration, all the while in the now we are presumably inhabiting a completely fresh space of power (note that this cross-centurial immanence of thought would be perfectly fine if only they believed in an outsider subjectivity capable of ahistorical imagination). From vending modernity as absolute rupture to vending empire as absolute rupture all the while fighting against absolutist logics, by tirelessly harnessing the past to justify the inception of a present that according to the analysis rests in complete disconnect with that same past, it seems the authors have quite deliberately commandeered the vaunting bravado of Enlightenment epistemology and all its self-contradictory tricks. Having said this, the narrative shows moments of brilliant assailment of a fictive age but then cannot help lending itself a gargantuan sweep that leaves nothing save its own theoretical vertigo—that is, it conveys a desperately epic tone; it is wracked by an extremist strain between pessimistic defeatism and unbridled utopianism; and its subheadings are riddled with gestures of infinite scope offset by supposed migratory deviations. One wonders, then, whether this pendulous swing between the inflated dispositions of robust triumphalism and alarmist nightmare, too invested in the now full-blown monstrosity of empire to think beyond it (or apparently to even allow it a beyond), is not susceptible to Nietzsche’s accusation of resentment in the Christian/anarchist: “The ‘fine indignation’ itself soothes him; it is a pleasure for all wretched devils to scold: it gives a slight but intoxicating sense of power . . . There is a fine dose of revenge in every

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complaint.”14 Where this becomes most blatant is in the fact that, for all their talk of plurality and sporadic affiliation, and despite a split-second revelation toward a race of “new barbarians” who would escape “the local and particular constraints of their human condition . . . to construct a new body and new life,”15 the authors do not follow this existential alloy into its proper outer reaches; rather, the text remains saturated with dialectical thinking of the most asphyxiating sort. This is why all renderings of a chaotic subject fail so poorly under their watch: for instance, their figure of the militant, who graces the final pages of the book, is at long last asked to stand in direct archetypal opposition with empire itself, thereby making it precisely non-isomorphic with Foucault’s specific intellectual; in fact, all specificities are badly engineered here, amid this lack of any craftsman-like attunement to the forging of an intricate subject-position, and therefore come stillborn into the theoretical world. A robotic army: without volition. More exactly, Hardt and Negri elide the most pressing component of a micropolitics of resistance, which for every other continental thinker of this outlook (Nietzsche, Kafka, Bataille, Foucault, Genet, Michaux, Cioran, Beckett, Artaud, Baudrillard, Serres, Deleuze, and Guattari) requires some nefarious architect in the laboratory (the overhuman, the supplicant, the deviant, the body-without-organs, the criminal, or the schizoid). Instead, Hardt and Negri convert each struggle into a hyper-attenuated collision with the obscenity of the world, such that when they go to actually visualize the attire and mannerisms of “militancy today,” they can do no better than to recycle tattered Marxist silhouettes of decades long-gone: “We are referring . . . to something more like the communist and liberatory combatants of the twentiethcentury, the intellectuals who were persecuted and exiled in the course of anti-fascist struggles, the republicans of the Spanish civil war and the European resistance movements, and the freedom fighters of the anticolonial and anti-imperialist wars.”16 This nostalgic portrait of the contemporary militant is bizarrely retrograde and misguided, and remains the sole precise reason why such trends in Western postmodern theory cannot begin to fathom an Eastern insurgent voice that says things like “I am the fever of prophethood . . . My blood is fire.”17 No hyperbole; no longing for sedative mantras (some are just like this now). This is also why Hardt and Negri, who like so many other communist philosophers today have turned toward recent events in the Middle East, going as far as to award the insurrectionary masses there with a place at the vanguard’s table, broadcasting the news that “Arabs are democracy’s new pioneers” and that “these revolts have immediately performed a kind of ideological

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house-cleaning,”18 should just stay quiet, relax their ridiculous heralding, and defer to those who have listened more closely to what is happening: for the record, these movements are neither fledgling attempts at socialist democracy nor a reinvigoration of the political (they are not even together, though clamoring in the same tight space); they are, above all else, carrying out a ritual purging and abolition of the political altogether (no city will hold any longer). So then, why the ongoing misapprehension of such Eastern insurgency? The fatal problematic for such authors is that class, not thought or poetics or affect, is still the touchstone of action. Notice that there is no existential springboard whatsoever in the communist appropriation of chaos (no will to power, no self-initiated becoming, no violent passage, somatic infuriation, or aesthetic lunacy of someone behind the wheel). And they admit as much in their ultramaterialist misreading of the ontological imperative: “When we say that political theory must deal with ontology, we mean first of all that politics cannot be constructed from the outside.”19 And yet, though demonizing the absolutely vital concept of the outside, they do in fact construct their politics of resistance from the outside: that is, from outside any unit of individual expression; note that there is not a single quote from the mouth of one of their would-be soldiers; there is not one extracted utterance or reflection derived from the living mind, throat, or teeth of a potential combatant; stated indelicately, there is no tangible voice to their warfare. This is the recurring failure of leftist materialism itself: that it avoids like the plague the most rigorous and meticulous piece of materiality (singular experience). For what relevant tools, if any, does their philosophical legion have to grapple with Adonis when he writes: My era tells me bluntly: You do not belong. I answer bluntly: I do not belong, I try to understand you. Now I am a shadow Lost in the forest Of a skull.20 For the sake of incontrovertible clarity, this verse was written in 1982 during the sieges of the civil war in Beirut, for which there is perhaps no more superbly political setting than this, amid a hail of perpetual gunfire and miniature bombs, and yet somehow Adonis finds within himself

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the tiny crevice that leads beyond the empire (there is only room to smuggle one at a time). And still, such virulent concentrations of chaotic thought, however translucent in their words and aims, have had no apparent bearing on Western postmodern philosophy (because it still wants the political, and the many that comes with it). What we get, then, are more throwaway logics of collectivity: through the diverse yet bloodless entity of the multitude, which is somehow driven by a humanism after the death of man, Hardt and Negri in mammoth stride turn the dialectic of revolutionary subjectivity versus localized structural domination into the even more colossal dialectic of the global revolutionary mass versus the age of empire. This leaves us standing not far from the typical Enlightenment penchant for massacring individuality in the name of saving some lifeless abstraction of the race or species. The Eastern insurgent, on the other hand, not only shuns the temptation of thinking of struggle as necessarily dialectical but also denies any potentiality of revolutionary intersubjectivity whatsoever (we are so alone in this).

Eastern Insurgency as Outsider Mood See now: you ended but the comedy did not You have died like all the others Like time sobbing in the lungs of our forefathers21 I would like to establish a theory whereby first and third world could be understood as their own exclusive moodscapes, untrustworthy epistemic climates through which certain patterns of smoothness, coarseness, anger, and revelation are deployed, such that belonging to one prism over the other would be regarded primarily as an aerial matter—that is, of what inhalation-exhalation ritual does one partake, and what are the particular qualities of this oxygen? For the business of first and third entails nothing less than to become immersed within a kind of temperature, ambiance, weather, and mesosphere of the mind/body. These moodscapes, like landscapes or dreamscapes, are exceptionally productive in nature—they give rise to insurmountable visions, ideas, and militant negotiations of desire. And they are unequal and irrelational vantages, for their respective singularities draw them toward the crystallization of incommensurable tastes. What separates these spaces then, above all else, is an experiential rift, a severe disparity in atmospheric-existential conditions that in turn allows for alternative gradients of emergent thought and affect. Hence

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the question that is rarely asked today would be as follows: How do the tangible lived parameters of third world subjectivity empower a distinct force-field of imagination? As a consequence, and before offering any answer, one point must be stressed here: that an insurgent consciousness is highly abstract but not hypothetical. This is not an attempt to establish some pure domain of subjectivity whereby the mind could retreat from the maladies of the everyday, neither does it succumb to a roundabout effort to resurrect the old Cartesian cogito (though this time concealed behind a tinted complexion). The intent is instead to argue that the circumstances of lived reality in the decolonized zones, at both their material and epistemic registers, have converged to create a gulf in identity-formation, which, if seized upon could give rise to an impenetrable form of revolutionary action: disconcerting, prismatic, something akin to cryptogenic stroke (no etiology). In this alternate model, individuated consciousness is no longer divorced from social praxis but rather the latter serves as the mere idiopathic extension of a radical interiority (such is the fluidity, rattle, and hyper-synchronous syndrome of the mood). The epileptic versus the hypostatic: and so it is that the Middle Eastern subject stands poised to access the most remote and complex channels of philosophical speculation without having to sacrifice any of its engagement on the ground (from which it steals its very groundedness). First and foremost in presuming such an argument is to clarify the specific mode of third world subjectivity that is being engaged, since to subsume the entirety of the postcolonial world under a unitary consciousness would be to perpetuate an essentialist narrative that resembles the very tropes of modernity itself. Hence the Eastern mood of interest here is that of the “vertical and horizontal outsider,” which is derived in part from a renovation of Hamid Dabashi’s theory of vertical and horizontal colonization.22 More exactly, the third world subject, epistemically marginalized by Enlightenment discourse and materially exploited under a global division of labor, is already by no choice of its own the horizontal other (using the spatial metaphor as a signifier of international power relations). For certain, it is this horizontal otherness that has bolstered both the phenomena of colonialism and decolonization, and which has most recently compelled the willingness of the third world to encounter the violence of modernity face-to-face. On the other hand, we see the almost immediate regression of these horizontally focused movements back into a modernist authoritarian project precisely due to their inability to privilege vertical otherness as the basis for a sustained revolutionary

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expenditure. By vertical other, the definition here is quite simply those internally marginalized elements of the society: specifically, this should include the rural and urban masses whose ceaseless class impoverishment reflect that they are only the beneficiaries of modernity’s wrath, the alienated intellectual or rebel who is constantly left vulnerable to the violence of an autocratic state apparatus, and those social groups (based on gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.) whose rights are not represented sufficiently and are susceptible to cultural-legal persecution without protection by the political sphere. For certain, this second phase of mobilization has just started occurring in the postcolonial world, for past anticolonial revolutions have in most instances proved internally hegemonic, claiming to represent the concerns of the masses while themselves prone to deep power-striations. In the case of anticolonial nationalism, these movements were invariably led by some prefixed elite who, often as members of the aristocracy or bourgeois comprador class educated abroad, had acquired their leadership position by playing the native informant or indigenous middleman to the colonial enterprise. With regard to Islamic fundamentalism, the support for the clerical establishment was derived from a traditional middle class with direct ties to the merchants stationed in the bazaar. Finally, in some of the more extreme cases, postcolonial societies were thrust under the control of a military or paramilitary state whose functionaries again were derived from a background with old ties to the now-evacuated colonial equipment. What is imperative to note, then, is that none of these initial postcolonial federations originated from their societies’ most alienated quarters since they were rarely articulated from within the cellar must of some vertical otherness (all of these partnerships had some prior leverage). The revolutionary programs described above were from their very congealment damned to prolong a form of internal oppression, not only because most of the leadership was already part of a historically oppressive social formation but even more importantly because their parting (from a kind of tormented intuition) left them with no existential frame of reference from which to formulate an ideational emancipation from modernity. And so, while often horizontally inorganic to the project of modernity, and thus allowing them to mount a serious challenge to the latter through decolonization, their vertical inorganicity with respect to the experiential air of otherness compelled the newly arising leadership to mimic modernity’s own failures. The same structures of tyranny fell back into place despite the expulsion of the first colonizer, evinced by the reemergence of political repression, economic inequality, cultural dis-

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crimination, and countless other atrocities under the guise of an authentic revolutionary mantle. Neither did their ideological prescriptions suggest any other possibility from the outset, steeped in either a toxic confiscation of modernity’s own principles or marred as a dialectical reaction to modernity that was always already defined by the discourse of its adversary, able to construct nothing more elaborate than the elder colonial paradigms of civilizational thinking rechanneled into a program of cultural nativism. This is why the idea of a discursive solidarity within the anticolonial era, one that encompassed all sectors of the society while also somehow representing a singular consciousness, was never even plausible. And still further, these revolutions’ profound disconnect from the social body whose cause they once claimed to champion has allowed many postcolonial states more recently to play servant to the neocolonial ambitions of capitalist globalization (such violations should come as no great surprise). What is critical to note here, however, is that their almost unequivocal faltering, their degeneration back into the strangulationgames of modernity, has unveiled itself time and again, and continues to do so at every level of the postcolonial reality. Throughout the course of this historical phase, the other has remained entrenched in otherness, and has begun to recognize a certain zero-degree of subjectivity therein. Now four times alienated under two separate yet analogous historical stages: (1) horizontally by the epistemic violence of colonialism, (2) vertically by the combination of a foreign colonial state and the indigenous comprador elite, (3) vertically again under the subsequent oppression and exploitation of the anticolonial regime, and (4) horizontally again under the continued global division of labor supported by local third world states—there are no more prospects for dehumanization outside of this quadrupled otherness. Left ravaged by all vectors of this compounding epochal configuration, the consciousness of the non-Western subject has gathered an intrinsic, perpetual distrust of its own time, space, and relation to power, which renders a portal into an alternative navigation of identity: that of the insurgent outsider. With the machineries of both horizontal power (colonialism) and vertical power (dictatorship) since thoroughly exposed, every revolutionary impulse toward engagement has concurrently been exhausted, such that the third world other now awaits the opportunity for an unstoppable confrontation with its historical age from the ahistorical vantage of its exteriority (the many moods that hover past the bridge). Speaking on a purely structural level, there is no remaining alternative but for this self-expelled grade to conceive of itself as the basis for the next insurgency. More than this, the very intention of the radical actor

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this time around must prove discrete from what we have seen before: namely, no longer to fight on behalf of remedying, reforming, or even re-creating society, but rather to fight on behalf of the continued existence of an autonomous isle (that of the unstrung). The insurgent’s concern is therefore not the fortification of a utopian vision of the sociopolitical, but rather the perforation of its potentially totalizing encasement so that certain pockets and corners of solitude, extinction, and imagination remain viable and thriving. The Eastern insurgent is an outer well-digger—into undergrounds with no dream of the surface (this is also the child’s nebulous tract)—and thus brings to prominence a new existential proficiency: to guard the very possibility of a more-than-this, the generous outside, for it alone will bring the end of the deathly “comedy” that the poet describes, and with it the end of the forefathers and their inherited sobbing.

Eastern Insurgency as Otherless Individuation Light advances

It becomes night in my regions I am torn and assembled Time takes the shape of skin and escapes time.23

Anomalous individuation (to be none other than this): that is what one is after here, though not as a turn back to the archaicism of liberalhumanist individuality but as the stalwart emblem of a subjectivity that has weathered the death of the subject and lived to tell of it. Insurgent subjectivity is therefore not the reward of the victim (it is not enough to be beaten), but rather of the survivor (the self-conscious affirmation of having endured and gone beyond). Otherness is no longer an end in itself, an idea that could only reinvigorate the respective slave moralities of postcolonial theory and poststructuralist ethics, but rather serves as an experience of the dire nihilistic out of which several overcomings and becomings might then emanate: that of the incomparable, the unparalleled, the self-with-no-other (too far gone). There should be no intimidating residual universe. The broader implications of this argument are to be found in a somewhat twisted reappropriation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic within the discourse of the self and other in modernity, though the terms must be revised in a quasi-Nietzschean arc (with some modifications). In short, Hegel’s insight into the skeleton of domination is of the utmost importance here,

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since it demonstrates the basic way in which it is always the master (self) who requires recognition from an external entity (the othered slave). Consequently, the master paradoxically remains in a state of complete dependency for his own self-definition on the slave, whereas the latter can gradually ascend toward an independent consciousness by virtue of his subjection (sublating “its own being-for-self ”). Despite the further complexities of this rationale, the immediate conclusion is sufficient for the purposes of this analysis: that it is the other alone who can outrun the self-other paradigm. The Enlightenment, in this same vein, always needs its other, which is then taken up in the monolithic construct of the Orient/non-West (among further casualties), all the while otherness itself (whose reality constantly resists such totalization) is never the beneficiary of this hierarchical relationship and therefore does not necessarily require it for self-definition. This dynamic points, then, to an undisclosed reservoir of thought and sensation from which to borrow momentum. Once again, if it has seemed otherwise in the cases of anticolonial nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, such that this othered subjectivity remains trapped within the binary, then the suggestion here is that its ideological visionaries were never interested in seeking out or excavating those undisclosed particles of consciousness (the untouched spaces within) but rather flung themselves headlong into the same narratives that would make of them a caricature (the other longing to be counted as self). For sure, as many have asserted, had decolonization actually been a populist mode of resistance, then it is unclear as to how postcolonial history might have unfolded; but far more importantly, had decolonization sought out the radical potential of otherless individuation (the hermit, the mercenary, the maniac), then an even greater opportunity could have been seized. The laceration forms a well-tethered cord to occultation. Nietzsche’s interjection at this point, his intense rejection of the Hegelian exaltation of the slave, is entirely justified in consideration of his project and our own. To attempt to romanticize oppression, to revel within the inherent wretchedness of the other’s dehumanized condition, is a self-delusion of the worst kind. And it is often postcolonial theory that is the most severe promoter of this unjust reading: whether constituted by the autobiographical lamentation of lost identity or even the functionalist theoretical gymnastics whereby otherness (despite the fact that it does not know this itself) is somehow always the simultaneous invention and subversion of modernity, both are horrifying manifestations of an apologetic, selfexcusing defeatism. The reason for this lapse in the equation is postcolonial studies’ convenient bandwagoning of the poststructuralist death of the

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subject, which allows it to skip the pivotal lessons of existentialism (that someone must actually contemplate, struggle, lash, bleed, and re-create oneself for it to be worthwhile) in order to expedite a vulgarized fixation with the concept of pregiven “identity” over self-initiated “individuality.” This gloss, however, is intellectually uninteresting and thus frequently devolves into one of two hermeneutic options: one either narcissistically bemoans otherness or elevates it to a falsely contestatory reality in and of itself, both of which provide a debilitating ethics of the abused. As such, neither does anything but perpetuate a reactionary politics of passivity (existential stasis) rather than keeping pace with the more covert, inexplicable factions now creeping across such regions with a vascularity more freakish by the day. There are no clones for this; they are not compliant; they are not tenants of the real. One can indeed scour after a fierce alternative to the ontological stalemates of the past, which is why one notices an ever-growing thrust toward privatized inhuman becomings in third world literature, philosophy, poetry, cinema, and art (the part IV, on sectarianism, will show this explicitly). An exilic postcolonial intelligentsia has unfortunately not kept up with these ricochet-developments and finds it hard to reconcile them with Western critical trends that remain painfully locked into humanist retrievals. Such brilliant existential overtures are often overlooked—again like Nietzsche’s overhuman, Foucault’s barbarian or deviant, Bataille’s headless monstrosity, or Deleuze and Guattari’s body-without-organs, not to mention their unanimous love for the animal, which are also not seen as serious contenders in the discourse of being within contemporary Western philosophy (treated more as metaphors or poetic renderings)—for the simplistic psychology of an otherness that does not carry the invaluable criterion of being self-willed. The payoff is clear enough, though: for what postcolonialism loses in content for not choosing a distinctive, self-wielding object of analysis (the unrivaled individual, the surprising one, the forceful arm), it gains in grandiose scope (it is always only the lowest common denominator that can be turned into a metaphysics). Far from this, we align ourselves not with the readable other but with the figures of bewilderment who have transferred the birthright of otherness into a more troubling vocation. One need only look to the excised verses of Adonis scattered throughout this chapter for a flawless sample; note that they are comprised of enigmatic words, seemingly foundationless articulations beholden to no sociopolitical determinism, for which postcolonialism can offer no solid explanation or interpretive approach. Since it restricts its gaze to the easier destiny of the always

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already other, it is insufficient in tracking the more unexpected turns of such insurgent offspring. It cannot handle the exception; it does not even genuinely wish for the exception. And so, time and again, postcolonial criticism (as a purely negative recourse) shows its poverty before the creative impulses of its own. This notwithstanding, does a revamped existential focus on the creative individual not send us back to the same ethical quandaries for which existentialism was accused from the outset? The specter of fascism always lurks behind such propositions, or so we have been told in the fairy tales of modern thought. And yet Nietzsche himself resolves this phobic tendency toward the exemption, for the overhuman is neither the universal slave nor the herd-appointed master, as neither could fulfill the now-undermined existentialist protocol of absurdity, ecstatic freedom, and responsibility. No, Nietzsche’s full rebuke of the victim does not subsequently fall into an excessive attribution of agency to the executioner; instead he and the Middle Eastern thinker realize that, though one may prove the apparent victor of the dialectic, the whip-bearer is in no more control of the discourse that sustains him than is his whipped counterpart. It is a ring of subservience, for which neither side of the coin allows much fresh air. Ironically, though, there are instances when postcolonial theory itself has fallen into this very conceptual error, demonizing the Enlightenment, the West, and the colonial apparatus while not recognizing the fact that the historical winners are as unaware of their ideological implication as is the colonized other (and even less so in accordance with the Hegelian argument). They are disgusting, but not diabolical: for remember the master lacks fluidity, variability, or self-concentrated judgment, and so remains entrenched within his own golden cage. By ignoring this, as many have detected, postcolonial theory of this breed is actually elongating a colonial project, ascribing to the colonizer a superior consciousness of his being-in-the-world while depicting the colonized as a hopelessly disenfranchised figure whose political paralysis also seems to preclude self-understanding. And still, the fact remains that the colonizer is an unthinking participant in the blood-spraying procession of the modern, a functionary to that which has conscripted him but which he never truly possesses or fathoms. One can only wish for some authentic malevolence, a trace of evil that would then carry the requisite style, but instead one finds blank stares everywhere. With this bleak observation in mind, the idea of accountability itself needs to be reconfigured. It is at this juncture that Gayatri Spivak’s proposition for a dialogic of accountability, wherein she calls for individuals to imagine themselves

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as both “receivers and givers . . . [imagining] anew imperatives that structure all of us, as giver and taker, female and male, planetary human beings,”24 proves both highly useful and problematic. This intervention is successful in greeting modernity as a global responsibility, and thereby calling for an attempted dissolution of the master-slave dialectic. Central to the argument is also a distinction between agency and subjectivity, with the former seen as a rationally legislated and institutionally validated concept and the latter embodying a category far less accessible to cooption due to its unrepresentability. Hence, it is a return to the subject(de)constitution of otherness alone that allows for different inflections of agency to unravel, a restoration of radical alterity over ipseity (identity) that renders one the ability to inhabit alternative discursive forms. One would hope for this, of course, but the prognosis neglects a number of factors. To begin with, the question of audience remains ambiguous: in this treatise, although it is the space of the other that must provide a window into this radical alterity, the indiscriminate prospect of a planetary subjectivity appears to necessitate universal participation. If this is so, then the argument has betrayed its own utopian inadequacy, for it is effectively calling for power to sacrifice its self-benefiting status (its superficial triumph in the dialectic) in order to embrace some disparaged meridian of radical alterity when the entirety of its existential signification is contingent on a sadistic ipseity. Thus, Spivak states in the following quote: “I am daring to take dialogics to its logical consequence . . . in the interest of a more just modernity . . . I am therefore suggesting that both the dominant and the subordinate must jointly rethink themselves as intended or interpellated by alterity, albeit articulating the task of thinking and doing from different ‘cultural’ angles. What is new here is that the dominant re-defines himself in order to learn to learn from below.”25 This is merely a noble humanist suggestion on the shallow surface; and yet, once again, we lack the mapping of a formidable existential trajectory (how does one ever become this?). No elaboration whatsoever of a pathway to this groundbreaking decision; no word of its instigating spark, its routes, tactics, obstacles, or penalties. To learn from below is to start a civil war within oneself and to entertain a true masochistic flare. But why would power ever commit to this self-beheading? There are certainly accounts of rebel-princes throughout history, a psychic formation worth exploring to its maximum depth, but these are a minor bloc not belonging to this conversation. First of all, the positionally superior do not see themselves as epistemic playthings in the way that the other admits, but instead lavish themselves with the artificial

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empowerment that comes from believing themselves architects of this age. And even if the historically favored were by some transvaluative marvel to allow themselves to see through the lie that underpins their very existential status, they would more likely fall into some introspective haze of angst than actively subvert a system in which they materially gain from the continued subjugation of the other. Furthermore, those who would abandon the heights of their epistemically distributed fortune in order to wallow with the agonized are beyond suspect as well; self-reduction is its own privilege (one wonders, then, whether Spivak’s call to “learn from below” does not reopen the Pandora’s box of a “going-native” or of an all too convenient “slumming”). In neither circumstance is the proposition of a voluntary redefinition of the master’s subjectivity plausible or even logical; at best, it never happens that they descend the ladder; at worst, it still never happens except as a self-righteous simulation—decadents and bohemians confessed this much, called themselves pretender-runaways and gutterpatrons, which then at least rescued great portions of their movements. Peace, solidarity, human rights—these are hollowed-out slogans that have never kept their word; what is more helpful, in their stead, is an anthem of futuristic savagery. Western postmodernism, interestingly enough, has anticipated this prompt, though it has forgotten any concrete methodology for the building of an apocalyptic consciousness and so consigns its more catastrophic dreams to pure accident. Eastern postmodernism, on the other hand, is rife with plans, recipes, and stratagems for the concoction of just such a cataclysmic subjectivity. Let it be said, then: that the objective cruelty of the modern epoch and its dialectic strap can only be undone by a non-matching iteration of subjective cruelty. The third specimen (more on this later). (As a relevant side-note, one can look to three coterminous trends of contemporary world cinema: whereas first world film, whether shelved in high artistic or popular culture sectors, often remains transfixed by tales of bourgeois crisis [moral, economic, and personal breakdown], precisely because they are so fantastical, and whereas certain predatory branches of third world film are quick to offer assemblyline pseudo-empathic renderings of everyday trauma in a deformed global South [soothing the overlord’s gaze of pity], precisely because they are attuned to what an ill-conceived postcoloniality has become in the primary marketplace of representation, the more compelling rogue currents of Third World film increasingly develop characters whose subjective peculiarity upsets even the balance of othered communities based in more typified racial, gendered, or class-based misery. They are bizarre even among the most stigmatized; their abnormality is incongruous with all else.)

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Moving onward, the hallmark of resistance against modernity for Spivak apparently resides in the local non-Western cultural imaginary, and in fact her lionization of third world culture as an antidote or shield against Enlightenment rationality is reflected in her statement that “the Slave countersigns the Master by speaking unreason from below.”26 This notwithstanding, it seems unwise to conflate these momentary interruptions of the slave’s countersignature (however poignant) with an immense reversal of the master’s consciousness, as if those most renowned for either their naked brutality or brutal complicity will now presumably deign to abandon their thrones and ingest some instructive lesson from the local reality of the other. In this semireligious schematic, otherness has become a generalized elixir or cure-all, granted a messianic healing ability that will miraculously convert the indoctrinated-unto-power to dwell among the dregs, the vagrants, and the undesirables; despite whatever long record of violence, it will conceivably all lead back to universality and equality with no incentive other than a spontaneous elevation of human nature. Massive transitions in consciousness, apparently, do not necessitate any more well-plotted trigger than this. A rickety Procrustean bed formed on a heavy dose of Christological sentiment. Obviously this falls into a no-win situation. If postcolonialism dares contend that the non-Western local is not itself beneath the awesome shadow of modernity’s global aims, or that somehow it remains nonintegrated and therefore holds an automatic subversive capacity, then this is nothing more than another nativist cocktail. But this is rarely the case: in fact, the more sophisticated postcolonial theorists were the first to acknowledge that the local is always implicated within modernity’s tentacles, such that to speak of a purely insulated space is to be either naive, atavistic, or disingenuous; unfortunately, this does not prevent some from their continued fetishizations of the villager, the peasant, or the urban slum-dweller (marginalization is often too strictly interpreted and thereby turns formulaic). In addition, even if one were to concede that the third world local still persists semi-independent of modernity’s talons, then there is a further idealistic assumption that this itself is not a reactionary zone. Herein lies Spivak’s willingness to take modernity at face value and to see the slave as dialectically opposed to everything (or are they even relics of a quixotic premodernity?). For while modernity itself strives to hype its own monumental rupture from the past as a progressive teleological step, Spivak then endeavors to usurp this logic of polarity so as to resurrect the local as the true force of progressive politics. What this ignores, however, is the bitter fact that, even if one were to locate that shred of

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unadulterated locality, it remains unpersuasive that it could provide any valid blueprint for a new or more intriguing reality. Why it is exactly that certain postcolonialists have not cultivated an allergic reaction to all forms of collectivity is a shocking oversight; why they feel an indebtedness to defending as unconditionally valuable those shuffling congregations which have been trampled, simply because they have been trampled, escapes all reason save a long-held paternalism and condescension (it is a fallacy that anything deserves to be). Instead, like Adonis and other visionaries from the postcolonial front, these critics might hearken to the one emancipatory tenet of every twentieth-century avant-garde movement: to revile one’s own home, state, and tradition. There is little in-between, to speak plainly: one either takes up the experiment of otherless individuation (insurgent will) or partakes of otherness to the point of idolatry (worshiping at identitarian altars). Again the fact remains that the local, whether construed as premodern or antimodern, whether stationed in the self-designated metropolitan centers or in the supposedly remote peripheries, is always bereft of radical ingenuity (because it operates as a sociopolitical sphere). Why, after Nietzsche or Freud, would anyone turn to society (here or there) for an answer? Is civilization not the very wellspring of every mutilation-ritual? To proclaim otherwise is to blind the critical faculty to endless anthropological and psychoanalytic chronicles that have found atrocity at the heart of every site of belonging. As such, the local should not be seen as the natural haven of radical alterity, but rather as similarly vulnerable to its own rigid forms of ipseity (what congested street is not a trinket of governmentality?). And if in fact Spivak notes this, conceding that the Western subject will not actually forsake the domination-practices that sustain its comparative advantage, that the local is actually not a revolutionary headquarters except by slight relative contrast in its juxtaposition with modernity, then all that is left for the notion of otherness, as she has defined it, to be channeled into a planetary politics is to make of the local a forced site of radical alterity. And this is where the more warped dimensions of the text become brazen, for it tacitly suggests a complete whitewashing of localized forms of ipseity that might, if one honestly believes in a retrieved moment of premodernity, precapital, or decolonization, be susceptible to their own hideously repressive customs. One part strategic essentialism, one part deconstructive smokescreen, but all retrograde in the final analysis. For here the author treads toward a vaguely Stalinist pursuit of reprogramming mass consciousness itself, with the postcolonial critic at the helm of its professional vanguard, coercing

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the local strata into forsaking their ingrained forms of identity (which to them are often sacred) for the sake of an abstract notion of alterity that they themselves may not desire. (As a telling digression, note that Spivak herself summarily condemned Deleuze and Guattari for their excessive attention to the topic of desire, which makes perfect sense now given her own prescriptive philosophical outlook in the aforementioned piece, and hence leading one to ask: What kind of theorization, if not a dogmatic, inflexible one, would ascribe no importance to the scales of individual desire?) Detachment genres: it seems all are just bystanders in these intellectual edifices—afraid of death, afraid of life. This notwithstanding, the very use of the word imperative in the title hints at an aggressive act of transformation, which would be fine in a repertoire of Adonis or Nietzsche that is tragically absent here; in this affectively drained realm, though, it looks more like an implanted mission with the critical theorist as guarantor of some prophetic directive, which itself belies a faithlessness in the prospect that this radical consciousness is already present within otherness. Instead it must be imposed (or rather interpreted). This is where the idea of the “undeconstructability of justice” and the sudden entrance onto the discursive scene of “ethics” in Spivak’s language becomes very suspicious. For only an insincere Enlightenment-drenched liberalism, or a theologically inflated leftism for that matter, would presume to talk of these terms as either sacrosanct universal or localized principles; only this kind of project would bother to protect one concept (justice) above all others, and perhaps the most fraught concept given the genocidal pulse of modernity, from whatever shades of ambiguity. Subjectivity, in these smoothed-over confines then, is only a polemical tool; there really is no individual mind, body, or existence of which to speak; just as we observed in the last section, one rarely ever even finds a quote exhumed from “below” amid the barrage of references to continental thinkers; these voices have all been forcibly removed to the detention-center of a virtual locality (spoken on behalf of). And all in the name of an undeconstructible call to planetary justice. One might recall, then, who the original philosopher of the call was and the grand downfall therein: it is common knowledge that Heidegger lent his ardent support to Nazism, Adorno turned his back on the postwar German student movement, and Foucault at different times endorsed both Zionism and the Islamic front in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. If anything, the fact that some of the most perceptive and wellintentioned critics of modernity of the last century were at times inept in comprehending which sides fueled the utopian and which harbored the

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dystopian (easy solution: they are all dystopias) demonstrates the sheer unfeasibility of an “undeconstructible notion of justice.” And so it remains that amid the eerie amalgamation of utopianism, nativism, and misguided activism in this text, a clear political program is consigned to the realm of impossibility. The sole profit of Spivak’s project, then, is that it borders on advocating a way out of a dialectical negation of modernity and that it seeks to articulate this escape from the border position of otherness. In this respect alone, it is a valiant assault against Enlightenment epistemology, but fails when it presumes (as is the fashion these days) to make individuality the culprit beneath the heels of packed generalities. More than this, it ultimately fails to discern that otherness, while maybe the best point of departure for resistance, cannot be a self-sufficient mode of becoming unto itself. One walks over the abyss; one does not stay within it. Above all else, this is because alterity can itself begin to assume the function of ipseity once perpetual antagonism molds over into a form of selfaggrandizing ideological identity. But even more pivotally, this constant self-subversion might eventually consolidate a negational subjectivity that precludes any form of existential action that is not politically oriented (and thereby contentious); in due course, paragons of belligerence become paragons of resentment. At best, an incoherent form of vacillation; at worst, an ever-heightening addiction to antithetical relationality that fulfills itself in a vendetta reflex. And once institutionalized, it will satisfy the Nietzschean prediction regarding the political realm’s “prostitution of the intellect” through equilibrium: “The robber and the man of power who promises to protect the community from robbers are at bottom beings of the same mould, but the latter attains his ends by different means than the former.”27 This also goes for the target of the robbery: all are exemplars of the human, all too human. And so, if postcoloniality has merely substituted the knowing subject for the token radical alterity of the othered subject, then it is unconvincing as to how this short migration has combatted the ever-present dilemma of humanism itself. By simply resorting to the other end of the self-other pathology, one limits the exclusive potential that the other possesses to traverse this rope-construction in its entirety. An Eastern postmodernity cannot therefore come about through the constitution of a planetary subjectivity, which fearfully resembles the liberalist rhetoric of universalism and in the wrong hands could even potentially serve as an underhanded discursive alibi for globalization, but must arise from the emergence of a supra-planetary subject within the

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third world that refuses to recognize the very existence of that which calls itself modernity. Unearthed. In this regard, the insurgent is an elitist; he pushes difference to its extremity (to be different from everything else, that is). Stated more flagrantly, the Eastern insurgent takes existentialist elitism beyond the threshold where even Nietzsche held back his twitching hands (“the crowd is untruth,” Kierkegaard reminds; “even so, the butchered river flows,”28 Adonis responds), for he or she will corner both the supreme and the abject, the intolerant and the disdained, into the same boat, and then set fire to the vessel altogether. In a counterintuitive streak, the reason why these selected postcolonial arguments cannot envision resistance except through the sustained apotheosis of otherness as uncompromised alterity is because they continue to operate within a domain of critical theory that is always articulated from the space of a dormant self (without urgency to reinvent). Hence, they are unable to fathom a sublation of the self-other construct as the gateway for an emergent ontological stamp of awareness. This is an old crucible, though: for instance, despite the relentless attempts of idealism to snake out of this relationship, even Sartre finds himself forced in the end to affirm the precarious reality of the other within his Being and Nothingness: “[The Other] is conceived as real, and yet I cannot conceive of his real relation to me. I construct him as object, and yet he is never released by intuition. I posit him as subject, and yet it is as the object of my thoughts that I consider him.”30 The result for Continental thought is that only two avenues remain: the absolute annihilation of the other or its acceptance/internalization. The first proposition, in which the other is rejected as fundamental to the constitution of subjectivity, is one that Sartre dismisses as a self-deceiving form of solipsism which “as the affirmation of my ontological solitude, is a pure metaphysical hypothesis, perfectly unjustified and gratuitous for it amounts to saying that outside of me nothing exists and so it goes beyond the limits of the field of my experience.”30 The second possibility, however, includes an option for the Being for-itself to behold the existence of the other but “not to make use of it.”31 Now this is something of value to be retained for our agenda, for it is through a similar notion of concurrent verification and abandonment (uncaring immanence) that we arrive at the doorstep of the insurgent once more: namely, the one who sees them but is not of them, does not accompany them, does not swear blood-oaths to them, becomes non-reciprocating, inessentially otherless, while keeping them under plain watch, and who chooses (after hard internal labor) an affective state that is unaffected by their modernity.

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Eastern Insurgency as Radical Coldness A freedom fighter traces his name in fire, and in the frozen throats He dies /32 A methodological suggestion: that when dealing with current postcolonial artifacts, particularly those that store an insurgent potential, one might start from the tracing of acute experiential modulations. In effect, what are the incremental shifts in tactility, movement, performativity, sensation, and thought patterns when injecting a certain concept into the surrounding air? We must picture this almost alchemically or epidemiologically: a man or woman sits kneeling in a bare nondescript room, at which point various concepts are then intermittently released through the ventilation shafts and into the room’s atmosphere, one after another, in slow vaporous bombardments that compel their own transfigurations for whoever breathes them. The question 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. These are how the masks are forged. It is at this point that a primary assertion of this section is forwarded: that while liberation from the steel confines of this epoch might only occur within the unforeseen space of a refashioned third world subjectivity, the method of combat must abandon a head-on collision with modernity and instead embrace a form of strategic indifference. The side door, the distant stare: this insurgent stance, as a force of otherlessness, must therefore practice radical coldness at every turn. In contrast, the reason why such ethical thinkers as Levinas prove so beholden to the concept of otherness is because their theoretical production is articulated from the ditch of the historical self in modernity; they are part of the Western philosophical tradition, even when flogged by it, and imagine everything from its parapets. Despite the fact that this ethical distress remains entrenched within an Enlightenment discourse that cannot conceive of a self without mediation through a formulated other (it is never even interested in this aspect of freedom), what this reveals even more disturbingly is the fact that Levinas’s principal goal is to repair the totalitarian self and not to explore the otherworldly powers of the other. Much like the beggar’s aspirations of certain postcolonial trends, always concerned with proving something that might fix the master, in this faulty dreamscape too the roughened self is to be redeemed by otherness, made well by otherness, made sane by otherness, and thus the other is never

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entitled to just walk away and seek its own external dominion. If the other possesses the talent of infinity, then presumably its sole responsibility is to dispense that infinity to the appalling lineage of knowing subjects who have crucified it (another ingratiation). Ethics, then, cannot permit the other’s leaving of the situation, its voiding of the encounter in order to enhance whatever extraordinary properties have fallen its way. But why is the other never allowed the right to isolation, solitude, hermeticism, anticommunalism, or misanthropy? It does not matter that much anyway, since what we find in both ethics and postcolonialism, more often than not, is a fleshless simulation of otherness; once again, they are not actually speaking of someone, only self-projecting silhouettes of an idea of someone (scarecrow theory). It is frustrating to chase these sublime or stale phantoms, those that either drift into incessant negative theologies (the impossible, the unthinkable, the unknowable) or are predisposed to the most unoriginal psychological responses (the wooden subalterns). They allude to something that risks no bone marrow in the game, and it discredits such musings. The earthly dehumanized Eastern subject, on the other hand, 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 a daily basis, the one of famine, war, or occupation, is not so thoroughly beholden to this ontological differential; they do not long, as some would hope, for the recuperation of this addictive hierarchy of being in which the self always sees itself as that which it is not and wherein the other must then negationally allow the enunciation of the “I.” Instead, disenfranchisement has afforded some malleability: since the self-definition of the other has always had a public-private dualism, such that to operate external to this inferiorizing paradigm would motivate the carving out of secret vicinities, except in instances of anticolonialism and cultural nativism that again lose their existential strongholds once they cease to be seditious forces and instead assume the seat of power, one can bet that otherness has at its disposal several unusual vectors of consciousness. And so it is that being written out of history is what has inadvertently yielded the very separatist possibility of an outside; in the wake of being circumscribed in degradation, one is mobilized to pick one’s faraway spots (the imperceptible expanse); one stretches across these wild fields more and more, preserves them at all costs, and ridicules the frail deceptions of the empire from such hidden angles. Rapid evacuation. The agility, velocity, and dexterity with which the insurgent drops this self-othering burden once again speaks to the fact that a certain third world subjectivity must transmit itself through the

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affective matrix of radical coldness. Fatherless. Motherless. To ascertain this ice in the throat, as it threatens the epochal vise, one need only turn back to the astounding poetic voice of Adonis (one example is sufficient when the intent is to confirm an exception rather than a rule). Thus he writes: “No, not from the age of the decline: / The time of dreadful agitation is at hand, the shaking loose of minds.”33 There is no equivocation in this utterance, no flattening and no loyalty to the reigning age or to the ease of others; dread, agitation, the loosening of brain matter itself: these are the only prime directives. As a consequence, it is not surprising that both Nietzsche and Sartre attempt to locate their own becomingfrigid within the same realm of an otherless individuation, neither do they hesitate to cast their perceptive eyes toward the Eastern corridors for guidance. In the case of Nietzsche, it is after the death of God that he asks whether the world has somehow grown colder, the meteorological reward of a vital overthrow, and from there proceeds (through his Persian antiprophet Zarathustra) to declare himself the enemy of gravity. Lightness, as Nietzsche tells it, is therefore a synonym for the postmodern coldness toward which this project aims itself (i.e., as a form of contempt without resentment). In the aftermath of a near-insurmountable tension with existence, a frictional association now unstrapped, Nietzsche speaks of the opening of a gap between his subjectivity (cold enough to suffer from its own humanity) and the rest of his former race (unwilling to accept the pain of treason): “My mind and my longing are directed toward the few, the long, the distant; what are your many small short miseries to me? You do not yet suffer enough to suit me! For you suffer from yourselves, you have not yet suffered from man. You would lie if you claimed otherwise! You all do not suffer from what I have suffered.”34 Neither is this a far cry from the writing of Hafez himself, as one of Nietzsche’s most emulated literary personages, who provides the ultimate paragon of indifference in his figure of the rend as iconoclast; an informal trickster, prone to drunkenness, sin, and heresy (though unbowing before such definitions), he is forever scorned but shows no sign of injury; he is without shame or conformism, only laughter, a joyful plague which the philosopher of the gay science admired. He is vivid, energetic, and guiltless; he is profound in his vertigo; his mania is beyond humiliation. Anger, disgrace, aversion, and even hatred, when taken far enough, become ejective devices that widen the chambers between incompatible ontologies—without forgiveness, friendship, or false warmth, and drawn only by the chill of a night that is its own sun: so it is that the insurgent becomes the winter of an impersonal event.

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Perhaps this variable has gone unnoticed, but one should definitely try to remember which existential attribute Sartre upheld as the most beautifully foreboding in his self-elegiac reading of Fanon in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth: “When Fanon says of Europe that she is rushing to her doom, far from sounding the alarm he is merely setting out a diagnosis . . . As to curing her, no; he has other things to think about; he does not give a damn whether she lives or dies. Because of this, his book is scandalous. And if you murmur, jokingly embarrassed, ‘He has it in for us!’ the true nature of the scandal escapes you; for Fanon has nothing in for you at all; his work—red-hot for some—in what concerns you is as cold as ice; he speaks of you often, never to you.”35 Radical coldness, itself the symptom of some fugitive passion, again appears as the calling card of a going-under/going-over exclusive to the civilizational villain; no longer heated by imperial fires, the shivering ones alone can dodge the life sentence of self-othering. Neither does this make them less hazardous; if anything, it enhances the scope and acumen of violence; it fangs them, this glacial bearing, all the while leaving them unenveloped. It is at once the touchstone of a rare immunity and a weapon. For what Sartre has done here in this lyrical excerpt, making of Fanon what he could never really attain but in the process establishing an existential diagram for the later third world to follow, is to invert the metaphor of absolute power. To be precise, the most disturbing and yet comprehensive expression of authority, used in legends and films to evoke the anxiety of the audience, is the figuration of the ruler who with a wave of his hand orders the death of a subject for whom he has no further use. In these scenarios, power does not bother to make eye contact with the condemned, though it has robbed the latter of his life in but a moment’s whim. Dismissive. Frivolous. A rushed gesture, and then the blade. He is not worthy of the ruler’s attention, even amid terminal throes or on the stake. If there are words spoken from above, then they serve the most idle sanctioning of assassination—“kill him”—itself an articulation of pure simplicity, brevity, and severity. The shortening of language to mirror the contraction of being; yes, this stands among the most horrifying manifestations of formalized coldness, and yet common for many centuries: not just the license to kill, but the mechanistic invocation of the license. One pauses, then: for is the will to radical coldness advocated in the pages of Adonis, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Fanon not cut from the same cloth? Does it not bring the havoc of a similar destination? If unmoved murder turned out to be the prevalent custom of the West in modernity, then the Eastern insurgent should conceivably avoid replication of this

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homicidal frost. This standard objection is wrong, however, for there is a miscalculation at its core: namely, that even when the apparent practitioner of subjective violence in our contemporary world (the knowing subject) looked cold, they still served a master-narrative of objective or even mythical violence (modernity, ideology, being, man, God) that was driven by vampiric thirst. The dullness of the one therefore disguises the craving of another; the grayness that conceals the redness beneath; though one holds the gun, another is the true proprietor of the contract. Put simply, there has always been bloodlust somewhere: someone has an acquired taste for this, though perhaps behind the curtain, and perhaps not even sentient; something pulls the strings of a pleasure principle, and shudders in delight, maybe even a historical era, at the impending consummation of each episode of carnage. It has never really been cold in the first world “(this is the misapprehension of technology, which only knows a kind of meta-scorching). The insurgent, on the other hand, may also kill, but only so as to deplete the radiance associated with the act (devoid of ardor). In his view, the targets are not the opposites but rather the strangers, deaf to their all-too-late pleading (meaningless), and with this comes a new template: the riot born of sureness, conviction, arctic demeanor; the riot without fever.

Eastern Insurgency as Eternal War In the beginning there was nothing But the root of tears / I mean my country And the expanse was my thread—I was torn free and in the Arab greenness my sun was drowned / Civilization is a vehicle for the wounded and the city is a pagan rose, A tent: So the story begins, or so the story ends36 To assault the ghost each time it appears (this is not repression, only war). The proposition of an insurgent stoicism, a self-without-other because it has experienced firsthand the detriment of othering, and since then has devised an antigenealogy for which no heritage or empathic stake can remain, requires a further exploration into the question of history and temporality. For certain, the motion toward radical coldness would involve an explosion of the epistemic continuum—as Adonis says, “my sun has drowned”—but not as prescribed by a Marxian discourse that neglects the

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inevitability of historical spectrality, discounting the phantasmatic return of the repressed and its perpetual haunting of the present. Thus, Derrida makes a compelling observation in Specters of Marx when he writes that the living appropriation of the spirit, the assimilation of a new language is already an inheritance. And the appropriation of another language here figures the revolution. This revolutionary inheritance supposes, to be sure, that one ends up forgetting the specter, that of the primitive or mother tongue. In order to forget not what one inherits but the pre-inheritance on the basis of which one inherits. This forgetting is only a forgetting. For what one must forget will have been indispensable. One must pass through the pre-inheritance, even if it is to parody it, in order to appropriate the life of a new language or make the revolution.37 Without question, Derrida is entirely justified in his accusation that this Marxist revolutionary consciousness seeks a mock eclipse—to suffocate/unmouth the ghosts of history—and by extension that any political movement that strives to avoid a conversation with the ghost is damned to leave itself with unresolved affairs. Herein lies the significance of his concluding remarks in the same text: “Could one address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back? If he loves justice at least, the ‘scholar’ of the future, the ‘intellectual’ of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet.”38 This call to speaking-with is fine enough, perhaps, but Derrida has ultimately left one possibility unexplored: For why can this speech-act not be a curse or threat? It may prove correct that every movement into an emergent time, including the temporal-existential traversals espoused by this piece, demands dialogue with the specters of the past, but this does not necessarily imply entrapment by those ghostly entities; neither must every dialogue be congenial (what of the rant, the taunt, the insult, the battle cry?). More precisely, when Adonis writes that “I sing the language of the spearhead. I shout that time is punctured, that its walls have crumbled in my bowels. I vomited: I have no History, no present / I am Solar insomnia, the Abyss, Sin, and Action,”39 to whom does he direct his propensity to sing, shout,

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and vomit if not the ghost of history who he repeatedly mocks and rebukes? Who is the addressee of his unfathomable scream if not the spectral (pre) inheritance which he now squanders and forfeits to the wind? Is Derrida so totalitarian or deterministic in his own mystical-temporal philosophy that he refuses the living subject the right to consciously refuse the (mis) fortune of past? Either way, despite the fictive allegiances of deconstruction, the Eastern insurgent subjectivity sculpted by Adonis and others provides a more thick-skinned approach to the backlashes, visitations, and intrusions of the temporal order (they slur the ages). Eternity, once again. A reorientation toward this single conceptual plane alone might reach beyond the dilemma of haunting, for the deconstructive qualification of Marxism is only viable within a theoretical framework that perceives time as a line-turning-circle (this is also a psychoanalytic temporality). With that said, Middle Eastern thought can range far before any of these philosophical schools to its own medieval mysticism in order to seek a preternatural concept of time as pure circle (or spiral). And this is a crucial difference: for the authority of the ghost in deconstruction is predicated on a hierarchy of reverence and accumulated temporal power based on a stratification of past, present, and future (which is then of course violated)—that is, the ghost has the power to cyclically reappear because it comes from the past, because it is past, and this ancient endowment is precisely what allows it to fling itself into the present/future. The most antiquated, the longest buried, therefore has the greatest chance to escape its antiquity. This notwithstanding, what is one to do then with Mahmoud Darwish, a man who literally treads on the millennia-old graves, shrines, and ashes of the supposed Palestinian holy land, when he casually spits on the debris of such past narratives and writes that: “Drums will beat loudly and other barbarians will come. Barbarians will fill the cities’ emptiness, slightly higher than the sea, mightier than the sword in a time of madness. So why should we be concerned? What do our children have to do with the children of this impudence?”40 Nothing to do with them, he says, even though they have been there before and each time maimed his family. Now if we permit this extra-species affront, one that shares no conservative or reverential etiquette toward the earlier ones, then it is no overstatement to say that a lone Middle Eastern poet can bring down the temporalontological pillars of both deconstruction and psychoanalysis (and what remains of their scaffolding after that, without trauma or the uncanny?). For one is activated by Darwish’s neutral renouncement of the returning barbarians to wonder which principle in particular allows him the space

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to articulate this perfect sliver of disinterest; in effect, how has he allotted himself and his waiting offspring the gift of uncoupling, colorlessness, and disentanglement? Why do the ghosts, even on arrival, cease to matter? The answer is in the question: that the return itself undermines the return (and so we fall through the primeval). There is no scarcity of revealing passages by Adonis to echo his poetic contemporary Darwish along the axis of eternity. Aside from the opening line of this section, which etches this same curvature of a ring—“So the story begins, or so the story ends”—there are myriad other instances where such authors veer into further proofs of the eternality underlying the writing-act: “Ali is the eternity of the fire and of childhood / Do you hear the lightning of the ages?”41 Indeed, there is an exceptional deviation from Derrida’s line-bent–semicircular model for which mere agedness affords momentum (to dictate, interlope, disturb, call backward or forward); for here the Middle Eastern recourse to an original circularity of things accomplishes a wondrous leveling-effect. Stated plainly, if certain forces do scare, command, or engrave themselves in Middle Eastern thought, then it has nothing to with a temporal privilege: it is a matter of existential power alone that designates what comes out ahead. With that in mind, one can search for a strong coincidence between this postmodern Middle Eastern time-scape and another juncture in continental thought: namely, the instant when Nietzsche himself linked the will to power to the eternal return. (Note: It is a highly conspicuous omission that Derrida, in his extensive meditations on Nietzschean temporality and the philosophers of the future, gives barely any mention to the eternal return, for what wicked subversion, complication, or thorn in the side would this countercurrent bring to the deconstructive machinery?) To recover it, then, it is Nietzsche’s own consecutive infrastructures of convolution that lead us back to the arsenal of spectral warfare where we are told to: Behold this moment! . . . For whatever can walk—in this long lane out there too, it must walk once more. And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must not all of us have been there before? And return and walk in that other lane, out there, before us, in this long dreadful lane—must we not eternally return?42 This seemingly paradoxical collaboration of the moment with the eternal is precisely what grants subjectivity its insurgent potential (transformative

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whirling: one rides the circle in order to bother the circle). Cyclonic spin, the unfastening, the becoming-offshoot. This is how we reconcile Adonis’s boast that he is “the lightning of the ages” with the repetition of an overwrought story; similarly, this is how we reconcile Nietzsche’s daring selfevaluations—that he is no man but “dynamite,” that he has split history in half and therein embodies the most destructive/beneficent figure to ever walk the earth, littered throughout Ecce Homo and elsewhere—with the sense that one can be at once inexorable and unprecedented. In fact, the eternal leads into the exemption (involuntary will): for if the eternal return is the most absolute structure of time, then it is also the only route to becoming untimely; it is how thought itself becomes a cosmological streak or blemish, takes on outstanding anticomplexions, and works itself otherwise. The ligature; then the outlier. Unimagined destiny. As we have seen, deconstructive and psychoanalytic semicircular linearity, where things go straight and yet come round, forces one to conceive of the ghost as elder, forerunner, or even omniscient supervisor. In the Middle Eastern eternal, however, the ghost is not specialized as precursor (the unborn has accrued the same years as the long-gone). Moreover, when Adonis writes “A rock breathing with the lungs of a lunatic: / This is it / This is the Twentieth Century,”43 one watches the twentieth meld back into the brew of all random numbers, and when he writes that “They arrived naked / Broke into the house / Dug a hole / Buried the children and left,” one watches the quiet patrolling of a poet across the field of travesty who will not even name the “they.” These are discussions in their own right, and yet no morbid worship of the apparition. Instead, the poetic subject arrives on the scene in order to condemn the ghost and promise a lifelong, death-long exchange of violence; he arrives in order to dismember its trace, not for the sake of enrichment but out of simple necessity; he arrives (if anything) in order to hound, malnourish, and leave the ghost disposable. In the so-called Eastern quadrants of modernity, there is a sustained confrontation with the rubble and drone of memory (ruination is everywhere); in the Western glare, though, subjectivity is rendered an amnesic reprieve. Despite the spectacular monotony of the metropolitan subject’s existence in the present-day real, the political economy of the sign has been amazingly successful in advertising the propagandistic image of epochal novelty.” More exactly, the negative mold of recurrence should be nowhere more protruding than in those segments most saturated by capitalism, but because the Western subject has so rigorously internalized the ideology of newness that is integral to the hegemony of the modern,

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its own everydayness precludes this from being seen (a self-replenishing cell block). First world consciousness then takes this as an invitation to become narcotized; after all, the grandeur of this ever-accelerating exterior world, the excitation of a time like no other, somehow compensates for the state of unreflection which cloaks its interiority. The tragedy thus completes itself: that modernity, despite its superficial extravagance, is reducible to the same human allegory, not really so different from any given layer of premodernity (unless one is persuaded by its own discourse), but because it tempts the participating subject into believing in the glint of its symbolic order, their perceptive sharpness deteriorates and goes blind beneath the artificial light of its screens and holograms. One sells whatever vague concept of self at the altar of modernity’s pseudo-phenomenological contraptions, its magnificent wheel of inertia, balanced in paralysis (nothing really moves here), until becoming a lost cause to resistance or elusion. Far away from this sightless condition, though, we find a third world subject who is never extended such chances to regress into existential slumber; the translucent violence of the real in these bad neighborhoods prevents him from closing his eyes and embracing the stupor; in fact, his entire plateau of circumstance is caught in the exploitation-apparatus of modernity, extorted from one end to another, and thus leaving him with a little-treasured alertness. High strung, hyper-cognizant. There is an experiential alacrity here through which one cannot help but solve the riddle of modernity’s farcical role: that it remains a component of the eternal return itself, its interminable rivulet of despair, veiled under a thousand names and transposed across a thousand faces but always this same lie, this same runaway train of human pathology-unto-hellishness. It is as Nietzsche said (to everyone and no one)—“existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness.”44 Who can deny that this lesson has been learned best in the third world, where the recurrence stands at its most devastating, though also lending the talisman of knowledge (of untruth) to those who wear its many scars? For the full view of modernity’s primal whip, the panoramic vision with which the Eastern citizen considers the era, enables a denuding of the latter’s very reality-principle (one has nothing to do with the charade anymore). Thus Adonis writes: “He creates his own kind starting from himself—he has no ancestors and his roots are in his footsteps.”45 Believe it or not, this is the appendage to an eternalist thinking; it is also how subjectivity becomes inimitable; it is how one begins to traffic in the irreplaceable. For to score everything through an eternalizing perception is to notice the all-sweeping arm of the apocryphal: memory as illusion;

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the ghost as illusion; being as illusion—such that one might as well go to theatrical war. Radicalized unreality: an insurgent code. The future remains (though not that future). For though often disregarded as a pessimistic dimension of a far more confident commentary on overhumanity/inhumanity, the halo of the eternal recurrence in fact unties itself as an affirmative frontal trail. It lends momentum, propulsion, the racing heartbeat, and thereby slings consciousness into the dark waters ahead. Herein lies the slackening behind Adonis’s profession that “From our thousand-year-old sleep, / From our crippled history / Comes a sun without ritual.”46 No, the eternal does not salvage a futural order; it is not in line with Adorno’s aphoristic statement that order would be good if “only as a good order,”47 neither does it hesitate before Derrida’s overly cautious exaggeration of the ghost as both unreconciled past and oncoming request. The circle of the now-as-then permits no fear, appeasement, or affinity (decadent axiom: the living are dead, the dead are living). (Note: Regarding the novelty of modernity itself: to subject modernity to an eternalist condemnation is not to deny the epochal transformation that has taken place over the past centuries. It is not pure sameness throughout; rather, the most cunning continental diagnosticians of modernity—Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, Foucault, Baudrillard—are obviously correct in suggesting a fault line in the temporal earth beneath us. There is a shipment-elsewhere that must be taken into account, much in the same way that Foucault describes the difference between a medieval monarch’s beheading of a subject and the self-regulating disciplinary apparatus of the modern state. The public execution is not the panoptical prison institution. Analogously, contemporary colonialism, with its myriad tentacles and clash of civilizations rhetoric, is not the equivalent of ancient warlords and dynasties. These are not identical edifices, not in the least, not in their abstract ideas or in their tangible perpetrations. Nevertheless, the Middle Eastern response of Adonis, Darwish, Shamlu, Hedayat, and others—that is, to perceive modernity as the manifold extension of an eternal atrocity—comes from an existential differential [between themselves and the human allegory] that then diminishes the importance or extent of this paradigm-alteration [these rumblings seem less drastic to the more extreme defectors]. It is therefore a matter of relative trespass that such world-historical frictions are of little tectonic value to those who have no patience for either concepts of “the world” or “the historical.” More pointedly, modernity has in fact taken on vast new particles and appendages, but not enough for those Eastern interlocutors to call it by another name. At base, it still

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partakes of the decrepit problem of the human; from the comparative aerial vantage of such figures, then, it has not strayed so far. Technically innovative, perhaps; epistemologically and ideologically distinctive even; but existentially still grounded in the tepid waters of what has always been [the desperation for being]. One is thus reminded of a presumed detail of the biography of Hassan 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. Over three decades, and only two supposed visitations to gaze on the existence outside: this is the worldview of the eternalist at work, for despite whatever alarms, emergencies, and overthrows of dynasties had taken place in his time, he would not deign to grant these incremental slips of history a serious distinction of radical change. He participated in them, manipulated them toward fatally constructive ends even, but did not honor these developments as a journey of any substantial kind [he wrote and read books instead]. With that in mind, flash forward a thousand years from one Iranian fighter to another to find a similar attitude in the likes of the poet Ahmad Shamlu, who when 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. That is all it amounts to in such estimations, and so the movement is not sufficient as to prove impressive. An anticlimactic description for modern revolution; an anticlimax for modernity itself.) The most vigorous modification brought in the wake of Eastern insurgency is that it restores subjectivity itself to the envisaging, enforcement, and shouldering of an eternal future (what must slingshot; what must become strident). The “I” as detonation-string. A becomingexperimental-imminence. The road beyond the portal of the moment is identical-in-time but improvisational-in-self: that is, it is the fatalistic individual alone that wills the four winds of radical difference. Reputation, content, and rank of the “I” (these must careen). This is what is most stressed in postmodern Middle Eastern thought (the prominence, variability, and magnification of the willing subject), and this is precisely what is missing in a waning continental tradition. For Hegel, the future represents that which is invulnerable to the form-giving activities of philosophical speculation, constituted by an openness to all possibilities that visualizes no foregone conclusions. Hence, he states that “the

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past is preserved by the present, as reality, but the future is the opposite of this, or rather it is the formless . . . no form whatsoever can be discerned in the future.”48 In a similar argument, Derrida reinforces this indeterminacy in his own theory of the promise: “Such a [deconstructive] thinking cannot operate without justifying the principle of a radical and interminable, infinite (both theoretical and practical, as one used to say) critique. This critique belongs to the movement of an experience open to the absolute future of what is coming, that is to say, a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and for the event.”49 And so, from one side of the continental spectrum to the other, minus Nietzsche’s midnight linkage to a predestined breed of future philosophers of the eternal, a minefield-image of the forthcoming is rightly insisted on though too often insidiously eliding the status of the subject therein (there is no one left to cut across the otherwise passive, abstract occasion). Indeed, for any mention of a rising existential stake in the future (the ever-rupturing self), one must turn to Nietzsche, Bataille, Artaud, or even Sartre in the following quote for this more explicit implication: “The original future is the possibility of that presence which I have to go beyond the real to an in-itself which is beyond the real in-itself. My future involves as a future co-presence the outline of a future world, and as we have seen, it is this future world which is revealed to the For-itself which I will be.”50 And still, the Eastern figure of Adonis’s design will go so much further than this: no romantic fulfillment, no alleviation of the travails of “what is,” but rather an exotic war-posture that brackets the self and the futural path, for “Doubt is his home, but he is full of eyes. / He is the wind that knows no retreat, the water that does not return to its source.”51 He choreographs the bypass; he teases out whatever plays traitor. The insurgent says, avoiding all useless ethereality: it is not still to come; I am still to come (though this “I” has since gained the formal reckoning power of the “it”).

Eastern Insurgency as Unresponsive Reversal . . . In a map that extends, etc. In which the word is transformed into a web whose mesh is riddled with holes like carded cotton, days bearing punctured thighs enter a history emptied of everything but talons, triangles in the form of women lying between one page and another.

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Everything comes to the earth through the eye of a word: vermin, God, the poet, by puncturing and by insomnia and by feverish voice, by bullets and ritual ablutions . . .52 If poststructuralism locates an internal saboteur lurking behind every saying (“the cutthroat within,” as Artaud would call it), then the Eastern reversal relies on the cutthroat without. At first glance, one might assume that an insurgent consciousness would stand in league with Baudrillard’s seductive ploy: “Inject the smallest dose of reversibility into our economic, political, sexual, or institutional mechanisms and everything collapses.”53 But this is not truly the case, despite whatever resemblances, for such arsenic-dabblings of Western thought in modernity—whether derived from Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, postmodern dualism, or deconstruction’s parody/parasitism/mimicry (where there is famously “nothing outside the text”)—are led by an open confession of their working-from-within for which no third god can conceive its own exogenous machinations of reversal. Admittedly, there is something to this tactical arrangement: it enables a certain kind of insubordination while remaining tangled within the wires and vines of the construct, as when Rumi points to those madmen who would wash their wounds in blood. But since we are no longer interested in the face of the other but only the other’s defacement, an ocular vandalism wrought from the Sahara beyond, it is clear that we must also entertain an alternative form of cunning. No traumatic remainder; no existential impairment. Mirage. Awe. The as-if-it-never-happened (because we have burned down its tower). (Note: In the recent news, a Syrian rebel named Abu Sakkar has come to attention, videotaped while eating either the heart or lung from a fallen soldier of the regime. He looks into the camera as he unsheathes his knife, cuts into the chest of the dead military body, and exclaims that “we will feed upon your hearts and livers” before he bites into the organ. Out of respect, we should not call this cannibalism, for he does not perceive himself of the same race as his cadaverous enemy. Nevertheless, the sight of his blood-flecked lips forces us to reconsider two prospects: [1] whether revolutionary violence can in fact dislodge someone psychically from historical trauma (the destruction that cleanses); and [2] whether, if not helping the practitioner of revolutionary violence himself, these gruesome rituals do at least provide a route for another generation to become alleviated of such polarizing histories [the rabidness that is a precipice]. More precisely, Abu Sakkar, with his brothers, uncles, aunts, and neighbors killed before him and his parents tortured while he listened, and

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himself shot fourteen times at date of writing, may prove too existentially disfigured to lead one out of the epistemic gauntlet, a lost cause mired in the detestations of the eleventh hour, but does his virtuoso cruelty not pay the debt of reversing this same ailment for others of his kind? If the debt is in fact finite, then does he not buy his people time to think and breathe in other directions [a diversion for their getaway]? Does his swallowing of the enemy’s flesh not quench, relieve, or deliver them from their own necessity for further blood-soakings? That the more he joins his fate to modernity, the more separation they gain [dispersed into flight]? Perhaps it is so, or perhaps it is not. Either way, we are obligated to at least accommodate the gore-covered waistband of this principle: for it may very well be that this warlord has pardoned others through the annihilation of his own mental well-being, his blade and reddened tongue ridding them of continued burden [becoming-dissuaded]. Consequently, if the agent of such revolutionary violence is himself incapable of a prophetic escape, far too mauled and battered throughout, then at least he might provide the force that inspires this prophetic escape.) And what is the link between genocide and reversal? Going backward somewhat, the argument can also be made in the deconstructionist’s own terminology were one to perceive the dichotomy of Western and Eastern civilization as representative of a linguistic binary between the central phrase and the supplement. If the third world as epistemic construct is simply a reflection of the first world’s (also a construct) desperate search for a metaphysics of presence, then it is because the discursive machinery of the imperialist Enlightenment already reflects an original absence. As such, the antagonistic relationship between East and West mirrors that which Derrida finds between writing and speech: the East as global other is considered, like writing, distanced, twice (or even thrice) removed from the inner meaning of the West; but because the exercise of colonial horror is of absolute necessity to modernity’s project, the third world must remain in some capacity, though converted now into a degenerative “sign of a sign” that reassures the center of its proximity to the transcendental signified. Thus, the malady of logocentrism plays itself out at the geopolitical level as well, with the third world delegated to a poisonous pharmakon, the bastion of myth and nemesis to reason. The deconstructive reading of this discursive process offers a helpful interjection, though: for much in the same way that Socrates must condemn myth in the Phaedrus by using myth, dismissing writing by mobilizing the written word, so can the first world operate its civilizational terminology only by speaking of and therefore indirectly to its negational counterpart (the third world).

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It thereby dips itself in the swampland, such that even the most violent renunciation of the marginal makes it increasingly irrepressible, as every loaded articulation already necessitates the former’s acknowledgment and outbreak (this will be the nucleus of a cardiac arrest). But to stop here, to have played the game of deconstruction only to get to a point where the originary statement unravels itself, is largely insufficient. Indeed, what Derrida perhaps has not explored is a deconstructive reversal executed from the other end (the otherless end). First of all, it is obvious that Derrida himself cannot help but reinforce the binary in his own severe Western-centrism, unable to critique modernity unless comfortably situated on what he believes to be the home-turf of Europe or ancient Greece or within a hyper-Christologized appropriation of Judaic hermeneutics. And to his minimal credit, he does distinguish this fact by saying that he is addressing the history of “Western” thought alone (as if it were ever alone). This is no excuse, of course, since such efforts at clarification then only confirm a hopelessly partial endeavor. The point here, however, is not to launch an accusation of intellectual Orientalism against that which calls itself a poststructuralist method, since its guilt in this respect is already flagrantly stenciled for the better readers. It is simply to illuminate a blind spot in critical theory that has resulted from this built-in tendency to perpetuate the terms of modernity through a less global or even extra-global mode of reversal (it does not go far enough to work). No, it is no longer adequate to crusade on behalf of whatever things “have been repulsed, repressed, devalorized, minoritized, delegitimated, occulted by hegemonic canons, in short, all that which certain forces have attempted to melt down into the anonymous mass of an unrecognisable culture, to ‘(bio)degrade’ in the common compost of a memory said to be living and organic . . .”54 This overbearing ethical concentration on the downtrodden and starved facets of modernity diverts any discovery of those arch-formations that have grown stronger all along (nowhere near this time-scape). The hordes: those for whom all is incidental, collateral damage. In a hilarious turn, then, one could say that the problem stems from the fact that deconstructionists are using the wrong archive. For if this group really were to pull off its greatest magic trick, it would need to have looked elsewhere, that is, particularly toward those creative morphologies that have always resided outside this one homeostatic text of the self and other, East versus West, and which thereby bring about a defeat-without-answer. (This is similarly the case with the profusion of other continental attractions to the Eastern encampments: whether constituted by Foucault’s

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early outright support for the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Baudrillard’s theoretical flirtation with Islamic terrorism, or Badiou and Zizek’s dazzled looks toward the Arab Spring, the problem is less their exoticizing impulse than their inability to realize that they have not yet discovered the most exotic strands of such regions. They have deplorable radars; they mistake fireworks for explosions, neglecting the better severities, and so remain ill-equipped for such far-off archaeological digs. Hence, the truly concussive elements, those live-wire electrocutions that could jolt the episteme out of its own skin, remain imperceptible to those trained beneath the pyramids of Western thought.) Toward another Eastern step: to make language peripatetic and thereby house the promise of a non-regimented textuality within a body that charges (uncivil incarnation). Once more, we follow the compass of Adonis: “Time was about to step out of time, and what they call homeland sits on the edge of time about to fall. ‘How to hold on to it?’ asked a man in shackles, almost bridled. He did not get an answer, only more shackles, and a crowd like powdered sand began to survey an expanse . . . walking across it, weaving banners, carpets, streets, domes, and building a bridge to cross from the afterlife to this world . . .”55 He has become the setback; he has become the resetting. The projectile, sent from abroad, from out of the trees, the steppes, and the unseen continents, which slices a turnaround bridge from afterlife to world: these are the distillations of reversal through which a Middle Eastern postmodern imagination asserts itself.

Eastern Insurgency as Killer’s Freedom “Did you say you’re a poet? Where do you come from? You have a fine skin. Executioner, do you hear me? You can have his head But bring me the skin unbruised. His skin means so much to me.”56 Such are the ever-acquisitive antics of power, for which there can be no rehabilitation, no hunger strike or quarantine, only the taking of heads in turn (for they have lorded over a lesser world). To this end, we must contrast three separate delineations of “freedom” in continental thought and then readjust their respective javelin-throws toward a Middle East-

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ern variation; that is, a sociology of the anti-executioner, though still he executes (note: only the identity is wiped away). In the first example, one finds Heidegger’s insistence on freedom as a paradoxical revelation of the concealed/concealment of the revelation that sets alight the otherwise dim-lit space of the open: Freedom governs the open in the sense of the clear and the lighted up, i.e., of the revealed. It is to the happening of revealing, i.e. of truth, that freedom stands in the closest and most intimate kinship. All revealing belongs within a harboring and a concealing. But that which frees—the mystery—is concealed and always concealing itself. All revealing comes out of the open, goes into the open, and brings into the open. The freedom of the open consists neither in unfettered arbitrariness nor in the constraint of mere laws. Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing there shimmers that veil that covers what comes to presence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils. Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way.57 In this way, freedom comprises a self-obliviating force that nevertheless exposes the ever-present veiling of things, to which two Eastern objections instantly arise: (1) What if one does not want access to or illumination of the original truth (is there only one?) but rather an alternative radiation, shroudedness, and engulfing of the next secret? (2) Why can this freeing power not be ingested and dispensed through the forearm of a distinct subjectivity? Rather than speaking of some primordial realm of the open, can we not instead envision the weathered face of the one who would commence a tearing-open (the forced opening of world, the bringer of awful freedom)? Taking both objections together, one can look to Adonis’s heretical rewriting of the story of Noah, which tracks the jagged psychology of the “New Noah” who now grows faithless toward the flood, hijacks the ark, and steers the stolen vessel beyond the shores of omniscience: “We are sailing and fear cannot bend us, / And we do not listen to God’s word . . . / We long for a new God.”58 His shipwreck is the more resolute undressing of what Heidegger posits: after all, there is a massive philosophical-existential difference between a self-automating freedom that one attains via a borrowed sacred (handed-over) and a hard-won freedom attained through the rending-apart of a closed world

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(through the intractable). Arduous, this stowaway ontology: rather than seek a harmless aperture of being that is always already gaping, this movement would enact the breach (against bedrock) and thereby gather around an unmistakable wound, which is why Adonis warns the world, “Don’t come closer, the wound is nearer than you / Don’t come closer, the wound is more beautiful than you,”59 for such is the desire-formation of a consciousness that does not want the world but rather the wellinflicted abrasion of the world, does not parasitically fasten itself to the glow offered readily by being but that demands whatever daybreak shafts against its vise-like will. Thus he writes in an earlier passage: “I’d have made out of all this for the wound / A song like a spear / Piercing trees, stones and heaven, / And soft as water, / Overpowering and amazing like a conquest.”60 No, such a poetics does not merely venture itself in the permitted space of long-standing truths; rather it knocks against the bolted door of the ancillary, scratches with avarice (for what has not yet been done), and produces the slit through which an avant-gardist neoarticulation might commence itself. Next we turn to Sartre’s classification of freedom as self-conscious authorship of the world, condemned to a certain responsibility before the event of one’s own existence: “Man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being. We are taking the word ‘responsibility’ in its ordinary sense as ‘consciousness (of) being the incontestable author of an event or of an object.’ ”61 While this affords a more lively subjective proposition than its Heideggerian antecedent, the Eastern nonequivalent can still push further; rather, one wonders whether the “worst disadvantages” and “worst threats” of which Sartre then later speaks in reference to this same idea of freedom could in fact be anthropomorphically embodied by someone and set against the extant. More specifically, what if someone made it their task, duty, or entertainment to compel the other to experience such freedom, a walking nightmare that would thrust the absurd burden of accountability into the moment of encounter itself? Since we know the final resort of such existentialist journeys (the hypothetical trapdoor of its edifice)—that is, that one can always suicide oneself—we can then contemplate a solitary figure whose prime initiative hinges upon making this very prospect self-aware for others at every turn, cornering the human “they” and ambushing it with some sight, idea, or touch that makes it think through the option. This is why Adonis writes of himself as infamous among the rest (because he seals and unseals them in their freedom): “You hate to say my name, / You always see me

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when you read obituaries / And scream / ‘I swear he has in his pockets a naked woman and a gun.’ ”62 He is the detractor; he is the one who they begrudge for loosening the valve. The Eastern poetic imagination, then, appears to be saying this: let them come face-to-face with the urgency of this option; let them begin the serious business of choosing to be (or not) and thus stand with or without this new thing (the insurgent “I”) that sheds itself on them. In short, it is his sole job to exemplify the crossroads, so that they might hail their condemnation-unto-the-decision to remain or check out. At long last, we pounce forward to Nietzsche’s sphere of freedom, where for the first time we hear a corresponding killer’s edge (the elder stands ahead of his weak progeny). This existential permutation, though occurring long before Heidegger and Sartre’s unwelcomed moderation of the path, does not rustle or cringe while according freedom to the following one conclusive trait: the willingness to dispatch others on behalf of a singular drive. Free to give and take life on behalf of “it,” to place one’s fingerprints on the pulse of self and man in honor of some train of thought, not out of sadistic negation (there is nothing fascistic about this imposition of pressure), but rather out of sheer Bacchic devotion to what is most fervent (in the air between)—a manual for transmission, advancement, and extremity: For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one’s cause, not excluding oneself . . . The human being who has become free—and how much more the spirit who has become free—spits on a contemptible type of well-being . . . The free man is a warrior.”63 In the Eastern dialect, one might very well substitute insurgent for warrior, though the substance remains the same: that partition alone brings immediacy with the most important question; that all iterations of respect-for-life are mere euphemisms for death, and; that life is meant to be disrespected, contested, and hounded if it is to be worth anything at all. Freedom, therefore, is the exclusive gift of the enemy. It is in this miraculous vein of generosity that we must read Adonis (as enemy to everything), but treading so ever-careful not to misunderstand the graciousness of his philosophical-poetic backdrop when he

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informs us that “I’m tired of the breathing of people,”64and even more succinctly that “He wrote in a poem (. . . /let him die . . .”65 Yes, literary subjectivity here has become what is necessary to instill the spine of self-creation (they cannot just pass), to re-throw the human inmate by offering itself as both the elliptical wound and the unsealed parenthetical that frames and unframes the freedom of this one perfect sentence: “. . . let him die . . .”

Eastern Insurgency as Affective Overreaction In the murderous age a person threw his history into the fire, covered The expanse of our faces with the red blush of ignominy And died / You shall not know freedom as long as the State exists /66 Affective overreaction does not contradict radical coldness; rather, they are born from one another in a kind of disc or cartel. Intriguingly, Middle Eastern patterns of suicidal violence provide two components of neomasochistic imagination through which one might circumvent the entrapment of dialectics and see the above-stated connection: 1. That the “extremist” does not actually locate their catastrophic action within the temporality of the pure present, but rather fights on behalf of an absolute present-future (the potential, hypothetical world that might have happened but which now proves impossible because of the enemy). The moment therefore becomes akin to a vengeance interval, a narrow eternal window of retaliation for the betrayal of the absolute present-future that will never arrive, the oncoming of which has been derailed and yet which hounds the fulfilled empirical reality of the now. 2. That the “extremist” does not perceive the primary thrust of his intention as a will to “kill the other,” but rather as a self-evisceration that might then encompass some inadvertent murder; that is, this figure circumscribes his own annihilation-vicinity, a torsional universe of bleeding and explosion that revolves around the single body of the practitioner; with that said, if someone else (the enemy) just

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happens to be in the neighborhood of that self-irradiation, then it is presumably their own fault for “being-there.” Dasein thereby rears its ugly head once more as a relevant principle in the discourse of terrorism, though with an entirely new reading (awaiting contusion)—the mere fact of being-there is now an indication of atrocity, violation, and trespass; more precisely, it catches the enemy in the midst of their wickedness, and thus collects the fitting penalty for such proximity, their nonconsensual nearness, the intimidating damage of their presence. The internal logic of the overlap: that one should not have been around in the first place to receive harm, never within range of the bomber’s touch when the decision was reached to shatter themselves in their own land, on their own territory, where they are supposed to be only among allies. This inclusive suicide, then, is a mirror of the ongoing crime of the enemy’s unwanted closeness and nonbelonging (one should have been elsewhere to begin with). In a similar line, another dangerous thought emanates from such dissections: namely, that of defending so-called fanaticism, however troubling, as the last remaining antidote to modernity’s disenchantment. With all the recent uproar in the Middle East over Western sacrileges against icons of the Islamic faith, whether intended or accidental, those that have led to episodic burnings, assassinations, or riots, what seemingly confounded most of the Western world was how such ire could emerge in response to a mere set of images, ideas, or words. But this is precisely the crux: that the Western inability to fathom the turbulent reaction abroad (however misguided or formulaic or destructive in its own right) is a sign of the loss of the power of the literal among those in the West who denounce such hostility. For what happens when a cultural imagination forsakes the spontaneous gesticulation, no longer beating or flailing in the cause of anything? Indeed, the once-nefarious impact of the 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). The visceral “overreaction” of the Middle Eastern mobs therefore appears bizarre amid the depletions, drainages, and pacifications that have led to “underreaction” in the West (and elsewhere). And so, what astonishes is the ruthless elitism through which such crowd-expenditures were condescendingly dismissed in the West

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as testaments to the perpetual uncivilized nature of their Eastern counterparts, reassuring an anxious collective consciousness that they would never degrade themselves to engage in such outpourings of rage, though never stopping to realize that rage itself goes hand-in-hand with all passions. One cannot forfeit the capacity for one affect without relinquishing the ladder to the others—that is, if one cannot grow angered over a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing, then one also cannot experience captivation with a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing (that is the necessarily connective vitalist logic of affect—that of mutual ignition, brooding, and inflammation—a tissue, sinew, or neuronal network through which all impulses rely on the same will to extremity). So is modernity a headlong plunge into the obliteration of the sharpness of the senses? This is not just a simple matter of hyper-mediation and technological diffusion that has led to sociocultural inertia (the old Marxist, anarchist, and postmodern critique). There is an even deeper existential cost at stake that comes from the loss of the radioactive potential of the world of appearances and the unwillingness to take things at face value, a self-thwarting cynicism toward the surface that leads to immobility and chronic hesitation. Just think of the myriad sparks and triggers that alone make possible the descent into Alice’s Wonderland—the child chases the white rabbit (a partial flashing image) without real thought to its enigmatic reasons or destinations (which is always the human concern—why and where is he going?). She, though, is only consumed by his color, speed, movement, and nervous incantation of lateness. Words and images as they are: plain, simple, and translucent even in their strangeness and secrecy (this is why Lewis Carroll himself warns in the book that one should always “mean what you say and say what you mean”). This is the very code of urgency. This is how the literal can conceive itself as an unparalleled thunderbolt. For it is not about truth but rather immediacy (there is passion even in the lie). That there is even the stated gulf or discord in the West between saying (or showing in terms of the image) and meaning is a monumental problem for the propensity toward acting, running, hungering, wanting, and living itself. It is the reason why the most groundbreaking ideational products in the West often fail to penetrate enough to excite or instigate (the avant-garde can no longer shock), while 1,400-year mythologies in the East can still provoke hysteria and radical fever at the drop. That is a scary difference—neither is ideal, but the latter is phenomenal if for nothing else than its quick-draw of continued electricity. The visual, the auditory, the spiritual, the philosophical—these are still fulminating currencies of animation in that context (though the literal is sneaky in

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that it always decontextualizes, because it vibrates and swings so conspicuously from its point of origin). The question that posits itself these days somewhat mysteriously is almost one of base physics: How can the sentence, picture, musical note, poetic stanza, ideological or theological concoction, generate so much energy in certain atmospheres, unleashing irregular storms while reviving millennia-old ones? It is almost a Frankensteinian task—tracking the kinetic channel by which the dream or vision is jarred, activated, and sent reeling into the material. And so, though most traditional likenesses of the fanatic are limited in their scope and ingenuity, one stays intrigued and compelled by necessity to decode the DNA of this “problematic” figure on a guess that the skeleton key to modernity’s stupor might lie somewhere within such toxic subjectivities. Is this a rising epistemic war, then, launched across the axis of an ancient fear of being touched—a tension between an agoraphobic West (with its endless barricades, shelters, and technocracies of dilution) and an overexhilarated East (with its endless throngs, zealotries, dogmatic caresses, and emergencies)? Yes, perhaps, but one is no longer interested in the critical-nihilistic exposition of the West (why does it suffer from its contemporary apathy?), itself a tired complaint of anyone with eyes and mind, but rather driven only by the frightening conviction of those Eastern circles that have somehow retained the timeless secret of mood and temperament (why do they still care?). An ode to whatever brews, seethes, and then wears the outfit of aggravation. This is a dysmorphic labor: for is it so hard to think of Dionysus or the blind owl as a revolutionary (of the last political)? If there is an obvious convergence between this theorization of an overreactive radical consciousness for the Middle Eastern subject and the Nietzschean imperatives to overflowing “greatness” or “genius,” then it is certainly deliberate. This notwithstanding, the contention here is that such ecstatic drive can only emerge once the individual has not only perceived the arbitrariness of exterior reality but has become sickeningly alienated from it, thus leaving third world otherness as the premium site of emetic opposition in modernity. As a consequence, the well-wrung imagination that figures into this piece rejects the tired premise that whatever exists beyond the portal of the current moment is another eternity of the same; it is, rather, a refined ploy to instill the recurrence with an aggressive stance vis-à-vis the insurgent now. Thus, the cultivation of a certain radar within an otherwise sparse history becomes of ultimate importance, and it is not mutually contradictory to locate traces of historical materialism, as defined by Benjamin but independent of all dialectical constraints, within the Eastern

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insurgent’s own supra-historical propositions. The former writes: “A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.”67 Conclusion 1: Articulated out of forsaken otherness alone, the eternalizing present, at once a standstill and a gateway, provides an impeccable battlefield on which to try extremity once more (the tribulation of what brings too much, of breadth and the inconsumable grin). Conclusion 2: Defiled to the core in its place of inception, the overhuman may just be given a second chance in the third world. In the end, this insurgent (i.e., the revolutionary of the unreal) is not the traditional freedom-fighter who picks up a weapon and takes to the mountains, singing anthems of liberation or reveling in the simple metanarratives of some diorama of good and evil. He does not wear fatigues or use the word comrade or any such symbolic equivalent; he does not fall victim to the collectivist mythologies of nation, language, and even culture, or to the elusive rhetoric of ethics and justice that have never done anything other than provide power with a convincing smokescreen. These third world insurgents are anarchists of a higher order, those of aneurysmal consciousness and affect, their war fought on a far more tumultuous battlefield, hurling the Molotov cocktails of otherlessness and reversibility at the tanks that run rampant through the streets and passageways of the mind/nerves. They thereby wrench existence into self-attested illusion. The concentrated intensity of their eyes is their only giveaway, an uncompromising gaze that sees what power tries so hard to mask—that there is nothing there to see. And yet there is a cool thrill to this unending fight, the under-rapture of struggle, derived from the knowledge that nothing can lull the insurgent one into that comatose state whereby it forfeits the compulsive wish to tear down and away, to set the world in blue fire and throw it toward its own zero-formulation. Ahmad Shamlu’s voice thus reinstates itself: —Alas I wish, I wish A decision, a decision, a decision were at work, at work, at work!70 Note that there is a profound existential difference between those types who would die for their ideas; that is, the division between those who

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die for “their own ideas” (the originators of a philosophical-poetic turn) and those who die as the loyal followers of an adopted ideology (the guerrilla fighter or disciple). Certainly both pay the same eventual penalty, and both have a mortal-experiential immediacy with the idea and its most unhealthy consequences, but only the first kind would meet the full insurgent criterion espoused here. At long last, across this very breaking-point of the analysis, where the practice of irregular warfare has now translated into an irregular subject of war, we may dare to speak of the first fourth of an Eastern postmodernism. The implication of such a statement is already to draft a kind of multifarious threat, one that eludes the modern and the antimodern, and the devastated rift in-between, so as to dash beyond its many weeds: modernity as ideology (power), as institutional mechanism (society), as phenomenology (perception), as ontology (being/death), as cultural emergence (spectacle), as temporal orchestration (time), as configuration (body/space), as political economy (capital), as epistemological framework (knowledge), as discursive apparatus (language/meaning), and as epoch (history). Beyond this, it is to exit this age of unrest, one of paradoxical ensembles, the interface of abstraction and everydayness, of fragmentation and totality, of the human and the machine, of fantasy and the real, of reason and madness, of immediacy and alienation, at once brutal and idealistic, retrograde and futuristic, smooth and disjointed, esoteric and banal, technological and carnal . . . its seduction, its revulsion, its exhaustion, a genesis and an apocalypse, a system and a chaos. There is a passionate charge here, one that teaches no acquiescence to the real but rather a disappearance at desert or sea. Insurgent consciousness cannot accept surrender, and so it strikes out across the drift. It will not relinquish its right to challenge the unchanging ones, to call question to a world that it did not make and which must be unmade again, like an accosted cabin. It must become silence and break silence in turn—and whether heard or not, once it has cracked the iron bindings that enclose, the fences as we know them, it wants nothing more than to fade into its own willed, reptilian oblivion. In that moment when the third world faces its zero-world counterpart for the first time, when it dares to enter the colder frontiers, the sickle will withdraw its assault on the plane of consciousness, for its triple-cut (of self, other, world) will have already become an integral part of the existential game. It is then that the imagination emerges unbound, amid the death march of this present-centered experience, as modernity finds itself disentitled once and

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for all and staring into the eyes of its own long-anticipated dissolution. Toward where, though? The infertile gorge, basin, ridge, or canyon; the wetland parcel, fissure, or oasis; the highland peak or wilderness; or even the next capital underground. A free-fall step beyond the continuum (to kill for the outside): the reckless straying-somewhere, toward whatever tropic, enclave, or ocean floor calls first (anywhere but here) . . . the first of four matrices of a counter-infinity.

Chapter 2

Images of Resistance Media, Modernity, and the Machine Within Iranian Revolutionary Ideology

In principle, the responsibility and the rule of contemporary enlightened souls of the world resembles that of the prophets and the founders of the great religions-revolutionary leaders who promoted fundamental structural changes in the past. Prophets are not in the same category as philosophers, scientists, technicians or artists . . . The great revolutionary uprooting and yet constructive movements of the prophets caused frozen, static and stagnant societies to change their directions, life-styles, outlooks, cultures and destinies. These prophets are neither in the category of the past scientists or philosophers, nor are they in the category of unaware common people. Rather, they belong to a category of their own. —Ali Shari’ati, From Where Shall We Begin? In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because of the standardization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned. What is individual is no more than the generality’s power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such. The defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the individual on show is mass-produced . . . whose only difference can be measured in fractions of millimeters. —Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Let us offset the last chapter with a somewhat recuperative account of older prototypes of the Eastern insurgent (their anger proves invaluable in hindsight). Despite the mounting formations of radical thought across the region, one might say that Iranian ideology in the twentieth century could

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not summon the same complexity or originality that Iranian literature, mysticism, and cinema produced in its confrontation with modernity. To begin, then, one must look at the failings and limitations of the ideological side of things: for while the role of modernity, media, and machinism in Iranian revolutionary thought has undergone myriad reconfigurations throughout contemporary history, particularly in its transition from a semi-colonial to postcolonial space, its underlying intent has more often than not adhered to the single rule of creating the appearance of a coherent identitarian mythology. Consequently, this piece will endeavor to trace that trajectory within the specific experience of Iranian society, commencing with the complex critique of media/representation forwarded by the anticolonial Islamic front in the 1960s–70s, and then projecting this forward into a commentary on the reappropriation of media toward an aggressive though subsequently oppressive end amid the dawning of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. To achieve this objective, this section will devote a primary focus to the writings of such radical ideologues as Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shari’ati, two figures whose early insights into the intersection of modernization and cultural alienation made possible the emergence of a theological narrative of resistance under the Ayatollah Khomeini and others. In addition, a side emphasis will be attributed to the aesthetic production of Gholam Hossein Sa’edi and Mehdi AkhavanSales, whose literary contributions helped introduce the technology debate to revolutionary discourse in an artistic capacity. Finally, this piece will address the reinscription of media as an instrument of discursive control within the postcolonial space, paying particular attention to the orchestration of images by the Islamic Republic of Iran as a means of solidifying the supremacy of its ideological vision.1

The Entrapment of Modernity: The Rise of Anticolonial Islamic Thought Central to the articulation of Iranian anticolonial ideology and its relationship to technology/media is the idea of a civilizational dialectic of power, one that in turn reflects the underlying logic of modernity itself. Consequently, the anticolonial narratives under scrutiny here fully appropriate the self-other construct as it has been defined within the parameters of a colonial epistemology, utilizing the East-West divide as a point of analytical departure. Though inverted toward a dystopic worldview, anticolonial Islamic ideology is nonetheless fully indebted to the teleological schematic of universal history first manufactured by the very Enlightenment it challenges. Herein lies the significance of Al-e Ahmad’s binary

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reasoning within the first passages of his famous Westoxification: “One pole is controlled by the satiated, the rich and powerful and the makers and exporters of manufactured goods, the other by the hungry, the poor and the weak, the consumers and importers. The heartbeat of evolution on that side of the world is progressive, while the stagnant pulse on this side is on the verge of stopping. . . . a world of confrontation between the poor and rich played out in an international arena.”2 Hence, the earliest phases of anticolonial Islamic ideology remain grounded within a materialist reading of the colonial enterprise along dueling civilizational lines: in effect, that the imperialist phenomenon proves merely a means to securing class domination on a global scale (and carving out two negational sides in the meantime). Still, it is critical to note the fashion in which such a base-superstructure paradigm is eventually thrust into paradox within this particular theoretical apparatus, as capitalism almost immediately becomes conflated with the monolithic notion of the “West” and its cultural infiltration of the Eastern third world. The detrimental result is that this mode of ideological speculation often then collapses itself into grandiose statements concerning the “eternal” struggle of East and West, culminating in such ahistorical commentaries as the following by Al-e Ahmad, which in fact defy his original Marxian diagnosis of the third world condition as one of exploitation under the expansion of capital in the latter stages of modernity: “From the time the sea routes were opened and the seafaring community summoned the courage to penetrate to the heart of the ocean . . . poverty in its true sense has been with us and we have been a forgotten people in the world of the living, a graveyard of memories, keepsakes, and monuments to open roads and wealthy caravans.”3 Certainly, while others attempt later to reconcile the inconsistency of this millennial, sweeping vision with more accurate temporal clarifications that “for the past 150 years, the West has undertaken the task of modernizing men with missionary zeal,”4 it will be demonstrated how even this iconic anticolonial figure cannot resist exploding the first and third world conflict into a rhetoric of transcendental struggle. Inevitably, this ambiguity of an infinitely widening horizon makes it such that Iranian anticolonial ideology is never capable of isolating a definitive historical agent for the project of modernity, nor is it able to perceive the “West” as merely an epistemic fabrication and not a civilizational reality (the enemy is authenticated). Having established this initial precept of a global polarity that seemingly plays itself out both in geographical and material terms, this version of anticolonialism then strives to call attention to the all-pervasive implication of the machine within modernity. In essence, the gaze

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is diverted from the colonial side momentarily to the inauguration of a technological revolution within the West, one that ushers in a new form of hegemony under the auspices of “machinism.” Hence, it is Ali Shari’ati above all others—with his uniquely renovated and hybrid brand of existentialism, leftism, and Islamism—who draws a direct connection between the presumed deterioration of global consciousness and the entrance of industrialization onto the stage of world history: “Science and technology have contributed to the development of the machine and improved its efficiency. This development has changed the face of humanity today.”7 This face-changing is not a superficial affair, though, as Shari’ati extends the boundaries of his statement to include a critique of the social-ontological repercussions elicited by a machine-oriented age: in this vein, he expresses a belief in the transmutative capabilities of the machine to strip away subjectivity itself and thereby diminish humanity to a homogenized mass. In the final scope, this gradual attenuation of the individual will enables the emergence of automation, an objectified and self-activating process wherein “he becomes an instrument, simply a piece of equipment for production and his effort is confined to a monotonous job which he must do day after day, and in doing so, suspend all the characteristics which makes up his personality.”6 Conceivably, the explicit objective of this technological upheaval is that of subsuming society within a condition of existential inertia, and thus revealing a correspondence between the suspicious vision of Islamist anticolonialism and the neo-Marxist critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Whether it be appropriated domestically or exported abroad via an imperialist pathology, the reverberations of the machine are the same in either context: the totalitarian seizure of consciousness, and the solidification of the devastating effects of instrumental reason, coalescing in a circumstance whereby the individual has become, as Adorno says, “an impersonation of the machine it produces itself so that ultimately the machine can replace it”7 and in which “the most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion.”8 An antimetallurgy of being: one of warping, erasure, and depreciation. Since it is only logical that the exploitative devices of capitalist modernity be rationalized through some superstructural medium, Iranian anticolonial ideology then projects itself into the realm of culture, forwarding the contention that integral to the machine age is a simultaneous condition of cultural alienation that operates through the vehicle of consumerism. More precisely, in capitalism’s endeavor to satisfy a dual

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function through the machine, ensuring a zero-sum relationship of class schism while also laying the foundation for the reducibility of subjectivity to the One, it would necessitate a rhetorical-seductive force that could legitimize its otherwise vicious historical emergence. As Shari’ati states: “The problem was to make people in Asia and Africa consumers of European products. That meant to change a nation literally . . . This was the project: all the people of the world must become uniform.”9 To this end, Shari’ati notes that such a dramatic reinvention of preexisting modes of peripheral consumption would appear implausible, for the consumer commodities of the West would apparently conflict with the local demands of the third world resident, without a contrived language of “modernization” to persuasively guide its cause, and that in turn reinforced by a concurrent terminology of “efficiency” and “progress” aimed at the conversion of the colonial subject into an unreflective utensil of pure consumption. This undertaking therefore gives rise to the genesis of a traumatic delusion whereby the third world subject embraces the false consciousness endemic to all constructed notions of the (extraneous) “modern.” Herein lies the significance of Shari’ati’s polemical remark that: “Modernity was the best method of diverting the non-European world, from whatever form and mold of thinking, from their own mold, thought, and personality . . . The Europeans realized that by tempting the inhabitants of the East with a compulsive desire for modernization, he would cooperate with them to deny, desecrate, and destroy his past with his own hands.”10 And so, as the third world individual comes to internalize the idea of local inferiority, entering into the process of a now self-inflicted cultural betrayal, the discourse of modernity gives rise to a neurotic catch-up game whereupon the “West” is then able to cement its control via a condition of perpetual dependency. Certainly, this inquiry into the predatory-parasitic operation of the colonized imagination is in complete correspondence with Fanon’s own theory of the intersection of language and colonial power within The Wretched of the Earth: “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language . . . Mastery of language affords remarkable power . . . Every colonized people—in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation.”11 Although Fanon is more concerned with the racial-psychic dichotomization inherent to the civilizational thinking of Western modernity, Iranian anticolonialism shares in its emphasis on the authoritarian potentiality of language inscribed within spheres of global political economy. In fact, this superstructural facet of

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colonial domination is rendered such an importance within the theoretical framework of Iranian anticolonial ideology that Al-e Ahmad goes as far as to suggest the primacy of a linguistic liberation preceding that of a material emancipation, claiming that “if he [the third world citizen] is able to understand the meaning of the words, ideas, and figures—or their meaninglessness—would there any longer be fear within his heart?”12 The false oracle must be made to stop speaking. It is in this regard that one might consider such movements’ antitechnology stance in large part a reaction to the hastily celebratory tone of such figures as McLuhan, whose utopianism coalesces to produce such speculative leaps as this that “might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?”13 And yet, because McLuhan is articulating his quasi-theological speculation from the standpoint of a beneficiary of modernity, detached from the material iniquities and epistemic violence left in the wake of third world subjugation, he is incapable of anticipating how the self-other paradigm, and by extension the hierarchy of discursive agency that accompanies the centerperiphery relationship, might exercise itself within the formulation of this “single consciousness.” On the other side of the colonized mind, then, the transitional affectivity that is generated by such an alienated consciousness is not one of an exaltation of universal consonance but one of a counterfeit intimacy with this new epoch, a staged humanity that seeks recognition by power at all costs, and as a result engages in a form of desperate cultural mimicry to attest to its rightful claim to a modern subjectivity. Shari’ati detects this tendency most heavily within the third world citizen’s feigned enjoyment of Western aesthetics, whereby sincere cultural performativities start to wane before bizarre spectacles of simulation: “In these countries [third world] not only does an individual have to pretend that he likes [Western] music and force a smile, but also he interprets the music for you too! An interpretation so lopsided it would infuriate the composer! Why does this man listen to something that he neither enjoys nor can he object to? Because the music represents a superior taste and a superior race and so objection and rejection are tantamount to being inferior in race and taste.”14 Accordingly, amid the historical othering that has always embodied the dark side of modernity, and keeping close to Shari’ati’s tragic truism that “consumption is a medium through which an individual vicariously transforms himself into a civilized class,”15 the colonial experience with technological innovation would undermine any serious contemplation of some notion of the global village.

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As a pointed digression, it is imperative to note the fluidity with which this anticolonial concept of cultural conditioning can then readily transform itself into a justification of cultural nativism, particularly in its implied suggestion of a prior subjectivity (i.e., the dream of an identity that existed before all this).16 Undoubtedly, the poststructuralist critique of the Marxian idea of alienation proves relevant to this hyperirritated historical moment of empire as well. For in observing Al-e Ahmad’s orchestration of degrees of cultural estrangement, especially the manner in which it so easily regresses into a tone of nationalist triumphalism, it becomes clear that there is an implicit suggestion of understanding what exactly constitutes the vanished premodern subjectivity to be restored: “Now, in the shadow of that flag, we’re like a nation alienated from itself, in our clothing and our homes, our food and literature, our publications, and, most dangerously of all, our education. We affect Western training, we affect Western thinking, and we follow Western procedures to solve every problem.”17 And so, the argument behind such revolutionary thinking is one that ventures to posit such an epochal rupture as organic to the deterministic unfolding of Western history while conversely alien to that of Eastern civilizations (brought in by force alone), thereby making viable a later discourse of deviation, reversal, and reconquest. In a similar vein, Shari’ati can only reiterate this same image of suspension between poles, harnessing the rhetoric of existential-cultural loss in order to bolster his diatribe against the supremacy of the machine within the contemporary third world. But unlike Al-e Ahmad, there is a more explicit articulation of the “now” as a defilement of the “what once was” in Shari’ati’s writing: “When I wish to feel my own real self, I find myself conceiving another society’s culture instead of my own and bemoaning troubles not mine at all. I groan about cynicism not pertinent to cultural, philosophical, and social realities of my society. I then find myself harboring aspirations, ideals and anguishes legitimately belonging to social, economic, and political conditions of societies other than mine. None the less, I treat these desires, ideals, and anguish as if they were my own.”18 Such is the outlook of a man who takes a sniper’s aim at his own day and damns his own fraudulent robes (but to what end?). The formulaic solution now appears clearly enough to our minds: for amid the translation of concepts of cultural extinction to the colonial enterprise, the trampling of the Eastern territories by Western modernity can only be met by a dialectical negation of the most devastating proportions: the elevation of the indigenous as representative of an authentic return. To achieve this miraculous exchange, anticolonial ideology must

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first enter into an exercise of historical revisionism, atavistically rethroning antiquity as the transcendental signified of a precolonial subjectivity. The way in which this transaction works itself out in this specific philosophical context is through the elevation of the past as antithesis to the present, with the respective connotations of the real versus the illusory attached therein. It is in light of such a strategy that Shari’ati feels compelled to offer the following defense of the non-Western world, manufacturing an exaggerated imagery of its now lost grandeur amid the contamination heralded by colonial civilization-building: “These non-European countries in the past were real and genuine. If you had visited these countries, say 200 years ago, they would have lacked today’s Western Civilization, but each and every one of them had its own authentic and solid civilization. They were unique . . . everything belonged to them.”19 As a consequence, there resides within Iranian anticolonial ideology an incessant struggle to recapture the zero-degree of some former essential identity-status, corresponding well enough to the return of the Real within the Lacanian Mirror Stage in that it strives to undo the moment of assimilation into a repressive symbolic order. As the foundational current that runs through all such anticolonial literature, this thematic arc of self-dislocation and self-rediscovery asserts itself as a conceptual pivot-point around which all other examinations revolve; and it is this same infatuation with the resuturing of the cultural-ontological fragments of a sacred past that would enable the Islamic front to seize the revolutionary imagination of 1979, as theological revelations became perceived as the entryway into a long-lost identity (to excavate the forsaken). In addition, anticolonial ideology affords a substantial focus to the necessity of intermediary bodies and practitioners of dissemination located within the peripheral vicinities themselves (insider agents of violation). Thus marks the reemergence of the Gramscian organic intellectual in an Eastern guise, as collaborator in the conveyance of imperialist propaganda, a discursive middleman whose status as beneficiary of the production plan of the invading oppressor (either associated with the new bureaucratic elite or the bourgeois comprador class) facilitates a readiness to assist in the onslaught of cultural rewiring. As Sartre writes of this figure in his “Preface” to The Wretched of the Earth: “The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of Western culture; they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to their teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking

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lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed.”20 Indeed, Iranian anticolonial ideology of the Islamic variation self-consciously reiterates this Sartrian proposition in its own assault against the native intelligentsia within Iran, both monarchist and leftist, charging such figures with having abandoned their own cultural underpinnings in the name of a foreign cult of reason. By imposing the gaze of Orientalist judgment on their own literary and scholarly traditions, undermining their own historical relevance through the importation of a self-professedly supreme yet disenchanting counterpart, the colonized intellectuals and political officials participate together in the eradication of third world heritage. As for the government agent, Al-e Ahmad describes the neurotic urgency with which this native informant craves approval from Western political entities, so beholden to their technocratic acceptance that they substitute the public welfare for the deceptive praise of the imperialist: “Unfortunately, our ears are still attuned to these self-serving words of praise from the agents of foreign ministries who come this way every few years as orientalists, ambassadors, or advisors, and who write up hideous scrolls when they’ve finished their assignments that say ‘Yes, you have the head of a lion and the tail of an elephant.’ ”21 A tragic chain of devitalization for which only one cure remains: namely, that this damaged subjectivity must be met in turn by the rise of an alternative histrionic consciousness for which one becomes a hostile tenant of the before-this. As a final note to this section, what is perhaps most intriguing about the proposed turnaround of Islamic revolutionary thought is that it borrows heavily from Marxist theory while at the same time equating Marxists themselves (especially third world Marxists) with playing into the equation of colonial mastery. While principally composed of academics, guerrilla student movements, and literati throughout the Pahlavi era, these leftists were also supposedly compromised by insidious Western influences, according to the Islamic front; thoroughly inculcated by the poor sorceries of a secularist Enlightenment, the leftist intelligentsia had chosen to superimpose the ill-trafficked remedies of an outsider ideology rather than to forge a specific revolutionary mind-set out of the historical realities/myths of its own country and people. It is in this vein that Shari’ati offers the following excerpt: “Thus a being was created devoid of any background, alienated from his history and religion, and a stranger to whatever his race, his history and his forefathers had built in this world; alienated from his own human characteristics, a second-hand personality whose mode of consumption had been changed, whose mind had been changed, who had lost his old precious thoughts, his glorious past and intellectual qualities

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and has now become empty within.”22 Beneath the same dense shadow of amnesia and treachery, Al-e Ahmad characterizes the Iranian academic scene as a bastion of corruptibility, thus seeking to relocate the structural site of resistance to somewhere outside the walls of the university. As such, he describes the pervasion of educational institutions by the Western manufacturing industry and its subsequent luring of the national youth into a state of self-forgetting, asserting that: “More interesting is the undercover dealing that goes on in the midst of all of this . . . Time Magazine is propagandizing for the head of the Planning and Budget Organization . . . Or this same Ford and Rockefeller give money to Franklin Book Programs in Tehran to furnish the schools with books. Go see it. What huge companies have built it and what a textbook monopoly they have made. And how they have broken the back of every local publisher!”23 In line with the antagonistic tone of such arguments, the far-reaching intrusion of capitalist modernity would have absorbed even the local pedagogy as an instrument of mass control, converting academic institutions into bartering houses for Western knowledge-instruction. No longer capable of a stronghold, but rather a counterfeit map whereby society itself could draft nothing but cartographies of entrapment: so it is that the headquarters of resistance would have to be grounded elsewhere.

The Transmission of Modernity: The Islamic Critique of Media Returning to the initial purpose of our investigation of twentieth-century Iranian revolutionary ideology, such incendiary thinkers also find that, beyond overt violence, it is through the advent of certain deceptive images/ideas that capitalism imposes itself on the periphery, and it is at this juncture that media assumes a fundamental component in crystallizing the saliency of modernity itself. To a large extent, Iranian anticolonial ideology, in its diatribe against the pandemic misfortune induced by machinism, endeavors to demonize the media as a mere functionary of Western programming (lending it a distractive smokescreen). Straightaway, all forms of media are condemned as appendages to a culture industry now projected outward into the third worlds. For certain one might contend that Al-e Ahmad was among the first to highlight the media as a source of cultural mortification, claiming that its instant accessibility to the masses made it the most wide-ranging armament of Western colonial paradigms. By fabricating an aggrandized image of the West, replete with a semiotic facade of luxury and excess that would stand in

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harsh opposition to the material circumstances of the impoverished Iranian masses, and in particular the newly emerging urban proletariat who found a certain form of escapism within the dreamworld of the culture industry, capitalism was able to usher in a new era of commodity fetishism even among the Eastern populations that it dominated. It is in this respect that Al-e Ahmad dismisses the media in its totality: “The molders of our urban public opinion are either these movies, government, radio, or popular photo magazines. All of these media strive to encourage conformity, to make everyone everywhere part of the same piece of cloth. This is the most prominent threat to our newly formed urbanity.”23 Since Al-e Ahmad can only conceive of media as a Western ploy to narcotize the revolutionary imagination of the third world, to sever prior logics of collectivity under the false promise of modernity, he is unable to see it as anything but a promoter of infinite pacification. Under such an assumption, media also becomes deeply implicated in the abrasion of the local, working in conjunction with patterns of economic marginalization generated by the colonial relationship to strip local forms of their sovereignty. More precisely, while the rapid industrial policies of the monarchy were coercing the rural peasantry into waves of urban migration, various forms of media were justifying such measures through a barrage of alluring images of Western prosperity and opulence. Hence, Al-e Ahmad even goes as far as to state that “seventy-five percent of [our people] live in villages, tents, or huts with customs from the dawn of creation, ignorant of new values . . . The only Western influences that have reached these villages are military conscription and transistor radios. Both of them are more destructive than dynamite.”25 In light of its ensuing reactionary uses by the colonial project, the anticolonial thinker (at this stage) remains unconvinced of the subversive capacity of media to challenge either the political authoritarianism internal to his society or the forces of dominance imported from abroad. Nowhere is the continued thread of this wholesale attack on media more prevalent than within Ayatollah Khomeini’s later revolutionary writings, since it allowed him to simultaneously reproach the infractions of the imperialist forces then present within Iranian society, alongside the patterns of monarchical despotism that negotiated between such foreign invasions and the disenfranchised populace. Hence, Khomeini writes in great detail of the conspiratorial alliance of consumer capitalism and indigenous configurations of authority (mutual forms of insinuation). Perhaps the most vital facet of his reasoning, however, resides again within the indiscriminate stroke with which he wages his rebuke of the media under

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a colonial condition, such that no visual circulation remains unscathed: “Importation of any commodity: amusement of men and women, especially the young, with a variety of such products as makeup, luxuries and frills, and childish games; forcing the families to compete with one another (in acquisitive behavior), ever-increasing consumerism that in itself has many sad consequences and diversion and perversion of the young who are the most active members (of the society) via the creation of centers of debauchery and pleasure; and tens of these planned and calculated tragedies, are all for the sole purpose of keeping (non-Western) countries backwards.”26 Furthermore, anticolonial ideology in such a format invokes this convenient impression of a civilizational dichotomy to portray media as abusive of Islamic tradition and thereby also a threat to the religious identity of the Iranian believers. Thus marks the prolonged translation of a discourse of geopolitics into a rhetoric of endangered cultural subjectivity, wherein a presumably sacrosanct facet of Iranian history is situated in contradistinction to modernity’s apparitional networks. Such passages are thereby meant to incite radical fervor against the disappearance or extinction of one’s own rightful space within the world: Radio, television, newspapers, cinemas, and theaters have been effective means of corruption and stupefaction of nations, particularly the young generations. In this century, many big plans were drawn, using these tools, for anti-Islamic purposes . . . Television films were products of the West or the East that would cause the young generation, men and women, to deviate from the usual way of life, work, industry, production, and knowledge, and would lead them to a state of self-estrangement or cynicism and suspicion regarding everything they or their country had, including their own culture, literature and valuable books . . . Magazines, with articles, disgraceful and deplorable pictures, newspapers, which were racing with one another to publish anti-cultural and anti-Islamic articles, were leading the people, particularly the useful young generations, proudly toward the West or the East.27 The content of such an excerpt reflects a profound mistrust, namely, that all such manifestations of modern media are connected within a unidirectional discursive apparatus, flowing perpetually from West to East, and that this apparatus in turn is oriented exclusively toward the single end of peripheral osmosis. More than this, innate to the above declaration is

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a heightened alertness to the colonial manipulation of semiotics as indispensable to a procedure of top-down indoctrination (surface diversions). Again invoking the totalizing imagery of a people enveloped in some phantom consciousness, deprived of any semblance of inner autonomy, Khomeini’s interpretation of the Iranian condition approaches that of Marcuse’s one-dimensional society in which “the productive apparatus and the goods and services which it produces ‘sell’ or impose the social system as a whole . . . The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood . . . Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and actions are either repelled or reduced to the terms of this universe.”28 And once entrenched within such an all-encompassing predicament, the potential for independent thought, for an unmediated cognitive intimation that escapes the confines of modernity’s discursive web, becomes consigned to the realm of impossibility. In accordance with the critique devised by anticolonial authors, modern media crystallizes its hegemony through a series of intricate distractions, eluding allegations as a conveyor of atrocity and bewilderment via a multiplicity of conjuring tricks that it has at its disposal. As Shari’ati notes, one of its most beloved tactics of perplexity is the aura of consumer novelty, as “the merchandise produced must not only be of a better quality but must have more ‘pizzaz’ because the competitors constantly try to introduce similar but prettier and better qualities.”29 In several respects Shari’ati’s insight coincides with Jameson’s theory of the “ever-new but always-the-same” within the theatrical operation of the political economy of the Sign. More than this, the colonial media succeeds in tranquilizing the revolutionary prospect of the third world via the introduction of an illusion of eventual fulfillment brought in the wake of consumption. Khomeini appears to seize on this underhanded principle of utopian potentiality and its innate connection to the victory of the commodity form in his statement that “widespread advertisements for the spread of centers of corruption, pleasure-houses, makeup, games, alcoholic beverages and luxury goods . . . made [our children] lost to the nation and to the lap of Islam.”30 This situational enticement makes it such that the spiritual depletion of the East is perpetually veiled behind the mirage of entertainment. In this sense, the passage by Khomeini corresponds well to Chomsky’s investigation of how superficial happiness can function as a detraction from the adverse effects of an alienated condition. Thus, he writes in his article titled “What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream”:

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“The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t let them bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems. Anything as long as it isn’t serious.”31 Taken to its most dangerous extreme, this false sentiment of pleasure can lead to an unreflective state wherein consumption becomes ritualized and the ideological narratives of power internalized as almost involuntary instinct or reflex. Perhaps best reflected in Adorno’s description of the television audience in the culture industry, the media ventures to thrust the social world into a disingenuous solidarity that disallows the exercise of critical thought: There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at . . . This wrong kind overcomes fear by capitulation to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practiced on happiness . . . In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity.32 Whether articulated by the Frankfurt School or by the ideologues of the Iranian anticolonial movement, since both are taking to task the same project of modernity while claiming to represent those groups that are consistently excluded by power, the two theoretical strands run nearly parallel in this domain. Within both frameworks, the intervention of the media aids in the conversion of the individual into a self-regulating entity, and thus might constitute the crucial link in the demise of subjectivity. Moving onward, Iranian anticolonial ideology maintains that the media lulls the revolutionary stamina of the third world into a state of false security through the assimilation of all subversive elements that

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might arise within society. The underground aesthetic is quickly transfigured into a mainstream aesthetic, presumably still organic to the masses but now always in the hands of an authoritarian elite, and thereby watering down whatever radical integrity it may have initially possessed. Al-e Ahmad cites the example of jazz music’s newfound place within the American mainstream to illustrate this procedure of integration-dilution: “In the case of jazz, it is the black Africans who now wail beneath the skies of New York. This is the same black man who was once a slave, growing cotton for aristocrats and Western companies in New Jersey and Mississippi, and who now shakes the ceilings of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and Carnegie Hall with his trumpets and drums, and in no time at all he will be finding his way into Gothic churches, which have never opened their doors to any music except Bach and Mendelssohn.”33 It is in consideration of such depletive instances that Iranian anticolonial ideology is unprepared to invest its mission within the media’s public endorsement of mass aesthetics (it fears becoming official). For once under the grasp of normality/everydayness, the sabotaging freedom of the aesthetic itself is left defanged, “deprived of its antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of its truth.”34 The representational content of the culture industry therefore can serve as nothing more than an intermediary for the class antinomies of a capitalist/colonial society, absorbing and drowning out the signals of a countercode. In further coherence with the rationale elaborated thus far, Iranian anticolonial ideology does not overlook the pivotal nexus between media content and corporate interest, converging with Benjamin Ginsberg’s statement that “the marketplace of ideas, built during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, effectively disseminates the ideas and beliefs of the upper classes while subverting the ideological and cultural independence of the lower classes.”35 Correspondingly, as was demonstrated in his reproach of the textbook monopoly held by Western business elites within the Iranian school system, Al-e Ahmad is not hesitant to examine the connection between corporate enterprise and the privileged channels through which information is communicated in the third world. Of particular importance to his project is therefore to thrust literary production under the lens of analytical scrutiny, exposing the damage of the global-becoming-local text and by extension the receptive audience it targets. In this vein, Al-e Ahmad’s primary objection is with the overarching mode of representation: in effect, that the media’s intense concentration on Western issues is of a flagrantly disproportional nature within the non-West, and that this

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fascination with an exoticized, dominant elsewhere in turn showcases the presence of a perceptual perversion: “This compulsory commerce even goes on in our educational system, even in literature and speech. Flip through the handful of so-called substantive literary publications. What information do they contain about this part of the world? Or of the East in general? . . . It all has to do with the Nobel Prize, the changing of the pope, Francoise Sagan, the Cannes Film Festival, or the latest Broadway play or Hollywood film.”36 As a result, the printed word as medium has also failed to escape confiscation by modernity, forwarding the aims of a glamorized culture industry that simply veils the underlying imperialist division of labor within the third world, and regimenting consciousness to such a dramatic extent that it might actualize Adorno’s skeptical prophecy within the Dialectic of Enlightenment of a populace “whose only difference can be measured in fractions of millimeters.”39 Emanating once again from a materialist framework, Al-e Ahmad traces the beginnings of this transnational hypnosis to a dire economic origin. And media, as a result of its close alignment with the former as a mechanism of ideological transmission (independent of form or content), is also thereafter damned to a violent purpose from its inception. Nevertheless, the detrimental outcome of such a guilty-by-association rejection of media is quite apparently the glossing over of both the intricacies and inconsistencies intrinsic to any single medium and at the same time the missed opportunity to acknowledge its mutinous horizon. Definitely the first faltering in Iranian anticolonial ideology—that is, its ineptitude in realizing the myriad variances that render any medium riddled with paradoxes—derives itself from its concurrent inability to observe the possibility for different subject-positions within the third world. Instead, within the monolithic vision advanced by such writers, tolerating no semblance of discrepancy, the entirety of peripheral consciousness is susceptible to the omnipresent deceptions of modernity. If there is a prospective exception, then it rests solely in the idealized future (that reinstates an idealized past). A direct conclusion following from this is that a certain strain of anticolonial ideology is limited in its historical insight into the intersection between aesthetic radicalism and political resistance. For instance, whereas Shari’ati had already damned the native intelligentsia to philosophical victimization, and Al-e Ahmad had renounced the printed word as a haven for Westernization, the historical fact remained that Iranian new poetry and literature (though often forced into the underground) occupied an incredibly significant role in the formulation of a politically charged atmosphere that would form the resonant backdrop for the

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oncoming revolution. Likewise, Al-e Ahmad’s effort to strip bare the hidden linkages between the Western film industry and the standardization of capitalist modes of production within cosmopolitan centers follows a similar rigid trajectory: “As for the cities—these cancerous organs—they grow and expand day by day into grotesqueness and superficiality . . . They have nothing better to offer than one or two cinemas, none of them any more than a means of arousing the people sexually, places to kill time or engage in pointless amusement. Our cinemas neither teach us nor help change our thinking. It may be stated with assurance that, in this part of the world, every theater is simply a piggy bank where every city resident drops two or three tumans a week in order to make millionaires of the principal MGM stockholders.”38 Now it is necessary at this theoretical juncture to validate, in spite of its overwhelming cynicism and conspiratorial resonance, the partial credibility of Al-e Ahmad’s explanation. For what Chomsky has elucidated on a domestic level, Al-e Ahmad sought to deduce on a global-imperial scale: that the operation of the media can in no way be divorced from objective, systemic violence (always snaking beneath). Hence it is in Necessary Illusions that Chomsky renders an acute correlation between the corporate elite that sponsor the media and the masses’ consumption of the former’s shrouded ideological imperatives: In short, the major media—particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow—are corporations “selling” privileged audiences to other businesses. It would hardly come as a surprise if the picture of the world they present were to reflect the perspectives and interests of the sellers, the buyers, and the products. Concentration of the ownership of the media is high and increasing. . . . The very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine. In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem.41 The inevitable conclusion reached by both Chomsky and Al-e Ahmad is that media, as an instrument of bourgeois valuation, aids in the sedimentation of the commodity-form, the routinization of capitalist modernity, and the subduing of revolutionary consciousness. As yet another example in this same theoretical line, Shari’ati (like Al-e Ahmad) finds no progressive

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use for cinema, denouncing its function as an agent of state autocracy and imperialist aggression. This notwithstanding, much like the case of Iranian literature in this era, what such anticolonial ideologues fail to recognize is the monumental effect of Iranian cinema throughout the 1970s, such that at the same time they were drafting their political treatises a number of radical filmmakers were harnessing this aesthetic medium as a means of sharpening social awareness into a weapon. Whereas Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow offers a moving allegorical journey into the psychic turbulence of a peasant confronted with the obliteration of his premodern world (and thus becomes his lost animal), Amir Naderi’s Man with a Gun depicts the material avarice that has overtaken local configurations in the wake of nascent capitalist formations to such a drastic extent that it gives rise to a well-digger’s being cheated of his life savings (and a subsequent murdervendetta spree); still further Masoud Kimiai’s The Deers renders a stunning portrayal of the existential disempowerment of one drug-addicted man whose agonized life in the urban ghettos of Tehran slowly convinces him to take arms against his surroundings (culminating in an epic shootout with the police). Now although such films were rarely oriented toward the promotion of an Islamic revivalist solution, their antagonistic themes vis-à-vis colonial influence and the monarchical regime places the medium of cinema at this historical moment in strong consonance with the anticolonial ideologues examined thus far. They interrogate the same crisis, and match if not surpass all others in their depictions of visceral reaction. But again the former’s uncompromising disavowal of all typologies of modern media as nonindigenous modes of expression prevents such a realization. In fact, such sweeping negations even lead anticolonial thought at times into an internal contradiction of the utmost absurdity, for Shari’ati will in spite of himself attest to the subversive possibilities of the media while condemning it within the same text. More exactly, perhaps nothing evidences this hypocritical blind-spot more fiercely than Shari’ati’s critique of the age of machinism and its drive toward automation and destructive uniformity through the citation of a Chaplin film. He writes: “Charlie Chaplin, in the role of this particular worker . . . in a momentary manifestation of a simple and natural human sentiment in him causes the system of machinery to break down. This clearly illustrates that in the present system there is not the slightest room for expression of a human sentiment.”40 And yet, Shari’ati is too entrenched in his harangue against every facet of technological experience, refining the genre of invective and accusatory barrage, to apprehend that it is precisely the interjection of the movie camera that has enabled this critical vision. For while Shari’ati is caught up in the

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whirlwind of his prose, reeling at the idea that human experience has been strangled, Chaplin has seemingly found a key to win its longevity. By mobilizing the cinematic medium toward an aesthetic rupture of the most volatile order, he has not only discovered a contestatory site from which he can enunciate his satirical point but has also set the stage for the riotous imagination of which Shari’ati now partakes. And so, among other glaringly deficient presuppositions, this obstinate reluctance to entertain the notion of media as an amorphous source of upheaval may characterize the very myopic downfall of anticolonial ideology. For whether it be in the case of new wave poetry or avant-garde cinema, this morose characterization of media’s death-sentence proves highly insufficient and limiting, as its deterministic outlook soon becomes an alibi for a self-defeating fatalism that is neither historically consistent nor politically pragmatic, a moral high-ground out of reach of what remains most palpable within a torn cultural landscape.

The Convergence of Ideology and Aesthetics: Anticolonial Discourse Within Literature Perhaps the most telling aesthetic supplement to this discussion over the meeting place between cultural alienation and technology/media resides within Gholam Hossein Sa’edi’s short-story titled “Dandil.” In brief, Dandil refers to the red-light district of the same name within a northern Iranian city, and seeks to depict the horrors of daily life within a semicolonized atmosphere. For the most part, it is understood that the impoverished village derives its limited income from prostitution, its consumers being the Western soldiers stationed in the barracks just outside the borders. So it is that from the narrative outset there is an imagery of enclosure and suffocation evoked. The formal tale itself, however, begins with a lighthearted conversation between two brothers, both of whom are pimps for an old Madame that runs the village brothel. After speaking with an acquaintance, the brothers come to learn that the Madame, who is in urgent need of money for an operation, has brought in a new prospect, a beautiful young rural girl (Tamarah) who is deceived into believing that she has traveled to Dandil in order to find a husband. Meanwhile, the citizens become involved in collectively contemplating the way to procure the greatest profit from her sexual “purity.” While Sa’edi’s intention is to reveal the rapacious speed with which the material despair of a colonial condition leads to the entropy of cultural-individual ethics, he does

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allow for some minor moments of guilt and vacillation. Nevertheless, they are invariably ephemeral, forced into repression under the overwhelming weight of tangible misery: for example, when the local policeman remarks that “It’s a pity they brought this girl to Dandil. If she wanted to, she could catch a thousand good husbands,” he is quickly silenced by one of the brothers who remarks, “You want to rip us off of our source of income?”41 And so, though a cognizance of moral injustice might emerge, the immediate material urgency of the third world subject’s surroundings demands that this doubt be thrust into absentia upon its very enunciation. As the narrative progresses, the local citizens of Dandil devise a scheme whereby they bring in a photographer to take the young girl’s picture, as this single object enables them to auction her off to the soldiers more effectively. This marks the first explicit entrance onto the scene of the technology/media discourse within Sa’edi’s story, and it is not coincidental that the photographer is described as an outsider and not a member of the Dandilian community. For the affective mode which the author aspires to trigger is one of absolute penetration, playing itself out both at the microcosmic level of the young girl’s passage into prostitution and also that of the ravaging of local identity by an imperialist project of modernity (the awaiting onlooker already threatens the singularity of this place). How this is achieved is through the phallic symbolism of the camera, which steals the one experience of rarity and freezes it as a generalized artifact for sale. But what is most imperative to acknowledge in the scene of the photo shoot is the interwoven state of the third world community in this process of self-decay, its own peculiar accountability, as the citizens of Dandil gather around to watch the taking of the picture: “The photographer took the camera and tripod off his shoulder . . . Tamarah came smiling into the yard . . . She suddenly laughed, screaming ‘Look! Where did they come from!’ She bolted from the stool in fright. The photographer brought his head out from under the cloth and turned around. They saw the Dandilians with their ragged clothes and disheveled hair squatting on top of the walls and staring at what was happening in Madame’s yard” (15–17). In this instant, the third world subject has assumed the schizophrenic role of a voyeur to himself, spectating his own literal-symbolic rape but not fully understanding it as such, while the real agent of power remains camouflaged in semi-invisibility. And although the sheer visual shockwave of this panoramic moment ironically lends the narrative an almost cinematic integrity, it is clear as to why technology and media cannot occupy anything but a negative space within Sa’edi’s aesthetic vision. For whether it be constituted by the trespassing nature of the camera, the

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alien presence of the photographer, or the final product of the picture which will be employed as a form of media advertisement to fetch a high price for the girl’s virginity, the outcome is the same: the commodification of innocence, and with it the death of third world codes of unanimity. What one notices, then, is that of central importance to the ideological content of Dandil stands the notion that the technological advancement of the Western world has turned the peripheral individual into its unknowing accomplice, a vital participant in the abuse and mutilation of his own locality, the assassin of his own native integrity. Modernity has now left him in a paralyzed compartment of its undulation—halfbystander, half-killer—and altogether barren of any impulse to stop the perpetration at hand. One of the ways in which this passivity and selfencroachment is rationalized is through the apparent fetishization of the West, such that the colonized become so infatuated with the supreme allure of that which it can never be that it willingly permits any intimate transgression (without preservation instinct, survival instinct, or self-defense). Remarkably, this extravagant desire for the West even infiltrates the everyday dialogue of the citizens of Dandil, whereby the same policeman remarks that: “I’ve seen pictures of their cities. The buildings are all glass, and the streets sparkle like crystal. There’s rows and rows of banks, and everyone of them is full of money. They’re not beggars like us. They all have private cars. Their whores spend four or five hours a day just playing around in the beauty shops.”42 For Sa’edi, such is the pathological fantasy endemic to the inner workings of a colonized mind. With the idealized West inserting itself as the absent referent in every mode of social interaction, the third world subject has now come to embrace the dialectical construct of the self and the other in its mythic entirety, perceiving itself as the negational instantiation of Occidental greatness and therefore having swallowed down the civilizational hierarchies of its oppressor’s self-projecting image. It is for this reason that the citizens of Dandil are unable to anticipate their own parodic downfall. In accordance with the story line, after having shown the photograph around to the soldiers, the policeman returns to the town with the news that a particular American army sergeant has agreed to furnish a large sum of money in exchange for one night with the girl. Nonetheless, the policeman explains that the overly civilized nature of this client therefore requires that they embark on a dramatic renovation of the town in his honor, not allowing him to see the filthy conditions under which they are forced to live. The author’s inversion here is flagrant, demonstrating the awful paradox of the third

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world subject’s need to conceal from the colonizer those very deplorable circumstances that are caused by the former’s imperialist enterprise. He is ashamed of his destitution in the face of he who robs him; he reshuffles his dwelling in anticipation of an intrusive encounter, to the extent that he no longer belongs in his own home (turned inside-out). In any event, this preemptive humiliation motivates the townspeople to feign an appearance of refinement, as everyone enthusiastically goes about purging the city of its most offensive dimensions: Mamili, the doorman, and Madame covered the open sewer and swept and washed the street. Baba was sitting on the stone bench in front of the coffeehouse hurriedly lighting the propane lamps. Panjak, having rolled up the bottom of his pants, was joyfully running around taking the propane lamps here and there and hanging them at the turns in the road and from the doors . . . Madame’s house had become clean and tidy. The curtains had been drawn aside. Pots of geranium had been placed on the wall and beside the steps. A square table had been set in the hallway. On it was a record player Asadollah had brought from the police station . . . When it was dark, the Dandilians poured into the streets and gathered in front of the doors and along the walls.43 Now what is so intriguing about this episode is that it bears a dramatic resemblance to Baudrillard’s theory of simulation (in this case turned graphically obscene). The Dandil presented to the colonizer, like Disneyland, is also not the real but merely “a play of illusions and phantasms.” But whereas the experience of Disneyland reaffirms the national self by inviting the American into a “miniaturized and religious reveling in real America, its delights and drawbacks,” the experience of Dandil is one of self-affirmation via the domination of the constructed other. Hence, the American sergeant, sent on a colonial mission to the third world, views his isolated barracks as analogous to “the absolute solitude of the parking lot—a veritable concentration camp.”44 He therefore craves an escape, and in the case of the third world this contrast is provided by the false exoticism of the local village, giving rise to yet another contradiction. For in the minds of Dandil’s inhabitants, the meager furnishings they have added to the town have rendered it civilized, whereas the army sergeant craves just the opposite; his aim is not to find a cheap imitation of the West, in that it appears to him as just a bizarre caricature of civilization,

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but rather wants nothing more than to frolic in the wretched simplicity of the villager’s existence; it justifies his own presence on the outskirts (he seeks the wallowing, the disgrace, the slum). Moreover, a true sense of empowerment for the colonizer cannot be attained until the moment of conquest, the assertion of his superiority through an act of desecration. It is in this vein that one must read the anticlimactic conclusion of Sa’edi’s tale of mourning. In short, the sergeant enters Dandil intoxicated that night, publicly ridicules the townspeople who have congregated to watch the event, enters into the brothel and engages in sexual intercourse with the young child, and leaves the next morning with a mocking laughter as he refuses to pay. Although this infuriates the local pimps who now gradually come to realize that they have sold away their own honor for nothing, they are warned by the policeman not to act on their anger for fear of retaliation: “No, you can’t say anything to him. You can’t go asking him for bread. He’s not like you and me; he’s American. If he gets upset, if he’s not satisfied, he’s going to turn Dandil inside out. He’ll kill us all and destroy everything.”45 And so the civilizational dichotomy remains intact in spite of the horrifying events that have transpired, with the trafficked, deflowered child serving as a metaphor for the cultural-political mistreatment of the third world under colonial rule. While Sa’edi’s literary sample deals somewhat more abstractly with the question of representation, the new poet Mehdi Akhavan-Sales’ “StickFigure” addresses the question of the medium with remarkable specificity. Within this composition, Akhavan-Sales gives account of the startling introduction of the television into a typical village setting. The onset of the piece is marked by a confusion of temporality, but one that signals a substantial transition, as the poet writes that this incident occurred in “another year, or I do not really know what year / Or of what century.”46 Similarly, the background is one of a bleak nature, and the mood is set by an allusion to “a cold winter night / a night of tumult / With the wind cold, stinging, hurtful.”47 From here, Akhavan-Sales shifts the narrative to the scene of a traditional coffeehouse, and immediately a sense of tension is interjected into the operation of the social arena, laying the foundation for a clash between what once was and what is to be. The way in which this confrontation unfolds is through the struggle between an aged storyteller, with his vivid narrative tapestries and classic legends, representative of a well-maintained folkloric identity, and the television set, as emblematic of the grandiose promise of modernity. From the very first suggestion of this dialectic it is obvious where the poet’s sympathy falls, as he wages a fierce rhetorical assault against the new medium, referring

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to the television set as a “magical box,” an artificial phenomenon that “entrances” its audience through a mixture of “uproar and commotion.” Again the idea of authenticity is largely emphasized here, as the television is perceived as a “foreign” entity and therefore an enemy to the millennial history of the provinces, “the thief of its religion and its world.” Having launched this opening slur, Akhavan-Sales then reverts his attention back to the “beloved” old storyteller, now sitting despondent in the corner, refusing with uncompromising pride to look in the direction of the television with which the rest are so enchanted. He is inveterate, seasoned, and adamant even while losing ground; apparently he sees through its spells, all the while recognizing the capacity of this new medium to annihilate indigenous modes of communication/expression (of which the roving storyteller is the ultimate instantiation). He therefore witnesses his own death in the inauguration of technological media, his coercion into the annals of a historical epoch soon to be abandoned by time. He is helpless as it unfolds before his eyes, leading into a compassionate description by the poet who now feels compelled to rescue this figure’s outdated expertise from dissolution in the wake of a merciless modernity. With unparalleled tenderness on the part of the aesthetic intervention, this “ancient and honest storyteller” is depicted as stooping somewhere to the side of the coffeehouse, detached from all the hyperactive behavior of the television-obsessed crowd, “whistling, blind, cold, dejected / . . . angry and tormented by his thoughts / . . . hands buried in his sleeves . . . saddened by the shamefulness of the fake images on the screen.”48 Having constructed such a dispirited portrait of the storyteller, Akhavan-Sales unleashes his hypnotic prose once more against the new media that has presumably robbed this revered figure of his rightful place. The way in which this is accomplished is through a nativist reversion to the literary legacies of antiquity, whose representative is embodied in the now crestfallen posture of the unwatched storyteller. Herein lies the poignancy of the poet’s anthropomorphic profile of the new technologically oriented media, forcing it to speak the following words: In truth, everyone listen to the storyteller of today Put away the stories of the ancient The heroes of the old tales have died with the old tales At this point it is too late and you are too distanced from it For the fire of legend is extinguished Dear children! Good children! The living heroes are to be loved

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Here it from us, the past is dead The present, the future is to be loved Listen for the living heroes are to be loved O you lovers of the dead, Alas now we are life, we are the living We, whom you see and know We, who you speak and sing 49 And so it is everywhere, pervading all facets of the current Iranian subjectivity without remorse for hard-won historicity, but focusing in particular on the undiscerning youth, leaving them suspended between a reliable past and a disingenuous present. From this point, Akhavan-Sales proceeds to list a number of epic heroes from Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings, making the new media accept responsibility for their fall into oblivion as it proclaims with scorn that “they are no more.” And still, in the end, despite this demonization of the television’s arrival, despite the author’s attempt to decry the defilement of third world cultural autonomy, the conclusion of the poetic narrative deliberately problematizes the idea of the new media as a historical No, it is not necessarily a matter of unstoppable indecency. For the final scene finds the storyteller crouched next to a steamed window, drawing the picture of a stick-figure with a trembling hand before he stands to walk away alone. The imagery is one of a vanishing present, as the illustration already begins to melt and evaporate as he is sketching it, with the water running down over the lines, such that the figure seems to be weeping for itself. Despite the clarity of the affair, the act’s meaning is laden with ambiguity; it remains unclear as to whether the representation indeed symbolizes the storyteller himself, lamenting his own erasure from the moment of the now, or whether it might be a prophecy for the imminent destruction of the new media. In this sense, Akhavan-Sales’s “Stick-Figure” may not simply constitute a dystopian bemoaning of modernity, but also an aesthetic testament to the possibility for a third world revolutionary imagination to emerge from the ruins of the colonial era (the antidenizen). This notwithstanding, it is once again apparent how such literary products, as a reflection of certain ideological currents within the anticolonial movement, remain invested in the logic of aggregation. Just as before, by tolerating no exemption to its seamless, undifferentiated characterization of the colonial condition, it falls into the trap of itself becoming totalitarian at two registers. In one respect, by representing the third world as in a state of complete existential-cultural atrophy, whether

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induced by the exportation of the culture industry or the monotony of the machine age, anticolonial literature reaffirms the all-encompassing grasp of modernity over peripheral subjectivity. It therefore attests to a power that modernity constantly lays claim to but in reality can never fully possess no matter how vast its scope; it casts Eastern subjectivity in unqualified, spellbound decline before the parade of manipulative black-magic images of the epoch. It is in this sense that Andreas Huyssen’s critique of Baudrillard finds a distinct peripheral relevance as well: Baudrillard’s theorizing is ultimately unproductive in its reductio ad absurdum of the power of the image. His notion of the silent mass of the spectators disables any analysis of heterogeneous subject positions in the act of reception. Any economic or institutional analysis of the apparatuses of image production, including national differences even within Western mass media societies, is rendered obsolete by Baudrillard’s notion of an almost self-generating and monolithic machinery of image dissemination . . . Any ideology critique of representations of gender or race, of the politics of imaging the various worlds of this world is disabled because ideology critique, even when truth and the real have become unstable, must continue to rely on some distinction between representations as well as to analyze their varying relationship to domination, their inscriptions of power, interest, and desire . . . Baudrillard’s society of simulation does not allow for such distinctions . . . Simulation, after all, may simply be the latest version of the ideology of the end of ideology.50 Undoubtedly, the theoretical apparatus of anticolonial ideology proves vulnerable to a similar error, as its constant inclination to collapse into a dialectical terminology of self/other, East/West, first world/third world, and modern/premodern allows for an omission of the toxic inconsistencies and multivocality implicit within each of these categories (note that the postmodern hinterland is precisely not in dialectical relation with modernity). One immediate danger of this approach, then, is that it recklessly dismisses anything associated with the other side of the binary; as a consequence, the near-reflexive equation of the machine with colonial modernity causes anticolonialism to overlook the subversive utility and democratic accessibility of certain technological innovations, as is evident in Shari’ati’s ultra-atavistic statement that “the intrusion of the machine into the human-half may go so far as to paralyze man; it destroys creativity. Imagine a type-written page that can be imposed upon millions

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of people, while before the advent of the typewriter everyone was free to use his creativity to the utmost in calligraphy.”51 Not reflecting on the historical reality that the exercise of calligraphy was always linked to a feudalist class structure, and often exclusively to the confines of the palace court, whereas the printed word (as some suggest) not only foregoes the reactionary aura of an intrinsic originality but is also open to a more widespread audience independent of material status, Shari’ati’s statement defies his own egalitarianism and becomes an endorsement for an aesthetic tradition (however technically astounding) with one of the worst records of complicity with aristocracy, kingship, and state elitism. Furthermore, anticolonial ideology fails to recognize that the premise of a universally applicable subjectivity within the third world, or even within the more narrow confines of Iranian society itself, is to entertain a fallacy of the most injurious nature. As such, it not only carries out the presupposed will of modernity by homogenizing its very own constituency, diminishing any possibility for individual initiative or insubordination, but it simultaneously precludes the advent of outsider radicalism independent of some religio-civilizational confrontation with modernity. And so, whether it be characterized by the grotesque cultural disaffection of the masses within Sa’edi’s “Dandil” or the historical treachery committed within Akhavan-Sales’s nostalgic “Stick-Figure,” the local is no longer accepted by anticolonial ideology as a worthwhile site of contestation. Now lacking in any intrinsic agency of its own, locked and bound within a misleading, mechanistic lattice, the social sphere must be brought back to its prior state by some higher influence of an untainted fellowship. And it is perhaps on this very basis that a resistance narrative would soon emerge that could not withstand its own degeneration into a totalitarian mode of representation, allowing only one protocol of insolence, one whose leadership could never escape a prismatic image of itself as the messianic defenders of the national history and thus the sole harbingers of a return to the real.

Hegemony Turned Inward: The Reinscription of the Modern Image in the Islamic Republic Should one beware the performativity (i.e., the dramatological turns and techniques) of power above all else? Walter Benjamin once ascertained that “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” since “the self-alienation [of mankind] has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first

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order.”52 With its own distinct qualifications, this is nevertheless precisely what occurred within Iranian revolutionary discourse at the dawning of the uprisings of 1979. The contention advanced here, however, is that this historical undoing of anticolonial ideology was already theoretically predetermined prior to the moment of popular mobilization and the subsequent ascendancy of the Islamic front within the Iranian political plane. As previously stated, because this movement subsumes everything under a pandemic condition of cultural erosion, with every resident of the third world reducible to the same diagnosis of attenuation (all-mesmerized), anticolonial ideology cannot help but produce an antidote that is equally colossal in scope, shape, and execution. In effect, its own drastic interpretation of an imperialist modernity has not allowed itself the room to articulate a countermessage that might escape the myopic trappings of a theologically-ordained dislodging; since there can be only one diagnosis, there can also be only one elixir, giving way to a metanarrative of universal salvation that permits no internal discrepancy, no semblance of instability. Accordingly, the anticolonial movement gradually foregoes its subterranean and deviant quality, instead engaging in a paternalistic imposition of its own antimachinery on that same social body that it seeks to liberate from a hypnotized state of being. Hamid Dabashi and Peter Chelkowski’s analysis of myth within the forging of the Iranian revolutionary imagination evinces this very devolution: Any art of persuasion is the collective construction of a handful of manipulative practitioners of what is quintessential to a culture. They are, whether consciously or otherwise, in direct communication with the most sacred symbolics that at once make and break a communal identity, the particulars of a representation of Truth. Practitioners of the communal culture, these artists/ideologues formulate their immediate political aims, as well as their distant ideological objectives, in terms of mental pictures that immediately register an instant cause of commitment and action.53 And in light of this, it is critical to examine the gradual readoption of the same hated media-channels as a way of ensuring the utter absence of permeability or flexibility within anticolonial ideology, and with it the systematization of the Iranian revolutionary consciousness. Unbelievably, despite the writings examined heretofore, since the most preliminary phases of Iranian anticolonial ideology there resides an advocacy for the strategic co-option of media toward the dissemination of

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a radical agenda. Although it is conceivably invoked toward a corrosive end for modernity, there are instances where these same thinkers fathom the reorientation of such enemy contraptions under the auspices of the anticolonial fight. This proposition, not coincidentally, is reminiscent of all the monolithic linearity of the Hegelian principle of sublation/supercession (aufhebung), and it is out of such a mindset that Al-e Ahmad makes it a priority to “put the genie of machines back in his bottle and make him work for us, like a beast of burden. Machines are a natural springboard for us, one that we must use to make the longest possible leap. We must adopt machines, but we must not remain slaves to them.”54 Disease becomes temporary cure (one must usurp in order to exorcise, to commandeer in order to purge). And so it is that Shari’ati seconds this tactical maneuver regarding such positively calculated borrowings of media in his claim that “we [the third world] must re-employ the same reactionary elements in order to stir the masses, to restore awareness, and to fight superstition.”55 It is in this sense that a modified revolutionary humanism, guided by a temporal-existential rupture delivered in the battle against modernity, will supposedly retain the technological achievements of the prior age while being regulated by the ethical compass of Islamic theology (its own apotropaic magic). The first noticeable appropriation of media by the Islamic opposition movements can be found in Khomeini’s adaptation of the radio. After a forced deportation by the Pahlavi regime throughout the two decades prior to the revolution, Khomeini’s accessibility to the Iranian public was limited largely to taped recordings of various sermons and political speeches delivered abroad but smuggled into Iran through a widespread clerical network. Perhaps, however, what is most intriguing about this imported dimension of anticolonial ideology lies within its orchestration of spatial distance to manufacture an exalted image of the Iranian religious leader. The thoroughly auraticized perception of Khomeini that was rendered by the otherworldliness of his exile, contrasted then against the profound social agitation of a semicolonial backdrop in Iran, lent his words a sage-like or overseer’s quality of unprecedented proportions. Herein lies the significance of the following commentary in Dabashi’s Theology of Discontent: Khomeini’s was a cassette revolution. The number of people who could have actually heard his voice personally . . . in Qom could not have been more than a few hundred. Once exiled to Najaf, his speeches and lectures were taped, and his fiery and defiant voice, smuggled easily into Iran, reached

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thousands of people. Student groups in Europe also had his cassettes mailed to them, broadcasting his revolutionary zeal on European, American, and Canadian campuses . . . It is only with unspoken words, unwritten declarations, merely by the assumption of an authorial voice for “what Islam truly is” that Khomeini generates in his audience a compelling obedience, a feeling ever so tacit that he is in charge, and that he is to be listened to . . . A sense of expectation seems to have anticipated Khomeini’s words in Iran whenever the king or his government was about to indulge in yet another pompous ceremony, engage in yet another totalitarian vanity, or experiment with yet another measure of political tyranny.56 Indeed, in its striking degree of penetration of the Iranian collective consciousness, Khomeini’s cassette-tape revolution demonstrates the insufficiency of Benjamin’s stance in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.” For in the case of the radio medium infused with anticolonial propaganda, Benjamin’s prediction that “mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art . . . characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert”57 would go entirely unrealized. In fact, it might be argued that historical actuality has engendered its opposite. Assuredly, the symbolic fury of Khomeini’s voice is only magnified in its cult-value through its transmission over the air waves, testifying more to McLuhan’s interpretation of the persuasive impact of radio: “Radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience . . . This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single chamber.”58 In this way, technological media in Iranian anticolonialism does not elicit the democratizing effect anticipated by Benjamin, yet instead more closely approaches the overbearing charismatic consonance of speaker and listener advocated by the latter reference. Without doubt, the way in which Khomeini reinscribes this media outlet reveals just this same constant need for ownership, the insistence on the magnetizing unidirectionality of revolutionary discourse, and a chronic worldview that will entertain no discontinuity. The sound incarnates; the voice projects immutability itself. Thus the potential for an emancipatory affect of “shock” subsides as mechanical reproducibility is recast by the anticolonial ideological vision into an instrument of militant training and discipleship. How this reality

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is augmented in the bloody aftermath of the Islamic revolution is nowhere more evident than in a particularly infamous television commercial sponsored as a public announcement by the new theocratic government. The opening image is that of a young man weeping on his knees before his mother, clutching her hand and begging for mercy, to which she replies with unflinching stoicism that she will not listen to his pleas, that he has betrayed the faith and the revolution and must be handed over to the new republic. At this moment the pseudorealistic mother-son interaction fades away, as the majestic figure of the Ayatollah Khomeini, cloaked as always in the legitimizing black robes of the clerical establishment, then emerges from the background to issue a black-hearted declaration: he asks that the mothers and fathers of Iran accept their sacred duty to hand over their children to the state if they somehow discover them involved in seditious activity. And so, what transpires in this exchange is the conscription of media toward a hyperstylized rationalization of the mass imprisonment and execution of political dissidents (even fanatical vengeance becomes a decorative, ornamental sideshow). In an analogous fashion, at the turn of the revolution it became a general practice for people to attest to their “belief ” in the regime by placing photographs of the Ayatollah Khomeini and some other secondary political clerics in their homes and storefronts (a common habit of the facade in totalitarian settings). While this had the practical advantage of eluding harassment by the government police force, it also had the long-term media effect of elevating the Islamic leadership to a panoptical register. As the desolation of the Iranian political culture in subsequent years would gradually transform metaphysical awe into banalized horror, that same omnipresent gaze of power (channeled at every level of social operation through the overflow of photographs) would now hover as a warning against all intimations of dissent. And still, such a regression in the insurgent capacity of media at the hands of anticolonial ideology entails yet a further demise: that is, the aggressive suffocation of all manifestations of so-called profanity and overstimulation (the dread of excess), which then gives concurrent rise to an era of unrivaled censorship. Thus, the Islamic leadership began to wage a concerted, programmatic effort to close off certain “aberrant” or “provocative” media with the intention of leaving the Iranian political scene with a vacancy of discursive opposition. One of the cultural zones that came under particularly violent attack was music, culminating in a temporary ban that was justified under the precept of the latter’s threat to reason: “Of course one thing is certain about music: As for such songs which cause dullness in the mind, that is to say such songs which so incite the passions that the intellect is temporarily out of control, which is to say

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they have the same effect as wine and gambling, obviously their inhibition of such is certain.”59 Nor was this by any stretch the final target of Islamic ideology in the initial years of the revolution. The same Ayatollah Motahhari whose above renunciation of the irrationality of music proved so influential, himself once a close associate of Khomeini and then ironically placed under house arrest by the regime in the wake of the power struggles following the former’s death, then extended his offensive into other realms of aesthetic production. One example of this was his resurrection of a seminal Islamic tenet that forbids the practice of figural art: “As for sculptures, the Islamic prohibition is based on its prohibition of, and opposition to, idolatry. Islam has agreed with such opposition to the idolatry of plastic arts. Because were the statues of prophets and others to be made, we would have undoubtedly had blatant idolatry today.”60 With almost equal severity, the literary-poetic realms were placed under the highest degree of monitoring and supervision, if not outright retaliation, for the same hazard of promoting false worship and defacement. Note, however, that each year the Islamic Republic itself reenacts the arrival of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran Airport through a procession of myriad cardboard cutouts of the former supreme leader, whereupon still-ardent followers interact and converse with these mock-images of the Imam in a kind of makeshift, state-run passion play. Although such enlivening distortions will be dealt with later, it is worth noting here that, despite the massive state censorship that has taken place since the inception of the Islamic takeover of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, despite the heightened social and political disillusionment of recent years, there has been an undeniable cinematic renaissance within these same decades of surveillance and attempted mutedness. And certainly what the reinstated medium of film has achieved in the decolonized space is beyond all prior conceptions of it by first world theorists. For it has now abandoned the rhetoric of the grand apocalyptic, no longer reveling within the massively abstract or ideological transformation but rather hooked into the contemporaneity of the localized apocalyptic (infinitesimal becomings). Since the ideological purism of the anticolonial period has since exhausted its credibility within the Iranian political culture, such filmmakers are now attempting to present as close an interpretation of the unthinkable strangeness of reality as possible (the unexpected thought, the nonstandard body or character, the irregular occurrence). Though there is no pretense to objectivity, by often using only “everyday” people and not professional actors, while also allowing for a conniving flexibility in the storyline consistent with the indeterminacy of space, culture,

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and event, the filmmaker is able to give rise to an open-ended cinematic hermeneutic that borders on an ongoing desertion of the real. Thus, the architects of this non-Western medium have come to the conclusion of Adorno’s aesthetic theory of their own volition, recognizing that “works that make socially univocal discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as themselves.”61 In this sense, the audience is given relative freereign over interpretation, projecting its own mercurial subjectivity into the cinematic experience of a now-delocalized ceremony of the localbursting-beyond-itself, and thereby inverting the hierarchical paradigm of McLuhan for which “the business of the writer or the film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his own, to another, the world created by typography and film.”62 Rather, the medium of filmmaking in present-day Iran attempts solely to bring the crypto-vantage of the everyday into obscurity-ridden view (to leave less clear), 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). Now while there is always the possibility that such an approach might coalesce into yet another exoticization of the local, it would be a vulgar impression of the medium’s dramatic evolution to reduce it to a nativist enterprise. For the notion of the Eastern local as it is reworked in this renovated medium offers an exacerbated version of Tomlinson’s definition in Globalization and Culture: that it is “not the image of the pure, internally homogenous, authentic, indigenous culture,” but rather realizes that “every culture has, in fact, ingested foreign elements from exogenous sources, with the various elements gradually becoming ‘naturalized’ within it.”63 No, Iranian cinema has gone even further than some intravenous, crosscultural alchemy: instead, it has introduced previously untried molecules of ingenuity, cunning, and aesthetic experimentation that in turn leave all watchers unversed and homeless. There is nowhere to sit comfortably, no kindred face or patch of earth with which to identify oneself; there is neither pure interiority (the protected indigenous) nor cosmopolitan transcontinentalism (the assimilated diverse); there is only the experience of radical foreignness at every turn. Another movement, then: for while Iranian filmmaking has perhaps hit a creative wall most recently, its wellspring of representational slyness now growing drier by the year, theorists both within and in exile of the Middle East are now taking up the inventive mantle. This is its own clever oasis (the theoretical tongue), providing yet another avant-garde resource to an inexhaustible postcultural imagination. Indeed, new wave Middle Eastern thought, as we shall see in later chapters, retains the knowledge

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of colonial occupation while standing amid the ruins of an oppressive present (though only so as to unknow the enemy); it wages its war on a micropolitical level but with an extra-global vision always in play; for this reason, the local represents a mindscape of that which cannot be overrun (a philosophical stronghold). Furthermore, by actively stepping into this terrain of necessary ambiguity, by demanding not the passive observation but rather the interpretive participation of a disturbed audience, this intellectual-aesthetic facet of Middle Eastern subjectivity has transcended that stage described by Benjamin, wherein “the public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”64 For not only is the postcolonial public conscious of its firm implication in the moment, but it sees this abrasive medium as a point of departure for the reconstitution of an insurgent imagination. Furthermore, as in Appadurai’s remark that “the images of media are quickly moved into local repertoires of irony, anger, humor, and resistance,”65 borrowing from de Certeau’s logic of consumption as resistance, the prospects of art, literature, cinema, and theory have now been recaptured by the postcolonial world and flung into a domain that innately harms the metanarratives of modernity by excavating its unwanted elsewhere. As a result, they are technical headquarters of disjuncture, innovation, and far-sighted prescience amid a world that professes to revolve around so many technologies of order; they stir surface-forces of eventuality that can suggest more than merely a social-realist critique of the age (they draw the unfathomed silhouette). With this extra-epistemic horizon in its gaze, the implication for the future of such media-prisms in the Middle East and beyond is of cataclysmic importance: that having admitted its seizure as an instrument of semiotic hegemony both within the colonial and anticolonial episodes of its historical experience, its contortion by both sides of the civilizational dialectic, the representational world of images, appearances, sensations, and language-games might now be infused with a conspiratorial, enigmatic capacity like nothing else that we have seen before.

Part II

POET

Chapter 3

The Poetics of Urban Violence The Night Raid, the Martyred Body, and the Execution Spectacle

4 A.M. will always be a special time for Mamad Ali (I have heard him scream I have heard him scream) How many hours does he have in 24? 20 hours he has He’s tortured 20 hours every 24 —Reza Baraheni, “Mamad Ali’s Hour”

When turning our critical attention to the literary front, one can establish a meeting ground between the most celebrated originators of new Iranian literature—Sadeq Hedayat, Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlu, Forugh Farrokhzad, and so on—and various Western critics and philosophers of modernity (Nietzsche, Adorno, Heidegger, Benjamin) in the heart of cataclysmic times. Through this kaleidoscopic lens, one can later theorize the monumental importance of Ahmad Shamlu’s prison poetics and Sadeq Hedayat’s master-novel The Blind Owl as variants of a “will to chaos” that at once correspond with Western avant-garde trends while also skillfully deviating from them toward new horizons of textual expression. Ultimately, the Middle Eastern avant-garde’s vision of the writing-act must be upheld as a novel experience of the modernist phenomenon that also sketches a fugitive postmodern map of escape from its grasp.1 As a curious point of entrance, one can track the unusual advent of the Iranian new poetry movement in the later twentieth century and its approach to demarcating a highly unique paradigm for the avant-gardism itself. As the European avant-garde increasingly exhausted its possibilities soon after the Second World War (amid the collapse of surrealism, futurism, minimalism, and existentialism), the visionaries of the Iranian new wave began articulating their own currents from the other side of the East-West divide and with an alternative templates in mind. These

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free-verse authors negotiated an unforeseen potential for language during moments of great social disorder and historical affliction (prison, exile, censorship); their evocations thus marked a rising cultural consciousness and epistemic shift, as the inner circles of new Iranian literature offered astounding insight into the role of art and writing amid the often disastrous epoch of modernity. To reveal the more intricate dimensions at work within these cultural groups of the 1950s–’80s, one can turn to any of the figures of iconic stature in the dawning of the new poetry movement, distinguishing their complex rules of the game, as each forerunner provides a partial answer to the riddle of how an Eastern or third world vanguard might develop and characterize itself in the heart of major historical tremors. From Nima’s legendary declaration that “with my poetry I have driven the people into a great conflict; good and bad, they have fallen in confusion; I myself am sitting in a corner, watching them: I have flooded the nest of ants,” to Farrokhzad’s assertion that “all those who are involved in creative work have as their motive . . . a sort of need to confront and struggle with annihilation,” to Shamlu’s continual reference to ambiguous cadres under the code names “the children of the depths,” “the children of the storm,” “the horsemen,” and “the bold ones,” there are countless testaments in which the tone of aggression becomes unmistakable. In this way, the most eminent voices of the contemporary Iranian front were brought to the helm of a charged discourse, one that holds unparalleled implications for the topic of non-Western literature, cultural imagination, and intellectual history. Specifically, it is of great interest to unravel one major thematic component in the ascent of this generation and its distinct philosophy of the avant-garde: namely, the definition of the poetic world as a protosectarian space. Perhaps derived from their correspondence with various revolutionary groups from whom they borrowed certain strategies of organization (i.e., insurrectionary columns and rebel leagues), the new poets would gather in similar fashion throughout the metropolitan centers of Iran so as to carve out hidden meeting-grounds for experimentation. These secret societies, in turn, allowed the new wave to convene, discuss, and explore whatever iconoclastic trajectories they wished from a protected subterranean vantage, and gave rise to some of the most influential counter-traditional texts of the time (Shamlu’s “Fresh Air” being perhaps the most vital example). As such, one must engage this strategic backdrop of concealment and dissimulation, a self-cloaking reflex that framed the evolution of these movements while providing an instrumental paradigm for radical thought (one of intimate alliance); furthermore, one

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must search after the direct repercussions that such a logic of prohibited confidentiality would elicit for the material of their own writing (how does poetry change when aligned with other unknown voices?). For stricter guidance, one can look to Nima’s “Moonlight,” Akhavan’s “Inscription,” or Farrokhzad’s “Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season” as excellent indications of a type of consciousness that perceives the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn. Strangely enough, then, as certain political federations of this time period began coordinating themselves in such compartmentalized and esoteric ways, the Iranian avant-garde established its own artistic version of this trend, seizing on the provocative tendencies of such proto-sectarian models (those of serious unity, isolation, and subversion) and turning them into viable aesthetic devices. While the complex relationships between individuals submerged in the new poetry movement are of great consequence—particularly the aesthetic discipleship that some underwent vis-à-vis Nima Yushij, the founding figure and elder of the collective whose air of mastery, emulation, and captivation yet again reinforces this proto-sectarian interpretation—it is the network itself that proves of surpassing interest. To this end, an elaborate series of questions arrive at the forefront of this research: In essence, how did these partially shrouded blocs of literary activity maneuver, converge, and proliferate their works? What were the intentions expressed in their manifestos and what was their overarching vision for the future of world literature? To what extent was this subculture persecuted and endangered by the reigning political forces of its day, and how did they circumvent or elude these pressures? In the face of institutional exclusion (expelled by the university system and the monarchical court), how did this peripheral narrative become a force of intrigue and seduction among the Iranian youth of those decades? How did they view their own emergent movement with regard to Western avant-gardist coalitions of the past, and to what extent did they abandon and deviate from these prior attempts in structure, philosophy, and style in order to generate an autonomous venture? What was the new poetry circle’s ambition with respect to social change, how did they respond to historical events of atrocity and transition, and did they subscribe to an elitist or universalist attitude toward humanity? Did they understand themselves as resembling a mystical, criminal, mercenary, or revolutionary edifice? Were there embedded or rotating hierarchies among the main participants of this constellation, did they construct themselves as a pyramidal or cellular apparatus, and were there eventual internal schisms? Who were the conceived rivals to their faction, and how did they respond to criticisms

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and challenges from such enemies? Finally, what were the factors that caused the obvious disappearance of the new poetry movement around the turn of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and have there been similar endeavors in the aftermath by the current generation? Without doubt, the answers to these compelling questions might illuminate the way in which such proto-sectarian tactics actually enabled the new poets to carve out a singular well-functioning blueprint of the avant-garde that would thrive throughout the latter half of the century and irreversibly transform the outlook of a nation. One could conduct an extensive comparative inquiry into the poetic compositions, correspondences, essays, journals, anthologies, and treatises of the most renowned originators of this countercultural wave, including a close reading of the groundbreaking journal Honar (Art) to which most contributed. This multilayered archive—in which Nima, Shamlu, Akhavan, Forugh, and Khoi often intersect and exchange impressions— demonstrates their self-conscious attempt to entrench themselves as a metamorphic entity. From Nima Yushij’s collection of “Night-Songs,” Mehdi Akhavan-Sales’ volumes titled Winter (1956) and Autumn In Prison (1969), Ahmad Shamlu’s Poems of Iron and Feelings (1953) and The Garden of Mirrors (1960), Forugh Farrokhzad’s Another Birth (1963), and Esmail Khoi’s On the Galloping Stallion of Earth (1972), these volumes tell a rich tale to be deciphered. These several texts would reveal the new poetry movement as an amorphous, obscure, and versatile ring of thinkers and writers with a forceful imperative before them: to launch an intellectual-existential offensive against the disenchantment of the modern age. Furthermore, they divided themselves along various conceptual axes related to key archetypes: those of power, hostility, banishment, solitude, desire, and sacrifice. In the final stride, this inspired shadow-configuration of new poets would leave an incomparable imprint on Iranian society and far beyond, one that continues to shape an unwilting outrage in the most profound and far-reaching ways.

The Poetics of Urban Violence A thematic of particular interest for this segment of the project would revolve around literary depictions of urban violence (as a microcosm for the collapse of modernity itself). For it is precisely this problematic, that of how an avant-garde thrives amid such harrowing conditions, which

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might offer the key to the formulation of the poetic component of Eastern postmodernism. The modern cityscape of the Middle East encapsulates a range of contradictory experiences, at once a site of autocracy and insurgency, concealment and detection, connectivity and alienation, integration and crumbling, gesticulation and idleness. Together these disparate gradations form a scaffolding like no other (more a gallows), and yet one from beneath which a rare poetic instinct might also come to fruition, a sort of philological writhing and proclivity for the most severe intonation (to report the disavowal), a semantics that slants against the persistence of all things.2 This chapter therefore explores some of the most acclaimed new wave figures of Persian literature as they engage the topic of urban violence in Iran from 1952 to 1981. These select documents, with a critical gaze locked on key historical moments, reveal how the city in modernity constitutes a staging ground for the most incendiary experiences of upheaval, hysteria, sabotage, and collective suffering. Within this vital framework, I isolate three prominent Iranian poets at crucial instances of biopolitical ruthlessness, those that showcase the capital city’s (i.e., Tehran’s) role as a transformative zone of both catastrophic and liberating proportions during multiple regime changes. These dramatic incidents in the heart of the cosmopolitan setting will therefore also provide insight into a more existential-spatial understanding of questions of cruelty, betrayal, torment, and annihilation as sculpted by the creative supervisors of the region in the face of a disastrous epoch. In terms of methodology, I will analyze three particular eventcheckpoints of Iran in the twentieth century (the Mossadegh coup, the Pahlavi backlash, and the Iranian Revolution) that together highlight the pervasive phenomenon of urban violence in the texts of its most far-seeing authors. In the first case, we will turn our attention to the poet Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, perhaps the most eminent cultural voice on the reterritorialization of urban space during the Mossadegh era— that is, the subdivision of streets, districts, and neighborhoods into dueling sectors of power and resistance, for which ideological clashes, marches, and protests would create an ominous series of ruptures arching toward an overthrow. In his famous piece titled “Winter,” the urban environment metamorphoses into a virtual minefield, as the city oscillates between periods of relative stillness and perforation (city nights pierced by machine-gun fire). Another selection by Akhavan-Sales titled

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“Lament” depicts the last Shah’s attempt to manipulate spatial politics as a force of dread and intimidation by allowing the decomposing body of a shot rebel to remain unburied on a main road of the capital city for an extended period of time, a corporeal reminder of the price of dissidence that scarred the urban environment in obviously shocking ways. In the next example, we will look to Reza Baraheni’s depictions of the spatial domination of the city by the returning Pahlavi regime, for which roundups become a common occurrence and full shutdowns of the capital city are mandated under the imposition of martial law. The poem “An Epic in Reverse” is an indication of this despairing confinement of the urban geography, wherein everyday movement is paralyzed and the typical flows of the bazaar, the alleys, and the parks are interrupted by a new apparatus of control that leaves the populace in a claustrophobic indoor state (now relegated to watch the city’s lockdown from detached balconies and rooftops). This work culminates with the recognition that all roads and avenues of the capital city lead toward the infamous Evin Prison and its maze of torture chambers. Finally, we will look to certain pieces by Ahmad Shamlu, perhaps the most legendary Iranian new poet, composed during the frenzy of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that deal with sightings of public execution and secret police night-raids. These graphic commentaries—disclosed in two works titled “In the Struggle with Silence” and “In this Dead End”—will shed light on a capital city immersed in exsanguinating atmospheres, those of permanent emergency for which previously ordinary urban locales (public squares, stadiums, stone walls) are now turned into volatile theaters of sadism, paranoia, and spectacular violence. Shamlu thus recounts the impact of a city swarmed by roaming theocratic firing squads and cranes used for public hangings. All of these authors, in turn, would find themselves consumed with the distinctive emergence of “the martyr” as an increasingly visible entity (exclusive to the metropolis) that defined the contemporary urban arena through complex negotiations of sacrifice. Ultimately, by placing these three avant-garde authors—Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, Reza Baraheni, and Ahmad Shamlu—into a conversational exchange across three historical occasions of the same cityscape from 1952 to 1981, all of which feature episodes of brutal collapse and transfiguration and all of whom were incarcerated at some point during this time period, the intent is to produce a unique understanding of the convergence between contemporary non-western literature and the postmodern metropolis at its highest points of atrocity, fracture, and transition.

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Akhavan’s Lament: The Radical Outcry of Urban Fratricide In Mehdi Akhavan-Sales’s most renowned literary achievement (“Winter”), itself arguably the most famous Iranian poem of the twentieth century, one finds a saga of existential desolation within which the cityscape plays a central, treacherous role. Composed in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh’s parliamentary coup, and with a triumphant king restored by foreign imperialist hands and told to solidify order at whatever despotic cost, the urban space finds itself immersed in a thick air of disenchantment, bitterness, and semiotic disorientation. The public secret remains fresh in the minds of the populace—that the one who rules is an impostor, the throne itself an emblem of fraudulent power—and it cloaks the entire city beneath a coating of falsehood, illegitimacy, and heedlessness. As such, there is an unmistakable topographic betrayal at work in the text, one that leaves the environment of lived everydayness hollow and thereby contaminates the operational fluidity of culture itself. The realm of traditional appearances remains intact, by force of an ill-born regime attempting to reentrench itself in the order of things, though this surface image is continually punctured by sentiments of exasperation and weariness that reveal the sheer gutting of a social and historical consciousness. As Akhavan illustrates in the following verse, itself a symptomatological inventory of maladies and perversions: The weather is heart-wrenching, the doors closed, heads buried in their collars, hands hidden, breath cloud-like, hearts tired and tormented, the trees like crystallized skeletons, the earth low-spirited, the sky’s roof low, the sun and moon enveloped in haze.3 What is left standing is the weak facade of an otherwise drained world; the ritual performance of the Iranian everyday continues (as a frayed curtain), the mechanisms of convention barely functional, but devoid of any meaning, purpose, or even reality-principle. The inauthentic reigns here instead, at its head a pretending sovereign, no longer the shadow of God but the residue of colonial trickery, thus leaving a poetic testimony swamped by themes of incommunicability, dissolution, alarm, strangeness, and corrosion. The result is a dire interplay of occlusions and mystifications, where the horizon turns gray, vision is placed under siege

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by clouds of fog and smoke, nothing is as it seems, no one is free of suspicion, and the bleak overtones of silence attest to the rise of a nightmarish age. Such is the undertow of exhaustion and its low-intensity disaster. It is against this evacuated backdrop of “Winter,” however, that one might then shift the critical concentration to another poetic document born of this time period and its predilection for urban violence: namely, Akhavan’s “Lament.” As previously stated, this work concerns itself with framing a desperate plea to the monarchical power-edifice regarding the corpse of a rebel that it has allowed to rot in full view on some thoroughfare. The corpse is obviously intended as a warning and death-omen to those who would dare challenge the state’s contraption, a flagrant practice of humiliation meant to showcase the vulnerability/mortality of its enemies, and one that embeds itself in the public consciousness by virtue of its multivalenced sensory assault: the visual horror of deteriorating skin, half-ripped apart by time or scavenger beasts; the auditory barrage of shrieking passersby, the rustle of the clamoring ones who gasp in negative astonishment, the disturbing sound of the wind as it strikes his frame and clothes; the natural stench it exudes beneath the sun; and last, the unreconciled question of the final sensory prism—that of touch—for who would set hands on the fallen in such a ghastly condition? It is this grotesque display that motivates Akhavan to compose the lament, at once a requiem and supplication for closure to the unfinished business at hand: that “our dear martyr’s body is left unburied.”4 Note, however, that the author does not hesitate (even while engaged in a subtle request for mercy) to uphold the status of the killed revolutionary as that of a “martyr” (thus perpetuating its sacred resonance), while simultaneously taking sides by claiming the broken cadaver as “our dear martyr’s body.” From this same beginning stanza, Akhavan then proceeds to shower the carcass with varied semblances of pride and affection (“noble warrior,” “crusader of our cause,” “leader of our host”) as a covert mockery of court poetics (panegyrics and hagiographies) typically aimed to elevate, idealize, or deify the king. Here the grand metaphorical outpouring reserved for the throne is redirected toward the lowest rung of the shattered and outcast corpse of the rebel, a defiant reversal of the politics of language that steals a certain privileged textual legacy and endows the accursed, the unforgiven, and the despised with its inheritance. This is certainly a pivotal figurative and expressive gesture on the part of Akhavan, to displace the custom of artificial monumentality, but not strong enough to override the visceral materiality of the problem before him: the actual flesh-andblood remains of a man left to disintegrate gradually on a street corner.

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This incremental perishing, this circus of putrefaction, is a defilement of the worst order: for the poetic figure, it is a matter of ontological dishonor that supersedes the question of ideology; he intervenes not out of any genuine interest in the dichotomized struggles of the day, but presumably as the formidable guardian of a more eternal code that must contest the fact that “ours are evil days.”5 And still, it is not what one might think: this poetic accent hearkens not to a universal system of ethics, nor is the condemnation of this wicked act some form of moral or metaphysical judgment, nor is it even the attempted resurrection of a cultural purity or nationalistic category of justice. All of these metanarratives miss the target of Akhavan’s incision, for his task is far more simple and precise: to protect the domain of radical individuality, and thus to remind that the decaying body (now past the outer threshold of death) must be treated not as an ideological archetype but rather as a singular artifact of a being-oncein-the-world. It is a matter of humanity-turning-inhumanity at the most miniscule level: that of the finite body of a man whose dying has been viciously stretched toward some monstrous prolongation of the undead (approaching boundaries of the defunct and invalid). And it must be overturned, without exception. No doubt, there is a commanding tonality guiding the poetic voice here, one that navigates the overlapping borders of fatalism, imperative, and inevitability (this must be done, and one must fear what he is saying). The lingering question for us now, then, is from where this certainty derives itself; from which hidden vantage of overwhelming force within the program of modernity does the poet entitle himself to speak in such explicit ways, to stare directly into the eyes of power and make concrete demands? Across such fragile tightropes, why would the ruling class not simply neglect the poetic interference, continuing to exercise its malevolence unchecked? What are the sealed repercussions of ignoring the transmission of this literary message, and can the crowned one afford indifference when it calls forward? Is the artistic charge a mere disguise of influence and supremacy, or is the firmness of its articulation sanctioned by some dominant elsewhere or otherworldliness? Does the poetic consciousness believe itself of an elite unknown rank, a caliber that can somehow exert its own staggering waves of pressure against the monolith? If so, if it is not just some massive bluff, then what unmapped reservoir of conviction makes this speech-act possible, one through which the writer emerges in the midst of urban chaos to settle the tipping scales of indecency, defend the overwrought populace, confront the offending source of the event, and recover the discarded bodies of the forsaken?

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What we have for evidence is the final verse of this piece, in which one must observe the lament’s quick metamorphosis from its mournful and tragic origins to a more hardened position of the ultimatum. To this amount, Akhavan does not contend with the facticity of how things have turned out—the immediate present belongs to the king, his stranglehold regained in excessive proportion, and he confirms this in the shell of a formalized salute: “Today we are broken, and we are weary / and instead of us you are the victors / may this defeat and this victory be wholesome to you.”6 Beyond this, the poetic figure goes even as far as to acknowledge the terms of their vanquishing and its necessary consequences— capture, torture, pillage, and plunder—all of which he grants are “yours by might,” supported again by the incantation “may it be wholesome.” Indeed, the banality of this contextualized situation proves irrelevant to Akhavan (most travesties are interchangeable at a certain level); sociopolitical discourses either bore or aggravate him, and the transient historical specificity of a decade’s turmoil only demeans his greater urgency (there are more vast experiential stakes in play here). Nor is the poet asking for anything nearing complete restitution, for the aftermath of this afflicted circumstance is clear enough: once lifted from the street and removed from sight, the rebel’s body will still be met with yet another misfortune, piled into some anonymous grave, without inscriptions or markers (forever the unnamable one). This notwithstanding, he must demarcate the parameters of the unacceptable. And so it is the muscularity of the concluding utterance— “but at least bury this noble body”—that wrests the event into nakedness once again, beyond its mythological or paradigmatic value as an act of punishment and subjugation and straight into the mouth of bare death (where for some reason the poet alone can inhabit an aggressive position). One should not confuse the idiomatic inflection: this is not the transcendent wisdom of the sage or the diplomatic response of the interlocutor; this has nothing to do with truth-telling or equal dialogue, but rather manifests the insistent rasp of the one who has earned the station to say “no more of this.” It is no longer a petition or negotiation but rather an order: he speaks in the leader’s tongue of directives and mandates when things have fallen apart; he is most persuasive when existence is at its most ragged. Inexplicably, this is the nexus of his expertise and sensitivity, amid the storyteller’s intimate relation to impermanence and destruction, ratifying his slow ascent to a countercurrent of power through which he aims an irrefutable decree at the supposed progenitor of all decrees (the king)—“but at least bury this noble body”—and therein proving some-

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thing once and for all: that when the urban space is reduced to its zero degree of rubble, debris, and wreckage (the wasteland city), it is the poetic subject who holds surpassing license over the destiny of this non-soil.

Baraheni’s Reversal: The Chronicle of the Urban Prison It is well known that, throughout the decades from 1952 to 1979, the Pahlavi monarchy would embark on an even more sinister version of authoritarian regimentation, to the extent of devising a nefarious secret police organization by the name of SAVAK,7 which at once responded to and fueled a striking development in the political consciousness of the urban centers. In effect, whereas the years leading up to the Mossadegh affair had essentially dispatched all resistance narratives to one of two competing camps—that of the constitutional democratic enclave of Mossadegh’s National Front or the emergent communist wing of the Tudeh Party—the subsequent period would bear witness to a new shape of insurgency. Rather than remain fastened to the exclusive pyramidal grip of the old subversive associations, this rising generation would instead break into countless subfactions, splinter groups, and minor movements, and each with their own slight variations on Islamist, Marxist, anarchist, and third worldist ideological principles. Centralization, hierarchy, and indoctrination gave way to multiplicity, machinic assemblage, and chronic reinvention, and so this molecularization of revolutionary practice along increasingly compartmentalized lines—whether theological, militant, intellectual, or vanguardist—resulted in a fascinating paradox of concurrent proliferation and cellularity (to widen the spectrum by growing smaller). Stated simply, the revolutionary threat would expand its scope through horizontal fragmentations and branchings, enlisting the format of more tightened sectarian models that could spread while intensifying the members’ sense of devotion, accountability, and even fanaticism. In the face of this labyrinthine evolution of the rebel form, whereby an ever-unraveling and yet ever-crystallizing collection of cadres would form a dangerous circulatory network, maneuvering with the speed, stealth, and mutability of a contagion, the state found itself with but one drastic antidote: the transferal of the urban reality into an all-encompassing prison camp. In the wake of these guerrilla deviations and offshoots of resistance, and the retaliatory crackdown of the regime, which now used the SAVAK to infiltrate such contentious blocs, honing its own methodologies of

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espionage by inviting, compelling, or extorting civilians to participate in the exposure and entrapment of their fellow citizens, the function of the poetic imagination would also take on a whole new significance. It is thus within Reza Baraheni’s “An Epic in Reverse” that we find a meticulous catalog of the four key components at work in generating the totalitarian ether of the 1960s and the 1970s, including: imperceptible misery, carnivalesque power, martial law, and literary vulgarity. In the first instance—that of imperceptible misery—Baraheni provides an outlawed map of the capital city as one divided along an architectonics of quarantine. Under the towers and columns of a hypothetical cosmopolitan utopia in northern Tehran, one that would flaunt the most opulent signs of modernity, there were of course the forgotten vicinities, the segregated southern quarters (ironically nicknamed “New City”) that formed their own mosaic of squalor. Districts of man-made plague, where unwanted traits would find themselves entombed, left to scrounge and wallow within their own toxic patterns (prostitution, addiction, theft, rape, apathy, and murder). According to the regime’s mentality of downward stratification, such were the neighborhoods of stigma, filth, and backwardness, where the wretched of the earth continued their supposed emulations of some hybrid of animality and criminality. And so the poet delineates these locations of unseen agony, stationed “at the end of the road we had chosen,” so that we might “look at the ditches and trenches” and view “the heads of birds” and “the thin arms of ghetto children severed from their lean bodies.”8 In this light, the sprawling panorama of ditches and trenches constitutes the dark underside of the urban space, its carving apart into pockets of relative paradise and inferno, luxury and dispossession, as the negative remainders of progress find themselves discreetly poured into the destitution and scarcity of the slum. But then the poetic voice goes further, beyond an abstract diagnosis of class inequalities and into the more affectively charged image of his own father’s death—“my brother and I lifted the shrouded body of our father, one of us on either side and slowly we lowered the body into the deep graves of Vadiyossalam”—and the subsequent sentencing of his mother to a beggar’s life: “Mother had put on her veil and was begging in Turkish in the royal road of the Shah and the Queen . . . My brother was telling passers-by in Persian ‘Pity this poor woman, her husband has just died and she’s delirious’ / And my sister gathered the small yellow coins falling on the ground like the dry leaves of late autumn.”9 Neither does this procedure of quiet deprivation simply end here, for it must reach its apex in the image of the starved vagrant-child, his near-skeletal torso and flailing

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emaciated limbs, as he rifles through trash for sustenance. Baraheni writes: “We would wait in front of wine houses for the scraps to be dumped in the garbage then dive headfirst into the trash cans so like starving dogs only our feet showed. Pulled out we smelled like corpses just yanked out of debris.”10 These scouring ones are the unintended bastard offspring of the modern city itself—banished, distanced, barricaded, unclaimed, exiled on the inside of things, the victims of a ransacked existence—and whose many anthems of orphanhood and abjection do nothing but confirm their status as lost causes. Meanwhile, at a far cry from such unclean alleyways and their adolescent dregs, the other half of the dialectical game is being played on the opposite side of the capital city, and hence transporting us before the flashes of carnivalesque power which Baraheni delights in ridiculing. More exactly, these satirical elements of the poem refer to the Shah’s neurotic reauthentication of his reign through inexorable parades, celebrations, and ceremonies. As a consequence, one of the intriguing factors of the experience of urban violence in this historical phase is the absolute inundation of the everyday with sycophantic indulgences of the dynasty. These circus-like processions were attended by the regime’s aristocratic servants and continuously streamed across the public squares, courtyards, ancient monuments, and palaces, as fortifying simulations of dictatorial invincibility. Thus we encounter the following vitriolic depiction by Baraheni: “The Shah and the Queen and their ministers would come and pass . . . The dogs in the square synchronized their steps with the heavy beat of the military march and rabid cats applauded.”11 It is a perceptual violation at work here, a barrage of dogmatic images of stability, smoothness, and unity, a merciless propaganda-campaign that tramples the psychic calm of the populace and forces them to nod in the direction of such well-staged demonstrations of the immaculate. Symbolic infestation. And still, what proves most captivating is the countereffect of disillusionment that such contrived feasts and banquets would actually induce, that is, the repulsive rather than attractive outcome of this overkill: for what is clear in Baraheni’s tone of contempt, derision, and scorn is that the state’s superficial veneer of perfection was but an abusive caricature of strength; rather than valorize it abraded interest, rather than mesmerize it chipped away at the patience of the beholder. Beneath the thin parodic blanket of such displays—their rampant ornamentation, extravagance, and garishness—was the subterranean world of coercion, which revealed the true face of the sovereign. Despite whatever smokescreens of incorruptibility and obligatory references to

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Enlightenment principles of freedom, justice, and human rights (themselves always just acidic jargons of massacre, whether in the East or West), there remained the clandestine yet transparent fact of martial law. Much like the dualistic indeterminacy and overdeterminism of death itself—that is, that one never knows when or where or how it will happen, and yet fully aware that it will happen, that it comes for all without amnesty or escape—so did the capital city in this time period find itself overrun with its own immanent sense of the eventual. Elliptical tyranny. Adaptations of fake randomness. Specifically, one faced the ever-present potentiality/likelihood of intrusion, a normalized state of emergency through which the secret police would unfold its tactics of roundups, interrogations, unannounced home visits and searches, detainments (without trial of course), and mock executions. Such is the inquisitional air beneath which Reza Baraheni then concludes his poem, now taken from his house with his wife watching helplessly, blindfolded, and driven to Evin prison to be mutilated and locked away in solitary confinement for 102 days: “And then we’d suddenly awake with the breaking of the door falling of the ladder opening of window the scattering of books the shining of weapons and in the car a hand put the black blindfold on our eyes. A lake of cold sweat—fear—drowned us. We would be driven to the dungeons then to the torture chambers.”12 Much resembling those survivors of concentration camps who would resurface from the war only to discover that the entire world had become the camp, so does this poetic consciousness arrive at a similar startling realization in the aftermath of his excursion to the jails: namely, that Evin prison was not some metaphoric echo or microcosmic appendage of the country, but rather the other way around. Iran itself had become Evin, in all its scathing universality And so, the question poses itself: 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 that one withstands in that unmentionable room, for this alone can accommodate the obscenity of the engulfing moment. This is why the author’s texts are littered with base material allusions to “dead ants float[ing] in the bile and watery blood,”13 “metallic pricks,”14 “pimps” and “whore[s],”15 and scared men who “pissed [their] pants”16 before the firing squad. For the most part, this gutterdialect serves two initiatives: (1) to unveil the degradation and depravity

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of power itself, to show it as unbeautiful and disgusting in its most nude form; and (2) to wage some reciprocal hate against the misdealings of power, not to plead, explain, or supplicate with soft words but rather to maximize the rawness of what is happening, to exploit swearing as a kind of trigger and antihandcuffing, to spit back the profane evocation that at least takes one across the razor’s edge of the improper, the coarsened, and the tasteless. The pure necessity of the slur . . . drawn out from the lungs, and then the trachea, at the outer frontiers of pain. After all, this is where one stands (in defamation).

Shamlu’s Dead-End: The Apocalyptic Upheaval of the City 1979—’81. We find ourselves in the throes of a new iteration of revolutionary terror, as the millennial institution of kingship is overthrown by the rise of a millenarian clerical establishment that foresees self-congregating apocalyptic signs everywhere it turns, and which looks to engrave this feverish certainty across every corridor of the urban reality. This is no longer the conservative disposition of an ordained Shah seeking to keep his dominion, but rather the vengeful return of a long-suppressed counterabsolutism that has been waiting anxiously for its chance to unleash, swarm, and envelop a national destiny in its now-seething ideology. This is no longer the dilemma of a monopolistic power-configuration trying to save itself from losing ground but rather the electric pulsation of a movement hungering to gain ground (an ascendant trajectory). And with it, the constellation of violent tendencies itself changes: for we are no longer in the hands of the formulaic technocracy of the SAVAK and its scientific approach to persecution, extraction, and confession, but rather the unpredictable and insatiate arc to extremity of a paramilitary coalition known as the Pasdaran (the Guardians). These are the entranced ones who, forever swathed in the robes of their quasi-worshiped charismatic seer and other religious elders, will bring the celestial abstractions of a faith crashing down into tangible existence; they are the ones who must sew, lash, and brand their righteous-ecstatic modalities into awesome materiality (they must make contact, and therein gel deliverance and damnation). To their restless minds, the continuum of time and space itself has opened in adoration, bringing forward a split-second window that nevertheless contains the eternal, and with it the second innocence of their creed. The prophetic, the messianic, the inspired, the sacred itself, have all become relevant

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vocabularies again. And they, in turn, are the sacrificial practitioners of its delirium, its one dream of immensity, conducting a transaction with some ruinous version of the sublime. Ahmad Shamlu is among the few poetic luminaries who would stare down such formations, meeting them at the farthest points of their kinetic possibility, where nooses lined the city’s old gathering-places and innumerable walls bore the stains of someone’s frame turned inside-out by bullets (heaven-soaked), and where the minions still hunt opportunistically for problematic souls in need of conversion by flame. This is the magical aspect of the political, wherein the prosecution of each traitor enables the iconization of the supreme leader; this is the carnal aspect of the spiritual, wherein the cannibalization of each nonbeliever enables a quest for immortal reward. In this way, the poet steers one into the logic of their reckoning hour, nowhere more palpably than in his piece titled “In This Dead-End,” a record of draconian trespass and fright in which the capital city marks the stage for the utter finality of Man and God. Tehran becomes this escalating dead-end, the urban space fully imprinted with the stern faces of clerics now consolidating their republic, though it is not them with whom the poet must do business but rather their transfixed intermediaries, themselves nothing more than the obsessive incarnations of an idea-becoming-death-rattle. We can commence our textual analysis of “In This Dead-End” with the recognition of a certain hovering vein of unfamiliarity, one that is carried through by Shamlu’s eerie refrain of the line “these are strange times, darling.” It is also a work that showcases an unprecedented genre, for while Shamlu’s avant-gardism had always led him to experiment with rotating styles of folkloric ballads, rebel anthems, existential meditations, doomsday rants, elegiac orations, and children’s lullabies, here they all seem to coalesce into the singular blast of an account of a devastated urban space that moves somewhere between legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, and war cry. No doubt, this complicated layering of techniques is itself a response to an Islamic revolutionary ideology that had enlisted its own sorts of alchemy and amalgamation, each proclamation from above comprising a lethal consortium of drives that fused the most savage, the most medieval, the most modern, and the most postmodern. If there is a defamiliarization of the capital city—whereby the more one walks through it, the more it takes on a foreign disposition—then it is not the obscurity caused by an absence of meaning but rather by the overdose of meaning. There is no famine behind this strand of incomprehensibility (it is not unclear); instead, there is an oversaturation of

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the apparent (too much lucidity), the blindness caused by looking into four suns, prompting Shamlu to begin with the following warning: “They smell your breath. You better not have said, ‘I love you.’ They smell your heart. These are strange times, darling . . .”19 This is the hideous climax of all claims to enlightenment: an epoch of permanent surveillance, where no action goes unwatched, no fantasy allowed its privacy, concealment, or fondness for secrecy and dissimulation, but rather must be dragged into the glare of knowing. This is why Shamlu goes even further in his counsel, telling the reader, “Do not risk a thought.”18 What makes things precarious, unruly, and enigmatic here, then, is the unusual asphyxiating experience of being completely seized beneath the density of a revelatory vision (no way out), one that colonizes the urban space by obsolescing and exterminating chance itself (the erasure of perplexity). There is no actual panic (except at the void of panic): one sees all too well amid these translucent clouds of rhetoric and enforcement. They are always there (never so sporadic), waiting in ambush (the unwavering). One can count on this; nothing is incidental anymore (there is no wager, luck, or accident to entertain hope); everything is to be expected (with or without consent). As a result, the bad mood that Shamlu conjures throughout “In This Dead-End” should not be mistaken for a fear of the sudden entrance of the guardians into the citizen’s home; one cannot import a hermeneutics of surprise in such straits (all is porous, forfeited, and long gone by). Rather it is the ultra-alertness and insomnia of pure anticipation, a calculus of assurance that they are coming, to the extent that the home is already an occupied realm (the interval of delay helps nothing in the end). The only suggestion of the poet here, in the wake of grim futility, is to attempt to shield the last remaining items of worth from the human allegory—love, light, joy, and God (note these heretical waters of advising that “we had better hide God in the closet”19 from a Shi’a theocracy)—so as to merely buy a few lingering minutes with them before their gradual confiscation. What was once most precious has become most unsafe, such that all schemes of evasion, deflection, camouflage, masking, covering, and ciphering will be decoded and broken in due time (the treasured objects are ripe for abduction). What is more, those who would screen and withhold such banned articles will be subjected to tremendous testing, thus leading us through the hallways of the next thematic juncture in this poetic text: the bloodlust of “the they.” Indeed, these are the more excruciating passages of Shamlu’s work, as he interprets the outlook of a regime that replenishes itself through eliminations and which must hazard the people’s skin in the name of

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demanding etherealities. He speaks, in particular, of the gruesome ways in which they stalk their targets, prey on their frailties, and rob the belongings of cultural memory only so as to raze them, and in that incinerationreflex proving their one main axiom: that everything is susceptible to appropriation (even the jugular vein). Shamlu writes, with an acute focus on the bizarre physicality of their expedition, that “they flog love at the roadblock.”20 He writes that “in this crooked dead end and twisting chill, they feed the fire with the kindling of song and poetry.”21 He writes that “he who knocks on the door at midnight has come to kill the light.”22 He writes that “those there are butchers stationed at the crossroads with bloody clubs and cleavers.”23 He writes many things in many ways so as to point back to this one recurring yet novel term—bloodlust; for this designation escorts us into an entirely new stratum of power: no longer the Shah’s infatuation with some glorified image maintained through undercover practices of sadism that were always denied, for sadism itself is a negative force of resentment aligned less with pleasure than with shame, but rather a devouring confederation that has acquired a true sensual taste for its own genocidal inclinations, that finds pathological exhilaration in the spillage and coursing of interiority into exteriority, the unstringing of the arteries, and looks with excitation to sink its fangs into the next forbidden one. No longer the semineutral assassins that Baraheni described— cold, discreet, stoic, always clothed in suits and high titles, distributing hurt in closed quarters, and never speaking the names of the slaughtered. No, these are different creatures altogether: the more cataclysmic progeny of affirmation (the guiltless, the unflinching, the impassioned), who do their killings in the open aisles of the capital, before the crowds, mosques, and statues, wherever and whenever, as orgiastic consummations of desire. A vampiric breed of hegemony—and it is not too much to speak of thrill and wonderment in this forum. The cityscape thereby becomes a vortex spun in cycles of gratification and renewed thirst, which is why Shamlu concludes “In This Dead-End” with a portrait of occult intoxication—“canaries barbecued on a fire of lilies and jasmine, these are strange times, darling . . . Satan drunk with victory sits at our funeral feast”24—for the Iranian metropolis of this revolutionary interlude is in fact the marketplace for a cosmological commerce of the most impulsive order. For certain, there is exultation in every Armageddon. Evil, as this poet summons the concept, is therefore not merely defined as the will to demolition: it is the impenetrable rapture in the will to demolition. It is the euphoric reddening of the eyes of the partisan amid the inhalation of the other’s strength to go on living.

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The Unparalleled Subject: When the Poet Leaves the City Glowing Hence one is compelled to ask: Does writing have a redemptive function when it transpires in such a tremulous cityscape? The answer is no, but more importantly this inquest already begins from the wrong footing, since it assumes a pale humanist longing whereby the author would necessarily venture to rescue something profound from such states of dejection. No, this is not the case here, and so let us speak honestly—that at this lowest knot of a homeland’s journey, the poetic figure emerges once again with but one watchword on the lips: conflagration. Middle Eastern aesthetics has been pushed too far to do otherwise, and so 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 (and they welcome this sin on their record). Rest assured that this makes them neither a collaborator with nor the pure adversary of the detrimental forces that we have met in this piece: instead, they are the third apotheosis of such malice and damage, the destination of a turbulent pathway. And why should we expect anything less than this grave fulfillment of the error? After all this, why would the poetic figure not take the final share of intolerability and disconsolation, the burden of cumulative angers, to commandeer the reins and make language unstoppable in the advancement of the limit? To remind ourselves, we have observed a doubled-edged equation thus far, one of sparring existential concoctions: under the Pahlavi monarchy, the administrator of urban violence was part amateur actor, part pseudo-scholar, part civil servant, and part serial killer; under Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic government, the administrator of urban violence was part vigilante, part crusader, part cult member, and part thug. Counter-intuitively, the contemporary Iranian poet is not the radical negation of these features but rather their composite and exacerbation (while adding some unseen factors to the alloy as well): in short, he is the centrifuge of perilous ontologies. And by extension, he must epitomize the last unequivocal administrator of urban violence (heralding extinction itself). Literary consciousness thus becomes the vise that compresses such menacing historical emanations into what is here called the unparalleled subject, a peerless figure at once primal and futuristic, reviled and exalted, who must slam itself against the defect of existence, emit the closing convulsion, and verify (for no one’s sake) the elapsing of a world. The human race has become a liability, a species of unhealed isomorphic flaws, and thus bestowing on the author a signed warrant to reconquest and discontinuation: that is, the arresting of even planetary

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motion. Three axes of hyper-subjective positioning, excavated once more from the books of the three trusted instigators of this chapter, are enough to place the discussion at rest: 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. (Akhavan)25 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. (Baraheni)26 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. (Shamlu)27 Each passage beckons toward a harmful eloquence, and with it a flair for self-irradiation—yes, we have seen self-immolation and suicide-bombing find their way back recently into the folds of the Middle Eastern politicalcultural imagination, and with troubling though good reason, for we have perhaps tripped into the next lair of insurrectional designs, where some feel they must now embody the grievance. The stratospheric exemption that permits no exemption. Admittedly, we are at a far distance from Western thought with its prolonged moral rigidity, one that still seeks a renovated cosmopolitanism as remedy to the injustices of the cityscape in modernity. Jacques Derrida, in response to the totalitarian breaches of an episteme, has not only called for an ethical suspension of the subject in ambiguity but also recommends a collective injunction toward hospitality: “For is it not the case that cosmopolitanism has something to do either with all the cities or with all the states of the world? . . . They must, if they are to succeed in so doing, make an audacious call for a genuine innovation in the history of the right to asylum or the duty to hospitality.”28 In the maladjusted eyes of the Iranian poets, however, these are but temporary naive deferrals of an unavoidable momentum, for there is a well-documented etymological link between the host and hostility (which they uphold at all costs and

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against all guests). This is not to say that they elide the strategic vagueness of this postmodern sensibility, but in fact elicit the fifth step beyond: for they have taken the precepts of doubt, disjuncture, slippage, impossibility, and infinity, and channeled them into a single jolt of disequilibrium, an explosive stance and decisive incident of the will, leveled from the peripheries in verses of steel and arson. To fight for the absolute failure. No, they are not subsumed by some delusion of infallibility but rather act in ardent service of the mistake (as the divulgence of its abyss). This is why the peculiar deed must fall to them, for only the creative mind can spoil creation (note that this is the furthest repercussion of the so-called crisis of representation: to usher in the unspeakable, the poisonous word, and thereby bring about the extinguishing). Hardship. Ordeal. Slander. Breathlessness. Their versatility and magnitude alone can compose the fitting words of obliteration, the fault lines of the human city that has forecast its own eruption and abandonment long ago, these three unparalleled poetic subjects, who have seen the inside of the prison and thus the outside of being, and now rally their kind to reap the overzealous. The ethos of the caretaker has since vanished, and with it an alternative volition comes to pass, one that shoulders and then purges the mania of several centuries.

Chapter 4

Will to Chaos Iranian Avant-Garde Literature and Western Thought

At this cumulative instant, yet another task remains: to sketch the undergrounds of the Iranian avant-garde in terms of the chaotic atmosphere that it enables, and then to place this insurmountable tendency in conversation with contemporary theory on a more global scale that at once binds and separates the East-West axis. The following section therefore intends to cast open the remaining planes and corridors of a chaos-consciousness that one finds thriving in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, with no particular end in sight, by abandoning transcendent abstractions and restoring it to the language of an annihilative venture. To do this, Hedayat’s inventiveness will be placed into close traction with the history of Continental thought, a single carefully extracted quote at the outset of each section enough to take on an entire lineage. Let them all answer, then, to but one challenger from the mutinous camps of the Eastern postmodern.1

Chaos as Ahistorical: Beyond the Ontological, Beyond the Phenomenological I must tell my story, but I am not sure at what point to start. Life is nothing but a fiction, a mere story . . . It is as though [my life] had been spent in some frigid zone and in eternal darkness while all the time within me burned a flame which consumed me as the flame consumes the candle.2 —Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl

If an Eastern poetic mask is increasingly synonymous with the concept of chaos, then one might assume sub-conceptually that a chaos-consciousness must exist without history (slow-motion rancor). In fact, this work places forward the argument that chaotic experience, in its assault against

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essence, Being, and structure, lies beyond all historical definition, beyond temporal-spatial specificity, remaining disoriented in the service of a lasting nonstate. Thus, the question as to how the proposition of an ahistorical mode of supra-consciousness would administer the relationship between subjectivity and history approaches its answer in the fundamental premise that it would attempt to stand beyond the parameters of either construct, such that these elder contexts would find themselves entirely desanctified of any operational influence by virtue of a precise abandonment. Nevertheless, both the philosophical underpinnings and ultimate implications of this dual gesture against history and subjectivity as mutually reinforcing delusions of “the real” first necessitate a broader overview of prior theoretical positions on the matter, revealing a legacy of thought that will be implicitly opposed by the content of certain figures from the continental and Middle Eastern front. To begin with, one might turn to Schopenhauer’s originary depiction of existence as a reckless collision of transience and nonsensibility, a movement ever bending toward limitlessness: “Our existence has no foundation on which to rest except the transient present. Thus its form is essentially unceasing motion, without any possibility of that repose which we continually strive after . . . where no stability of any kind, no enduring state is possible, where everything is involved in restless change and confusion and keeps itself on its tightrope only by continually striding forward.”3 In his aversion to this presumed tyranny of an evasive present, Schopenhauer then (as a counterbalance) forwards the postulate of art’s inherent nonrelation to the circumstances of history, which is to say that already one can uncover within The World as Will and Representation a dramatic dissociation of the aesthetic from the historical. In this classically pessimistic stance, Schopenhauer seeks to establish a self-perpetuating dichotomy between history and art, perceiving the former as the space of the will’s vicious reign over existence, wrenching humanity into despair, ignorance, meaninglessness, and savage cruelty, while the latter is upheld as neither a redemptive corrective to the barbarism of the will (which fully dominates the historical moment), nor as a weapon by which one might attempt to overthrow it. Rather, the aesthetic remains a temporary oasis, the impermanent restoration of a quasi-metaphysical consolation, an ever-subsiding space of escape that cannot bring retribution or deliverance from the profanity of history yet instead offers a rare, fleeting opportunity to reimagine existence as it potentially could have been (but never will be): “If, however, the individual will sets its associated power of imagination free for a while, and for once releases it entirely from the service for which it was made and exists, so that it abandons the tending

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of the will or of the individual person which alone is its natural theme and thus its regular occupation, and yet does not cease to be energetically active or to extend to their fullest extent its powers of perceptivity, then it will forthwith become completely objective.”4 At this measure, the artistic deconstitution/reconstitution of subjectivity as an objective, ideal state would already in and of itself comprise an act of treason against the historical constitution of the subject, echoing Kafka’s own contention that art rests “outside the world.”5 Hence, within Schopenhauer’s own archetype there persists a philosophical precept to which the articulation of the chaotic here will itself return, though in quite different form: the possibility of the artwork to retain its force of autonomy vis-à-vis its historical surroundings, remaining encompassed but never taken hostage, and as such providing a realm of agency beyond the confines of the historical continuum. Ultimately, however, this inquiry into the chaotic will revoke the transcendent element from Schopenhauer’s rendering of the aesthetic precisely by reaffirming the alliance of the artistic imagination with an existential nonstate, and therein reengaging the world not as an objective perception yet as an invasive experience of the unreal. From here, one might then consider the reverse Hegelian paradigm of a complete collapse of subjectivity with history—that is, a pure interface whereby the fulfillment of the latter must posit itself as a coterminous event alongside the achievement of absolute knowledge, such that consciousness of the historical moment and the inevitability of its self-mediating telos in turn brings to fruition the highest understanding of the Spirit’s place within the world: “Self-consciousness which, on the whole, knows itself to be reality, has its object in its own self, but as an object which initially is merely for self-consciousness, and does not as yet possess [objective] being which confronts it as a reality other than its own.”6 Self-realization, therefore, as evidenced by the Hegelian schema articulated in The Phenomenology of Spirit and its ensuing explorations of the master-slave complex and the labor of the negative within dialectical thinking, must occur in sync with the forecast of one’s larger station within the unfolding of the world-historical process. At this stage, having borne witness to the grand ascendancy of Reason, consciousness unlocks the means to its own freedom alongside the culmination of the historical, setting the stage for a drastic redefinition of the terms of subjectivity (now itself dialectically sublated/elevated to the level of a systematic, logical-scientific and universalized presence): “The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process . . . On

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the one hand, Reason is the substance of the universe, that by which and in which all reality has its being and subsistence. On the other hand, it is the Infinite Energy of the Universe . . . the infinite complex of things, their entire Essence and their Truth.”7 And so, as a converse postulation to Schopenhauer’s search for minimal nonredemptive agency within the detached remission of the aesthetic, the Hegelian model disallows the possibility that subjectivity could attain its goal by any avenue other than that of History itself. And yet, much like a Kantian sublimity that remains unbending as “a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason,”8 even Hegel would (in an uncharacteristic instant) acknowledge the saturating presence of a force beyond his own architectonics of historical perfection, allowing for a recognition, however resistant, of the chaotic exception that plagues his every rule: This descent into dark regions where nothing reveals itself to be fixed, definite, and certain, where glimmerings of light flash everywhere but, flanked by abysses, are rather darkened in their brightness and led astray by the environment, casting false reflections far more than illumination. Each beginning of every path breaks off again and runs into the indefinite, loses itself, and wrests us away from our purpose and direction. From my own experience I know this mood of the soul, or rather of reason, which arises when it has finally made its way with interest and hunches into a chaos of appearances and, though inwardly sure of the goal, has not yet worked through them to clarity, and a detailed grasp of the whole.9 In a nowhere-zone between desolation and the everything, where function and orientation are stripped bare before a tirade of experiential anarchy, where the myth of subjectivity itself is left defenseless against its own unreality, where the control of Reason comes undone and where Being is compelled to relinquish its own claim to unity . . . it is here that this project will attempt to dwell. Proceeding onward, it is in this same Hegelian vein that one might then try to approach the Heideggerian call for Dasein’s interminable turn toward an authentic historicity. In effect, Heidegger’s unwavering insistence on the idea of the “repetition of the archaic” as the temporal-ontological gateway into Dasein’s emancipation of the “decisive moment” shows his

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deep attention to the connection between history and subjectivity. As a preliminary note, Heidegger’s firm belief that one’s “thrownness” into the technologized functioning of “the they” (das Man) proves an unavoidable feature of one’s “Being-in-the-world,: such that the “projection” toward one’s possibilities is always to be understood against the draped curtain of one’s relation to the historical specificity of the individual’s One (i.e., one’s world, the materiality of one’s existential condition), reveals the predominance that historical circumstance commands within the workings of “authenticity.” In short, there is no way out from one’s confrontation with a predetermined set of limitations, and thus no envisioning of an ontological modality that can propel itself beyond its immediate historical space. As a result, Dasein’s eventual realization cannot derive itself from a misplaced desire to surpass the barriers of historical consciousness, but rather must work within this preconceived framework in order to modify its stance within the world. It is in this regard that Heidegger attempts to then make history work to the benefit of Being by recasting the concept of “heritage” as that which enables one to criticize the present and thereby commence the journey toward “authentic destiny,” seizing on the past as that which must be siphoned into a unifying future: “The way the present is rooted in the future and in the having-been is the existential and temporal condition of the possibility that what is projected in circumspect understanding can be brought nearer in a making present in such a way that the present must adapt itself to what is encountered in the horizon of awaiting retention.”10 Here the present must be stripped of its hierarchical preeminence as a time-within-itself and instead brought back into communion with the other dimensions of temporality, for Dasein would then turn back to analyze those possibilities of self-interpretation made available to it by historical legacy so as to make palpable a higher form of identity, one that can better negotiate its entanglement within the everyday while charting its course towards a historic “goal”: “[Dasein’s] own past—and this always means the past of its ‘generation’—is not something that follows along after Da-sein, but something which already goes ahead of it.”11 It is also at this phase, wherein one accepts and in fact manipulates one’s indebtedness to the particular configurations of a historical timespace in service of the oncoming, that Dasein abandons its insularity and self-enclosed disposition so as to embrace the “collective mission” of the communal body. Of course, this is not to say that the subject remains a neutral bystander in its own metamorphosis, but rather that the terms of the conversion are established beforehand; the task, therefore, lies not within an original reimagining of the future but in the selection of which

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historical knowledge will best suit that impending move toward the edifice of authenticity, cultivating an awareness that might disallow a perversion of the past and in turn a detraction or deviation from the future. Ultimately, this foundational intimacy with the historical culture of the epoche, by disclosing Being’s possibility at any given instant, allows one the power of orientation toward essence, creating a transhistorical linkage between the transmission of entrenched knowledge/experience and the realization of a futural consciousness . . . a process which is presumably bridged by the transformative event of the now, assuming, however, that Dasein is willing to break from the undifferentiated state of das Man via an encountering of finality that would catalyze the transition to a Being-toward-death. From this point onward, subjectivity is dethroned as a measure of coherence and guidance, withering beneath the epic onset of the totality embodied by authentic destiny. And as a final corollary within the Heideggerian account, one might leap from Being and Time to a later article titled “What Are Poets For?” so as to demonstrate the fact of Heidegger’s absorption of the aesthetic within the heretofore outlined schematic, endowing the artist with a paragonal significance in enacting “the turn” from out of the abyss in which humanity remains suspended, drastically shifting from the age of midnight to the dawning of authenticity. Here the poet (and by extension the artist) stands as the incarnation of history’s redemption, saving it from itself, and therein bringing into perfect totality the fusion of the Self, the aesthetic, and historical Being: “It is a necessary part of the poet’s nature that, before he can truly be a poet in such an age, the time’s destitution must have made the whole being and vocation of the poet a poetic question for him . . . Where that happens we may assume poets to exist who are on the way to the destiny of the world’s age.”12 Quite obviously, the drafting of an Eastern poetic mask within this project would challenge such mergers of the aesthetic with any redemptive/transcendental historical vision resembling the above excerpt, and instead will place the spheres of art and history into an antagonistic intercourse by virtue of the former’s alliance with a chaotic intensity beyond the constraints of ontological and phenomenological definition. An intriguing contention that at once stands in convergence and exemption to all such prior discussions is that of the Marxist reading of historical subjectivity, one which receives its classical elaboration in Marx’s The German Ideology. As an onslaught against the idealist propensity for abstraction, Marx’s writing here carries with it the intention of restoring humanity to its actual historicity by undoing the Hegelian retirement from “life as it is.” This resuscitation of the “true essence of man” can only occur

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in wresting thought away from the proto-phenomenological treatment of consciousness as an end in itself, anchoring it once more in the streets, a transfiguration of outlook through which the material world is then endowed with an irrefutable centrality: “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity.”13 Within the Marxian combination of positivism and humanism, it is clear that anything less than a materialist stance would cause humanity to betray the epochal advancement to which it is entitled, one that is grounded in strenuous corporeality, while furthermore wasting a chance at the revolutionary progression of consciousness and history (in simultaneity). As such, Marx inaugurates a critique by which any such regression into the privileging of the intellectual/philosophical over the material consigns itself to the service of the obscenity of the capitalist era, leading one back toward the trappings of what Lukacs later called the “phantom objectivity” of the commodity form. The objective for Marx, therefore, is to offer a curative approach to the question of historical existence that might allay humanity’s alienation with respect to its materiality, making relations of production and class strife visible once more and thus also forcing compositions of exploitation and domination into transparency, such that a legion emerges “from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness . . .”14 The logical consequence of this assessment by Marx is a mode of historical criticism that has since been termed dialectical materialism, and which for the primary purposes of this discussion can be said to have again placed subjectivity in a state of subservience to a larger “historical reality.” As a pertinent clarification, Althusser even goes as far within both his Lenin and Philosophy and his For Marx to claim that subjectivity itself has no true history, but only an illusory one, that it is in fact nothing more than a functionary of the ideological superstructure of bourgeois modernity consummated in the act of “interpellation” (whereby power first manufactures a conception of the Self that it can later subjugate through the surveillance techniques of the institution—and this of course being a precursor notion to Foucault’s own extraction of a theory of biopolitical discipline and the falsity of “the soul”). Though in these works Althusser tries to safeguard Marx by offering a quasi-apologetic recasting of the dialectic as that which does not necessarily condemn human agency to over-determination, he nonetheless maintains his predecessor’s

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emphasis on the supremacy of material history as the exclusive designator of consciousness, asserting in the end that subjectivity exists solely within the revolutionary progression of the prevailing modes of production (as the gateway into a utopian mode of species-being). Once again, however, the chaos-consciousness outlined within the poetic section of this work, though similarly blurring the delineation between interiority and exteriority, would effectively disband the Marxian hierarchy of true and false consciousness by virtue of its dissolution of all paradigms of historical “reality”; rather, it would seek the interlacing vines of experience, thought, and desire made sinuous only through an account of self and world as mythopoetic entities (willed immateriality). Transferring the theoretical gaze to Adorno, as the major adversary of Heideggerian ontology, one arrives at a similar decrying of the concept of subjectivity as in any way transcendentally independent of the logic of its own historical organicity (one is always just an allusion to the larger condition). For Adorno, the discourse of individuality within modernity operates as an accomplice to techniques of reification and the overall obfuscation of the culture industry, a phenomenon which he traces to the assimilation/execution of myth by instrumental reason. That being said, although Adorno virulently alleges in The Jargon of Authenticity that the Heideggerian encounter with Being merely allows for a distorted perception of how subjectivity mediates itself, he does venture to ascribe a largely similar role to the artwork as a reconciliatory entity vis-à-vis the actuality of the historical condition. To accomplish this, the aesthetic for Adorno must lend itself to a revolutionary hermeneutics adherent to critical reason, dialectically challenging the historical surface, and one that in turn embeds greater ambiguity in the social fabric so as to strip industrial society of what Marcuse termed its “one-dimensionality”: “The tension between what motivates art and art’s past circumscribes the socalled questions of aesthetic constitution. Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants. It is defined by relation to what it is not. The specifically artistic in art must be derived concretely from its other; that alone would fulfill the demands of a materialistic-dialectic aesthetics. Art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it has developed out of; its law of movement is its law of form.”15 In line with this framework of oppositionality, Adorno then endows the philosophical critic with an exclusive hold over the uncovering of art’s meaning, unwinding ideology by extracting the truth-content of the aesthetic and setting it against patterns of submergence (best expressed in his article on “Commitment”). Furthermore, it is the critic

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who, as the spokesperson of the radical historicity of the object, seeks to mediate subjectivity in terms domestic to the sufferings imposed by capital, bringing a heightened awareness of the iniquity of power to the masses by virtue of a piercing vision into the artwork’s message (decoding disenchantment). This notwithstanding, as he proposes in Negative Dialectics, the philosopher does not endeavor to reconcile the thesis-antithesis friction, for Adorno is forever wary not to fall into redemptive gestures, but he does somehow regard the aesthetic as that which retains an intimate connection to the dialectic, able to expose its inconsistencies and contradictions, and what is more to turn it against itself when necessary. This fact is of the utmost importance to Adorno and to the Frankfurt School at large: that subjectivity thrives in the decisive act of interpretation, one through which the ideological saturation of society finds itself unmasked and history is restored to its contestatory complexities (where art and history stand as undifferentiated arenas). As a digressional point, Sartre’s own What Is Literature? forwards a corresponding assumption as to the intersection of existential liberation, historical “engagement,” and artistic subjectivity by demanding a vibrant reconceptualization of the writing act as a praxis-based motioning toward futurity: “I reveal the situation by my very intention of changing it; I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it. I strike at its very heart, I transfix it, and I display it in full view; at present I dispose of it; with every word I utter, I involve myself a little more in the world, and by the same token I emerge from it a little more, since I go beyond it towards the future . . . The ‘committed’ writer knows that words are action.”16 And still, the aesthetic gestures of such figures as Hedayat and Nietzsche, forging a chaotic encryption soon to be explored, defy precisely that beckoning which both Adorno and Sartre uphold as indispensable by altogether discarding the search for a writing act tied to revolutionary desire, negational change, futural hope, and pseudosalvational intentionality. In keeping with this particular strand, one comes upon an aphoristic commentary of unequivocal gravity from Adorno’s Minima Moralia—“the coming extinction of art is pre-figured in the increasing impossibility of representing historical events”17—for here one is faced with the contention that art in its present condition has receded into a state of devastating incommunicability vis-à-vis historical reality, and thus by extension invalidating mimesis as a legitimate conceptual category. In accordance with this stance, the aesthetic, once a dramatic counter-inflection against the unindividuated consciousness of the age by virtue of its dialectical complexity and deep connection to the historicity of the object and

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mediation of the subject, has since forfeited its ability to speak to the material situation with which humanity is now confronted. Consequently, representation for Adorno risks becoming an inane farce, and with it the aesthetic enterprise falls in jeopardy of being relegated to an esoteric triviality through which the repressive structures of domination and exploitation and the discursive totalities of capitalist modernity might persist unchecked. Of course, this somewhat dystopic analysis of the artwork’s dissociation from any subversive or progressive social relevance takes place on several fronts: (1) the social body’s gravitational pull of consciousness into the unreflective drag of the collective trance, resulting in the invalidation of subjectivity as an autonomous classification; (2) the Enlightenment drive for mastery of the world through which instrumental reason elicits the neutralization of critical reason, and for which even the realm of artistic imagination does not remain unscathed; (3) the pseudorealism of the culture industry as a superstructural accomplice and simplifying/obfuscating mechanism of capitalist hegemony (one might look to “Television as Ideology” and the latter sections of Dialectic of Enlightenment for substantiation of this outlook); (4) the ensuing chasm between the possibility for an aesthetic depiction of reality and the objective truth of its operation. More than this, Adorno strives here to render obsolete and anachronistic the romantic conception of the artist as a creatively independent and existentially self-sufficient entity standing somewhere beyond the matrices of historical circumstance—rather, the artist is now left straddling a dual function, with each extreme embodying its own reactionary position. On the one hand, the artwork can struggle to engage directly with the moment and therefore find itself invariably entrapped by the artificial presentations and camouflages of the obscenity it challenges, leaving it to produce what is generally an epic (and hence unsophisticated) casting of the problem that ignores the underlying contrarieties, oppositional stresses, and irregularities in wild confusion beneath the surface (i.e., a form beholden to an excessive synchronicity that does not “permit the monstrosity of modern society to emerge in full clarity from the phenomena masking it”).18 Conversely, there is the mode of artistic expression that still clenches itself to the delusion of its distance from the everyday, reveling in the detached indifference, treating its creativity as an end in itself (“stuffing the extinct subject like a museum piece”).19 The first tendency, for whatever insurgent desires and intentions it carries, freezes the dialectic in a rigid back-and-forth of monolithic polarizations and exaggerated narratives of good and evil (perhaps best embodied for Adorno in the aggrandizements of Brechtian social realism), whereas the

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second impulse ventures desperately to resurrect the archaic phantom of sovereignty amid a world of unavoidable, mechanistic interconnections (as in some surrealist endeavors to transgress the borders of actuality through unsteadied sequestrations from existence “as it is”). In either instance, however, the artwork attests to a fictive template of freedom, clinging fast to the delusion of its righteous self-determination all the while “subjective freedom no longer exists,” except in such “stereotyped declamations.”20 Thus, the proposition of a mimetic intercourse between art and historical life is condemned to inevitable failure as the two spheres gradually drift apart into a state of incompatibility, the intricacies of the historical event either occluded or eluded by the aesthetic’s now hopeless venture to articulate itself against, within, or beyond the world. Certainly Adorno would himself overturn this assertion at least partially in his further writings on commitment and, above all else, in his elaborate structuring of an Aesthetic Theory, reinstating the artwork with a potentiality to enact socially pertinent change without falling vulnerable to a falsely utopian ethos. Undoubtedly, though, Adorno here brings a somewhat constrained gaze to the association of art and history; first and foremost, the presumed subservience of both to the politico-economic machine of ideological production evinces an affinity for totalization in its own right, leading into sweeping conclusions that disregard the very eye for complexity that he seems to call for at every turn—evidenced most transparently in his unabashed use of the universalizing abstraction of “humanity” and his detrimental reconfirmation, however revolted, of a world-historical process inaugurated by the alliance of Enlightenment epistemology and the commodity form. Building on this premise, Adorno’s paranoiac tone (of infection, contamination, threat) brings alongside itself a continued investment in the binary-laden rhetoric of false and true consciousness, the artificial and the factual, the symptomatic remnant of what Nietzsche would call a treacherous surface-depth dichotomy, and what is more one that compels the former to sustain a moralizing proclivity for perpetual judgment and truth-seeking. Finally, there is an irony within Adorno’s tireless emphasis on specificity: namely, that it captures him in an overblown indebtedness to time, such that he is always temporalizing experience and even more horrendously misleads one into thinking that the apocalypse is forever convening and culminating “right now” (an Enlightenment pathology in itself). And so, it is not surprising that grand theories of degradation and decline abound whenever he delves into a critique of the world, sneaking ever closer to a purist’s theology of negation and an almost reverse-messianicism (he can do nothing) that

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a chaotic engagement with the question of art, history, and self would make irrelevant. Where this perspective perhaps remains most limited, however, is in the steadfast adherence to the concepts of “history” and “reality” as purely objective classifications, even as “individuality” and “freedom” are discarded as theoretically untenable contrivances of the modern epoch. Because of Adorno’s dedication to the Marxian perception of historical Being as an intrinsically teleological functioning, his own intense cynicism cannot align itself with a Schopenhauerian pessimism, whereby history itself might be held primarily accountable for the atrocity of existence (though the latter suffers from its own equally problematic elevation of art to an exclusive region of blamelessness). Instead, the ideal relation between history and art can only occur for Adorno at the moment of their perfect intersection, collapsed into a mutually fortifying and reciprocal cycle of happening and interpretation, such that their descent into any distance from each other could only reflect a catastrophic outcome. In a similar vein, Adorno is entirely unwilling to entertain the Nietzschean intervention of treating history as metaphorical illusion, a hollow significatory edifice that nevertheless manufactures meaning, directionality, and causality for an otherwise anarchic world. For it is alongside this extreme move toward history-as-unconfessed-construct that it then becomes an equally necessary gesture to redefine art as that which openly confesses its devotion to unreality and therein keeps itself radically supra-historical. It is in this regard that Nietzsche dares to set art against history in a drastic war of energies in his “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” the latter interwoven with the desolation of the will to truth and the former with the eruptive potentiality of the will to power. Hence, we come across a converging paradigm of disunity: that art and history (while both encompassed by an uncaught world of illusion) attack from different angles and therefore partake of contrasting idioms; for Adorno, this proves a counterproductive antagonism, while for Nietzsche it is the emblem of a crucial and eternally returning battle between the ferocious risk of greatness and the asphyxiating decadence of mediocrity. More exactly, while history bears the pretense of thinking it “is,” becoming the province of a suffocating closure and constancy through which the linear assurances of the thing-in-itself are perpetuated, art does not search to prove itself worthy of a definitive ontological or phenomenological substance but rather strays from the apparitions of logic, knowledge, rationality, objectivity, and even the claim to an authentic existence by maintaining an insatiate appetite for chance, unrest, and variability.

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Against Adorno’s belief in art’s increasingly brutal dissolution from the world-historical scene, a devolutionary transition for which “the object, the purely inhuman, which alone is worthy of art today, escapes its reach at once by excess and inhumanity,” an alternative inquiry into the nature of the poetic-chaotic would resuscitate a trend of deliberate incommensurability.21 At this juncture one is met with the imperative to explore the prospect of a supra-subjectivity that indulges the infinite precisely in its defection from that which calls itself “historical.” This aestheticized existence, as the means to a poetic-chaotic becoming, would be neither reactive nor dismissive but irresolute enough in its affirmative dynamics of disarray to evade designation or confinement by the self-automating regulations of a particular historical context. This would transpire not as the misguided exaltation of autonomy but as the refusal to lay prostrate before a design that never was, save in the protestations of those who command an authority that equally never was, vindicating “the everything” without backlash into purpose or essence. Without goal or end in mind, beyond the underlying drive for coherence and (nonsynthesizing) salvation within Adorno’s mournful denunciation of art’s current fall into uselessness, beyond even Schopenhauer’s contorted metaphysical search for aesthetic perches (above the plains) can isolate a chaos-consciousness for which the disparity between art and historical reality becomes the very source of its saliency, driven to hazard further than before by the irreconcilable discrepancy between order and disorder. This nonexhaustive summation of continental philosophy’s varied approach to the associations of history, art, and subjectivity is geared toward revealing the way in which the principal thematic strand has been that of conflating the three spheres (though with the latter two generally framed as functionaries of the former). From that point, however, this project can then begin to ask how it is that a chaotic nonstate might animate itself from an outsider position, emulating a frenetic clash between a hypersubjectivized aesthetic and the barriers of historical Being (and concluding in an annihilation both of the “I” and of the historical). Once more, Schopenhauer was strategically enlisted at the forefront of this response so as to provide an outlook on history and the aesthetic that is intrinsically antagonistic, neither one suiting but in fact constantly impeding the objectives of the other, and therein suggesting a theory of abrasion between the created self and the created world. Carrying this conception forward, one might look to Benjamin’s outright forsaking of a strict Marxian reading of historicity in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” a piece which subtly reinstantiates subjectivity as that which

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must defend itself against the profane rotations of the historical. In his rejection of history as a seemingly endless stream of atrocity, going as far as to say that “every document of civilization is also at once a document of barbarism,” he conjures an almost mystical image of the historical materialist as he who “blasts open the continuum of history” and therefore remains “in control of his powers” by “brushing it against the grain.”22 From there, a comparable pose is assumed in his piece on “The Destructive Character” and in his musings on the productive desolation of divine violence in “The Critique of Violence,” wherein an aggrandized mode of subjectivity again arrives only in the wake of a catastrophic transgression of the historical moment: The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing way. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred . . . For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away the traces of our own age; it cheers because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed eradication, of his own condition . . . No vision inspires the destructive character. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed . . . [he] has no interest in being understood.23 And so here, in the midst of Benjamin’s unexpected allegory of the angel of history as that which is ravaged of its innocence at the hands of progress and then restored by the overriding strength of the historical materialist, one finds an apocalyptic battle between subjectivity and oppression that requires an anti-historical event. Although this demonization of the monstrosity of the historical alongside the celebratory poeticization of the subject eventually resolves itself in a spin toward intensely metaphysical meditations on time, it is this vindication-seeking affiliation between a certain individualism and the real that this project would like to examine and expand in greater detail. It is from within such a hostile capacity that the premise of a poeticchaotic experience of the world is first excavated, drawn out from within the interstices of subjectivity’s very struggle to overcome (for the sake of life) the mandates of historical life and its cancerous petitions to real life. For it is here that both Nietzsche and Hedayat first assert their relevance to the topic, as the alliance of their respective worldviews in fact renders inoperative all conventional perceptions of historical consciousness, join-

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ing to dispossess the term of any legitimacy whatsoever, but even more significantly to make certain that subjectivity not be held in a derivative placement vis-à-vis the here and now (one must imagine beyond). To substantiate this argument, and in a way such that it does not become a mere alibi for some alternative discourse of literary-philosophical humanism or aesthetic transcendence, one must place under scrutiny the commensurate manner in which the historical is navigated, orchestrated, and then overcome within the works of these two figures. As a starting point, one might illustrate a parallel between Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense” and Hedayat’s “Message of Kafka,” both of which mark an effort to strip history of any recourse to an ordered narrative by sanctioning the chaotic will. Here one detects Nietzsche’s move to reduce historical knowledge in its entirety to a loosely woven string of self-referential metaphors that evince nothing save the frailty that haunts the human confrontation with an inexplicable existence, leaving one “[confined] in a proud, deceptive consciousness . . . that rests upon the merciless, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance—hanging in dreams,”24 and in the same stride recognize Hedayat’s attitude regarding “a world which negates its own purpose,” where one “feels the absence of something” and is consequently always alienated within oneself.25 In both instances, one can distinguish a strong desire to divorce history from any potential taxonomy of meaning or intelligibility, to thieve it of its pretense to understanding, and leaving in the wake of this evacuation only the untiring palpitations of the nonsensical. And yet the human delusion will then revenge itself upon the lawlessness before it, imposing structure upon this otherwise gaping vista through a mass of essence-formations, a violation which leads Hedayat to speak of the entrapment of Being through which “man is not even free to determine his own thoughts and actions . . . tries to justify his own existence . . . but is a prisoner of his own pretences . . . caught in a vicious circle out of which he cannot break.”26 The incoherence is thus coated with a thin resin of unity, its fractal pieces of inexorability and boundlessness now converted into the wreckage of totality, and therein leaving behind only the experience of a nonstop inquisition: “The minute we are born we are put to judgment . . . Eventually we are convicted . . . Both the executioner and the victim are silent.”27 On trial before its own fear of exposure, desperately evading the slightest hint of transparency, each examining impulse of the “historical” serves as nothing more than a clouding-over of the relentless violence that the real must elicit against the chaotic at every turn and from every angle.

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As a result, and as previously stated, both Nietzsche and Hedayat find this all-too-human consciousness initially unequipped to address the indeterminacy and illogic necessarily associated with a chaotic world, and thereby thrusting itself toward a counterfeit rhetoric of comprehension labeled “history” for which an ensuing deception of “historical subjectivity” then slowly emerges. From within the security-net of the “I” and its constant articulations of supremacy, this pseudo-person is then able to deny the uncertainty of the exterior (that nothing “is”) and by extension its own fictive interiority, by fashioning a saga of valor vis-à-vis existence. For Nietzsche this leads into the decadence of a will to truth that awards Being its false readability, attributing to events a rational look by fixing them within universalizing patterns of signification: “Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying ‘there are only facts,’ I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.”28 This massive enterprise of concealment is what Nietzsche indicates as the fraud of the historical, from its nascent outburst in the formation of language to its expansion within Platonic idealism and the messianic grandiosity of the Hegelian world-historical process . . . though no philosophical mitigation is any more or less genuine than the other, without immunity before the insurmountable untruth of existence. In short, history is the lie that humanity tells itself in order to shield its eyes from the explosiveness of a chaotic universe, the lie to hide the all-presence of lies, detracting the experiential immediacy of this creative-destructive effusion in exchange for a “knowledge” of that which cannot be “known.” And yet, in what seems like a paradoxical pursuit, Nietzsche then dares to chart the history of the impostor-depth called history, an undertaking that compels him to innovate a methodology distinct from traditional historicism (as a discursive phenomenon indispensably linked to Enlightenment epistemology and its overriding drive for world-mastery). It is this counterexertion to unveil the self-delusional presumptions of history that heralds the dynamic invention of “genealogy,” a procedure of open excavation of the past toward which Foucault later shows an acute affinity in his “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” and through which one might be able to investigate the happening of certain events without the imposition of any standard of causation or sequentiality. Within the confines of Nietzsche’s own body of work, this approach of suspended judgment exercises itself performatively first within The Birth of Tragedy, seemingly a study of the pre-Socratic culture of Dionysian ecstasy, but in fact what the author himself would later confess to be little more than a self-projected hallucination of antiquity. This point will be accentuated later when the theme of history as

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subjective dreamscape is revisited as an entrance into illusion, hypermetaphorization, and ultimately the thought of the unreal. And even beyond the already searing insights of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche elsewhere takes to task multiple facets of “History” by means of his genealogical technique, illustrated best in such later works as the Genealogy of Morals and Human, All Too Human. Within the former, the author wages an archaeological assault against the composition and enforcement of moral and metaphysical norms, making everything from religion to law a target through intricate discussions of the ascetic ideal and the origin of ressentiment and slave morality; within the latter, he takes on the petty narcissism by which Enlightenment Man attempts to assign himself centrality within a self-serving hierarchy, one that further propels the entitlement of outright control under the auspices of a misunderstanding of “the will.” Both inquiries, however, are motivated by the author’s own single desire to decimate this scaffolding of certainty, emanating from “a skepticism that is characteristic of me, to which I reluctantly admit—for it is directed towards morality, towards everything on earth that has until now been celebrated as morality—a skepticism that first appeared so early in my life, so spontaneously, so irrepressibly, so much in contradiction to my environment, age, models, origins, that I almost have the right to call it my a piori.”29 This rare license to unravel is what we might call the link between chaos and a certain poetic evocation. With this in mind, Nietzsche’s second untimely meditation on “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” assumes a climactic gravity, for it is within this work that Nietzsche deduces four separate mentalities through which consciousness pretends to come to terms with its own historicity. The first he calls “monumental,” which describes those who would seek out heroic episodes from the past as examples of imminent greatness within the present and future, forever resurrecting examples of nobility to serve as inspirational models of emulation (an ethos behind which large-scale causes are mobilized). The second mode that Nietzsche underscores is the “antiquarian,” composed more or less of a harmless reverence for that which has elapsed, leading largely to a compulsive preservation of faded events for no other purpose than that of ensuring their permanence in memory. The third affective stance laid out by Nietzsche is the “critical,” the one he perhaps privileges most among the three, though he selectively affirms and dismisses aspects of each, for it is within this particular sentiment that the courage for insurgency and disavowal of historical legacy pulsates, present in those who unflinchingly confront the failures of the past so as to secure the realization of an alternative

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counterfuture in the present. But even further, it is in this early work that Nietzsche makes brief mention of a supra-historical mode of consciousness that does not bow to history in any form, yet instead rests in superb indifference to its decrees: “He is blind to everything behind him, new sounds are muffled and meaningless though his perceptions were never so intimately felt in all their color, light and music, and he seems to grasp them with his five senses together . . . His whole case is most indefensible; it is narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to danger, deaf to warnings, a small living eddy in a dead sea of night and forgetfulness. And yet this condition, unhistorical and antihistorical throughout, is the cradle not only of unjust action, but of every just and justifiable action in the world.”30 Here Nietzsche leaves such an “indefensible” possibility stranded as the remote achievement of a rare elite, though he will subsequently come back to ascribe this very guise a premium weight; one must note above all else, then, that even in this preliminary sketching he assigns such an exalted ahistoricality to the ownership of the artist, and therein allows for a discussion of an aesthetic mode that might overturn both history and subjectivity in one chaotic stride. In the Iranian faction, Hedayat beholds the notion of historicity with an almost vitriolic contempt, and reflects this from his earliest writings in a distinctly nihilistic-absurdist approach to both metaphysics and society. In the case of the former, one can take into consideration such works as The Myth of Creation and “The Benedictions,” the first a satirical play that invests the genesis narrative with a ridiculous vulgarity, and the second a dark tale of life-after-death in which spirits find themselves condemned to wander aimlessly throughout eternity, and from within their own severe pointlessness are no longer even afforded the luxury of salvational hope that subsisting human beings retain in not yet knowing the conditions of the afterlife: “A deep silence fell upon the tower. The moon was slowly rising and its cold glimmer gradually outlined the inside of the sanctuary . . . The smell of putrefying flesh, the strong stench of decaying bodies permeated the gentle evening air.”31 Through these projects, Hedayat attempts to distance himself from the symbolics of divine authority, forsaking the empty promises of metaphysical longing and owning up to the death of God that many proclaimed in torturous rapture . . . though he is not finished yet. Of equal concern for Hedayat’s literary production is the manner in which consciousness rushes to disguise and camouflage its own lack of purpose, filling the existential void with any number of random rituals, routines, and superstitions. It is at this observant touchstone that one finds the author’s mockery of historical traits and customs, renounc-

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ing the insincerity and corruption of the reigning codes by strategically placing the writer against history in a clear pledge to vengeance: “In such a society as this, supported by and designed for the life of your kind, I cannot be of any distinction. My existence is useless . . . Hence the greatest and most noble poem in my life will mark the destruction of you and your kind.”32 As these quasi-elegiac/quasi-vendetta writings seek to impart, it is not the accidental nature of existence that leads it astray but rather the drive to impose a solid and substantive narrative of historical order, a premise that Hedayat makes sure to emphasize in his more tragic stories, each of which concludes in a stream of betrayals, defilements, seclusions, degradations, and anonymous deaths. If anything, these affairs of desecration reveal his loathing of history as the self-sanctifying emblem of man’s failure to reconcile himself with a provisional existence, an everywhere-hovering disenchantment that will cause the author to reconfigure the terms of his own involvement. And it is no small statement that his masterwork’s narrator, the blind owl, will ultimately serve as the instantiation of this viper’s becoming, forming a perpendicular dimension of the unformed through which greatness thrives in its own overconsumption, and in which all life is internalized as a chaotic token. Even amid its most towering combat with the real, the ahistorical experience of chaos remains an affirmative enterprise (how many scalps are enough?). Thus, the argument here is that Hedayat vigorously tries to crawl his way beyond the tainted delusion of historical consciousness only then to return (with fascinated sockets) to the world-as-illusion, an expedition that takes place across several fronts. On the one hand, there is the striking repudiation of language, such that he not only stylistically thrashes the word against its own restrictive matrices, diminishing its effect as a regulatory apparatus, but even more so in that he elevates silence as the one creative sector against which history cannot intrude. This concurrence, in turn, brings to pass a poetics of chaos that in and of itself embodies a scathing indictment of writing, the assumption here being that history, which again is to say the myriad series of spectral constructs by which subjectivity comes to be constituted as an ordered entity, first infringes on consciousness via the inception of the word . . . and with it the naming of that which resists all classification, turning the illegibility of the thing into the experiential barricade of the thing-in-itself. Proceeding further, chaotic desire fractures itself away from historical definition by virtue of a temporary pact with radical aloneness, against all generalizing discourses, attesting to both Nietzsche and Hedayat’s unparalleled emphasis on solitude, enduring the test of untying and reforging

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subjectivity far from the homogenizing abstraction of the “human.” Such a poetic consciousness deliberately casts itself to the wayside, inhabiting an exilic disposition, always alone, always apart, so as to preclude exposure to the indoctrinating whispers that run rampant within historicity. From here it is a rather easy trade to embark on the next strike: namely, the excision of time and space from the encounter between the “I” and its world. On one front, there lies the Nietzschean vindication of untimeliness as that which tirelessly remains out of step with the age, though for both authors this design for atemporality is implemented most adamantly via the convulsive open-endedness of “eternity.” Nietzsche writes: “From this gateway, Moment, a long, eternal lane leads backward; behind us lies an eternity.”33 Hedayat writes: “The solitude that surrounded me was like the deep, dense night of eternity, that night of dense, clinging, contagious darkness which awaits the moment when it will descend upon silent cities full of dreams of lust and rancour.”34 As shown above, Nietzsche devises a concept of the eternal return through which temporality yields its stratification and resumes its trajective frenzy, a principle of self-sustaining conflict that stands in direct opposition to Heideggerian notions of temporal unity and Benjamin’s “homogenous empty time” (to come down from the mountain and infest the back-alleys). On the other hand, Hedayat fashions the most brutal repetition-compulsion within his narratives to serve as the entry point into temporal infinity, illustrated most effectively in The Blind Owl where the designation of “two months, four days” recurs as an all-time without any semblance of regulatory monotony, leaving only an indefinite replaying of the incident as blurred possibility/impossibility. As an all-altering, unprejudiced derailment of temporal currents, the chaotic thus arises from within the embers of chronology. With respect to space, a similar shivering exhibits itself, such that the chaotic eludes all identitarian technologies by deterritorializing its own footprints, showcased once again in Nietzsche’s commissioning of the wanderer and in Hedayat’s conjuring of a nameless, eyeless character sitting on the outskirts of a wasteland in conversation with his own shadow. Nietzsche writes: “I am a wanderer and a mountain climber, he said to his heart; I do not like the plains, and it seems I cannot sit still for long.”35 Hedayat writes: “I had no idea in what direction I was going . . . I did not care whether or not I ever arrived at any place.”36 Hence a vital recognition manifests: that if history asserts its pretence through temporal and spatial definition, then the chaotic’s own recurring arrival must curve beyond time and space as a gesture toward discarded worlds without clocks or maps (the will to aimlessness). As a side com-

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mentary, such a strategic dismantling is implicitly noted by Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination as the self-devouring nature of “chronotopic” literature, wherein an extratemporal scenario unleashes the energy of infinite time (the converse of real time) against the architectonic governing of space, making everything coincidental—and setting up these conditions as a precursor to what he will later deem “the carnivalesque” as a site that “grants the right to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking; the right to not be taken literally, not ‘to be oneself ’ . . . the right to rip off masks, the right to rage at others with a primeval (almost cultic) rage—and finally, the right to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and prurient little secrets.”37 It is precisely this brand of a hyper-event, disabling the structures of time and space with reckless disregard for all documented constancy, which will eventually enable the articulation of a premise that goes past History and Being. In this way, the fearless questioning of “reality” proves a quintessential stage in the overcoming of history, leading Nietzsche to eliminate the binary of the “true” and “apparent” world and the surface/depth ratio it engenders while causing Hedayat to even more subversively crash the unchained terrain of neo-fantasia into the claustrophobic region of socalled reality . . . erasing all divisions between the banal and the bizarre, the mundane and the extraordinary, the grotesque and the beautiful, the possible and sheer impossibility, through a series of hallucinogenic contraptions. Here both writers wrest their trackings of simulation to an unexpected degree, beyond even Baudrillard’s theorization that “the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion . . . [since] illusion is no longer possible because the real is no longer possible,” and into an active march to the unreal that neither grieves the demise of the real nor looks to offer it a surrogate metareality, but rather hallows the inability of existence to escape its own fictive composition.38 With respect to Nietzsche, the discussion of authenticity is challenged most fiercely in The Gay Science, setting the tone for his later definition in The Antichrist of “the instinctive hatred of reality” as a “consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and excitement . . . because it feels every contact too deeply,”39 while Hedayat’s The Blind Owl again stands as the most obvious proof of this mistmare technique of stealing from the reader the most basic hermeneutic device of distinguishing between the imaginary and the actual. But then there is the final atrophic element of this strategy, perhaps by the admissions of both the hardest to withstand: that of ontological death

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(annihilation), and with it the death of ontology. For if the first experience of subjectivity occurred as an appendage to the truth-obsessed dictates of historicity, then the desertion of the historical can only be enacted through a sacrificial cleaving of that prior state—the chaos released from the extermination of the “I.” Thus, in Nietzsche’s writing one can locate any number of passages on the concept of the free death: that “one must pay dearly for” immortality: one has to die several times while still alive” and that “I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding . . . who makes his virtue his addiction and his catastrophe . . . going under” and that “the great genius is always a finale . . . wasting itself, squandering itself . . . like a river’s flooding the land.”40 Indeed the entire imagery of the step-arrangement from mankind to overhuman is predicated on an irreparable fading or presence-emission within absence, a descent into nothingness (what coils across the ravine) resembling a hyper-masochistic wish. Neither is it coincidental that Hedayat craves the same underpass (always beneath), initiating his own distinct migration toward an inhuman state for which “whatever was human in me, I have allowed to be lost.”41 Having said that, Hedayat’s own fascination with the emancipatory force of finality surfaces time and again in any number of stories, though particularly within his aphoristic essay titled “Death” and his short story “Buried Alive,” both of which uphold transience as the patron of an unmediated experiential sensitivity to the randomness of existence (world-aschance). While the former piece simply strives to break terminality away from its usually melancholic referent, enjoining it instead to a sensuous proximity with consciousness, the second source exercises the idea of a dying without death, such that, after composing a protracted suicide note, the protagonist finds himself face-to-face with the scandal of his own non-Being, then emerging from the rendezvous with oblivion as a radically changed forerunner (epitomized ceaselessly by the metaphor of a split mirror-reflection and the disjointed loss of memory). For if, as some psychoanalytic branches would argue, consciousness makes its first step toward historical subjectivity in the workings of the mirror stage, then it is within the fragmentation of this second mirror stage (the one to rid all mirrors) that subjectivity can begin to step away from its historical costume and into the gear of a chaotic imaginary. And yet, the following question looms in the aftermath: How would this ahistorical figure, having traversed the borders of language, humanity, time, space, and reality, and even having irretrievably crossed the determining boundaries of life and death, engage with a world still captive to the presuppositions of historical Being and its syndicates? The

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declarations of a poetic-chaotic consciousness issued thus far admittedly stand in defiance of the injunction to historicize existential experience, supplanting it instead with the countervailing imperative of never historicizing so as to ensure the irreducibility of experience to a unitary or static assumption (to reengineer the world as endless becoming). If, as Jameson writes, “the traditional dialectic teaches us [that] the historicizing operation can follow two distinct paths, which only ultimately meet in the same place: the path of the object and the path of the subject, the historical origins of the things themselves and that more intangible historicity of the concepts and categories by which we attempt to understand those things,”42 then the chaotic must tread beyond the narrow scope of this dialectical pendulum by virtue of a dual annihilation of subject and object within the work itself. No longer the Socratic-Platonic version of philosophy as a “learning how to die” but rather as a “learning how to kill.” For although the literary nonidentities introduced in the works of Nietzsche and Hedayat undergo a transformative process that occurs against the world at large, its formulation is only ever otherworldly in the perceptual sense (the nerves, the visions), never even remotely signaling toward some form of superior metareality; rather, it simply resembles an existential plot that has surpassed the hunger for historical immutability, a conspiracy to start walking and thus stray beyond the trepidations of signification, mortality, and ontological or phenomenological framing (the fool’s pace; to favor the wonderstruck). Without digressing too far, one might ascertain a resonance in Deleuze and Guattari’s own theorization of “the body without organs” (Anti-Oedipus) and the schizoid devotion to “nomadological thinking” (A Thousand Plateaus) as the acceleration of such prolific kinds of desire: Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energysource-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts . . . Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.43 To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and

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think . . . To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.44 Similarly, in this particular mask of the postmodern, we cross through a drawn-out phase of subjective annihilation with an enkindled accessibility to the ahistorical pulse, one that forever links the intensities of the chaotic with the experience of the unreal without the intermediary of “pure consciousness” (only a host of many someones). In this sense, an unprecedented corrugation of mind/body becomes an integral force in destabilizing the tyranny of historicity that first defined subjectivity in its facing of the world around itself. This marks Nietzsche’s return to the dilemma of history in various lengthy expositions throughout Beyond Good and Evil, excerpts wherein he calls forward his legion of “new philosophers,” those who are seemingly on their way from the future to galvanize their transvaluation of historical limitations and fashion an ulterior moment. In this counterstrike, one that is legislated by those who have altogether overcome the restraints of historical Being, experience would no longer find itself entrapped by apparitions of objectivity and cohesion and could theretofore invite chance, risk, and endless experimentation toward itself in “good conscience.” And it is to this existential figment that Nietzsche devotes the later overhuman, though he then dislocates himself from all discourses of insurgent change and revolutionary questing for caution of being pinned back to either that embittered and crisis-ridden symptom of ressentiment, which needs to mold the world in its image at all costs (a power-basing, vengeful urge for which he has no patience) or to a simplified discourse of intentionality by which the will to power again perverts itself into a premeditated, calculable claim to mastery (prompting his continuous depiction of the will as a “wave”). Regardless, it is in the very prospect of an “I” without subjectivity, a becoming-silent-unto-oneself, without meaning-based self-referentiality, that this chaos-consciousness makes its way to interlock with practice, offering no lag-time or delay between the speculation of the task and its enactment . . . such that its war-swaying against History is already both idea and raw performativity. No longer consigning the imagination to an escapist frontier, the Nietzschean revaluation of art as an active, competitive exchange (with what is outermost) overturns the passivity of Schopenhauer’s own mystical retreat: “Now one uses works of art to lure aside from the great road of suffering of

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humanity those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick, and to offer them a brief lustful moment—a little intoxication and madness.”45 Conversely, here there is no synthesis or transcendental utopianism at work, but rather only a requisite affirmation of a chaotic potentiality which, once hindered by the obstacles of historicity, now indulges its own thrashing motion as an immediate acknowledgment of the world-as-unreal. As for Hedayat, he comparably finds himself reintroduced to the world after History has been relegated to futile standing, reentering limitless regions from within the defection, though this time broaching existence as the satchel-bearer or pallbearer of his own realignment. What this subsequently entails is the ability to perceive himself reflected immanently in any circumstance, asserting his own refracted dominion, such that within the course of The Blind Owl there takes place an ultrasolipsistic articulation of an already kaleidoscopic mind. Though the protagonist uncovers existential doubles in every other he comes upon, the most telling instance occurs when he is given a vase from antiquity on which he finds reproduced the identical drawing with which he has been infatuated throughout the entirety of his life, leading into a sensation of exultant intimacy with the eternal (not as harmony yet as an aggressive breaking-into): “There was not an atom of difference between my picture and that on the jar. The one might have been the reflection of the other in a mirror. The two were identical and were, it seemed obvious, the work of one man, one ill-fated decorator of pen cases . . . I wished that I could run away from myself.”46 It is this hyperbolic dispersal, escalating itself to the extent of its own irate dissolution, that bestows the narrator with the capacity to enter into any moment with an indiscriminate sense of proximity. No occasion is foreign to him, no experience barred from his touch, penetrating through to each recess of existence as if the toxin-ingesting author of its text, though without any longing to inscribe a fixed interpretation . . . as if it were all his own “maddening fiction.” And it is precisely from within this contentious fluidity, this unkind seamlessness, wherein the “I” now finds itself organic to every happening while at the same time rending itself apart, that historical context ceases to hold influence . . . giving way to the highest empathic caliber without a centralized subjectivity at stake, allowing the chaotic to infuse itself across the heterogeneous axes of existence without concern for entitlement (pure intrusion). And so, if one were to endorse taking Nietzsche and Hedayat to a certain extreme precipice in the wake of their portrayals of the overhuman and the blind owl, then the placement of these two figures within such a

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detonative alliance would appear appropriate (united in the glint of a time bomb ticking down to the end of time). With nothing allocated as alien and with the symbolic order thrown into discordant flux, with the search for closure halted and with impossibility now dismissed as an obsolete concoction, both voices would find themselves circumscribed within the nontotalizing immensity of a scourge. Furthermore, the quasi-dialogic adaptation staged here between Nietzsche and Hedayat may elicit even larger repercussions for the subordination of history to a kind of literaryphilosophical piracy or bedouinism, since this transhistorical conversation itself testifies to the prospect of an exilic meeting ground far from the fabricated citadels of geography, civilization, and culture. By severing all indentured faith to the surrounding, by de-shrouding the countenance of a life without beginning or end through the naked fatalism of the return, by discharging its one obligation (to solar convolution) over and against all former debts to linearity, by wrenching nihilistic disbelief toward the fiercest exhalation of untruth, by invoking illusion against a foul and sordid precept of Being that is forever unwilling to confess its own artifice, by executing varied forms of world-sculpting/world-stoning from a vantage irrelevant to both time and space, by interrogating the very authenticity of the “is” into merciless submission, these figures extend themselves beyond the vise of the once-called historical.

Chaos as Nontranscendental: The Affirmation of a Destructive Self/World Repose was utterly denied me. How could I have found repose?47 —Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl

This is a consciousness that must go beneath itself (into the underpasses). A significant contention of this section, as it is to be theorized across varied writings of unrest, situates itself on the following principle: that, despite its motioning beyond the real, chaotic desire is starkly incommensurate with transcendental desire, and therefore even its annihilationendeavor must necessarily derive itself from a nontranscendental province if it is to serve as a gateway. For although there is a paradox innate to the attempt to unravel the transcendental construct of subjectivity without the undertaking itself assuming a transcendental disposition, as such an inquiry would rightfully suggest, it will be argued here that this tenu-

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ous assault can be negotiated without faltering, dilution, or entrapment. In diagramming the prospect of an annihilative moment that does not inevitably relegate itself to its own totality, that it shatters consciousness into myriad fragments without reassembling its structure, one first must demonstrate the intricately barbed-wire nature of such an event. Above all else, as a medium through which the chaotic avows and exercises itself, annihilation can hold no claim to the absolute, and thereby finds itself stripped of all rights to the imposition of a surrogate truth-value in the afterward. To evidence such a position, one must trace the outline of a pivotal argument, at its base bringing into consideration Nietzsche and Hedayat’s matching conflation of creation and destruction into a brand that perpetually extinguishes without subsequent drive to institute.48 For, within this traveling impulse toward extreme violation, there can prevail no redemptive synthesis, no rising world in the wake of subjectivity’s deletion, no ingrained logos in mind, yet only a gesture to reckoning (without reward or cause). Before advancing further, this analysis should entail a clarification that subjectivity does in fact constitute itself as a transcendent category within the real, while in the scope of annihilation, and in direct accordance with the Nietzschean claim that “Being is an empty fiction,” subjectivity will come to rid itself of its transcendent profile.49 The first would endow itself with an undeserved essence whereas the second would excel beyond the accreditations of a legitimate self-consciousness, divulging itself as the mere delusion of transcendence in a world of illusion for which transcendence proves the ultimate impossibility. To ascertain this point, one might take into account Nietzsche’s proposition that subjectivity constitutes itself as the ridiculous metaphorization of an existence that cannot be ordered, writing that: “There have been eternities when it [the human intellect] did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it.”50 What congeals, then, is a series of binding devices—language, society, law, morality, metaphysics— strung into motion with the intent of veiling the fundamental inability of consciousness to confront the unintelligiblity of a chaotic world. That being established, the notion of man-as-subject is nothing more than an allegorization of that which precludes all understanding, and certainly Hedayat reiterates this perception time and again in his treatment of the “I” as a spectral counterfeit, an apparition which struggles (in utter vain-

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ness) to camouflage the transparent obscurity of existence by implanting itself into the world: “The source of my excitement was the need to write, which I felt as a kind of obligation imposed on me. I hoped by this means to expel the demon which had long been lacerating my vitals, to vent on paper the horrors of my mind.”51 Against such backdrops, this project can begin to disrobe subjectivity, not as a self-contained category but rather as a repressive defense-mechanism through which consciousness recedes into a naturalized experiential daze. And it is through this hardwon acknowledgment—that subjectivity bears no right to uphold itself as a transcendental classification—that annihilation forsakes its bondage to the inhibitions of Being and therein already partially divorces itself from the indentations of a real world. This notwithstanding, the exposure of subjectivity as a mythic denial of the chaotic does not bear alongside itself a regression into some alternative theory of authenticity, but rather escalates the stakes of fictiveness by then indicting the entire conformation of reality as delusion (always verging on conscious illusion)—illustrated best in Nietzsche’s discrediting of the dichotomy of a “true” and “apparent” world by relinquishing both in the eleventh hour of the overhuman’s becoming. Moreover, it is worth noting from this preliminary phase that the shift toward the chaotic itself is no more “true” or “real” than the phantom reality it unravels, enslaved to no surface-depth hierarchy, and that ironically its privileging here is directly proportionate to its own untruth and unreality. Its striking deviation from that which it exterminates rests only in the fact that it is a self-confessed illusion, an open dreamscape and honest lie, nowhere better demonstrated than in Hedayat’s relentless insistence on the fact that everything he writes is the product of a hallucination . . . but one from which there is no waking, no prospect of sobriety, no deliverance from the grasp of the unreal: “No one can possibly imagine the sensations I experienced at that moment.”52 As a result, the annihilative expedition violates that rift that subjectivity systematically produces and then adamantly maintains between presumed actuality and the imaginary, the commandments of objectivity and intoxication. And herein lies the incredible pressure behind Hedayat’s vastly exploited symbol, carving into the surface to show there is nothing behind it, nor that even the surface itself remains, as that which contravenes all demarcations set before it: the opium haze. While examining the counter-programs by which annihilation dodges transcendental wanting, it is worthwhile to devote some attention to

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Nietzsche and Hedayat’s own monumental attacks against asceticism (as the hallmark of a degraded inwardness). In the case of the former, there is a particular onslaught against what he terms “the ascetic ideal”: namely, the logic by which one recedes from the world at hand for the sake of a higher state of Being (another form of metaphysical inference). A lengthy exposition in The Genealogy of Morals is dedicated precisely to exposing the perilous comforts of this reclusive position, steeped in the seduction of esoteric secrecy, and ever gazing at the world with disgust and arrogant resignation: “One knows the three great pomp words of the ascetic ideal: poverty, humility, chastity . . . At the same time it is entirely possible that for the present their dominant spirituality had to put reins on an unbridled and irritable pride or a willful sensuality or that it perhaps had a difficult enough time keeping up its will to the “desert” against an inclination to luxury and to the most exquisite things, likewise against a wasteful liberality of heart and hand.”53 More than just an instinct for deprivation, the ascetic ideal marks at once a sedative and a surplus of excitation, provoking the most severe engagement in pain, rallying an extravagant joy in an agonizing stimulant, and in fact this duality operates under a mutual co-dependency . . . tranquilization and exhilaration, the transcendent (as lack) meeting the hedonism of consumption (as excess), the prohibition of enjoyment and the imperative to enjoy wrapped together in a strangely masochistic doublebind. For Nietzsche, it is within this push-and-pull that certain anti-affects are able to ensnare consciousness, fetishizing an arrested state, laming it with a dissension of guilt and desire. Correspondingly, Hedayat writes a short-story titled “The Man Who Killed His Self,” about a young teacher in search of overstepping the inane treacheries of the everyday, and turning to the incantatory promises of some pseudomysticism with great expectation of achieving an immaculate ontological possibility only to discover the emptiness within which it circulates. After falling into unspeakable despair, the protagonist ultimately takes his own life, a terse notice in the newspaper that “a serious young teacher . . . for unknown reasons has committed suicide,” serving as the lone remembrance of his disenchantment with the beyond, and thereby embodying the author’s own struggle to exorcise this longing from his literary imagination . . . allowing his protagonist’s obliteration to stand symbolically as the eradication of the transcendent facet of his own subjectivity.54 An unconditional anti-messianic principle is at work here: not only to discredit the saviors of the world, not only to thwart and eviscerate the pedestals of such saviors, but to deliberately prevent those who would dare save it (to block the redeemers).

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From here, one might continue by drawing further distinctions between the transcendental districts of subjectivity and the annihilative technique through which the former forfeits its standing as a custodian of security. Without doubt, one of the most conspicuous symptoms endemic to the formation of a transcendental signified is the belief in origin, with subjectivity alleviating itself of a confrontation with the rampant disquiet of existence through the manufacturing and authorization of its “originary history.” Inversely, the chaotic, careening back and forth between “overflowing” and “oblivion,” beholden in its trespasses neither to the totalitarian trappings of Being nor to the nihilism of non-Being, inhabits a nowhere-space for which no starting or concluding point is granted. In that vein, annihilation brings to fruition a splintered terrain for which there remains no interest over the binary of presence and absence, neither occupying a centrality nor allowing for the emergence of a prophetic matrix in the aftermath of subjectivity’s demise. Transposed against the Hegelian paradigm by which the Self gradually disperses its presence into the vicinity of absolute knowledge, a supercession that occurs coterminous with the dialectical fulfillment of the historical, this event of erasure withholds all precepts of directionality (the poetic-chaotic as a dire suspension irreducible to straight-laced orientations). Beyond this association with a beginning-end paradigm, there is the further matter of subjectivity’s supposed intrinsic relation to temporality, nowhere more apparent than in Heidegger’s fixation with notions of “heritage” and “the archaic,” resuscitating the past as a catalyst for the projection of Dasein out of its undifferentiated thrownness of the present (circumscribed by the frailties of das Man) and into the authenticity of futural destiny (Being-as-time). And of course it is at this “post-philosophical” juncture that Adorno launches his biting reproach of the Heideggerian schema’s grandiosity in The Jargon of Authenticity, accusing the latter of recklessly betraying the historicity of the subject by skipping the essential mediation between subject and object in the name of a passive pseudo-spiritual idealism with no connection to life itself. Nevertheless, whereas the Heideggerian Being-toward-death might fairly be reproached as a transcendent resignation, the vast majority of Adorno’s own critique grows irrelevant with regard to the advent of an annihilative event, since annihilation evades such insinuations via its spasmatic non-commitment: that it has no lone ambition in mind, leaving consciousness wholly non-definitive, coasting inconclusively, no longer concerned with the exoneration of life or death, Being or the Nothing, yet instead forcing the network to cannibalize itself in the wake of that which has exhausted both regions

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(the unparalleled shift into the straits of being “buried alive”). Annihilation, as an untold forerunner of the chaotic, is neither subservient to the Heideggerian metaphysics of time nor to the one-dimensionality of an abstracted “mission,” in itself a self-sustaining autocracy of the same, nor does it continue to lay prostrate like Adorno before the fallacy of the historical through which negative dialectics can somehow reinstill an objective infinity to the world: “Its substance would lie in the diversity of objects it seeks, a diversity not wrought by any schema; to those objects, philosophy would truly give itself rather than use them as a mirror in which to reread itself, mistaking its own image for concretion. It would be nothing but full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection.”55 Far beyond the good-and-evil tension assumed by the description of a life that is “disfigured . . . prohibits . . . cheats men out of their dues,”56 annihilation unleashes itself to dispute/clash with all that presumes to “be,” both objective and subjective, an amoral obliteration of self and world that does not mourn the loss of that which subjectivity is supposedly “owed” . . . no longer caught in the vengeance-seeking injuries that some willingly display, no longer questing for a reparatory moment of grace (actualized existentially, aesthetically, intellectually, or within externalized rebellion) that might make “right” what has never been “wrong,” clawing desperately to rescue history from itself. No, annihilation infuses its carnage with complete ahistoricality, never subsumed into doctrine or orthodoxy, and what is more relinquishes its bond to the hierarchization of experience through which such prior discourses would venture to lend the world a phantom cohesion (tenacious disobedience). In this same respect, whereas Enlightenment humanism’s translation of subjectivity into a hyper-rational mode would seek only inscriptions of comprehensibility, annihilation dispossesses consciousness of its ties to the cult of reason, use-value, and functionality, transforming the “I” into an arational vessel, with no substantive referent or signified to monitor its place within a provisional world, leaving only a chaotic passenger sitting before the everything-all-at-once. This particular erosion of subjectivity diverges once more from the logic of transcendence by virtue of its unshaken dedication to restlessness, ever rising against permanence as an emblem of perfect nonallegiance. Whereas transcendence contains a core assumption of contentment, always aspiring toward serenity, annihilation crashes consciousness into the convulsing arms of the unsatisfied, braced in the fine antagonisms of a seizure. One might reflect at this instant on Bataille’s philosophy of the summit, affiliated with the most daunting climes of risk and chance, as analogous to the haphazard tempo of

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the Nietzschean wanderer or of Hedayat’s hearse-driver as exemplars of unquenched hunger for wagering and experimentation (until the imperative of collapse sets in). And so, rather than consign itself to harmony and emotive equivalence, an inclination which Hedayat denounces as a concealed death-wish and which Nietzsche dismisses as the weakness of a follower’s spirit that cannot wage war with the existential continuum, annihilation allows Thanatos (and his twin brother Hypnos) to escort consciousness toward a hurtling variance; it blurs the spheres of tragedy and ecstasy, destruction and creation, through its unique killing-song. No disciplinary technologies of thought, no epistemological certitude or submission to routinized instrumentality, no codification of a symbolic order, no descent into self-regulation, no self-automated patterns of signification, no faith in causation, and more than anything no search for rapid closure (a remnant of narcissistic fastenings). Here annihilation is neither a falling away from nor a retribution committed against the world, yet rather marks an affirmative occasion for the trial of subjectivity’s disappearance, proving that there can be no movement toward the sedimentation of a transcendent condition as long as experience is left amid the chaotic flux of the always-ending. Whereas subjectivity assumes a transcendent figuration by entitling itself to mastery, fabricating a concept of agency through which free will is then construed as an axial impetus of control, the annihilative will steers clear of any such discourse of intentionality. As an example, one may survey Hedayat’s commentary on the affair of his life as that which occurs neither beyond him nor within the scope of his known volition, and therefore consigning the stream of occurrences to a zone of inconsistency beyond the polarities of fatalism and pre-meditation: “I began to walk and involuntarily followed the wheel-tracks of the hearse. When night came on I lost the tracks but continued to walk on in the profound darkness, slowly and aimlessly, with no conscious thought in my mind, like a man in a dream.”57 He wrestles with the concept of discretion. Hence a closer scrutiny of Nietzsche’s own rhetoric of “legislation” reveals something far more complex than would be assumed at first glance, for here power is also synonymous with a certain hardness, and with the endurance of a demented acquisition, an ordeal sanctioned by an instant far too inaccessible to call choice: “And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you triumph with me? And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut and cut through, how can you one day create with me? For creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax . . . to write

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on the will of millennia as on bronze—harder than bronze, nobler than bronze.”58 There is only the merciless suffering of the test, a hammer-like unknowing derived from the metal compounds of desire through which one enjoins a “calamitous, involuntary fatality,” that intemperate, transgressive spontaneity which rests beyond anticipation or preempting. This is why overcoming, especially in its annihilative format, cannot attain a transcendent status, for it surpasses even the apprehension of finality, able to withstand and will the inevitability of the ever-fading from which subjectivity shields itself (as an unsublimated facing and defeat of mortality). Herein annihilation embarks on a transvaluation of the Self ’s fragile urge for the always/everlasting, though ironically as a corridor into the return, bringing into full proximity the agitating impact of ephemerality all the while disclosing our dying toward the eternal. For, although the chaotic cannot be distilled into a theory of accident, it does embrace the erratic collision of energies in a supreme existential imbalance, compelling a total unfathoming of the world-as-capsule. And it is from within this ambiguous surging of the “atomic whirl” that Nietzsche, with typical Dionysian fury, charges himself to disturb synchronicity and dismantle the mandates on which Being anchors itself in any given age, a task accomplished “by applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of [one’s] time.”59 Likewise, Hedayat orchestrates narrative spiraling (a quasi-cyclicality that approximates the eternal return) as an instigator, one which in turn hurls him by nonlinear progression toward a “shadow-becoming”: nameless, soulless, barren of any predisposition to self-knowledge, entirely supra-subjective, and unsusceptible to the temptations of transcendental thought. Macabre militancy. Finally, this proposal comes back to Nietzsche’s aphoristic statement that “the total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos,” a postulate that implies there is nothing to transcend beyond the delusion of transcendence that subjectivity retroactively affords itself against the world-as-illusion. Stated simply: a kind of chaos has always existed at our disposal, readily available to that experiential modality, which would dare to abide the distortions of the abyss, but suppressed and entombed in the chambers of the real under the frail auspices of subjectivity’s genesis. On that count, annihilation does not engage dialectically with the Self (too reckless for a negation), but instead endeavors to dismount it from within its own irrepressible unreality, abdicating it as that which never “was.” This notwithstanding, annihilation does not take consciousness anywhere (rather, it disappears the here and now), least of all beyond the experiential world, asserting no covenant that might suggest a departure toward

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an alternative plane of existence (just the this that is no longer)—neither retreating into the temporary pacification of the aesthetic nor hunching in that sanctuary of a textureless “futural.” The chaotic becoming merely allows for an undefined reengagement with the world-under-threat, this time with no course or fixed purpose burdening that reimagining, no utopian thirst for revolutionary change . . . no projection into the workings of an ethereal level, no reaching toward the celestial . . . yet leading gradually into the Nietzschean idea of amor fati (“that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity”) as the necessary counterpart of affirmation (“all is permitted”).60 For some this is deleterious beyond belief. Here one remains vigilant before the arbitrary, a maximal paradox (of tracking improvised choreographies), through which consciousness grows beholden to a translucent, contentious domain. Thus, annihilation slices through subjectivity so as to isolate a sphere of interminable roaming-unto-extinction, annulling the ideological circumstances under which a transcendent sighting of “the real” first inaugurated itself, and in doing so irreparably screens over the limits of possibility and impossibility around which subjectivity revolves. Necro-scintillation; the immortally expiring (with nowhere else to go).

Chaos as Strange Everydayness: Overthrowing Entrenchment A strange, an unbelievable thing was this: whenever I stopped, my shadow fell long and black on the wall in the moonlight, but it had no head. I had heard people say that if anyone cast a headless shadow on a wall that person would die before the year was out.61 Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl

Surely, if an underlying profession of this section is that the poetic-chaotic transports its participants without any transcendent aching, then it is equally necessary to provide a brief tangential discussion of the concept of “everydayness,” particularly so as to demonstrate the precise fashion in which this second masking embeds itself within the trenches of the real only then so as to disrupt the transmission of its presumed immutability, imploding the operation of the ordered and the ordinary from within its own strangeness. To achieve this in terms of the writings of Hedayat and other members of the non-Western avant-garde, one might first conjoin certain aspects of the apparently diametrical positions of Heidegger and Benjamin in this line, highlighting the hermeneutic distinctions sepa-

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rating their interpretations and assumptions vis-à-vis the everyday so as to show how, despite adhering to largely alike presuppositions and even methodologies, they eventually carry the idea toward quarrelsome destinations. More clearly, within both thinkers’ respective worldviews there resides an antagonistic duality, one which thrives in the conflict between a cautious investment in the everyday (as a preclusion of any metaphysical tendency) and a titanic hunger to advocate a historical moment beyond the restrictive parameters of that same everydayness. It is such a consonant strain within the Heidegger-Benjamin schism to which the following part of this section will dedicate its focus: namely, that a rift occurs in the translation of philosophical desire into phenomenological praxis that inevitably leads both thinkers to deliberately waver in their approach to the everyday, one that leaves them tightly fastened to it by necessity but ever with a gaze cast beyond its limitations. In the case of Heidegger, the assiduous drive to uncover the essence of authenticity, a process of tearing back layers one by one, necessarily carries with it the implication of the former’s concealment; it is therefore the everyday which assumes the role of the Heideggerian scapegoat for authenticity’s occlusion, diverting its realization along myriad tiers of distraction by addressing itself with static self-reflexivity. This procedure, in turn, results in the irrecuperable “fallen-ness” of Dasein toward the undifferentiated crowd, an anaesthetized mass of the unthinking, with Being now assimilated inward toward a state of unreflective automation and self-regulating obliviousness. And at the center of this degraded position again stands the category of “the they” (das Man) as the paramount standard of individuality’s expendability in an ontologically impoverished epoch, a perversion of the human condition that Heidegger describes as laboring under the most petty concerns and hence capable of the most brutal “vulgarity.” Thus marks the birth of everydayness, the stage for inanity and desecrated potential, the emblem of wasted life and warped consciousness, and hence eliciting a transparent disdain in his analyses of its detractions from the otherwise inherent nobility of our Being-in-the-world. Specifically, the points of aversion rest along the axis of a series of interdependent allegations against everydayness, the first of which is tied to its solidification of a productionist metaphysics whereby the human succumbs to the error of its own primacy. Now encased in a maniacal orientation that Heidegger termed technology, consciousness then proceeds to privilege itself as autonomous and sovereign vis-à-vis the remaining continuum of Being, and hence feels itself justified in upholding a will to mastery of the world around it—

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with active subject inscribing itself on passive object, and therein geared only toward efficiency and manipulation, such that enframing prevents disclosure and all remnants of poiesis are effaced. Here the will becomes an authoritarian mechanism of everydayness that halts, obstructs, and facilitates downfall in a destitute age by coercing everything toward itself with all-encompassing strides; hence subjectivity appoints itself as the force of gravity around which all else gathers and toward which all must inescapably fall. It is Being, though, in Heidegger’s schema, that should perform this enterprise: “Being, which holds all beings in the balance, thus always draws particular beings toward itself—toward itself as the center.”62 Furthermore, the everyday is held liable for bastardizing the experience of time by virtue of its widening characterization of the present, its treatment of memory as a permanent repository of experience (the supposed preservation of the elapsed event), and the sustenance of anticipation via the ethos of “waiting for” the next to come. Even more, it barricades authentic time by rupturing the synchronicity of historical temporality (actual temporality) and supplanting it with the stationary, insular, free-floating, and entirely flawed invention of clock time. This is how the present forfeits its linkage to the past as well as its duty to the now-deterred onset of the future; it is detrimentally construed as a moment-unto-itself, and in doing so grinds Being into crisis by abandoning the historical sensibility and acute sensitivity to the function of time as a successive actualization of mission: “Everyday Da-sein taking time initially finds time in things at hand and objectively present encountered within the world. It understands time thus ‘experienced’ in the horizon of the understanding of being that is nearest to it, that is, as something that is itself somehow objectively present . . . The vulgar concept of time owes its provenance to a leveling down of primordial time.”63 In a more broadly applied sense, this source of temporality’s obfuscation sets the precedent by which Heidegger continues his offensive against the everyday, then saying that at every measure the latter strives to regressively mutate understanding by ascribing things empty and deformed meanings, reducing consciousness to the hollowness of “ontic” knowledge. Nowhere is this more flagrantly evident for Heidegger than in the everyday’s violent disempowerment of language, treating words as given entities without etymological or significatory lineage and, hence, abandoning the search for origin/source (logos in his own idiom) whereby one might perceive oneself not merely as a parasitic exhauster of Being’s force but rather as the inheritor of its legacy (with all the responsibilities and obligations it

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entails). Beyond this, the affective experience of death is similarly frozen as an abstract or even anonymous conceptual category to which consciousness is given minimal contemplative access, now operating under the mistake of agelessness provided by the everyday’s own narrow selfreferentiality; for this reason, Dasein is not afforded the skylight to confront mortality at an unmediated level, to chisel out that very pathway to finitude that occupies the most crucial place within Heidegger’s meditations. Stated rapidly, if authentic destiny constitutes an accomplishment exclusive to the one who has initiated the thinking of terminality, to the extent of reconfiguring oneself from a Being-in-the-world into a Beingtoward-death, then the everyday comprises the quintessential obstacle to this compulsory instant of recognition of the nothing. And yet the great irony remains: that, in the end, Heidegger deeply needs the everyday—ever wary of the potential for his reflections to remain mere speculative gestures consigned to their own self-enclosed realm, he reveals an undeniable urgency to ground his thinking in a space amenable to praxis. For if the epic objectives he prescribes are to instantiate themselves in tangible ontological incarnations, if his cause is to avoid its own stranding in incommunicability, then this sudden yet ever-present move toward the authentic necessitates an execution at the more banal frequencies. In effect, heroism must allow itself to turn prosaic, and thus marking the return to that same undermined pit of everydayness, though only in the attempt to wrest sublimity from the clutches of “idleness” as a requisite of the “goal.” This pragmatic resuscitation of the everyday by Heidegger, almost preemptively addressing Adorno’s accusations of an endemic idealism, first takes place in the awareness of the condition of “thrownness” as a directive of “entanglement” and ultimately of “projection.” More exactly, Heidegger decisively concedes that the circumstances of “the One”—that is, the contextual reality encompassing Being-in-theworld—are to hold an inescapable impact in the formation and direction of consciousness, for subjectivity cannot shun the influences of the era into which it is given. In this relativist instance, though again only so as to readjust thought along the hinges of a new universalism, Heidegger firmly articulates his belief that consciousness cannot dodge the grasp of its surroundings, though this does not by extension preordain an overdetermination of consciousness. Rather, it is through the orchestration of the forms and constructs that Dasein’s particular everydayness allows into fruition, however restrictive they may appear, that one obtains a semblance of flexibility or leniency (in the principle of “care”). In this

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capacity, the everyday is not overturned nor deserted but is dealt with directly, and what is more is dramatically rearranged so as to restore it to its integral association with past and future, bringing to pass the eruptive repetition of “”the archaic” as a gateway into the future’s destiny and in doing so suturing the prior tears in the totality of Being. And so, whereas the everyday is discharged to provide the means, Dasein itself is held accountable to sanction the end by drawing everydayness into the arsenal of authenticity; or, articulated differently, the everyday, despite its concomitant weaknesses, is left to establish the terms, though it is Dasein alone that must designate the purpose. Herein lies the importance of Heidegger’s simultaneously emerging interest in collectivity, for now that the everyday has been relieved of its ability to dictate and compel consciousness into a stance of prostration before its own phantom-dominance, the public sphere becomes less claustrophobic a region within which to maneuver. Whereas once Heidegger unleashed angered invectives and denunciations against the “gutter-chatter” of the throngs, now he finds himself strangely enticed by the prospect of “community,” a transformation that plays itself out across two distinct yet interrelated currents. First and foremost, there are Heidegger’s increasingly insistent considerations of the optimal strategy for spreading understanding across the general populace, weighing the most accessible mode of truth’s wide-scale exportation, and thereby revealing his concern for the practical application of his project. Perhaps the most telling example of this trend occurs in his work titled “What Is Called Thinking?” where he desperately seeks to uncover a premium mode of pedagogy with respect to the interchangeable (and thus inauthentic) flocks, though eventually the gesture carries with it the at once authoritarian and redemptive gesture of “teaching obedience” as a resolution. And, beyond this, there is also Heidegger’s lionization of the figure of the poet as the one who can elicit “the turn” to authenticity in an “essential language” that bends to consumption without forsaking complexity, the one who intuitively understands the nature of “the venture” as the risk of “flinging oneself into the danger of the open,” to dare to risk “the game,” to weigh or “throw in the balance,” as in the sense of “wager” . . . to “throw into the scales,” to “release into risk,” to enter into “the boundless, the infinite . . . in which one does not dissolve into void nothingness, but redeem themselves into the whole of the Open.”64 Though this quest also bears within itself an obviously condescending and even messianic property, such a drastic reimagining of the poet’s station in existence as that of fearless spokesperson and guide—the one

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whose words lead humanity into, through, and out of the pitch-black abyss as through the evolving stages of pure submission, nihilistic disbelief/angst, and authentic destiny—demonstrates Heidegger’s irrefutable effort to bridge the gap between his prescription and the generally invalid activity of the concourse. Thus, what was once a counterproductive tension for Heidegger comes to reconcile itself in terms domestic to the intricacies of its own logic, proving (at least within the scope of its own prior philosophical assumptions) that the loitering dust of the everyday can in fact be seized on as a point of departure for something beyond a mere resignation to the iron rhythm of everydayness itself. The disinterment promised only by a deal with the devil: for it is this very misfit and embargoed fertility (of the abhorrent ground) that also rests at the core of an Eastern postmodern turn. As already introduced, it can be espoused that Benjamin follows an analogous methodological route in order to arrive at a reverse conclusion, abandoning the militancy of the Heideggerian infatuation with unity, truth, and essence in order to pursue a statement of far more crucial importance for this project: that “every passion borders on the chaotic.”65 For although the triangulated strands of metaphysics, mysticism, and materialism in excited conjunction throughout Benjamin’s thinking already make for a convincing amalgam, it is the particular handling of these seemingly oppositional intellectual-experiential currents toward a quasi-chaotic nexus that allows for a remarkable articulation of everydayness to take place. Still, Benjamin’s own close affiliation with the Frankfurt School at first leaves him sympathetic to negative renderings of the everyday as the warehouse of subjective catatonia, extortion, and cultural entropy, such that he often reiterates and rehearses Marcusean renderings of social onedimensionality, Lukacsean notions of the phantom-objectivity of the commodity form, and even Adornoean critiques of instrumental reason and dialectical mediation in various places and toward varied theoretical ends. Nowhere is this more clear than in his anthropomorphic metaphorization of History as an angel whose innocence/purity is left ravaged at the hands of a storm called Progress in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” an episode of desacralization, which, again, poetically collapses his trinity of metaphysical, mystical, and materialist elements into a singular tragedy: “This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows ever skyward.”66 In light of such turmoil-ridden altitudes, the design behind this initial

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point is just that of isolating Benjamin’s propensity to at times assume a typical combative stance vis-à-vis the everyday; in this case, Progress, the self-assigned stamp of everydayness in capitalist modernity, is demonized as the insignia of overarching injustice and stagnation. Nevertheless, the unique monumentality and bravado of the narrative, enjoining the historical materialist to be “man enough to blast open the continuum of history,”67 should not be elided, since it is here that Benjamin will also seek to distinguish himself from the rest (i.e., in the transition from diagnosis to rejoinder). For if one were to take into account the incontrovertible violence and hypervirility of his prose, and then to reconcile it with his previous imagery of the defiled deity, then one might stumble on a terrifying yet vital proposition at work in Benjamin’s viewpoint: that he does not loathe Enlightenment historicism for ravaging History, but that he resents that the affair was so cheaply contrived, now leaving it to the historical materialist to ravage it a second time, all over again, but in this instant so as to retrieve it . . . to free it to a breach which it presently cannot initiate without the painful spark of the materialist’s touch. Moreover, Benjamin’s fascination with “divine violence” in “The Critique of Violence” as an unchecked vanguard of wreckage without aim or rationale that opposes itself to legal, positive, and mythic forms of power, complemented then by his loosely veiled captivation with the “destructive character” as that which razes without impulse to surrogate creation, imparts a new aspect to his perspective: the need to purge history from time to time through varied trials of catastrophe and suffering, to burn down its structures and edifices, to reduce it to nothingness, to atomize all that it is so as to lay open a space for what it could foreclose (and on some exceptional occasions what it must foreclose). This rupture in the parameters of existence does not have in mind any objective beyond the immediacy of desolation, and thus leaves in its wake a clearing for that infinite possibility which defies “profanity” by virtue of its capacity for the erasure of boundaries: “If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.”68 Despite the author’s somewhat suspect entrance into a theo-discourse that threatens to approximate the Heideggerian search, it is the initial sentiment of indiscriminate ruination that will be extricated here and associated with an Eastern postmodernism, for it is in this way that the poetic-chaotic divorces itself from a metaphysi-

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cal allegation: namely, in that it refuses to judge that which it destroys, entirely nonreactive and unprejudiced, and always evacuated of the drive for substitution or reconstruction of the fallen systems of the real. In this regard, though his other inclinations will take him elsewhere, Benjamin’s Marxian basis leads him into somewhat archetypal lamentations of the unreality-principle of the contemporary world: that is, that socialized existence has since become a fraud, a charade of lethargic ritual, reified monotony, and the dismal industrialization of the spirit under which the alienations of false consciousness exercise a seemingly unalterable regime. One might look to his “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” for a rather complicated example of this trance-like paradigm, a piece that analyzes the anachronistic presence of the flaneur amid the labyrinthine streets of the modern everyday, presenting an incompatibility which in turn alludes to the consignment of past modes of understanding and experience to trivialization. This sentiment of pitiless transition is again reinforced in “The Storyteller,” a seminostalgic reflection on a death-enveloped figure from whom the everyday can extract no further use-value, thoroughly unavailing to exploitation, and thus “is already becoming something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant.”69 But it does not cease here, for Benjamin takes it on himself to search out and elaborate a more liberating conception of historicity for which consciousness would no longer be the casualty of existence, but rather a forward player in its game, and therein his own materialist predisposition throws him back to that very scene of everydayness that he had so severely decried (now in quest of a second round). Whereas Adorno receded in Schopenhauerian fashion toward the ephemeral refuge of aesthetics and the hyperbolic rhetoric of negative dialectics, whereas Lukacs invested a pseudo-theological faith in the hope for a “proletarian soul,” and whereas most others of the neo-Marxist crew simply relegated themselves to a dystopic miasma, Benjamin returned to the very bowels of modernity’s indecency to wage his counterresistance. Accordingly, he quickly becomes beset with the imperative to somehow teach himself to affirm concreteness, to salvage it at some level and make it work for him, a task he in fact fulfills quite gracefully in his work titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction . . . To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts even from a unique object

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by means of reproduction . . . The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.”70 And so, amid the avalanche of diatribes to which his counterparts dedicated themselves, Benjamin dared to extract the emancipatory potential of everydayness from within itself by assessing its insurrectionary features (to down the ramparts).71 Arguing for the disintegration of art’s previously maintained “aura” as a reactionary and elitist trap of high culture, he would look to the disseminative capability of mass-produced art as that which undoes the stratification of aesthetic experience across class antinomies and therefore opens a more egalitarian, nonexclusionary entryway to art’s insurgent core. Hence, in the maneuver away from the artistic object’s fetishized singularity and into the alleyways of popular consumption, one which diverts the imminent dispersal of the aesthetic from any hierarchizing presupposition of “the original,” Benjamin struggles to chart a new blueprint of resistance through which modernity damages itself via its own rationale and techniques of indoctrination, making the reproducibility of the everyday devour its own claim to authenticity. This is how we come upon yet another convergence-point between Middle Eastern postmodernity and certain revolutionary-mystical trends in so-called Western thought—that is, in their mutual defiance of the lived world. To become a field-ranger of the threshing: the defunct, the undernourished, and the acerbic versus the commonplace, the spore, and the council (toiled-unto-senility). This is also the idiosyncratic formula wielded by the blind owl, a snake charmer who forfeits his own thin shares of solace in order to enter/crack open the sternum of banality’s spectacle, an ambidextrous practitioner of disturbance who enrolls the once-lurid thoroughfare in its own autopsy (to remake it as an outsider geography). A new relationship to catastrophe. It is well-known that the last century compelled Western literature and philosophy to develop its own theories of the catastrophic moment: for psychoanalysis, catastrophe came to be diagnosed as trauma (the irrepressible); for existentialism, catastrophe would be experienced as event (the irreversible); for poststructuralism, catastrophe would be read as rupture (the impossible); and for postcolonialism, catastrophe was branded as disjuncture (the liminal). What is different about each of these remarkable paradigms is their orientation: the framework of the existentialist event is one of beholding a pure exteriority, like a spectacle occurring in the surrounding air; conversely, the poststructuralist rupture takes place initially in a pure interiority-slippinginto-exteriority, like the ripping of cloth or the splitting of mind/text that

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tears from inside-out; psychoanalytic trauma is a condition of overpowering exteriority falling on interiority, some separate outsider force imposing, crashing against, and piercing through the inner layers of one’s being in a process of unforgotten violation; last, the postcolonial disjuncture marks a nebulous in-between that circulates back-and-forth across the catastrophic border. Nevertheless, what is similarly limiting about each of these conceptual blocs is that they all presume the original boundary between interiority and exteriority, self and world, the inside and the outside, the individual subject and the catastrophic fissure (even when disturbing its meaning, schizophrenically altering its unity, or making its semiotics porous). Against this erected wall, however, contemporary Middle Eastern thought comes forward to offer another terminology— that of hassar (siege). Specifically, “siege” takes the political vocabulary of “occupation” and hurls it into an occult-spiritual parallel of the becoming-occupied or of mutual possession; the catastrophic episode therefore incites the vaporization of all boundaries between self and disaster (complete apprehension); rather, they are already twirling within one another, like the gruesome forensic evidence gathered from beneath the fingernails of the murdered—the flesh, follicles, and genetic traces of the killer are now intractably embedded in the skin-made-habitat of the killed. This is the intimacy of nondifferentiation and seamlessness (the wasp’s nest) for which once-divided sides become so ferociously braided together that one cannot tell where subjectivity begins and the bullet ends; everything is caught in the same chaotic strangulation, in the cruel fog from which no one point of emanation can be determined. Individual thought and sensation melt into the bombing, the air raid, the famine, or plague. Siege is therefore the absolute gyration of the turning-cataclysmic itself, for which no narratives of authority, victimhood, or even alterity can withstand its liquefying touch; instead, it is the feeling of shared hallucination that takes place in the movement of the storm’s eye. The adulterant, the pollutant, the alloy (what has not been mixed here?). This Middle Eastern siege-connectivity to modern catastrophe thereby enables one further unique trait: namely, it provides the bombarded writer a platform from which to glimpse the excessive intentions of the violence itself. To extract the magical even in bare life. It is for this reason that the blind owl’s everyday is nothing less than the harbor of omenic indicators: blood drippings, headless bodies, birds of prey, and symptoms of pestilence. The result is a deeply predictive writing that inscribes the potential future at every street corner: much like ancient Mesopotamian war-rituals whereby the blood-spattered entrails of certain

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animals (thrown against the wall or floor) would yield visions of victory or defeat, deciphered by whatever soothsayers, astronomers, sorcerers, or fortune-tellers, so too does this Middle Eastern text reveal a kind of intelligence-gathering and divination-technology exclusive to the state of war. Notations of signs, wonders, miraculous turns. Thus Hedayat writes: “All the inhabitants of the town had died by some strange death. Each and every one of them was standing motionless with two drops of blood congealed upon his coat. When I touched one of them his head toppled and fell to the ground.”72 Note that this particular breed of author develops his own singular radar toward the everyday in order to map the overhanging will of stars and moons—to decode, foresee, and envision the otherwise clouded aftermath that waits in ambush, and he uses the refused metals of society to uncover this totalitarian design. Much like the homeless vagrant, this omenic author becomes an expert collector of discarded things, guarding with his life the unread sacred value of thrownaway items, artifacts, and phenomena. Whatever the average ones have dismissed, rejected, flung carelessly amid the waste piles: these form the devices of oracular insight into the next phase of the siege. Alignment-unto-drowning. Through that which other thinkers could not allow themselves to endorse—the takeover of the machine age by way of the machinic itself, exploiting the very principal instrument of exploitation—both Hedayat and Benjamin trace an alternative countertheological identification with everydayness as a facet of “the concrete totality of experience.” Still, another question remains in the wake of this stratagem: in what form does the everyday unravel itself subsequent to the historical materialist’s assault from within, and in what way is that passage in the service of the chaotic? As one who in most instances proves himself invulnerable to reductionist utopian positings, Benjamin makes sure that the answer not be so readily available, yet instead his remodified version of the everyday is predicated on a steadfast immersion within the present, turning exteriority into a combat-zone from within which an overshadowed historical possibility is then engendered and secured. There is no indulgence in anything beyond what lives or livens, and as such revolutionary action is never to be deferred to the horizon of the future or conceived as a mere resurrection or reinvigoration of the past, but consummates risk and peril in the voracious moment of the impurely now: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.”73 In brief, it is a strange

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immediacy alone that makes viable both political and existential rebellion, and thus it is worth noting here that the overriding quality intrinsic to this countercontemporaneity vis-à-vis the present is a drastic fusion, confusion, and effusion of the occurrence of time. Here, in the great foray of an everydayness reconceived by the many aspirations of the historical materialist, destructive character, or blind owl, temporality works its spindles through an ornate arabesque, such that the present mediates past and future in non-causal, non-serial transversals beyond the designations of calculation, determinacy, or constancy. Now liberated from the simplistic linearity and rigid sequentiality of historicism, but somehow still retaining its troublesome momentum, this radical morphology of historical time coalesces the disruptive and the aqueous within one untethered occasion of the now, such that continuity and unevenness become obsolete criteria and subjectivity finds itself hurled into a near supra-ontological province (with some likeness to the detonations of the carnivalesque). And indeed this is where the ethos of a particular seething or palpitation occurs most visibly for a so-called blind owl and destructive character: amid the dregs of an everyday that is anything but ordinary, contention without beginning or end, mobility beyond genesis and closure, open to everything, self-dissecting and nontentative, a bursting loose of material reality brought forth from the recesses of the present and sent forward to wreak illuminating devastation throughout the arcades of the world. Chaotic night-sun. Its arrival brings about a different existential attachment to the global and the astral: for here we see both space and thought shaving against themselves, driven to self-consumption, at once a cutting-inward and a carving-against the everything, self-infliction and world-infliction now a simultaneous action of the becoming-vilifier/ becoming-vilified. This approach can be tracked with diligence through several of the anarchic depictions that line this text, those that lead to the revitalization of the daylight as a battleground for willed chance, spreading variability across its self-proclaimed actualities. From here, a distinct channel is recognized through which everydayness can be reinstated not as a bastion of the hegemony of authentic Being but as a living record of the inexhaustible inauthenticity of existence (site of the masquerade, of delirium, of the festival of visors and dissimulation). It is that distraughtmaking excess of intensity that displaces the uniformity of experience by virtue of its newfound eeriness, its ghoulish taste for defect and misdeed, now a shape-shifting, amorphous juncture tying together the chaotic and the unreal within a non-state beyond the frontiers of the historical subject, and yet somehow housed on a bewildering street corner.

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Chaos as Incendiary Nihilism: Silence and the Formlessness of the Extreme I desired to record on paper those eyes which had closed for ever; I would keep the picture by me always. The force of this desire compelled me to translate it into action. I could not resist the impulsion. How could I have resisted it, I, an artist shut up in a room with a dead body?74 —Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl

A dead body in a room presents a rather ferocious challenge, for it negotiates a blood-alignment between chaos and the writer that then brushes against the real as an apocalyptic conveyor of irreconcilability. Amid such an all-collapsing force, closure, synthesis, and comprehensibility become luxuries no longer afforded to consciousness, delivering only an obscurity without trauma, a hanging deprivation of all faith in totality, abandonment without search for the redemptive . . . the world facing kinship with its own silence once more. As regards Nietzsche, his own incubations of void and overcoming are quite evident, each theoretical gesture trying with relentless diligence to unveil the shallow nature of whatever edifices of meaning-formation: ranging from the genealogical critique of historical progress to the purging of metaphysical certainty occurring coterminous with the death of God to the desanctification of morality amid the turn beyond good and evil to the rampant denunciation of objectivity, absolutism, and the cult of rationality. No doubt, this onslaught takes place on several disparate yet intertwined fronts. Within the particular scope of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, these inconstant angles are best orchestrated through the author’s allusion to the abyss and his parable of the tightropewalker who delicately prepares his defection from the real so as to stray across the infinite nothingness of empty space, never mourning but rather exalting the vanished horizon. The acrobatic mastery of the high-wire artist: against the dogmatism of belief in verticality, a figure of elite footsteps and filaments, this subject summons itself to affirmation, ecstasy, and the eternal return of the unmanacled one. This is how a certain incendiary nihilism becomes the middle passageway into the poetic unreal. As for Hedayat, literary consciousness falls into an even greater miasmatic despair, carrying out a daily succession of beheadings—forever wringing, spraining, or shearing against, as words become a pendulous death-game (the air thins).

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This allows for a textual forsaking of the definitive, an unseen genre where authority is undone and judgment adjourned, and where all expression thirsts for indeterminacy. With truth-content no longer at stake and representation held in triviality, the creative instinct begins to dynamically warp the stylistic parameters of writing itself (new iconographies). For theoretical elaboration of this abrupt change, Roland Barthes’s own S/Z advances the possibility for a new phase of articulation, positing the ideal type of a “writerly text” for which unity is no longer privileged, one that might elevate semantic breakdown above rhetorical continuity: “Yet reading does not consist in stopping the chain of systems, in establishing a truth, a legality of the text . . . it consists in coupling these systems, not according to their finite quantity, but according to their plurality (which is a being, not a discounting): I pass, I intersect, I articulate, I release, I do not count. Forgetting meanings . . . is an affirmative value.”75 In line with this premise, such a shift toward discordance emerges in the chameleonesque stylistic measures of Nietzsche’s writing, those that commingle poetics and prose, apocalyptic verse and intellectual ranting . . . halficonoclast, half-lunatic . . . as the disjointment of language leaves the trachea open to suddenness, volatility, and flaring. On an equal field of talent, one bears witness to Hedayat’s massive deviation from classical forms of literary voice and tone, one that sprawls beyond imagism and symbolism just as quickly as it moves from jaggedly terse evocations to the hypnotic spirals of a run-on typology that offer no pause, no cessation, no space to breathe from beneath the avalanche of serrated words, bringing stream of consciousness to an unparalleled gradation (beyond consciousness itself). He warns us: “How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing.”76 Furthermore, there is Hedayat’s increased commandeering of repetition-compulsion as a strategic destabilizer of linearity and sequentiality, one that scrapes the spinal cord of representation into unfailing irregularity and imbalance, a tactic further complemented by the text’s ability to accommodate episodic insertions of black humor. Within this linguistically decentered galaxy, one whose disposition would perpetually evade all significatory impositions, a poetics of chaos arises for which the enclosures of language forever dissipate, as a power exclusive to the filed-down contours of the fragmentary. This notwithstanding, there remains a further aspect of such chaoswriting, the key to its rabid administering of style, which necessitates exposition: the unremitting hatred for language itself. While the fugitive protagonist of Hedayat’s story finds himself hysterically condemned to

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carry out the writing act, compelled to inscribe his becoming by a force with which he claims to share an intimate relation and yet which somehow rests beyond his grip, it is essential to emphasize Hedayat’s concurrent pull toward silence: “[I] have realised that my best course is to remain silent and keep my thoughts to myself for as long as I can.”77 Countless times within the unfolding of the narrative, there surface such passages on silence as the ultimate territory of existential forgetting and neglect of the world order, a fact one is reminded of amid the blind owl’s final transformation into the convulsive visage of the old man before the mirror, a figure whose recourse to language is discarded in the wake of a laughter that intercepts both torment and rapture. And Nietzsche also, in his calling toward the “stillest hour,” wages an inimitable onslaught against language as an embedded fixture of consciousness, asserting a paradox whereby the most blaring moments along the existential spectrum elapse in the wake of that which “spoke to me again without voice” and then “became still around me as with a double stillness.”78 As its own mercurial vortex, this silence fuels the poetics of chaos onward, marking a dissolution of the word as limit and thus leaving desire to propel language beyond its expressive margins (into its unspeakable outside). In the dissociation of existential experience from any assumption of absolute reality, turning toward this new nihilistic rank, the authorial imagination then endows itself free license to interject the bizarre, the grotesque, and the inconceivable without incurring the prior rift between fiction and the objective event. As a wayward sabotage of old divides, agitating the monolithic binary between the real and the mirage to the extent of indistinguishability, the poetics of chaos dispenses its chimerical infuriation of such barriers. Once again approximating the many premonitory speakers of Hedayat’s novel, Nietzsche’s own “soothsayer” becomes the one who might rally words against their given essence, one whose tongue brings both the whirlwind and the emblem of a dreamscape now invading the world-as-real: “I had turned my back on life, thus I dreamed. I had become a night watchman and a guardian of tombs upon the lonely mountain castle of death.”79 It is this transprophetic episode, in which Nietzsche’s figure is overrun by a malignant vision, one where he sees himself standing on an ethereal peak as the gatekeeper to the realm of nonbeing, engulfed in coffins that would fling themselves open at random interludes, that reveals the collaboration of nihilism and the unreal. The fact that Zarathustra himself will actually assume this role by the conclusion of his drunken song, inaugurating the death of man with tearless eyes, reveals in turn the way in which fantasia becomes

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integral to the workings of an impending deauthentication of the world. Hedayat, however, is even more vindictive in his contemplation of the possibility of reality’s falsehood, halting and arresting himself in scattered introspections as to whether the entire allegory he is weaving is nothing more than his own hallucination, a proposition then reinforced by his opium-haze exhilaration and the way in which the first half of the story invariably intrudes on the second, and vice versa, in an arcane recursive format, such that the reader is afforded no avenue of interpretation as to what is conjecture, aberration, or genuinely transpiring. The poetics of chaos thereby becomes an ignition-point and quick trigger, as panels of the imaginary and the familiar/the obvious enter into an irreverent alliance, clasping themselves together at a sometimes ruthless, sometimes gentle, zero degree. As a somewhat tangential commentary, there is also the matter of how time and space are often intensified toward exhaustion in this kind of poetic philosophy, rendered a different relevance/irrelevance as traits of chaos-writing. From Hedayat’s accelerating reiteration of the “two months, four days” time-span to Nietzsche’s chant of the eternal return, given its most extensive treatment in the section “On the Vision and the Riddle,” both aim at a transvaluation of permanence and temporal rigidity through a mutual proximity to the transitory and the infinite (the vanishing eternal). Perhaps Bakhtin’s own elucidation of the “chronotopic” disposition of certain literary forms in The Dialogic Imagination mirrors this chaotic overthrow of temporal and spatial epistemologies, asserting that the expansiveness of the novel overturns the frigidity of the epic by virtue of its ability to surpass both continuums, such that they gradually lose their stations at the perimeter of the literary event (falling into coincidence): “They are the organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel . . . where the knots of narrative are tied and untied . . . Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins . . . [providing] the ground essential for the showing-forth, the representability of events.”80 The poetics of chaos, as will be shown, demands even greater turbulence from its forsaking of the real, one which will not only implode time yet will brutalize the act of narrative itself, disfiguring representation and decimating subjectivity with a rare ecstatic arc. And there is a parallel recomposition of space, for such chaotic expression typically gears itself toward a covert retreat from the confines of an existence in the real (stealth; eloping; indirectness). What is more, this premium on radical seclusion and insularity manifests itself in a largely exclusionary

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and singular recession toward the first-person, a nondialectical stance which is highlighted in the mock-autobiographical chroniclings of Ecce Homo and The Blind Owl . . . such that severe disconnect alone leads onto the higher ramparts of creativity. Such an evaluation of course possesses a large-scale bearing on the quasi-confessional styles of both writers, this in turn heightened by their consonant aversion to society and to man as procurers of self-betrayal. Hence Nietzsche discovers Zarathustra finding sanctuary in a deserted cave while Hedayat’s blind owl sits within “four walls” somewhere on the outer banks of an uninhabited wasteland. Here distance, asymmetricality, and nonequivalence embody a threshold into overcoming, though ultimately it is the instance of their becoming-silent, a vault across the ledge of unspoken desire, that will bring the world to searing. We are not above the spite of the chieftain, the clairvoyant, the hitchhiker, or the marauder (it is the only way beyond envy).

Chaos and the Unreal: Wounding, Illusion, and the Existential Nonstate I smoked the whole stock of opium, in the hope that the wonderworking drug would resolve the problems that vexed me, draw aside the curtain that hung before the eye of my mind and dispel my accumulation of distant, ashy memories.81 —Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl

The unreal deceives tirelessly (malicious propagation). As has been alluded to already, one of the strongest points of convergence among all performances of a chaos-consciousness rests along the contorted equator of imagination: that is, the subtle yet uncompromised perception of the world-as-unreal. Unmistakably, it can be said that this suggestion possesses removed precedents in other inquiries as well, from the surrealist mission of abandonment to Kierkegaard’s own commentary on the self-prostitution of the real: “What the philosophers say about reality is often as deceptive as when you see a sign in a second-hand store that reads: Pressing Done Here. If you went in with your clothes to have them pressed you would be fooled; the sign is for sale.”82 And even further, there rest within this critical line Baudrillard’s own several meditations on the impossibility of the real—in effect, that “it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real”83—which in turn drives him toward the dramatic conclusion that “there is no more hope for meaning.

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And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal”84 as a feature of the potential for a “perfect crime” perpetrated against existence from all sides: “The perfect crime would be the elimination of the real world. But what concerns me, rather, is the elimination of the original illusion, the fateful illusion of the world. We might agree that the world itself is a perfect crime. It has in itself no motive, no equivalent, no alleged perpetrator. So we may imagine that, from the very beginning, we are already in a criminal enterprise.”85 In other texts, he seems to make a distinct motion toward some chaotic principle (with Manichean qualifications) in his claim that “the world is not dialectical—it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis,”86 against which he then proposes seduction as the vindicator of “an ellipsis of the sign, an eclipse of meaning: an illusion . . . the mortal distraction that a single sign can cause instantaneously.”87 Thus Baudrillard’s own scattered emulations of criminality, simulation, and seduction shed light on the typology enlisted here, especially in its subsequent attendance to a “fatal strategy” that would “not oppose the visible to the hidden, but will look for the more hidden than hidden: the secret . . . not distinguish the true from the false, but will look for the falser than false: illusion and appearance.”88 Indeed, this very thing must transpire: the intensification of the unreal as a flood and trend of thickening aggression. Likewise, in his further privileging of appearance as that which remains “invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself,”89 Baudrillard presumably upholds the following assertion by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols: “The true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.”90 Without this paradox of mutual elimination in place, the coming raid against the real eventually falls victim to designs of negative hierarchy, forever differentiating between the supposed degrees of the illusory, weighing varying inelegant divisions of simulation (the real to hyperreal) within a spectrum that should not even prevail were the real to go unconfirmed, outclassed, and devalued. Moreover, this tendency for distinction within reality’s self-replicating scope would leave one further susceptible to temporal reductions, ever convinced that matchless ruptures are taking place “right now,” condemned to reality’s own rhetoric of the “new,” and therein ascribing flux to a nonentity through constantly changing theories of the former’s escalation or devolution. Baudrillard himself stumbles here at times, unlike the Middle Eastern authors under scrutiny, for out of this standpoint a tone of dystopian prophecy then issues forward—that “clearly our system is headed for catastrophe” and

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“now marks the vanishing or end of the real”91—that affords veracity and direction to a system and ending that never “was” or possessed “beginning,” and in its universalizing depiction reinstating the need for a discourse that would “at the same time remain humanist, concerned for the human.”92 Nevertheless, deviating entirely from this at once alarmist and redemptive position, against the ethics of Being and the concern for the conservation of the human, against the reverse-mourning of the real and the authority of subjectivity it implicitly resuscitates, against the immobilizing search for the promise of a surrogate meta-reality, this project’s own administration of the unreal as an all-distorting force of the chaotic will compel itself elsewhere, beyond all incentives to protection or guardianship, and thus sliding toward a dynamic mockery, yielding itself to immediacy with the transparency of the unknowing ones. As a point of transition, Nietzsche’s staging of the woman at the outset of Beyond Good and Evil proves highly analogous to Hedayat’s own orchestration of the feminine icon throughout The Blind Owl, particularly in the intricate way that each manipulate this figure as an instantiation not of the real, yet rather as the fifth column, supra-illusory antics of the alchemist or forger. The Nietzschean “suppose truth is a woman” depicts the varied endeavors of the philosophical outlook for centuries to engage in flirtations with this plaything of authenticity, desperately trying to carry itself with grace and style but inevitably failing in its pursuit of its fetishobject, and yet somehow compelled onward all the more by its failure, its addiction only enhanced by the stark futility of the search, and thus growing increasingly tyrannical in its need to conquer that which is most unavailing. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s own stance here as a derisive spectator remains somewhat ambiguous at first glance, for though he mocks the absurdity with which others attempt to capture this reality-axiom (in all its false promise) there remains the question as to whether he himself is cultivating an alternative strategy of approach, whether he believes he can succeed where others have faltered, able to gain proximity with that which has interminably evaded the rest. The Derridean deconstruction of this same episode places a predominant value on the role of distancing, clear enough in the following passage that: “A non-identity, a non-figure, a simulacrum—is distance’s very chasm, the out-distancing of distance, the interval’s cadence, distance itself, if we could still say such a thing, distance itself. Distance out-distances itself. The far is furthered.”93 For it is just this enigmatic distancing, Derrida maintains, that enables the Nietzschean “dangerous perhaps” to “engage the only possible thought of the event . . . to open on to the coming of what comes—that is to

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say, necessarily in the regime of a possible whose possibilization must prevail over the impossible,”94 which in turn allows for “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.”95 This notwithstanding, the hermeneutics of poetic masking in this lowland project would attempt to undo the implicitly messianic, hyper-futural, and presence/ absence-saturated resonance of the above interpretation, instead of spotting this unspeaking feminine character as a self-effacing seduction of the real that discloses itself into chaotic unreality once subjectivity has undergone annihilation. This encounter between consciousness and the so-called woman, then, marks a demanding exorcism of the remaining vestiges of belief in the real, an overcoming of the desire for substance and the certainty of presence: she is the apparent sage/charlatan of all “that is,” who will in fact reveal only the inherent lie in all acts of revelation. And so, the disaffection presumed between Nietzsche and the woman does not remain static but elicits a further nearing in the wake of a treacherous and heated transaction of moods, drawing them into closeness once the former has relinquished her temptation and allure of truth-content, no longer selling herself to the filthiest rungs (of amateur philosopher kings), no longer parasitically tied to abstraction, no longer enticing metaphysics and idealism, no longer representative of any unseen depth yet thriving in an indeterminate obscurity, and with a shameless allegiance to the empire of discoloration, tarnish, and stigma that she must eventually embody (the unreal companion). This same duality of the feminine emissary, the one who shows the unreality of the real, occupies an elaborate place within the confines of Hedayat’s own work, tirelessly conveyed forward as an executioner of essence. In this vein, the author conjures two disparate feminine images throughout the story, at once powerful counterpoints to one another and yet carrying an ominous resemblance, the first as an enchanting, submissive apparition that offers no explanation of her arrival and the second a depraved wife who withholds herself from her husband’s grasp with sadistic cruelty . . . yet only to collapse this outward dichotomy into a coterminous singularity in the final textual movement. What is more, inasmuch as this is a trans-solipsistic work that blurs the millennial division between interiority and exteriority, the women he commissions are in fact nothing more than distorted reflections of his own impending shift, emulating different phases along the axis of an unrelenting metamorphosis toward the chaotic: a technique of conduction that runs simultaneously

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through the shadow, the old man, and the mirror image. Hence, the second woman, the one who revels in his constant existential distress, serves to unveil the protagonist’s continued investment in the expectation of the real, ever hoping in his narrowly circumscribed room that she will deliver him from the discontented personal depths to which he has fallen. In that it never reaches him though, his rescue and conciliation left stranded in taunting abeyance, in that the real never does fulfill itself, here the woman is again cast as the possessor of a reality-content that is then rapidly exposed as but the ruse, slur, and disgrace of that possibility. It is in this sense that Hedayat’s narrator coincides with Nietzsche’s philosopher, consigned to an arrested post in the throes of anticipation, searching for a dangerous gratification that in its incessant drive for closure can only be associated with a subtle death-hungering: “It intensified my longing for her, brought her before me full of vitality and warmth. What better could I do than give her a glass of that wine and drink off another myself? Then we should die together in a single convulsion.”96 And yet, if anything Hedayat is supremely aware of this affliction, and so offers another dimension in which he handles the feminine trickster-guide far differently, administering his interaction not as one of nihilistic longing but of crazed overcoming (unreal passion). If one takes into consideration the opening scenes of The Blind Owl in which the spectral woman first appears, one immediately comes across the fact that she never speaks, which is to say that she has no recourse to the significatory impositions of language, and in her silence remains unchained by the hegemony of the utterance. The author proves diligent in describing her as intrinsically contradictory, that the breathlessness of her gestures, motions, and expressions is itself an interface of oppositional affects, all the while she appears entirely detached from her immediate surroundings (susceptible to the trappings of neither time nor space). And yet it is precisely this inconstancy to which the protagonist is attracted, the impregnability of spirit she epitomizes in every affectation and mannerism, such that we witness for the first time an emergent consciousness able to install itself in non-knowing (the prelude). In that she elicits a sensitivity that cannot be contained or calibrated, one that throws emotive impulses into the most restless antagonism, in that she forces him out of his self-imposed stupor and into lethal combat with himself, she becomes a source of exotic affirmation rather than repulsion. Here the feminine withstands objectification because meaning has itself become a fierce impossibility, such that even when the protagonist attempts to sketch her picture over and again, a last-resort effort at mastery, he finds

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that mimetic representation will not bend to her ethereal form. The woman is therefore not the envoy of the real but of reality’s undoing, issuing forth an interminable ambiguity that dismantles all claims to the definitive and the conclusive as something beyond the phenomenological threshold (sulking-turned-awe). This vindicates the striking convergence between Hedayat and Nietzsche’s deployment of the feminine as temptress, provocateur, and illustrator of the organic untenability of an objective world. That being said, the blind owl’s mere concession of disbelief is insufficient, since it maintains the passivity of separation, but rather his protagonist must become the silo of this very nonactuality that the angel-demon brought to his doorstep. Consequently, his becoming-unreal sets as its imperative a vine-like integration with the woman, demanding the internalization of all her sublime contrarieties and inconsistencies, such that the former decoy is consolidated (in the body, in the senses) without further procrastination. But even more, perhaps nowhere is this ability to negotiate such discordance better evidenced than in the episode of her murder and subsequent dissection at his hands, which not only brings a symbolic transvaluation of permanence, in that he accepts and even enjoins her transience, but also an onslaught against the drive for totality through a new will to mutilation (the violence of chaotic desire): “[I] began by cutting open with great care the dress of fine black material which swathed her like a spider’s web. Then I severed the head. Drops of cold clotted blood trickled from her neck. Next, I amputated the arms and legs.”97 He allows her to expire, owning up to the ephemerality of her existence and in doing so confronting the limitations of his own mortality, the desolation of the “I,” and then escalates the stakes even further in his readiness to trim down her layerings into incalculable parts, a thirst for incision that will inadvertently gain him access to the cavernous arenas of the unreal. This notwithstanding, it is again worth reiterating that this occurs within an entirely self-enclosed realm (though leaking outward), that the blind owl is in fact invoking such actions against himself, such that each interaction or event serves to extricate an interior barricade of some kind. Herein lies the rationale behind the fact that the woman’s blood remains stained on his clothes throughout the entire narrative, her death-erotics imparted across his skin even long after she is buried in some remote desert plateau, and that regardless of her suppression she resurrects herself inexorably (there is no escaping the unreal). Taking the infatuation with annihilated forms before all else, again one should be hesitant to theorize this impulse within the normalized conception of finality to which subjectivity ties itself, nor even to associate

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it with the petty resistance of the suicidal or the insidiously metaphysical conviction to which most martyrology adheres (here it belongs more to the masochistic euphoria of a chaotic sacrifice of the sacrificial). Within such projects, the notion of terminality is evicted from its general status as negation, an inevitable descent toward the nothing at the sight of which subjectivity collapses into paralyzing terror, and instead builds a platform beyond the constraints of Being and non-Being. Invariably dynamic, Hedayat’s appropriation of the death drive is anything but a branding of alienation; rather, he adopts these self-devastating tendencies as median spaces of transition (death as smuggling or trafficking). Effectively, his ruinous becoming-unreal is founded on a kind of autocessation; he gives his own eyes as a necessary offering at the altar of the chaotic, which is why this hearkening to the end almost always occurs in those instances when he is gazing in the mirror, wrenched viciously into a state whereby somehow “my reflection had become stronger than my real self and I had become like an image in a mirror.”98 This is its own expressive reward of shattering, one for which all things become indicative of a psychic refraction, for this moment unsheathes the passing of a trial in which the scandal of mortality is brought to its crest and reenacted for all to see (in blindness). Once more, this concurrent thicket/disjointedness between what one is and what one will become plays itself out across the riveting stage of self-annihilation, signaling the importance of a certain recurring imagery (hearses, skeletal horses, shadows, reflections, beheadings) of overtures invulnerable to direct intentionality . . . exertion without control, the unadulterated loss of self with no curative synthesis. It is quite easy at this point to draw a bridge between Hedayat’s own adaptation of fatalism and its similar evocation by Nietzsche throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra, both fashioning a complex affiliation between the annihilative event and the pedals of an unreal turn. For the latter, the search for the potential extinction of the last man sends consciousness reeling into vertigo: “And all the whispering? Was I dreaming, then? Was I waking up?”99 Furthermore, in that these thematic strands in both authors’ work can be conflated with a larger concern over subjectivity’s annihilation, so must the motif of purulence be entertained as equally integral to the fulfillment of this stance vis-à-vis the will to illusion. From Hedayat’s first line in The Blind Owl—“there are sores in life which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a cancer”100—to Nietzsche’s declaration in Ecce Homo that “the most painful things are not lacking; there are words in it which are downright bloodsoaked,”101 a paradox becomes visible whereby scars will eventually vindicate chaotic rapture. There must be a wear-

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ing down, one that motivates the gradual departure of the “I” through the scalpel’s mischief, hyper-exhaustion, and the radical harassment of all self-assurances (the body will undo the mind). This idea gestates within Hedayat’s narrative through: the recursive fixation with the “bone-handled knife” as an instrument of dismemberment and decapitation, both physical and mental, particularly the way in which the character of the butcher revels in his mangling vocation, that in turn reinforced by the imagery of maggots that appear and gnaw away at the different casualties of the protagonist, ever heightened then by the latter’s voyeuristic attachment to the truncated flesh of corpses and by a setting in which all walls and edifices appear to be rotting, though supplemented furthest by the author’s insistence on a discourse of infection and disease that sets the stage for a reduced state of affliction (a leprotic flaking-away of Being). Moreover, there is an almost sinister preoccupation with the poisoned wine that rests in a hidden recess of the room, an elixir containing cobra venom that may have already been consumed long ago . . . now working its way slowly through his veins until the moment of his convulsive demise/climax. Either way, Hedayat’s narrator feels himself contaminated in every waking second, ravaged by a plague he cannot even begin to fathom, and yet somehow better in the end for having been robbed of purity. Exteriority is implemented here as a simulacrum of interiority, such that the body disintegrates alongside the rapid deterioration of subjectivity—as the protagonist’s “soul” sustains laceration, so does his physical condition follow suit, as if providing the window to an inner realm under progressive self-maiming. In Nietzsche, there resides a comparable resonance in his portrayal of “The Leech,” one who sits by a solitary lake allowing creatures to suck the blood from his arm, feeding off the latter’s waning strength, and therein engraving in his own carrion an immovable covenant with gashing: “And at that the seated man got up and pulled is bare arm out of the swamp. For at first he had been lying stretched out on the ground, concealed and unrecognizable, as one lying in wait for some swamp animal . . . [and] much blood was flowing down the bare arm.”102 Beyond this, the harrowing transition from man to overhuman must also align itself with erosive tactics, as does the execution of God— “Gods, too, decompose”103—causing Nietzsche to equate the warrior spirit with that which “is the life that itself cuts into life,” always compelled toward its own lesioning.104 Forever deeming his quest “a going under,” the wanderer emphasizes that it is through the most unexpected pain alone that he is able to wager himself, striking a pact with the forbidden and safeguarding chance against the threat of order only by virtue of

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risking his very existence to vanishing. Still, this affinity for self-wounding also enables the prospect of healing, though this paragon of resurgence should not be assimilated into a concept of resurrection yet rather held as the chaotic cyclicality of an experiential rise and fall, leading into the following Nietzschean commentary on the “intoxication of convalescence” in The Gay Science: “Life—that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame—also everything that wounds us; we simply can do no other . . . Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time.”105 An incendiary circle of disfigurement and injury, then lapse and exhaustion within the emptiness of the abyss, then full regeneration from out of the grasp of the nothing: such are the orgiastic throes of this new existential rhythm—crazed, unchecked, impassioned to the highest degree, and demanding infinite suffering from the one who would dare to return infinitely. Hence, abrasion has its virtue, clearing a path for the most far-reaching becoming, proving resiliency, what Nietzsche himself described as “the saturnalia of a spirit who has patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure—patiently, severely, coldly, without submitting” and who therefore “after long privation and powerlessness” begins to feel “the rejoicing of strength that is resuscitating.”106 Scarring here signals a circumstance of vicious self-flagellation, as the strained ambivalences of hurt coalesce to disclose a modality of the most violent kind: that of selfinflicted contagion. And thereafter a sort of ontological hemophilia takes place, leaving an “I” that cannot contain the spilling of its own blood, pouring out in an uncontrolled deluge, unable to halt the ebbing of its life force (antipersistence). For just as an obsessive necromantic performativity (self-slaying; self-raising) takes one to the other side of death, excelling past the Being/non-Being disconnect, so also must an almost vampiric adoration of abscess serve as the guarantor of recovered vitality. And whatever remains among the black ash of that affair, testament to one’s having endured the wild sways of openness, taxed even beyond the borderlines of annihilation, will set the course by which consciousness might then embrace the chaotic possibility of a world-turned-unreal. Taking such inquiries to a warranted extreme, one comes across the following contention: that all writing is a fiction because all existence is a fiction (one recollects the assassins here, and the old man on the mountain). With such an admission in place, there are two specific features of this impression that will be explored at greater length within the confines of this section, both of which bear vast implications for the station of narrative amid the more expansive disengagement of subjectivity from “the real”: first, that inasmuch as language is itself a perpetual

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farce, every manifestation of the writing act is necessarily predetermined to comprise a mythopoetic undertaking; and second, that on recognizing the meaningless enunciation of identity, through which pointless features hold unchallenged reign, the insupportability of knowledge lays itself bare time and again in every constellation of words (tampered with, non-adhering). With these dual premises in mind, one must thereafter seek the vigorous interconnection between literary hallucination and the fictive renunciation of the world itself (there are several factors). The first proposition outlined—one that treats the inherent fraudulence of the word—comprises the underlying argument of Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” a piece wherein language is exposed (far before and yet clawing far beyond structuralist interventions) as a series of loosely arranged, self-referential metaphors through which consciousness conceals the obscurity of an existence that will not bend itself to intelligibility. Thus, for Nietzsche the signifier and the signified are equally contrived phenomena, both arising from the incapability of consciousness to confront the fact that “the fictitious world of subject, substance, ‘reason,’ etc., is . . . in us a power to order, simplify, falsify, artificially distinguish . . . [from] the character of the world in a state of becoming as incapable of formulation.”107 Amid the complete lack of a primordial sensibility at the heart of life, in the wake of its irreducible shape and anti-epistemological abductions, linguistic constructs cannot be regarded as anything but desperate defenses placed in motion to arrange a world that defies all continuity—for as Nietzsche further comments at the conclusion of The Will to Power, the world is but “a monster of energy . . . without beginning, without end . . . a firm, iron magnitude of force.”108 One cannot even begin to construe a referent. This notwithstanding, having been deprived a unifying functionality, the discourse of the real then attempts to constitute itself through naming, giving way to measureless conditions of interpellation (this is one of the reasons why the aforementioned authors prove so intent on anonymity and multiple titles as a means of dismantling identity). But it is even less the fabrication of language itself that disturbs such authors than its pretense to legitimate the earth: that it presumes to interlocute something of absolute substance, an unsublimated conveyor of the nature of things, and hence that it refuses to confess its own genesis in an immense smoke-screen (that there is something to even call “world”). This is why writing must become a lost cause, a vagrant’s trick, one for which no one accent can be privileged over the other, no hierarchy of utterances sustainable, since words have no genuine holding—all articulations are chimerical, all texts

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a ridiculous charade, a testament to the insurmountable absurdity of existence. And yet this recognition, if discerned unconventionally, would not hurl an already-trembling subjectivity into nihilistic detention but rather wrest it toward another infinity-standard, the valley beyond itself, and thereby surrendered now to the silent rhapsody of the inauthentic. Still, it is in the aftermath of Enlightenment humanism’s sedimentation of rationality that Nietzsche feels particularly compelled to launch an assault against language as a major conspirator (alongside subjectivity) in the larger discursive barbarism of “the real.” In one instance of The Gay Science, Nietzsche even goes as far as to attribute the survival of metaphysics to the preservation of grammar, as its most mercenary accomplice, and therein again drawing an obvious linkage between the totality of meaningformation and language. Furthermore, he works to performatively counteract these forces by virtue of his own stylistic diversification, evident in the fashion through which he simultaneously operates in disparate genres of poetics, philosophical prose, ranting, and aphorism precisely so as to transgress all suppositions of coherence and congruity. For if the author cannot avoid the asphyxiating grasp of language, then he will at the very least not remain static in his mode of articulation, turning the word against itself with a runaway streaking of sounds (throat saturation), though ultimately elevating silence, howling, susurration, and screaming above all else. As a result, Nietzsche’s increasing loyalty to the aphorism reveals his endeavor to disassemble language from the inside-out, to violate and abuse it in its own confines, but on his terms, causing it to crash against its own restrained settings through a series of fractional statements with no underlying structure or uniform conception (rakishness). Instead, one is left with a riotous group of assertions, some subdued and some more fiery, but all harsh enough to avoid prediction, classification, or formal cohesion. For the aphorism succeeds (in its impatience, haste, and discourtesy) in diminishing all lag-time between the idea and its communication, and by extension the delay between theory and praxis, aesthetics and the lived, amid leagues of orphaned authors and pages of chaotic disproportion. Surely, Hedayat can be placed in solidarity with this same lethal desire to traverse the iron bars of a linguistic consciousness, most observable in his orchestration of long, rolling sentences and hypnotic rhetorical spirals sporadically infused with terse and unfinished thoughts that inevitably disrupt the pace of the former, deliberately leaving the expression incomplete, perforated by anomaly, blemish, and exemption. For in doing so, in coaxing language to unravel and divulge itself to insolent sayings,

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in disclosing the ingrained fault in each invocation of the word, selfparodic and self-interrupting, the authorial imagination effectively repairs the sublimity of non-actual thought. Herein rests the critical importance of Hedayat’s very first comment on his literary undertaking: namely, that everything he is about to produce will unavoidably find itself to be “entirely imaginary, something utterly different from reality.”109 The unreal thus becomes flagrant (which is to say observing no rules). Having established this argument of the perplexed disposition of all language—that the storyteller appears when there is no story to tell—one can then turn back to the broader critique of the real and its eventual conferral toward the commanding of the unreal. If it is the first inscription that impresses taxonomies of meaning on consciousness, and that in turn perpetrating the more grave injustice against experience, then a counter-inscription must be born. Once again, in the case of Nietzsche, there is a sharp censure of so-called realists throughout The Gay Science as those who would forge a dichotomy of the “true” and “apparent” world and its ensuing symptoms, caught within their own postures of solemnity and self-possession, equilibrium, and symmetry, causation and dialectics, truth-telling and objectivity. Having allayed their fears through neutralization, the realists cloak themselves in rags of worn-out impartiality that might in turn elide the burden of greater accountability (to will the world), shielding the myth of Being from a chaos-consciousness looming at every turn. These are the insidious peddlers of the cult of reason who seek to consolidate the mechanistic structures of morality, knowledge, and universality, propped up everywhere by methods of politico-institutional surveillance and social regimentation, and hence freezing man in a twilight of the idols from which there can be no exit save through the most savage contours of annihilation.110 But perhaps it is the more illustrious merger of Nietzsche’s viewpoint with the deranged personage of the madman, allowing lunacy to ventriloquize his own signature marginality, that best subverts the conceptual credibility of the realist and his faint concoction of the “is”: “Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek God!” . . . The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. . . . Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out.”111 It is here, within the unbalanced eyes of the madman, within the acute imprecision of his stare, that vision grows dim, crippled, disarmed by an unceasing confusion, disconcerted over its own inability

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to extricate significance from the event that passes right before it (all the while dodging its grasp). Against those who would ascribe legibility to the aerial (realms of mystification), draping them with deterministic purposes and in the process entitling themselves to speak of the absolute with extending tones, Nietzsche unleashes a vintage non-character with the most unrefined disregard for the mandates and inhibitions of perception . . . beyond the solace of a horizon, beyond recourse to false illuminations . . . wresting things against the enlightened, into darkening and demeaning. Here there is only a rampant desecration at work, robbing thoughts of their self-assigned sanctity, emitting sacrilege against any protocol of inherency/inheritance (all is threadbare), but with no substitute reality-kingdom arising in its wake. Though done in other ways, Hedayat is also staunchly disapproving of the reality-principle, enlisting the sleek device of an opium haze to profane any remnants of clarity still lurking in his protagonist’s consciousness. The Blind Owl is, in its entirety, predicated on the denigration of all signposts between marvel and tedium (monotonous miracle), pinpointing existence as nothing more than a well-executed intimation. For Hedayat, there can be no plausible dividing-line between the mundane and the bizarre, the banal and the extraordinary, the grotesque and the exquisite, possibility and impossibility; here all realms clatter together toward ultimate interchangeability, irreversibly colluding, such that the reader can never differentiate between what is occurring only in the protagonist’s feral mind and what surpasses that self-containment to transpire concretely within the outside world. Such is the reason why those instances of composed sobriety throughout the text are no less prone to erraticism and contingency than are his drug-induced states; conversely, if anything it is his battle with subjectivity itself that leaves him with such a dangerous high, and thus narcotization is not a catalytic stimulus but is in fact invoked more as a pacifying instrument, anesthetizing him into trance, one through which the protagonist is afforded a temporary amnesty from his surging meditations on the fact of his own decay. From the very inaugural pages, though, it is this ferociously maintained imbalance between figment and materiality, reverie and the waking moment, which leads Hedayat to offer the following statement about humanity itself: “Are they not a mere handful of shadows which have come into existence only that they may mock and cheat me?”112 With reality impaired at its ground floor, this literary requiem is able to summon a phantasmatic aggravation like no other (affect versus the law): an old man cackles, emaciated horses gallop, a window disappears, and with them the rasp of a waking dreamscape convenes a

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textual space beyond the prior dormancies of self and world (voluntary insomnia). With subjectivity disabused of its false centrality, reminded of its vacancy and its throbbing untruth, its fully artificial claims to domination, consciousness finds itself staggering toward the many neighborhoods of the shaded, for which a peculiar becoming is then readily available (no longer even an unconscious, only cubes and cylinders of faintness/ dimness). For the chaotic, as an unremitting possibility and precarious impossibility, must exercise itself in a world-becoming-shadow. In summation, one might rehearse the theoretical abstract lain out thus far as follows: that the writing act is nothing more than a fictive allegorization of an already fictive existence which at its base level cannot be distinguished from certain domes of curiosity, astonishment, and horror. Chaos-consciousness, however, learns to embrace this eccentricity, and what is more to make it palpitate in remarkable manifestations, uncaging the most defiant paroxysm of the imagination in its devotion to an all-consuming unreality. Thus it is here, where the self turns toward the void of “what is” and a spectral morphology grows immanently pervasive, where meaninglessness mutates into a new currency of sovereignty and the heresy of faithlessness slowly makes its way to affirmation, a tightropewalk to anarchy, that consciousness comes to forsake its self-imposed walls. For it is a hard but not far leap from unreality to boundlessness, from Nietzsche’s “dangerous perhaps” to Hedayat’s ever-menacing “what if?” charting a sphere where the dueling propositions of “all is illusion” and “all is permitted” fall into diabolical simultaneity.

Chaos as Annihilation and Beyond: Divine Fatality, Shadow-Becoming As my eyes closed a dim, indistinct world began to take shape around me . . . For a few moments after waking up I had no sense of time or place and doubted whether I really existed.113 —Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl

Annihilation scours across every last territory, across the second mask of an Eastern postmodernism, across the nailed doorways and hind legs of oblivion, infusing consciousness with a deep conspiratorial drive (to become condemned). In this stratum, annihilation begins to stitch itself to the once longed-after, the raptorial presencing of absence, not a nihilistic regression into nonbeing, but a rampant collusion of being and nonbeing

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as chaotic desire. This is not a resimulation of death (the lime-covered body), but a willed perishing that unlocks its own imperative of vitalism: that all permanence wishes to fall. Chaotic vitalism thereby requires a lone motion toward the endless surfacing and decimation of intensity. It is this relentless process that ensures the power, magnitude, and seduction of the chaotic, for which annihilation is its envoy, a force extracting excess from within nothingness (at once an eclipse and a carving). No longer fearful or anxiety-ridden, no longer surrendered or even human: the annihilative one overturns slow deathliness for a more persuasive experience of the last breath. Though with several thematic subcompartments explored along the way, the fundamental premise of this concluding section might be broadly depicted as an arch-trajectory that covers several existential segments: (1) that subjectivity becomes a citadel of the chaotic in an ordered world until the point that it must turn in on itself as well, inviting annihilation; (2) then to rise from that vanquishing toward the hyper-enhancement of the “I” to metaphysical proportions; (3) then to die as a god in a world of one’s own making, as the full conversion of the objective into the subjective, internalizing the torrential height of a “divine fatality”; and (4) then a procession into the immaterial vicinity of a “shadow-becoming.” These are the rifts that vindicate what is spoken of here. This alliance can be charted most extensively through a close reading of how such quotients begin their confiscation of writing, navigating the twisted halls of yet another literary imaginary, its nebulous textual interstices, so as to reveal the exchanges between annihilation and an ascendant chaos-consciousness. Here one encounters annihilation not merely as a draining expression of the fight against subjectivity, a rash instinct for the lashing-out of the “I” or the reckless tearing-away at all that stands (sheer destruction), but also as a precise modulation of thought. It is outlandish at times, it is far-reaching in its wrath, and yet the annihilative event champions its cause through a careful interrogation of the decadence of the real, summoning its own covenant with the neo-illusory to unchain havoc against an existence in denial of its own contrived origins. As Bataille himself writes of this conglomeration of death, subjectivity, artificiality, and the loss of an objective world: “This emerges last of all: whatever is its nature, the existence of things cannot enclose that death which it brings to me; this existence is itself projected into my death—and it is my death which encloses it . . . I affirm the illusory existence of the self-that-dies or of time . . . I project their existence, on the contrary, into an illusion which encloses it.”114 And so the principal fashion by which consciousness sur-

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reptitiously implicates itself in the oncoming of the chaotic, thoroughly disenfranchising Being of its ability to trail as a haunting, is through an abrogation of identity’s most essential component: the partitioning of the inside and the outside. Specifically, if subjectivity is encamped in its core assumption on a massive perimeter between the “I” and the world that engulfs it, then annihilation must trample these blockades. We have already seen how, for Lacan, this process first engenders itself within the mirror stage, a psychoanalytic articulation claiming that the nascent constitution of the ego hinges on an inescapable episode of fragmentation through which one gradually comes to acknowledge the “I” within conditional surroundings. Contemporaneously, the once uninhibited experience of the Real begins to diminish and is in turn supplanted by the repressive mechanisms of a Symbolic order that thrives on this psychic theft. Forever unable to reconcile itself with the prevailing context of an outer world, this subjectivity is at best left stranded in a matrix of gnawing dispossession and at worst goes in search of the recuperation of an estranged mirror-image now doomed to instantiate itself in the death wish tendered by a malformed double: The human being comes into the world without an ego— without an identity, without a sense of self separate from an other. “Unable as yet to walk . . . he nevertheless overcomes the obstructions of his support, and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image.” In the mirror image, the child senses stability, unity, and stature. [This act of recognition is ultimately a misrecognition: that is, by seeing my self in the mirror—by saying this, what I see with my eye, is I—I glance over the fact that the existence of this “I” assumes a split between the self and the (mirror-image) other: I glance over the fact that the “I” does not, in any way, pre-exist.] In recognizing my self—in accepting the image before me as my self, I create a self before the mirror.115 Having situated this outlook, one might then relocate the theoretical gaze to Deleuze and Guattari’s “machinic” sedition against the rigidity of such overdetermined psychoanalytic models via further acts of fracturing, an aggressive incursion against the “I” that proves reminiscent in some ways of the annihilative trend introduced here. In their evocation, the sublation of the Oedipal paradigm via nomadology’s sole dedication to production,

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culminating in a schizoid desiring-machine for which the self falls into sheer disregard and irrelevance, leads Guattari to his own later commentary on a process termed chaosmosis: “An initial chaosmic folding consists in making the powers of chaos co-exist with those of the highest complexity. It is by a continuous coming-and-going at an infinite speed that the multiplicities of entities differentiate into ontologically heterogeneous complexions and become chaotised in abolishing their figural diversity and by homogenising themselves within the same being-non-being. In a way, they never stop dividing into an umbilical chaotic zone where they lose their extrinsic references and coordinates . . . [toward] Universes of infinite speed where being can’t be denied anymore, where it gives itself in its intrinsic differences.”116 This all rests on the near-catastrophic dismemberment of consciousness, though never as a disenchanted manifestation but as a chaotic electrocution of sorts, one that can be said to possess several literary analogues in the non-Western postmodern figures of Kobo Abe (dune women, ark builders, box-wearing men), Reinaldo Arenas (rebel artists, predatory sharks, erotic deviants), and Hassan Blasim (heretical composers, cannibal soldiers, corpse exhibitionists). In Western philosophy, this compulsion is given its most explicit attention in Nietzsche’s early portrait of the soothsayer: “A long twilight limped before me, a sadness, weary to death, drunken with death, speaking with a yawning mouth . . . My sighing sat on all human tombs and could no longer get up; my sighing and questioning croaked and gagged and gnawed and wailed by day and night.”117 This is a desperation like nothing else. On the other side, Hedayat speaks of the unrecognizable: “When I looked into the mirror a moment ago I did not recognize myself. No, the old ‘I’ has died and rotted away, but no barrier, no gulf, exists between it and the new one.”118 The death of Man executed from within . . . until the “within” falls away . . . leaving only invincible successions. After this furious divulgence, obsolescence, and dispersal of subjectivity, the requirements go further; there is then a kinetic procedure of self-heightening, indulging a rank of supra-conscious willing for which all self-reference becomes a striking absurdity. Annihilation, then, is also an aftereffect of the acceleration, effusion, and excess of a “divine fatality”: that is, the attrition of the “I” via its own limitless magnification. Before pursuing this statement further, it is appropriate to take note of a particular conceptual tide of great significance within the work of so many leaders of contemporary world literature (especially those in conflict zones): that of fast engagement with those forces against which one sets oneself adversarially, an idea that necessarily leads consciousness into

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greater proximity with that from which it craves distance. Stated otherwise, overcoming is never a retreat or recession from the challenge yet is only plausible after having come into close confrontation with that which threatens to arrest becoming in place—and the same holds here for subjectivity, for the subject is not annihilated by means of a casual disavowal but is hyperbolically indulged to the point that it achieves maximization . . . and then crushes itself of its own volitional magnetism. This annihilation-register, then, maintains that subjectivity cannot be deserted until it exhausts itself of its own possibility, an achievement won only after having provoked its own totalizing expansion within the world (whatever trickles or gushes; the unclotted). This in turn marks the tendency of both authors to revert to self-adulating narratives, not simply allowing but in fact encouraging subjectivity to take on a monolithic preeminence, pounding out the “I” above all else (in theatrical projections). As Nietzsche writes: “The species of man he delineates delineates reality as it is: he is strong enough for it—he is not estranged from or entranced by it, he is reality itself, he still has all that is fearful and questionable in reality in him, only thus can man possess greatness . . .”119 As yet another example, there is the wide-scale extension of Hedayat’s protagonist in The Blind Owl, a non-figure who comes to occupy such an immoderate textual centrality that each supplementary character eventually becomes nothing more than a mutated reflection of the one who recounts the story—each other, and alongside it every object, is synthesized back into the realm of this lone subject (becoming many), leaving no space unscathed: “All of these grimacing faces existed inside me and formed part of me: horrible, criminal, ludicrous masks which changed at a single movement of my finger-tip. The old Koran-reader, the butcher, my wife—I saw all of them within me. They were reflected in me as in a mirror; the forms of all of them existed inside me but none of them belonged to me.”120 What this increasingly powerful accumulation of the Self beckons toward temporarily is a heightening of the stakes of subjectivity rather than a diminishing of its rule, letting it loose to pervade all facets of the so-called outside world so as to make the latter its own, until it is overrun by epiphanic fumes. In doing so, in unleashing consciousness to devour its own environment, entitling it to split across all borders with a predatory drive for annexation, traversing the threshold between the self-proclaimed “I” and “the outer,” it effectively inverts the insularity to which it had previously fastened itself. And it is amid this distended, all-encasing configuration, obsessively amplified to the extent that no occurrence can stand beyond its envious grasp, that subjectivity simultaneously forfeits the interiority/

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exteriority division on which it was originally based . . . yet only as the first step in securing its own impending downfall. This brings one halfway into a principle of chaotic suffusion, in that every allusion, happening, and dimension actualizes itself as yet another searching limb of the individual consciousness; this tenacity, greed, manifestation, and growing prowess makes any ensuing boundary-formation between inner and outer purely superfluous. Additionally, it is at such median stages of attainment, displacing the “I” from its prior enclosure, rendering it tentacular abilities and inflating its scope toward sheer implication in a steadily evaporating world, that a certain doom grows imminent. As foreseen, this monumentality of the subject’s orbit is accompanied by an unavoidable penalty, leading into Goethe’s attestation that “I want to taste within my deepest self / I want to seize the highest and the lowest, / to load its woe and bliss upon my breast, / and thus expand my single self titanically / and in the end, go down with all the rest.”121 Amid such a tremendous incorporation, subordinating the real in its strife-ridden entirety, consciousness gradually begins to flood itself, submerged at the most devastating degrees, overwhelmed by the raw accountability that accompanies such a godlike transformation. At this juncture, having examined the first expulsion of subjectivity through a quickening, one can begin to unravel a number of profoundly informative excerpts from Nietzsche and Hedayat, and then to place these respective passages in a philosophical conjunction here termed divine fatality. Against this backdrop, a certain metaphysical-annihilative reading can be produced: from the assessment that “I love him whose soul is overfull so that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things spell his going under”122 to the search for the one “who chastens his god because he loves his god: for he must perish of the wrath of his god,”123 and both placed into the scales of the madman’s rant pronouncing the death of God and then heralding the chaotic reverberations of that assassination: “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to seem worthy of the deed?”124 This is a winding task (to recruit the ungoverned), one that demarcates an ever-lengthening outroad to damnation. (Note that this approach again finds its most telling instantiation in the image of the tightrope walker, expert of cables suspended over the abyss, and thus compelled to tread through nihilistic despair before having earned its ecstatic right.) After all, “Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God,” as Nietzsche’s histrionic alter-ego suggests?125 And so it is here as well: that the subject-now-turned-divine must cave

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in under the density of its own embrace, the death of God enacted twice, this time in the anguished eyes of a Self that can no longer withstand its own hold on eternity, overburdened by the lightness and asymmetricality of it all, and therein soliciting its own extermination. For it is in the quasi-elated/quasi-sorrowful realization that “God too has his Hell”126 that subjectivity falls into incompatibility with itself and therefore exorcises its imagination through an experience of forfeiture . . . no longer holding any allure for that which had conquered the infinite, only to be conquered therein. To launder the cheap infrastructure of Being to an alternative ratio of victory and defeat: one hangs the head and says “no more” (the human ejected); one lifts the head and says “once more” (the poetic mesmerized). Following this premise onward, Hedayat carries his own blind owl into just such an excruciating period of divine fatality, inducing the simultaneous degeneration and augmentation of his own agonized consciousness as the One, narrating his experience as a blended encounter of decay and extremity: “I understood now that I had become a miniature God. I had transcended the mean, paltry needs of mankind and felt within me the flux of eternity. What is eternity? To me eternity meant to play hide-and-seek with the bitch on the bank of the Suran, to shut my eyes for a single moment and hide my face in the skirt of her dress.”127 As is evident in the above definition (microcosmic, minimalist), it is here that one arrives at the bad crossroads of a moment whereby the self assumes a sharpened aspect, the once-nucleic “I” now having granted itself the gift/accursedness of deification in every corner, and thereafter compelled to answer for its own prime stake in creation. Chaotic becoming (in its beginning features) is not tacitly theological in character but flagrantly metaphysical, propelling subjectivity beyond its lesser narcissistic falterings and into a cosmological epic by which it is rendered accessibility to the most unadulterated immediacy, responsibility, and thirst . . . yet then interrogated beyond the threshold of its own endurance. In positing this unconventional (mis)carriage, one that carves into the superiority of Being from the angle of its own self-reviling apex, we come upon Hedayat’s own readiness to label “the real” nothing but a slightly misshapen appendage to his own frantic thoughts, confessing that “it has all been myself, all along,” and then afterward begging for an end in his longing to “surrender myself to the sleep of oblivion. If only oblivion were attainable, if it could last forever, if my eyes as they closed could gently transcend sleep and dissolve into non-being and I should lose consciousness of my existence for all time to come.”128 In observing this annihilative desire,

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one may be reminded of Kierkegaard’s own portrayal of divine love as the internalization of the paradoxical torment of the absurd, speaking of “a teleological suspension of the ethical”129 that takes place “precisely where thinking leaves off ”130 and for which “all human calculation [has] long since been suspended,”131 and also echoing from a distance Schopenhauer’s elegy to the one forever scarred for climbing such spires, musing that “if there is a God who has made this world, then I would not want to be this God. His misery would tear my heart to shreds.”132 In this case, however, it is a subjectivity daring godliness that is broken, or rather which tears itself apart, unremittingly wracked of all ontological solidity, ousting both humanist and celestial designations in one revolution, and therein overturning the cyclicality of Levinas’s own warning (in a text on humanism and anarchy) that “the end of Metaphysics is our unavowed metaphysics.”133 For, as has been elucidated, it is amid the often startling passages of Hedayat’s existential-aesthetic venture that a supra-subjective “I” comes to extend itself beyond even the incarcerating circumference of metaphysical experience, though unable to uphold its own seismic energy and thereby carried toward an irrevocable quenching. Annihilation leaves its own type of debris: the strobe of ideafragments (they are unwell), outlandish reflective strands that turn consciousness itself chaotic. It questions from every angle with insatiate force only then to morph into the impossibility/unreality of its own answer (it scorches the response; it becomes unrivaled), brokering a pact between hysteria and calm, rage and vanishing, for which illusion endlessly violates a world-in-haze. The epitome of this clandestine movement is that of the shadow-becoming. Levinas himself advocates (in a different capacity) for this gradual clouding-over of Being, remarking once that “the whole of reality bears on its face its own allegory, outside of its revelation and its truth . . . The sensible is being insofar as it resembles itself, insofar as, outside of its triumphal work of being, it casts a shadow, emits that obscure and elusive essence, that phantom essence which cannot be identified with the essence revealed in truth.”134 Nor does Nietzsche depart from the cryptic inclination of this shadow-becoming, but rather ruthlessly assimilates it inward in order to set it against both interiority and essence: “I myself once sank out of my truth-madness, out of my day longings, weary of day, sick from the light—sank downward, eveningward, shadowward, burned by one truth, and thirsty.”135 They preside (these shadows) as a kind of antinomian elect; they are an oligarchy. They shepherd the reader into a bottomless mine-shaft or well, where one is forever stalked and swarmed by charades of a nightmarish glow, handed

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over to the ravenous dissent of half-lit non-souls, brought before the courts of obscurity and convolution, their hushed tirade of experiential webs . . . disquieted, indefinite gloom . . . the low-pitch anthem of that which will not plead for Being . . . ever vouching for the immateriality of a world without gauges or parameters . . . the surplus and gluttony of the desolate . . . ever grafting itself to the scions and coins of yet another doomsday thinking, the shadow-becoming proceeds to make subjectivity bleed just one last vial’s worth. In brief summation, the pattern of this section has arranged itself across the following axes-of-flight: from the annihilation of normalized subjectivity to the measureless dilation of the self, from the solidification of a divine ontology to the brutal annihilation of godliness, from a mode of supra-consciousness that no longer finds itself entrapped by the constraints of identity, reality, or metaphysics to the realization of a chaotic scorning of the world (existential warfare). This notwithstanding, such an assembly of coordinates can perhaps best be demonstrated by virtue of placing together a selection of passages taken from the mouth of our blind owl, though their literary arrangement within the text remains a formula for derangement, never sedimenting a whole, each becoming cloaked in its own colossal waste: (1) annihilation—“The smell of death, the smell of decomposing flesh, pervaded me, body and soul”136; (2) divine fatality—“At that moment I was conscious of my superiority. I felt my superiority to the men of the rabble, to nature and to the gods—the gods, that product of human lusts”13; and (3) the shadow-becoming—“This shadow surely understands better than I do. It is only to him that I can talk properly. It is he who compels me to talk.”138 So many gradients and chalk lines of annihilation; and each state encountering a rare demise at its own hands, at times convening, intersecting, and melting, and at others held in blazing opposition, yet always leaving behind a radiant lattice of casualties. And what persists of subjectivity in the aftermath, where many are singed, immolated, exhumed, or excoriated, is not altogether an absence of identification, but the continued usage of the “I,” though now jarred of any meaning whatsoever (it only scowls), no longer able to be chained to a signified (that it happens is enough), but rather left open to a blind owl’s mutedness, screeching, and laughter. Such is the menacing arena of a new textual-existential outlook.

Part III

MYSTIC

Chapter 5

Vision, Disappearance, and the Soundscape New-Wave Iranian Cinema and the Postmodern Pack

I speak from the bitterness of my own soul I speak from the bitterness of my own soul When I was silent, my existence would become decayed from my muted screams all day long . . . —Forugh Farrokhzad, The House Is Black

Through their own fascinating anthropology of the image, a select group of Middle Eastern filmmakers have embarked on a neomystical trajectory that shifts our critical lens across yet another (third) postmodern mask. Although admiring of their famed revolutionary elders, and though always caught in the demanding shadow of their bold poetic counterparts, one might argue that the luminaries of Iranian cinema have gone elsewhere for inspiration—no doubt, their uncanny mixtures of vision, calling, disappearance, and minor sensation place them in more explicit league with the mystical channels that have haunted the region’s mountains and cities for millennia. And it is this conspiring that sets them apart. While the thin boundary between film and life is a frequently explored topic, the works of Iranian avant-garde directors Amir Naderi and Forugh Farrokhzad provoke a rather different form of inquiry: namely, the neomystical projection of an ethnographic imaginary. Executed through a highly specific filmic style, they present worlds immersed in a kind of constructed a priori, and always arising from an amorphous collusion of sound and image. What is particularly intriguing about this technique, however, is that it depicts similar prototypes of closeness and removal, proposing environments where an empirical approach alone will not suffice before the perplexed stare. In order to solve such puzzles, this section endeavors to carry out two interrelated analytical strands: (1) to isolate the rare technical and conceptual arsenal behind an ethnographi-

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cally imagined space, and (2) to delineate the unrivaled importance of sound in formulating such an elite visual plane. As such, this particular segment will dedicate itself to a diverse thematic spectrum, taking into account varied orchestrations of realism, minimalism, asynchronic sound, space, and silence. Ultimately, the aim will be to scrutinize the ways in which this approach affords a more expansive understanding of the genre of Iranian new-wave cinema at its base, tracking its core principles and initiatives toward the horizons of a mystical inquest. For are these pure fictions, absurd documentaries, forays into an untold realism, or something entirely beyond? One thing is for sure: that these films void the barriers of audition, dialogue, and narrative, relying instead on long takes, limited soundtracks, and powerful cinematography to yield a highly mystifying form of cinema that does not fail to transmit a hypnotic effect to its viewer, and might therefore pose yet another blueprint for epochal treason.1

Subterranean, Exilic, and Minimalist Space First a detour. For among the most incisive ways in which contemporary Iranian film posits itself as a radical redefinition/embarkation of culture lies within its transformative impact on the question of space (both in terms of the representational space depicted in such films as well as the unconventional networks in which these films are themselves viewed in their home country and abroad). Specifically, we might now venture to situate the experiential typology of this cinematic-mystical space along three distinct conceptual axes: the subterranean, the exilic, and the minimalist. To analyze the cinematic-mystical landscape as subterranean is obviously to relegate it to a dominion of the partially unseen: that is, to lend it an imperceptibility beyond the borders of the public view. It therefore inhabits a low ground or undisclosed chamber far beneath the surface at which mainstream society resides and perpetuates itself. In contrast to the relative transparency of the everyday, this cinematic-mystical space must inexorably shroud its own intentions, guarding its inner workings and concealing its impending trajectories. In this respect, it aspires to the simplicity of a cistern, a realm of self-containment contingent on an esoteric logic of interiority. More than this, it lures cultural manifestations downward and into the covert beneath that sustains their autonomy (for only the buried dimension is sovereign). To speak of these cinematic-mystical circles as an intrinsically clandestine presence is to draw an immediate association with the idea of

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secrecy. Such basement-engravings of an alternative culture do reflect the emergence of a deliberative will, however vague it might seem; they are in fact the enforcement of an elusive stance from within the self-enveloped site of the event. They steer through disparate webs and meditative passages that are prepared both everywhere and nowhere (closer to omens than artworks). The makeshift venues in which censored films are played (alleys, rooftops, private homes) are host to only furtive occasions, at once episodic and veiled, protecting their right to invisibility above all else. The reason for such hiddenness, one might speculate, is at once self-evident and convoluted: for it rests on the assumption that such new-wave cinematic phenomena, like their mystical predecessors, perceive themselves as merchants of the unreasoned experience so prohibited within the social continuum. As opposed to the mechanisms of instrumental reason that control the social body, both hyperdeterministic and constrictive, the indiscernible underpass of the cinematic-mystical world asserts itself as a warehouse of the irrational, a cellar-arena of provocation and unrest. For it is not only the gradual hooded conversion of spatial parameters that consumes attention here, but also the transmutative repercussions of this depth-forming for the revaluation of subjectivity itself. More exactly, the inhabitant of the cinematic-mystical lair must effectively subordinate the presupposition of self-as-totality to the abrupt disorientation of the surrounding ambience, one of indefinite sensory qualities that stray toward and over the limits of possibility. It is an encasing, and an inviting madness therein; the transposition of consciousness is therefore inevitable as indeterminate reactions drive the presumed unity of the modern subject into irrevocable disarray. And so, the proposition of a subterranean spatiality as the basis for an innovative nether-cultural model concludes with a paradox: that it is within the most narrow expressive corridor that things begin to grow, swell, magnify, and inflate their imaginative proportions. Alongside the verticality of the subterranean holes, this cinematic mysticism elicits a spatial reconfiguration on the horizontal level as well, thus marking the emergence of a notion of exilic space. Above all else, exilic space is characterized by its inherent distance from the prevailing order of things, a site of pure after-marginality and dislocation that renders some haven for those who would abandon existence at the foreground. As a sanctuary for fugitive currents, the cinematic-mystical space therefore begins from a point of rejection; it refuses and recants the injunctions of the common grain so as to overcome the incarceration of the social anatomy. To this extent, although eventually gaining novel turns, the original impulse of exile is one of relinquished connection: that is, counterhistorical

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disenchantment with what is, a corner-becoming-island, the quintessential refuge from the constraints of a being-in-the-world and its preexisting cosmologies. Hence, the initial function of this exilic space is that of shielding the agents of detraction, protecting those aberrant instincts that lead into a deviant individualism, and therein establishing itself as an outlying asylum. Moreover, this state of exilic amnesty instantiates a new experiential modality: that of the suspended (chasm of self-consciousness). This halfway point, in turn, carries two significant components for the contemporary cinematic context under investigation here—namely, the continually interlacing experiences of solitude and immobility. The film products are solitary by virtue of their alienation from the outside masses, highlighting the stark incommunicability that has arisen between those who transgressed (even the fringe) and those who remained behind. Accordingly, the participants are also immobile due to the acute and exhausted concentration exercised while present in the filmic aisle, such that the mind becomes its own straining desert out-world. For sure, both of these are pervasive, formative reactions to the sudden exposure to exilic space, and never to be overturned by acclimation. And still, this withdrawal is not emblematic of a blockade but rather yields an inverse outcome; as such filmmakers note in their own insistent references to “the doorway,” these exilic badlands remain porous areas, vulnerable to contingent interlopers. As a result, the openness of the cinematic-mystical space becomes a guarantor of its constant mutability, as the former condition of being-stranded gradually abrades, implodes, and seeks proliferation (portable frontiers). A drastic shift occurs here, one that lays the tenuous groundwork for a new postcultural fold, one of animation and saturation, as the intimations of sound, image, and idea flood to fill the gaps. Consequently, what was once permeated by solitude and immobility now resurrects itself as a channel of sensorial effusion, one that pierces, effaces, brims over, and spills itself from every angle. Yet another pivotal corollary of the formation of an exilic cinematic space can be seen in the rampant dropping of the interiority-exteriority divide in such works, such that the rigid dialectics of inside and outside are irretrievably dismantled. At this stage, the cinematic-mystical site no longer exists as a negation of social reality and thereby escapes the dualistic entrapment of a center-periphery binary. To achieve this end, the cinematic-mystical subject dramatically alters its own self-perception, maneuvering away from opposition and toward indifference vis-à-vis the dominant codes of reality; no longer a criminal, rebel, or antagonist, no longer subordinated under the classification of “the other,” it is freed

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from all relationality. Willed oblivion. There may persist an inadvertent reciprocity between spheres, but certainly all expectations of a transaction have been disbanded. It is its own self-banishing void. Thus, the cinematic-mystical sphere becomes an irrelevant wonder, a third meaninglessness of postcultural interaction, neither profane nor indecent but simply inconceivable, with no proximity to the past or known present; it speaks in an idiom foreign to the discursive terminologies of an authentic world, its articulations forever immune to coercion. The theoretical matrix of exilic space—having drawn itself across the lines of refuge, solitude, immobility, and nondialectics—fulfills itself in the actualization of a permanent elsewhere. To clarify this conceptual plane, the elsewhere does not exemplify a transcendent reconstruction of the beyond, but rather opposes all metaphysics by crystallizing itself as a faraway angle and remote curvature. For the mystic-filmmaker, it is this nearly ungraspable notion of the elsewhere that time and again marks the genesis of a will to reverie (the mind flees across secluded planes). Furthermore, there is an exultation at play here, the departure point of a more refined awareness of the creative drive, a reclining wilderness of non-allegorical insight. This is why the classical mystical portrayals of the tavern (mey-khaneh) and the ruins (kharabat) evoke such cryptic yet elaborate resemblances in this aspect of postmodern film, for whatever aesthetic possessions of the watcher can only transpire once this nuanced position of removal is provided. The third and final aspect in examining the intricate convergence between the cinematic-mystical image and spatial experience rests along the lines of a minimalist qualification (to strum within darkness). As a supplement to the premises of subterranean and exilic space, the minimalist factor brings to light a particular perspective on presence and absence that in turn bears serious reverberations for the argument of an alternative anthropological manifestation. For if it is indeed the case that the most cataclysmic theological revolutions occur in the smallest of districts, then it is precisely the cinematic-mystical spectacle that might effectively capture the possibility of such a molecular precinct. This is perhaps the limbo of which the Iranian poet Esmail Khoi speaks, that antinest in which “there is no hope / hope that from among this rabble in limbo / one good as truth and God / or one evil as untruth or Satan / would rise . . .”2 No lanterns, no deities. In deciphering this complex procedure, one might commence by searching after the way in which minimalist space undertakes to translate abstraction into materiality. At first glance, such an orientation might

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seem implausible, especially in consideration of the fact that mystical phenomenologies are typically perceived through unusual crucibles of figment, extinction, and annihilation. This notwithstanding, the minimalist rituals at work here (small in their elocution) in fact supersede the dichotomy of presence and absence by converting nothingness into a force of tangibility; they evoke a concretization of speculative experience, making its hypothetical-sensory world palpable as sound and image themselves becomes physical incarnations. Suddenly one finds revelatory declarations in the most diminutive gestures. Thus, a minimalist artifact would by necessity lead onto a spatial horizon of visceral proportions, one that would privilege aesthetic tactility over aesthetic fantasy, not so as to confirm any presupposed authenticity of the event but rather so as to lend substantive power to the realization of a collective illusion. Though there is no truth-content ascribed to the circle’s congregation, its actuality neither verified nor disproved, the meeting-ground or ravine is nonetheless overrun by episodes of frenzied contact. Ironically, whereas social reality typically invokes empiricism in a positivist search to prove its own legitimacy, it is in fact the strange outer banks of this cinematic mysticism, with its attestations of ecstatic non-objectivity, that strike the most severe ties with materiality. For it is the visual-acoustic faculty alone that intuits the more trying dimensions of corporeality, making the body integral to its aims and dispersing the smokescreens of discourse for the raw aggressions of matter. It is the minimalist side of mysticism, then, that unleashes the flux of dominant, impassioned, and hostile limbs. Nowhere is this precept more evident than in the abruption through which noise breaks across these filmic screens during an evening gathering; it marks the synthetic coordination of minimalism and space, the emptiness taking on a strange metallicism, and in the end cementing a state wherein each expressive act immediately beckons toward a reign of hardness and conflict. A concurrent and equally notable tension, and somehow often organic to the formulation of a minimalist task, arises from its tendency to generate conditions of excess—that is, that it turns desolation itself into a scathing instrument for the watcher/listener. Here what was once-canceled becomes defiant and incendiary, as even the finest hauntings forfeit their phantasmatic quality and begin to take on an almost unbearable megaresonance. An entire geography of affect set to gel unearthly potentials. Indeed, the cinematic-mystical ritual engenders its own atmosphere of overwhelming densification, its apparent lapses becoming sources of sheer extremity, its stillness a catalyst for acceleration, the miniaturism of the

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walls serving the vastness of a world-cultivation and world-imprinting. To this end, it steadily becomes an environment of immersion, one that subsumes everything it touches, wresting presence and absence, being and nonbeing, the apparitional and the material, into dissonant interplay. Such is the near-infinite spectrum of the minimalist space, one that traverses from the zero-degree of nothingness to the fatality-point of hyper-suffusion, and ever tempting an ascension toward a summit that goes too far. And so, the concluding accomplishment of a minimalist space rests in its ability to conjure the immense from within a highly isolated domain. To comprehend this gesture, one must attune the interpretive gaze to the magnetism of the event under focus; for it is a minimalist approach alone that could advance on the objective world with such cumulative precision, assimilating with slow strides while consolidating everything toward itself (its own projective empire). Hereafter, Iranian new-wave cinema becomes an exercise in absorbing profiles, at once regenerative and specific, condensing sensation into a versatile device impatient with remaining one size alone; instead, it uncovers a rather treacherous nexus wherein consciousness ventures to simultaneously retract and extend the seizure of unmastered space, exploiting the elegant collapse of all conventions into the infinitesimal. This is why it remains a minorized affair: mostly by its own volition, Iranian cinema has adopted an existence without context, never evolving into a major social enterprise, never truly a productive phenomenon within the hierarchy of mainstream culture, even when globally celebrated, and yet still propelling itself forward with enormous kinetic proportion.

The Sound-Tribe: Nomadism, Multiplicity, and the Experimental Pack Conceivably, it may be the case that such cinematic-mystical practices embody one of the last remaining relics of a neotribal culture amid the onset of (post)modernity. To reinforce this conjecture, one must be devoted to unlocking the nomadic inclinations of these affinities, detecting their varied movement patterns and in particular concentrating on drawing parallels between their own reflexive tendencies and the theoretical designations of the pack. In sketching the neotribalistic disposition of the cinematic culture, one must trace its emergence back to an instance of original desertion, a moment of profound separation from the networks of social reality. In this case, the subject betrays its own historicity, walking into the great breach,

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turning its back and trampling over the point of no return, interrupting the transmissions of the episteme and thereby irreparably puncturing its ties to the surrounding world. The impending result of this disjointment is a renovated perception of all activity as self-forsaking, such that all locations appear scorched in turn. More than this, one might proceed to describe this deserter-transition as a complicated apprehension of the will to stab-through, neither a moment of pure agency nor of pure hegemony. Instead, this leaving-behind resembles a compulsion, an empowering yet irrepressible instinct to unbrace what once was. Intriguingly, the overbearing inevitability of this trek, one that is strikingly visible within the performativity of the cinematic-mystical event, which is itself predicated on an instinct for abandonment and anonymity, at the same time mutates the urban environment in which it stages its runaway line. No doubt, the cityscape itself is cast into the frenetic rush of this disavowal, to the extent that it becomes the equivalent of the desert in (post)modernity, an invalid sand dune of dangerous shape. The aesthetic lays itself bare before just such an overture: that of an eventual discarding that wrenches not only the participating subject but also the objective world of the metropolis or refugee camp into a circumstance of complete discontemporaneity. The exceptional momentum caused by this desertion results in a condition of existential restlessness and inconstancy, the precursor to aesthetic nomadism. Having escaped the captivity of the social topography, now unhinged from its panoptical techniques of surveillance, this imagesearching consciousness is thereafter handed over to a fate of perpetual itinerancy (rootless and erratic by necessity). In this way, the deconditioned aesthetic subject emulates the mentality of the wanderer who stares at one conflagration after another in order to become a visionary. At this stage, the law of movement reigns alone, as this newfound mobility supplants all essentialism, loosening subjective experience from the chains of identitarian qualifiers. The leper, the orphan (we will note how these become the heroes of this antitradition, and for good reason). Having established such a theoretical backdrop, there are, in effect, two types of nomadic movement of surpassing interest for this inquiry: that of departure and that of consumption. Both of these incidents are supported by an interpretation of the cinematic crowds as taking forms of flight and feast, two dissimilar yet interrelated phases of communal interaction that will later set the stage for the conceptual advent of “the pack.” Following Elias Canetti’s own thematic outline in Crowds and Power, here we see how both of these are equally indispensable categories in providing an overall inventory of the cinematic-mystical ethos and its implications

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for the present epoch. In the first example (flight), a provisional mass convenes as a result of some unmediated threat, and therefore is bound together simply by virtue of a shared self-automating impulse to escape. This synchronized stealing-away, however, effectuates a fevered swarm experience, one that refracts the abrasive regime of stratifications that had held sway over their existence in society and instead leads them into an indiscriminate throng of exodus. Velocity and orientation alone assume a supreme status in the binding of this new confederation—clear amid the cinematic audience’s rhythmic swaying, weeping, and gasping—one that brings about a crucial disembodiment at all scores. With this side in place, one might then turn to the next solidifying technique of a nomadic force: the insuppressible urge to consume. Undeniably, this second factor galvanizes the other half of the movement equation, charging those present to advance toward a seething act of semitribal expenditure (they adorn themselves in rags and then feed). They forge an ecstatic coalition of the survival-instinct that translates all movement into a collectively undergone anarchy of desire, devouring, and indulgence. Hence, whereas the departure-group proved contingent on an affective framework of fear or crisis, one that then motivated an abrupt divergence, the consumptiongroup conveys itself toward an egalitarian experience of pleasure, abundance, and partaking. It is precisely such episodes of exaggerated consumption, thriving amid a certain delirium, that ensure the impermanence of these cinematic screenings: the trends burn out, and thereby enjoin a continued allegiance to nomadism. For sure, the same explosivity that fuels their inception comprises the very logic of their fading, leaving only the cyclical rise and fall of a vanguard sensibility, a roaming assemblage of assertion and depletion. Analogously, the fluctuating concerts of the mystics are not only in perfect accordance with this diagnosis but perhaps attest to some of the only remaining documents of such tribalism in the contemporary scene; for they are by design entirely transient affairs, at first transposing and then toweling themselves away almost instantaneously (and so eternal in their unrelenting death and recurrence). To this end, such aesthetic relapses speak to a combination of fragility and intensity, and thereby form self-disintegrating countercultures always on the verge of extinguishing. Building on this prism of nomadic movement, immediacy, and fragmentation, we can at last bear witness to the rise of an anthropological alternative to the pseudo-universalism of social collectivity: namely, the crystallization of “the pack.” As alluded to above, if one of the key aims

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of this section is to perceive the cinematic new wave as the revitalization of a once-mystical and now-postmodern tribalism, then it must also dare the (a)historical restoration of a fractal universe of interaction. In light of this development, the pack can be invoked here as an unstable aggregate, never a community, never a frustrated body but a paroxysmal alloy, not a unity but an incessant procession of particularized tonalities.3 As a primal/futuristic morphology of alliance, one that approaches the borders of animality, the pack is always first and foremost an uneven constellation, a circle of incongruous elements with no claim to absolutism, yet which contorts and collapses at will in the face of each attending predicament. There is something ingenious about its aqueousness and its discharge. In the case of the cinematic environment, though, what is perhaps most provocative about this kind of pack-formation, independent of its non-essentialist and non-identitarian underpinnings, is the unprecedented manner in which it emphasizes individuality (in a postsubjective light). Because of the relative exclusivity of the pack, each added figure is invested with an overriding impact, a staunch counterbalance to the drownedout and muted condition of subjectivity in the modern cityscape. The participant is not merely ingested into a pregiven social taxonomy but stands within and apart as one of certain hard-won entitlements, one of rarest initiative, sensitivity, and taste. For this reason, the cinematicmystical audience bears the same exacerbated weight of accountability for the venture at hand as the filmmaker, integral to its happening, not merely a passive spectator but a requisite forerunner of its tint, volume, or nuance at any given moment. Neither does this extravagant association of the “I” threaten the nomadic workings of the pack event, for individualism in this context is not defined as a sedimentation of the self but rather as the migratory sensibility of a subjectivity adrift. Terminologies of alterity do not even begin to cover its reach. In that the tribalism endemic to Iranian new-wave cinema, both in its creation and reception, coagulates in diverse pack-coalitions, it can be said to embody a state of self-producing multiplicity. Extemporaneity (because they are many); experimentation (because they are alone). Opposed to the tyranny of oneness, warring with the universal, this gathering eradicates the dichotomy of subject and object by handing all derivations over to the fractured interlacing of the singular (the ones who have become no one). It is in this direct respect that the operation of the cinematic space arrives at the threshold of a performative heterotopia, securing the pluralism of a third principle of disappearance. This proclivity for internal contestation/evaporation is what makes it an irreduc-

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ible revolutionary site, one that remains unassimilated while at the same time permeable, shape-shifting and multilayered, opening and closing at will, often barely accessible and yet always amenable to the possibility of remodification or total loss. As a consequence, this unconventional tribalism, in its construction of a heterotopic zone of visual-auditory experience, in its energetic conduction of a dire multitude, sets the backdrop for an aesthetics like no other.

Sound and Arealism: Minimalism, Asynchronicity, and the Incidental With respect to Forugh Farrokhzad and Amir Naderi’s complex approach to the question of realism, one might argue that their technique is contingent on a systematic defamiliarization that seeks the restoration of reality to the incomprehensible. These images remove even the most mundane objects from their presumed banality and project them into an unnatural light, drawing them into an after-context that subtly accentuates their obscurity. And still, this subversion of the known world does not serve the purpose of generating an opposing transcendent unreality, a movement toward pure illusion or fantasia, but rather searches after an alternative vision of experience. More precisely, it ventures to supplant the authenticity of empirical reality for the palpability of subjective impression, invoking the filmic medium not so as to mimetically reproduce reality “as it is” (i.e., as an absolute entity unto itself) but rather to capture with scathing accuracy the existential reaction to and entanglement of their protagonists with this surrounding pseudo-world. In the place of a regimented society, one encounters the irreconcilable struggle of individual consciousness to engage with a gray smoke outside, and yet forever unable to synthesize the bombardment of impulses, desires, and thoughts toward a static epistemological framework. It is with the power of this experiential formlessness, then, that Farrokhzad and Naderi align their work, one that inscribes illegibility within meaning, impossibility within truth, and which inexorably reflects an unknowable existence in each frame. (Note that while the narrative axes of these films are perhaps less relevant, it is still useful to be aware of their premises: Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black [1963] provides episodic glimpses into the everyday life of a northern Iranian leper colony supplemented by an extended poem read over the sights and movements of the infected inhabitants. Amir Naderi’s The Runner [1990] features a young orphaned boy from southwestern Iran named Amiro who is captivated by his own capacity for

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physical movement and by transporting vehicles [planes, boats, railroads, bicycles], and who places his body into strenuous exertions as a means of attaining vicious levels of self-consciousness.) In allowing the critical focus to revert back to the question of sound itself, one notices a vast intersection between the conceptual territory of the former and the topic of realism. Indeed, from Cavalcanti’s initial premise that “while the picture is the medium of statement, the sound is the medium of suggestion”4 to Truppin’s later insight that “sound, as a phenomenon that can bypass reason to communicate on a more immediate, more intuitive level . . . can transcend the material towards otherwise inaccessible realms of experience,”5 it is clear how the manipulation of sound might bear elaborate mystical implications for the perception of authenticity in documentary filmmaking. In light of this theoretical backdrop, one might take into consideration Farrokhzad’s own auditory orchestrations as evidence of a drive to combine such potentials with vital impact. Thus, in several scenes from The House Is Black, the residents of this enclosed site of the leper colony ignite into song or game-playing (without justification) in the centers of rooms or courtyards, then depart from the scene, and then reenter to be clothed in poetic voiceover. And yet, while this bizarre procession could be interpreted as an instantiation of the carnivalesque, the bare tones permeating the atmosphere instead lend a strange malaise to the occurrence, and therein diminishing its apparent radicalism. The collision of sound and image at this point serve to level one another, countervailing a transgressive visual manifestation with a sullen and almost leaden aural wave, and in the process generating a third option: an alchemy of the concrete and the illusory, an in-between that trips below the dialectics of the real and the unreal. Similarly, and yet with an inverted orientation from the previous example, one might study another scene from The House Is Black in which sound and image coalesce to disturb the polarities of realism and fiction—namely, an instant in which a man in crutches makes his way across the archway of a staircase, half encircled in light, half in shadow, while most others remain surrendered to postures of idleness and resignation. Slowly approaching the perspective of the watcher, as if walking into the camera lens itself, this figure then begins to strike his crutches against the surface of the floor, emitting a hardened echo, pounding on the steps as an alien auditory current overtakes the atmosphere. This corresponds with earlier scenes in which a rusted wheelbarrow infests the film with its own piercing, monotonal drone or the coarse sound of a plucked loom invades the sensory domain at hand. Consequently, though this man seemingly never

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abandons the physical contours of the afflicted, Farrokhzad allows the tranquillity of the scene to be inculcated by an abrasive resonance (no longer the debilitated, he becomes the aggressor through sound), once again rendering a violent though fluid contradistinction by which the film ultimately resides neither as completely legitimate nor as completely hallucinatory, but rather an admixture of the once-fixed binary. This is not some mere emulation of Rouch’s claim that “fiction is the only way to penetrate reality,”6 but rather raises the stakes of this penetration to an altogether higher caliber (where both categories become the knife). One of the most distinguishing tactics within Naderi’s constant defamiliarization of reality lies in the minimalist anthropology he devises, a methodology that devotes acute emphasis to the singularity of gestures, expressions, movements, and artifacts. With almost excruciating precision, the most negligible element is empowered to dominate an entire scene, such that the cinematic gaze is continually drawn toward the seemingly irrelevant and inconsequential aspects (ice, pictures, coins). In this sense, by undermining and even inverting the hierarchy of valued things, once dispossessed facets are now infused with overwhelming supremacy. Furthermore, this steadfast concentration on the minutiae of impulses, desires, thoughts, and objects serves an adverse effect vis-à-vis their presumably intrinsic realism: that it enhances their arbitrary curiosity rather than ratifying their truth-content. Over time, these features withstand a subtle distortion by which they forfeit their disenchanted status and appear increasingly off-centered, transfigured, and unbalanced. In this way, Naderi gradually transforms the prosaic sterility of habit toward a more ominous spectrum of fragmented events, animating select trivialities and therefore generating this unsettled air without ever having betrayed the crafted simplicity of his technique. Thus, the objective world under view is in no way physically altered, no dramatic metamorphosis or extreme rupture elicited, and with it no aesthetics of shock or surreality is allowed to exercise itself. Instead, reality is almost inconspicuously subordinated to sabotage itself from within, an undercover fall and unraveling, fundamentally disassembled on its own hyper-specific terms. Advancing further, the manner in which such a minimalist-mystical treatment of the image coincides with the thematics of sound rests on Naderi’s insistence on incidental noise. This attentiveness to the seemingly unpredicted possibilities of sensation, in turn, may demonstrate an intuitive recognition of Balazs’s own notion that “the ear can distinguish more delicate nuances than our eye. The number of sounds and noises a human ear can distinguish runs into many thousands—far more than

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the shades of color and degrees of light we can distinguish.”7 Accordingly, Naderi nearly exalts this intrinsic variegation of sound by showcasing the endless deviations and intrusions of incidental noise that perforate his settings (trains, breath, crowds). More exactly, the marvelous inflections of the main character’s movements are illuminated rather than censored or clouded over by the constant rattling of his limbs, to the extent that the audience is compelled to endure an auditory documentation of the most negligible fluctuations of his adolescent body. The Runner yet again provides an exceptional paragon, whereby a random group of local boys convene by the waters to gather bottles thrown from foreign ships in the Persian Gulf, and amid the hurried collection process all that is recorded in depth are the reverberations of waves and clinking glass. Obviously, this influx of involuntary noise is strategic, for it escorts itself across the filmic space almost so as to fulfill Ruoff ’s note that “location sound recording in observational documentaries does not clearly differentiate foreground and background spaces; rather, all sounds compete together in the middleground.”8 For sure, such a description mirrors Naderi’s method flawlessly, for the former goes to seemingly boundless lengths in order to cultivate just such an ambience, one in which divergent soundformations are subsumed in an arena of indiscriminate exchange: the undifferentiated matrix of listening. As a further indication, toward the outset of the film there is an image of a woman staggering across a highway, obviously pained, who has covered herself in traditional robes, and then proceeds to play out a harrowing cycle of stopping, sitting by the road, and then continuing to walk awhile when able (though she is not alone, but accompanied by another who pulls her forward). Undoubtedly, however, what comprises the most disquieting factor in this action is not the solitude within which she stages this crippling dance, or the torment one can assume casts itself across her hidden expression, nor even the incongruous choreography of her hands, but rather the ceaseless and awful clamoring of an awful clamoring of passing cars (i.e., the coarse murmur of machinic motion, an intrusive rustling of traffic that deflects the viewer’s encounter with her pain onto an impersonal register). Moreover, this dissonance of modernity’s incidental noise, atonal yet organic in its offense, reinforces the conviction of the following excerpt: “Without recognizable sources in the image to anchor the sounds, we hear a virtual cacophony of clanging, snippets of dialogue and music, and various unidentifiable sounds, almost an experimental in concrete music. Freed of their associations to objects, the sounds resurface in their phenomenological materiality.”9 And finally, to once more exhibit this

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profound interlude between Naderi’s minimalist visual poetics and his mindful appropriation of sound, there arises a pivotal moment wherein again the main figure Amiro stands by the shoreline, screaming at the passing ships, forging his own chamber of sensorial explosion. He is instantaneously taken by these otherworldly crafts that say nothing and yet beckon him gracefully to become transfixed. He affirms this request and relentlessly howls toward the unanswering distance, a gesture that might imply an ascending hope for communication, but instead the dominant sound of the protagonist’s own breathing patterns eradicates such a possibility, exuding weariness, loneliness, and unrequited fascination rather than fever or excitation. As a result, the recurring whisper of breath becomes the overarching vantage from which to gauge the scenario, one that essentially deprives the original image of its innate seduction and draws it back to an experience of approximate obliteration. Note that this is not a far cry from the mystic’s encounter with divinity. Nevertheless, in returning to the original discussion, this paradoxical gasping does not jeopardize the credibility of the experience, for if anything the scene becomes almost too real by virtue of these collaborative fibers; rather, it even aggravates and expands the realism, though it is precisely this excess of radical groundedness, one that leaves no recess untouched, that also lends the space its impending unintelligibility. Yet another crucial device in both filmmakers’ arsenal of defamiliarization is the disavowal of an explicit narrative trajectory. The deterioration of such strict plot horizons, in these cases, remains unspoken and underenunciated so as to preserve the experiential fluidity of the work, again revealing a directorial willingness to sacrifice technical consistency for a more elusive perceptual cohesion. The resulting affective rush is that of a near-immanent disorientation, one that elicits vertigo in the continuum of the spectator’s understanding, an irrevocable blurring of true sight. Images emerge either completely dislocated or in vague continuity, to the extent that each episodic scene is suspended within itself, disembodied and displaced, without recourse to normalization, sealing its own headless internal cosmology. The places are highly localized, embedded, and vigorously shown, though without conceivable origin or future, and so the inexplicability of these areas is maintained despite the raw transparency with which they are displayed. Suitably, the components are neither symbolic nor metaphorical, but rather invested with a sense of the unfathomed, just as the overall intent of the film remains shrouded in clearest ambiguity. There is no crystallization of an apex, no final resolution that might suggest a logic of aesthetic redemption, just

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as all conceptions of linearity are disbanded, and thereby leaving only a visual tremor to overturn the paralytic interventions of a narrative arc. In fueling this inclination, just as Amir Naderi endeavors to offer a veritable catalog of incidental sound so as to augment and then dilute the viewer’s perception of the real, so does Forugh Farrokhzad employ asynchronous sound in a concerted effort to confuse the storytelling principle. In this particular regard, it appears as if the films under scrutiny here defy the theoretical assumptions surrounding the subject of synchronicity as a necessity of the documentary genre. For while Ruoff outwardly states that “synchronous sound observational documentaries borrow conventions of storytelling and continuity editing from fiction films,”10 it is almost irrefutable that Farrokhzad invokes asynchronicity in a direct attempt to escape the limiting conventions of both pure fiction and pure observational documentary; instead, she superimposes a quasiethnographic arealism. Accordingly, this cinematic undertaking also subverts the precept that asynchronicity necessarily provide a link between the image and its presumed meaning, deviating from the suggestion that: “Each of the discrete images in such documentaries [is] the bearer of a pre-determined meaning. They were often articulated like the images of a poem, juxtaposed against an asynchronous sound track of music or commentary.”11 Indeed, Farrokhzad’s use of asynchronous sound accomplishes the contrasting objective of decodifying the chains of signification by placing images into a non-stratified and non-sequential region of expression. Perhaps nowhere is this dissective operation more discernible than in the opening takes of The House Is Black, whereby the leading image of a deformed veiled woman staring into a mirror is incongruous with the ascribed soundscape that comes before it (a moralizing, humanist introductory statement about ugliness in the world). Her own mysterious dark eyes possess a softness that offers no connection to the preceding austere declaration of the omniscient male narrator but rather dismantles the original passage altogether. And so, whether performed via the antagonism between a desolate coastline and an instrument of aerial technology or via the submergence of a crowd in the turbulence and commotion of the street (as in The Runner), or in the startling calm that devours an opening speech-act (as in The House Is Black), the purpose is the same: to allow manifestations of asynchronous sound to obfuscate narrative and thereby to leave the question of realism stranded in an enigmatic space of variance. Beyond this, equally important to the procedure of defamiliarization is the heightened self-reflexivity that permeates such artists’ use of the

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cinematic medium. More precisely, Farrokhzad provides deliberate indications of the fact that she is constructing a simulated domain of experience, not so as to diminish the practice of her cinema to a complete artificiality but rather so as to interlace the varying dimensions at work in a collective areality, bringing into full-view the architectonics of the expenditure. In this sense, she effectively shatters the distance between the final product, which typically remains self-contained, and the orchestration of the filmic event that encompasses it—stated otherwise, the content of the film and the process of its execution are brought into perfect simultaneity. Specifically, the filmmaker develops this strategy on a number of levels: from the ever-announced inclusion of herself as participant observer (through poetic voiceover) to the occasional suspension of the actors in a particular position. The first instance is not an attempt at self-referentiality but merely an eradication of the gulf between the author and the ongoing text, to the extent that the director-speaker is implicated as merely another transpiration, emanation, or component of the creative event (here the conceptual distinction of on-screen and off-screen becomes obsolete). In the second instance, the actors are intentionally frozen in specific postures, often staring directly into the eye of the camera (though often without eyes themselves), and hence coming to resemble a piece of visual art in the sense that the viewer then becomes hyperconscious of the act of observation. The atmosphere slowly turns toward an almost museal quality, the characters each embodying a separate installation, as an extra-culture of intensified watching emerges, not as in the frenzy of the spectacle but rather as if to mark the intimacy of a private visual exchange. Once again the design here is not to promote a contrived realism within the interior confines of the film, and thereby to carve out an escapist zone of the imaginary that merely resembles “actual life,” but rather to disclose the concrete actuality of the film’s “taking-place” by representing the disparate influences of its exteriority. In order to magnify this effect of visual self-reflexivity, Farrokhzad then introduces a parallel mechanics of alerting sound tides into portions of the cinematic event. This phenomenon presents itself across diverse axes in the films, yet always saturating the image so as to induce an almost grave slot of cognizance between the filmmaker, the viewer, and the aesthetic object itself. She even commands this subtly in her rhythmic poetic insinuations: “Let us listen to the soul who sings in the barren region / The one who sighs and stretches their hands out saying: / ‘Alas, my wounds have numbed my spirit.’ ” What this auditory exposure reveals, essentially, is the tacit presence of a creative will not

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simply behind the scenes but rather maneuvering incessantly through the scenes, such that nothing is able to be perceived as a fully extemporaneous outburst. As Ruoff writes of this non-accidental nature of the documentary: “Although documentary filmmakers often imply in interviews that such incidents simply happen and are just happy coincidences, their use clearly demonstrates an intention on the part of the makers, a sense of aesthetic and thematic unity, and an implicit point of view.”12 Though not aspiring to any embedded rationale, Farrokhzad’s integration of self-aware sound tides imparts the fact that there is a forceful intention behind the artistic act, and that a well-chosen mosaic of agencies determines its outcome. Neither an aesthetics of randomness nor of determinism, this interjection simply warns that “the ruptures in the sound track suggest not that strictures for making documentaries were violated, or that audiences were necessarily deceived, but rather that all films are constructions, meaningful assertions about the world made by directors and by those with whom they collaborate.”13 It is thought alone that eclipses thought. As a telling illustration, one might turn back to The House Is Black, wherein a leper himself appears, stooped in a corner, draped in the non-clarity of the black-and-white cinematography, his presence as ancillary and unconstrained as the other characters. In this instance, his visual entrance as a subject is irrelevant; instead, it is the almost indistinguishable shifting of the body, carried forward by the barely audible susurration of his back against the wall, which commands the sequence. By this slight gesture, the impression is then activated, the viewer’s access to the image lent a sharpened quality by virtue of what is heard, a contemporaneity of experience made visceral through the discontemporaneous arrival of sound. And still elsewhere, we return to the aforementioned figure who walks across an empty floor (with an amputated half-leg), halts his motion, and then stares directly into the camera for an extended period, the expression of the unrecognizable face arrested in time and reduced to an irregular postponement. Here one bears witness to a hyperextension of the observational approach, as the camera lingers too long, hovering above its image beyond the threshold of its exhaustibility, and yet this awkward temporality takes hold first and foremost by the sheer density of its soundlessness. To be clear, this is not a state of natural silence, a conceptual area to be developed later, but rather an imposed mutedness, a violent suppression of sound that incarcerates the viewer in the sealed prism of the gaze (i.e., functioning not as a grieving absence but as an all-implicating presence, an existential-visual black hole). Indeed, the

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deafening here serves to entrap visual perception from both sides—that the action cannot continue, cannot escape this condition of stillness, until the sound-barricade is lifted—and thus the suffocation of sound itself forges an acoustic perimeter or frame around the image that enforces the captivity of both the watcher and the watched. This notwithstanding, it is this same tense enclosure of the look, incommunicable yet severe, and guarded over by the entombing of the auditory backdrop, that enables an aggravated site of conscious engagement to surface beyond the dialectics of subject and object, and hence beyond the conventional definition of authentic experience. (Note that as an excellent correlation to this nexus of the visual and an extinguished acoustic pattern, Camper’s own description of silence expresses the same aforementioned potential to elevate consciousness: “The silence of such films is not merely the silence that comes from the absence of sound: it is a deeper silence, in which the noise of the external world has been stilled, in order to allow the contemplation of other sounds—as from the body, the nervous system, the mind, in a revelatory purity.”14 Even more, this bodily interiority will find itself compulsively straying outward, and thereby making all it contacts susceptible to mystical traits of distortion, imperfection, and even conquest.) And so, in the final measure, whether executed through an application of absurdist sound, incidental sound, asynchronous sound, or selfreflexive sound, the question of the real is once and for all rendered indistinct and indefinite.

The Soundscape: Silence, Space, and the Imperceptible In giving shape to the various film worlds they conjure, Farrokhzad and Naderi pay particularly close attention to the composition of space within their medium, achieved largely by establishing an unconventional mixture of proximity and distance. Whether filming in a mundane, indoor setting (hospitals, schools) or in the most fantastic open landscapes (beaches, ponds, shipwrecks), the three dimensionality they bestow on their subject matter is one of the most striking characteristics of such enterprises. They alternate, then, between two main modes of spatial representation: the distant landscape shot and the extreme close-up of people and things, the combination of which allows the viewer to perceive a sense of looming scale of the physical environment as well as the confined nature of those dwelling within them.

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Instances of the former technique are a common occurrence throughout much of The Runner, with the imposing southern Iranian sands usually shown from a great distance, as if located far from the actual proceedings of the film (although they are in fact its primary setting). This aesthetic decision inscribes a spatial discontinuity that permeates throughout, one in which the viewer plunges into awe of the physical environment (exemplified by an apprehending cinematographic touch), while at the same time distinctly aware of the separation between the filmic object and the viewer, the transparency of which in turn allows for a sort of estranged zone of contemplation. This spatial interplay between intimacy and irrelationality bears a remarkable resemblance to the experience of entering a peculiar, half-enchanted fairy tale district: left speechless and gazing on unforeseen surroundings, an unstoppable mesmerized reaction is felt in response to the emerging topography. In the same instance, however, one cannot deny that, despite this fixated interaction with the shorelines and sand dunes, there is also an alarming experience of foreignness; one is always trespassing when on new grounds. Thus Naderi’s flashes of sandstorm leave the ground unsafe. For by mirroring this paradoxical association through precise spatial transpositions, breeding an at once attractive and unforgiving mise-en-scène, the filmmaker once more brings a curious aberration of realism to the highly aestheticized cinematic displays of the Iranian cities and provinces. In contrast to the wide-open vistas previously discussed, we turn now to The House Is Black as our main example of an oppositional current amid Farrokhzad’s use of close, tight shots and, as the name of the film implies, a sinister space of confinement. The beginning phases of the film witness a combination of a series of constricted shots of the inhabitants of a makeshift schoolhouse in various forms of inane recitation—praising God for their eyes, ears, and other mangled appendages—and then countless extreme close-ups of individual faces, usually painted with some sort of distressed, asymmetrical, or stoic expression. In both instances, the people comprise the entirety of the frame, efficiently conveying this constrained hall of experience, as there is nowhere else to look, no expanses in which to hide, only an unrelenting claustrophobia (the feeling of kindred burial, and of the wayside). Approximately halfway through, however, the residents hold a wedding party in the middle of their shelter’s corridor, and suddenly the spatial character is transfigured. Lively ballads pour out from all sides; yelling, cheering, and clapping ensues; some dance, some smile; drinks appear in the hands of the once inert people; gone are the morose appearances and

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the melancholy moods, such that the once-contracted prison of the colony has adjusted into an inviting space of celebration. The director accentuates this reorganization of space visually with the use of quick panning shots, drawn from one end of the area to the other, so that the previously static foreboding close-ups are replaced by the sudden dynamic traveling of the camera. At this point, the viewers find themselves assuming a different positionality with respect to these beheld figures, drawn into a moment of elusive and unanticipated pleasure, though this marks its own eerie break from the signposts of tragedy, atrocity, illness, and abandonment that the film otherwise sews together at times. Thus, just as was evoked by the landscape scenes of The Runner, so does the mutable space present in The House Is Black reconfirm the filmmaker’s explorations of the mystical aspects of cinema through folds of bareness, sealing, and entry. At this point, as we turn a focus once again to the implications of the clandestine use of sound in such films, it is significant to note the way in which the spatial element of cinema is so often intricately linked to its auditory dimension. Even in the most traditional films, sound is often praised as that which is able to transcend the limitations of the flat screen, invading the unsuspecting physical realm of the theater. Camper elaborates on this idea in the following: “Sound fills the space of the theater, while the image (at least in the literal sense) remains confined to the rectangle of the screen. Two effects ensue. The sound gives the action it accompanies a spatial presence, the image gains the illusion of filling the air around one, as the sound itself does.”15 With this convention in mind, let us consider what is perhaps Farrokhzad and Naderi’s most noteworthy experimentation with sound: the use of the sound bridge. This asynchronic use of the audible, where the sound of the film does not match the image currently visible on the screen, but rather compliments the preceding or proceeding image, allows for an undermining of the transitions between frames, linking the images together in such a way that the frontiers of one bleed into the next, and therein violating the spatial boundaries of both. (Note that although this factor will not be explored extensively here, it is worthwhile to monitor how these filmmakers’ unique alignment of sound with the long take, inasmuch as it distorts space, also bears provocative repercussions for the issue of time. In particular, the filmmaker’s fixation with intimations of slowness leads to an innovative expression of cinematic rhythm as well, one that again challenges objective chronology by placing it alongside highly subjective-unto-mystifying modes of temporal experience. Moreover, in posing this dualism, it appears as if

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these filmmakers have provided a volatile archetype for Pudovkin’s own theoretical proposition of sound, time, and the subject-object dichotomy in the following passage: “Always there exists two rhythms, the rhythmic course of the objective world and the tempo and rhythm with which man observes this world. The world is a whole rhythm, while man receives only partial impressions of this world through his eyes and ears and to a lesser extent through his very skin. The tempo of his impressions varies with the rousing and calming of his emotions, while the rhythm of the objective world he perceives continues in unchanged tempo.”16 In culmination, whether accelerated or halted, eternal or transient, this time-sound matrix must remain entrenched in the ceaseless contention between subjective, objective, and even inhuman mystical renderings of the world.) For an example, we may look to a moment in The House Is Black when an aged man sings a delirious, nonsensical melody, drawing out several short mournful-playful notes, as if caught within his own sonic fog. As the viewer observes the scene and listens to this curious ritualistic anthem, the image on the screen transitions from the chanting man to two young girls combing one another’s hair. What is so incredibly perilous about this moment is that, although the images advance onward, the soundtrack corresponding to the preceding frame remains, such that the tinges of his offbeat hymn coat over the din of the hair-brushing, and the quiet desperation of the sick/colonized is thus inflicted onto the next generation (they will carry his unhealthy melody beyond his own disappearance). Here, the lines of the interior and exterior have been crossed, such that an entirely new spatiality (un)forms: one of resistance to the demarcation of ontological limits, and therefore of cross-infection; the girls smile as the deranged man sings, for it actually subverts their incarcerated fate as much as it upholds it. To elaborate further, Andrea Truppin expounds on this phenomenon in the following passage: “In the manipulation of spatial signature . . . sound bridges join together heterogeneous worlds, subverting our expectations of conventional depictions of reality that the films initially seem to follow. Sound bridges are used to join the real with the unreal, making each more like the other.”17 Above all else, though, it is Farrokhzad’s own poetic incantation, woven like a spell above the heads of the host she explores, that attests to this tense connectivity. Thus, from the execution of the sound bridge comes an obsessive, unacceptable congealing of moving images, stringing together a kind of defacing spatial continuum used to escape the rigid dialectics of the inside and the outside, the adjacent and the excluded. An armament, vandalism, and unholy partnership between things.

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The only dilemma in discussing the relationship between the sound bridge and space in these films is that, however effective the device, it is used rather sparingly (though always at the most pressing junctures). Hence, in order to further understand the mingling roles of sound and space in such projects, let us turn our attention now to what is perhaps the most prominent aesthetic designation of both films: silence. And though neither typifies “pure” silence, there is an uneasy quietness that pervades most frames, a hushed tone that approaches absolute silence without ever fully lapsing into it. The image is left largely soundless; only the incidental noise of the environment filters through, ultimately bribing the visual quarter to operate on its own incommensurable terms. As Camper explains in the following: “Without sound to spatialize it directly, the image, whatever its content, hovers before the viewer in a kind of mysterious and splendid isolation, like a fragile chimera. Freed from either an accompanying orchestra or an accompanying sound-track-on-film, the work can now operate solely for the eyes and, through them, address the mind.”18 In other words, as the conventional view claims that sound in film allows the viewer to engage more directly with the medium, infiltrating the physical space of the theater, acting as both an entry point and an intermediary in the filmic experience, it also neglects to mention how the image suffers as a result. At this stage, in sketching the definitive way in which silence threatens its surrounding world, the words of Truppin again seem exceedingly relevant: “Sound is used simultaneously to disorient, to usher us into another realm of experience, and to narrate symbolically . . . Defined and dynamized, perhaps the most deadly sound of all is silence.”19 Here silence is possessed of an almost deleterious capacity vis-à-vis the image and its spatial arrangement; it tears away and desanctifies the vision at hand, and with it any compact meaningformation that attempts to circumscribe it. Nowhere is this more prevalent and ecstatically demonstrated than in Naderi’s final scene, a monumental race wherein the main character escapes an anonymous destiny so as to will an apocalyptic victory as “the runner” against a massive backdrop of flames. As he grabs hold of a piece of ice that also embodies his climactic self-realization, banging wildly and euphorically on the barrels below, one hears only the exceptional soothing roar of fire (which silences all else). Within such expressive spheres, then, silence assumes a deeply affirmative stance (both devastating and intoxicating). Indeed, in considering the specific aesthetic traits behind this gesture, one notes how it may in fact provide the perfect prism through which to understand such filmic movements, abandoning plain dialogue for acoustic invasion. (One is

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reminded of Amiro’s wondrous maltreatment of the Persian alphabet, wielding his punctured, slicing phonemes against the ocean rocks and foam.) On the surface, then, silence appears to act as a forum for emptiness, passive in its apparent aesthetic simplicity. On closer examination, however, a curious strain of thought takes hold: for in that instant when all the wells of sensory experience are concurrently drained, the experience of nothingness takes on a surging aesthetic pulse, that same minimalist excess where the mystic’s void calls to itself more attention than any overt materiality could hope for, building a heightened sensibility from the most innocuous of places. In relaying this idea specifically to film, we see the silent image as the portal into a spatial stratum where perception and thought collide. From this conceptual springboard, we may come to accept how there might thrive in both Farrokhzad and Naderi’s experiments an overarching experiential quality of the imagined real, a phenomenological overdose, whereupon the starting point of meditation, reflection, and knowing hinges on a careful listening-act, a meticulous chant that will form its own vicinity of the thinking-becoming-unthinking subject. To this, Bela Balazs writes: “How do we perceive silence? By hearing nothing? That is a mere negative. Yet man has few experiences more positive than the experience of silence.”20 Thus, it is through this specific implementation of silence that the aesthetic experience of the film becomes synonymous with a miraculous counter-epistemology. To illustrate this in the films mentioned here, one need only look to the many long, drawn-out, silent takes fixed on a character’s face, and although they are often without any change in expression, it is through the exchange of these complicated countenances that they reveal an untranslatable set of stories to us. Again we turn to Balazs: “A silent glance can speak volumes; its soundlessness makes it more expressive because the facial movements of a silent figure may explain the reason for the silence, make us feel its weight, its menace, its tension. In the film, silence does not halt action for an instant and such silent action gives even silence a living face.”21 In harking back, then, we may now comprehend the filmmakers’ exodus beyond narrative, reality, and language, one that locks the viewer in an outsider terrain of desire so as to hear the unspeakable (the encrypted disastrous). Thus, in concluding our inquiry, the question of the anthropological implications of such work remains. For if we are to understand the idea of ethnography (roughly) as the anecdote of an encounter with another culture, then perhaps what this faction of the Iranian avant-garde achieves

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is the acknowledgment of an even more intrepid postcultural crossroads: a zero-world, off the radar, off the map, and populated by forsaken or discarded legions. This is how the cinematic imagination can take us to a neomystical edge, beyond the cliffs of reason and representation, toward a distracted nowhere that seems closer to a dream and yet all the while feels too real.

Epilogue: The Mystical Postmodern And what is the (in)exact connection between mysticism and the postmodern (though both have a thousand divergent typologies)? At first glance, a postmodern generation perhaps seems least predisposed to a mystical turn: in effect, that the postmodern obsession with speed apparently precludes the stillness, calm, slowness, and sunken tranquillity of the mystic; that the postmodern fixation with narcissistic technologies and self-projected images appears anathema to the relaxed self-annihilation espoused by a monastic order; that the hyper-materialistic nature of the postmodern consumer appears antithetical to the ascetic renunciation of material attachment that is always associated with mystical circles. And yet, what if the postmodern era marks an unconscious and unwilled descent into some alternative version of mystical experience? What if the postmodern generation harbors insane mystical tendencies and capacities, without ever knowing it or cultivating it through disciplined study, or even having chosen this path? At some bare performative level, is not the postmodern flattening of affect and the quasi-comatose stare of the postmodern screen-watcher some variation of the stoic, impersonal composure of the mystic; is not the addictive bodily movement across the surfaces of postmodern technological devices not some variation of the mystical world of ritual; is not postmodern automaticity some variation of the mystic’s intuitive realm of gnosis; is the postmodern arc toward infinite reproducibility and instantaneity not, if taken into an absurd fold, some passive variation of mystical eternity; is not the anarchic global connectivity of postmodern communication and information networks not a mechanized, disenchanted variation of the mystical goal of fractured universality? Is artificial light not still some kind of illumination? Is alienation itself not still a lesser form of miraculous detachment? Perhaps a more wretched mysticism, involuntary and cynical, coerced by circumstantial pressures above all else, but with some altered resemblances nonetheless. More than this, if so many mystical schools have been founded on this

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most radical premise, itself so threatening to both the religious and the political establishments of prior histories, that there is only one world (no transcendence, no metaphysics, no idealized beyond) and yet that this same world is a mere smokescreen, haze, figment, or dreamscape (no empiricism, no positivism, no realism, no truth value), then could we not think of a more fitting generational consciousness to carry that nihilistic-ecstatic concept forward than one that orients itself toward the ethereal workings of endless simulation? Last, what is the (in)exact connection between mysticism, postmodernism, and the so-called East? The answer to this might rest partly across the straits of a perilous ontological void, for here we must recite a prominent fact of the postmodern imagination in Western culture and ask after its implications: namely, that the folkloric instinct of this postmodern generation in the West bends compulsively toward apocalyptic landscapes (in film, literature, humor), always contemplating and flashing images of extinction, and that this end-of-the-world reflex thereby lends itself to two viable diagnoses. The first is that this era’s populace truly believes itself on the outer verge of disappearance, driven by an intuitive paranoia of being in the latter stages, dancing along the last precipice before finitude makes good on its claim, having become the generation that has (at long last) gone too far. Or, as the second diagnosis goes, these eleventh-hour fantasies are the signal of a far more mercurial syndrome: that this age of inexorable virtual replications has in fact yielded an unwanted immortality, looping the postmodern subject into an accursed penalty-syndicate of the forever (note the contemporary preoccupation with the vampire, the mummy, the zombie), and that these stranded epochal casualties are thereby confessing, in essence, a single terrorizing fact about themselves: that they have lost the capacity to die. That they could not die even if they wanted to; that they do not even believe in the slightest prospect of acquittal before their own faces (the holograms are too many, and too widely distributed for recovery). They therefore experience themselves as the undead—a roaming, decrepit, and unnatural residue or echo of former life that now moves without breathing, feeling, or desiring anything in its path—and yet never to be let off the hook of their devitalized, prolonged staggering-across. This is why their cultural apparatuses frenetically produce stories and pictures of world-devastation: because they long for what has since become a technical-existential impossibility within; they long for some morbid release from this purgatorial suspension. Thus we must ask: Is the West’s almost hypnotic attention to the Middle Eastern terrorist a telltale sign of some displaced frustration for

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closure? Is Middle Eastern militancy the bitter fulfillment of some last remaining sliver of finality, incineration, or erasure in the postmodern matrix? Is it supposed that these figures contain the lost formula for absolute exhalation? More exactly, is the Middle East the last place on earth where one can still go to die?

Part IV

SECTARIAN

Chapter 6

Sectarianism I And They Shall Dream of the Enemy

Contemporary Middle Eastern thought, although comprised of its own endless internal variations, has given rise to the granules of an incomparable, breakaway modality—that of a sectarian consciousness. For this reason, such anomalous products should not be read through the overbearing lenses of Western literary and philosophical criticism, but rather must be treated as a singular movement with its own intellectual and existential ramifications. In the same way that psychoanalysis, Marxism, semiotics, existentialism, and deconstruction provided hermeneutic arsenals through which various modern texts could be decoded, so too must this strand of Middle Eastern writing be accompanied by an organic theoretical apparatus capable of unlocking its more elusive patterns, contours, techniques, and ideas. The application is beyond open. No doubt, there are themes and concepts here in the sectarian work, at once profound and untimely, which are unrecognizable to all preceding interpretive frameworks. Their apparent foreignness, as the insignia of an untold/emergent fate for the creative instinct, must therefore be met by a forceful methodology with its own effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, and narration. There is no turning back from Mahmoud Darwish’s inscription that “I am one of the kings of the end.”1 This is a major forensic adjustment; something irrefutable has happened here, the revelation of an unsettled horizon, and he is not alone in his aloneness. Hence, in order to sufficiently convey the signals of this previously nameless school, to demonstrate its true predominance among the luminaries of the region’s more recent literary, philosophical, and poetic topography, this section assembles many evocations that point to the ascent of a thriving sectarian approach and sensitivity. Without fail, one can capture each of these iconic figures—Adonis, Samih al-Qasim, Ghada Samman, Nazim Hikmet, Ahmad Shamlu, Forugh Farrokhzad, and countless others—in

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a less common verse or page, wading episodically across such disturbed plains; despite whatever political, linguistic, or cultural disparities exist among them, almost all have taken to the hills at one time or another and experimented with the dark-pitched voice of the sectarian. Almost all have shared this antihumanist temptation to convert the text into a closed circle, and thus to conceive of the genre of “the sect’s threat” in all its immensity, forbidden power, and moral ambiguity. And so, under the collective density of so many converging declarations, we must become convinced of the undeniable necessity for this kind of reading act (and the will to extremity that bears it forward). The lightning of a century requires its own password.2 1. “He shall recite the lament for the dead . . .” then on bloody paths he’ll collect the skulls covered with the dust of ancient graves he’ll place them behind the wall then to trouble the bereaved at heart he’ll squat among the skulls and he shall recite the lament for the dead. —Nima Yushij, “Woe and Wellaway”3 From this sectarian standpoint, an Iranian author describes the one transfixed by the concern that there is always someone who wants him dead. This is the first dream of the enemy: the one of morose talent and reciprocal obsession, at once like and unlike, whose own one need is to hound, tamper, and ruin the vast plots of the sectarian. He is the bane of all ambitions, the one who campaigns against and intervenes at each turn in order to prolong the blood feud. This quarrel is so powerful that it streaks even beyond the graveyard (the nemesis outlasts all finality), locking the two visages in an iron ring of mirroring and recurrence. The sectarian does not underestimate the treacherousness at stake, for to diminish the counterpart—his cunning, his ruthlessness—would be to risk one’s own elevated status (they are bound together in quality). Maleficent brotherhood. Their thoughts summon one another. For this reason, the enemy’s overhanging presence compels the sectarian to remain in continual motion, staying only so long before dodging elsewhere, such that all time is restless, borrowed time and all space just a temporary hideout; one is never safe or immune from the oppressive will of this being; his shadow nears and targets, itself the presumed source of all tension

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and unhappiness, while also spreading its influence over others (many are susceptible to his whisperings). The sectarian thus develops a perpetual alertness to his approach, and sees the potential work of the enemy in all things and all people (schemes are everywhere). For this much is known—that the enemy, above all else, seeks a perfect crime: to slip into the sectarian’s own camp under disguise, penetrating the inner circles in dissimulated form and thus unspotted, so as to commit a traceless cancelation. The impostor. No mediation: the knife that pierces at short distances, the silk scarf that strangles from behind (revenge in closeness). And even more than this, the enemy will attempt to escape accusation if possible, to remain a while even after the kill, his camouflage intact as he presides over the very funereal rites of his murdered. The spectacle. To shed false tears among the genuine: yes, this is the last compensation, and with it the sweetest corruption of the sect. A collector, reciter, and sectarian himself in every lethal sense. 2. “A deep silence fell upon the tower . . .” These were the only observable movements that prevailed in the silent precinct, the monotonous recurrence of thousands of years. The tower, built of lime and mortar, looked from afar like a silver ring thrown on the flank of the mountain. (Sadeq Hedayat, “The Benedictions”)4 From this sectarian standpoint, an Iranian author describes the great significance of the tower and by extension the necessity of fortification. Bastion. Citadel. Stronghold. Such movements require an operationalphantasmatic point of reference, a nerve-coordinate that combines both permanence (it must appear formidable, immutable, and impenetrable as a tangible headquarters encased amid far-flung mountains) and ethereality (it drifts mainly as a figment in the nomadic mind of the sectarian who lives most of his nights as a marauder in enemy camps). No, one does not spend much time beneath its columns; only disciples remain there for long periods of training and indoctrination. Rather, it is where the agile, committed ones go after the consummation of a task, roaming through its courtyards in a meditative-conversant state, speaking with the tower’s white and black keepers, for just a short while before receiving the next command or trial. It offers no real homecoming, only renewal of the promise, and with it the facticity of another harsh assignment in store. More than anything, its function is that of an apparitional center for those

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sent back into bad waters, a spiritual geoscape of concentration, warmth, and continuous imaginary return for those engaged in illicit excursions on behalf of the cause. It thus provides solace only on the outside: the name/ shape of this tower must be a force of awful intimidation to those beyond its walls, and at the same time a guarantor of belonging and project to those who once scaled its jaggedness and now find themselves scattered, held captive, or thrown apart. The outline is most essential (the isolated glint of its spires). For as long as it stands, all else seems indefensible by comparison; the world itself can never aspire to the tower’s security, and so looks ripe for the taking. Thus the fortress holds, and with it the dream of the fortress. 3. “The earth is closing on us . . .” The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through . . . We saw the faces of those to be killed by the last of us in the last defense of the soul. We cried over the children’s feast. We saw the faces of those who’ll throw our children Out of the windows of this last space . . . —Mahmoud Darwish, “The Earth Is Closing on Us”5 From this sectarian standpoint, a Palestinian author describes the sensation of a globe in states of increasing compression, forever constricting around his kind, about to sever the limbs of whoever remains within its narrowness. And yet, they will turn the blueprint of this deteriorating prism against the enemy as well, its tapering and bombardment, its gravity and thinning tessellation, luring the deserving ones through its lesser corridors (where breath itself grows slender). Tightness. Entrapment. This cylinder is itself a drawbridge to mutual obliteration, one that reflects the drastic eagerness of the sectarian: to become a lost cause himself, to plan his own burial alive because the earth has become unlivable, to suffer the same outcome of choking and mutilation for the chance at a single showdown with those who have thrown his children from the windows. The sectarian negotiates for nothing more in the last passage, asking for no exemption from its world-historical bowels, no release from the contracting stomach of things (all inhabitants are squeezed together), so ready

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to turn fractal and share a mass grave with those who stand against the soul’s last defense. The dim underneath of the concept of equality. No, this tube is an entombing of both sides together, the recruitment-untosmothering of self and other, sect and society, though only the sectarian can claim consciousness of its vise-like induction. He stares with cooler passion toward this verdict, the crushing and snapping of joints, with a viable doomsday mind-set in place: that even stalemate would be triumph. All penalties to one’s own are warranted, as long as they go down also (wrested beneath). 4. “To make another planet . . .” I have a simple dream to make another planet that can house all my enemies I proceed into it before them and live there temporarily We nibble its delicious pieces when we are hungry —Mazen Maarouf, “Hand Made”6 From this sectarian standpoint, a Palestinian author describes the incremental chapters of yet another dream of the enemy: (1) extraplanetary construction; (2) confinement of the unwanted within the planetary borders; (3) momentary infiltration of the planetary lair; and (4) invigorated consumption of the planet. This procedure, in turn, assumes several conceptual twists in order for it to maximize its endeavor, hinging on a quadrangulation of desires, attributes, and identity formations at every turn. The sectarian’s four intertwining desires: to be the most accountable (creation), the most disconnected (banishment), the most invested (possession), and the most around/above/upon (engulfing) the planet. The sectarian’s four corresponding attributes: labor (to build it), renunciation (to disown it), stealth (to invade it), and hunger (to eat it). The sectarian’s four corresponding identity-formations: the carpenter, the judge, the trespasser, and the glutton. Hence, we are dealing with a galactic scope of perception, and with it the expansive and multiple proportions of a continuous incident of cruelty; it is a formula that requires consciousness to bounce from states of complete distance to complete nearness with respect to the reviled/convicted. This forms a pendulous movement between repulsion and attraction for which one must simultaneously manage being-apart and being-into, at once devising the stratagem of counter-persecution, disavowing into exilic reaches those who will suffer

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at one’s hands, playing warden to the incarcerated, lying in wait to ambush the new arrivals, and ultimately converting oneself into a depth or pit in which the targeted must forever sink. Entire worlds are disposable. And still, it is the final act in this orbit (the inhalation of the enemy) that offers perhaps the more eccentric piece, for one wonders how the sectarian can learn to salivate and gorge on what is most detested. Does this grinding mouth point us back to barbaric rituals whereby one feeds on the heart or tongue of the dead warrior in order to gain strengths, or rather to criminal rituals whereby one swallows all evidence so as to avoid exposure? Perhaps a mixture of both, or neither, but this much is sure: that to ratchet enough greed as to pass them through the ribcage, these objects of disdain, to allow them the privilege and oneself the torment of overlapping, is no easy calling, and yet the only reliable way to maintain both absolute possession and absolute dispossession in the same bout. 5. “A red zone: city of killers . . .” —A Red Zone: City of killers wearing turbans and black masks. —A Green Zone: City announcing that the killers are gone. —Amal al-Jubouri, “Baghdad, After the Occupation”7 From this sectarian standpoint, an Iraqi author describes a state of semiotic barrage whereby one is met by inaccurate, misleading signs around each corner of the cityscape. The neighborhoods themselves are built around these deceptive and insidious facades before which one is constantly taken astray and stranded amid false omens; undoubtedly, there are names and flags that ensure a kind of detrimental guidance, the etymologies of a chronic police state. We are speaking of the largest-scale propaganda (the misinformation of the world’s existence) beneath which the occupied mind begins to tire, then disintegrates, and gives way to misapprehension. And still, among these marshlands of ill-advising codes are a handful of correct forecasts; it is assumed that some authentic billboards have been smuggled through the transmission of the dominant message. Residual communiques, roundabout and hinted-at reports, encryptions and fugitive programs, oblique or implied forms of caution, alarm, or advisement. The minor syndicate versus the inundation; the minor syndicate versus the drone. There is a fine tissue stretching between the memorandum and the dispatch. The sectarian, therefore, is always caught in a dual hermeneutics

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of suspicion and discovery, keen to inspect and scan, to separate the wise from the unwise articulation, tokens of illumination from the fool’s gold of confusion, becoming a close reader who can balance along the fault lines of the decoy and the path. 6. “Wretched of the heavens . . .” We will go to God naked. Our shroud is our blood, our camphor: the teeth of dogs turned wolves . . . . . . she did not say a thing: she was dragging my brother’s bloody body behind her, like a worn-out mat. —Saadi Yousef, “The Wretched of the Heavens”8 From this sectarian standpoint, an Iraqi author describes the proper response to the utmost experience of degradation (where one is made into something trifling). Disenfranchisement. Abomination. The perversion of the worthwhile. A brother’s corpse hauled through a jail arcade and left on the floor, tossed down like some ragged carpet: in this there is the first mistreatment, to be handled just as any other (non-differentiation), but then also there is the second insult, the height of the pollution, to be turned into a metaphor (antisublimity), the reductive injustice of the literary over the literal, and the vileness therein (trivialization of the epic one). There is no greater shame than that of being coerced into the trite box of similitude, to be considered as something else—something faded, leaden, in dreariness, and thus far more dismal than before. Accordingly, the practitioners of such representational violence do this, lowering the sectarian into squalor and disentitlement, in order to raise their own standing, counting on the reliable sadism of dialectics to make all things dampened and brooding like themselves. But then how does one rectify the callousness? The sectarian’s remedy is visible: to enter the disgrace, to inflect the profane occurrence and encourage the contamination of language and sight, to meet the travesty on fair dialogic ground (for whatever it is), veering back into the despicable, into the stint of atrocity, at the worst juncture. To go barefoot and dismembered. Vulgarization requires vulgarity. More than this, it is a matter of replicating the disgrace on

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oneself and through the mean dexterity of one’s own fingers, to polish the wound as a diamond, if only so as to exhibit the extent, the willingness to disfigure oneself, as warning to the enemy. For self-flagellation, in its most basic recourse, has always asked this same question of the spectator—that is, “given what I have done to myself, what would I not do to you?” No, the sectarian does not wish to appear before the maker in clean robes, with pristine skin and well-preserved veins, but rather in blemished and tattered form (to prove hardship). One flaunts the torn ligament. 7. “The storm alone bears unrivaled children . . .” The unknowing are identical The storm alone bears unrivaled children. For these ones having stared into the face of the hazard are defenders of fire the alive, marching alongside death ahead of death forever enlivened even after having crossed beyond death —Ahmad Shamlu, “Elegy”9 From this sectarian standpoint, an Iranian author describes the impulse to fight all things victorious, a decree that is not restrained to prevailing causes but also includes individuals in its objection and vendetta. It circumscribes the lone person within the pursuit of the grudge; it places burden and fault upon their everydayness (the routine is the enemy of the ritual), for people are not the habituated victims of abstract systems but rather the explicit carriers of their rancor. For the sectarian, the single human is coated in the overall misdeed of humanity: soldiers in reserve, drinking the oil of sameness on behalf of a godforsaken ethnos. Note that their unawareness, their unintended and accidental collusion, does not disqualify them from being full recipients of the condemnation. If anything, the unconscious participant is the most stigmatized; indifference itself is the epitome of the controlled fixture, the supreme collaborator, a threadbare consciousness that follows along, by default, waiting to be put out of its misery. Their own distress does not unhook them from this determination. Even the fringe cannot be mended; simplicity is indecent; apathy is impermissible. That they breathe is consent enough to hold court for their heads.

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The implication of this principle, one that equates tyrannical regimes with individual beings, is the carving of the world into constellations of alliance and opposition—the relegation of certain spaces, phenomena, elements, objects, and faces to one side or another. Mutually exclusive hemispheres. In this strict rationing, neutrality is disallowed; everything holds an alignment. A little girl, a demented old person, even the unborn: all are assigned a party, designation, or stamp. More than this, even certain tunnels, coves, herbs, buildings, and meteorological happenings must be ascertained in the tabulation of this one ultimatum (the compendium). The sectarian therefore trains in the ability to decide exactly where things stand, on which half of the partitioning curtain between sect and world, and is guided by one preeminent criterion in the process: the capacity for the volatile. Inclination to turbulence. Storm. Fire. Transfigurative speed. The outlandish. This alone belongs to the sect; this alone can outpace the gallows. Nevertheless, one must remain wary of things that might feign rage, frenzy, mania, hysteria (there may be pretenders among us). The sectarian does not worry, though—for one can only fake the unparalleled for so long. 8. “The one who held me, like an oracle . . .” The one who will come has come . . . And I used to observe him from my black hideouts his walking toward them them toward him . . . Like a deep carving he clarifies his secrets as he walks. —Ghassan Zaqtan, “A Carving”10 From this sectarian standpoint, a Palestinian author describes the specific gaze beneath which the leader holds all onlookers hostage (bolted to the ground). It takes years to become this magnified, undeniable presence, to cultivate the shock and thrill of such reaction upon mere appearance: fear, awe, paralysis, stammering. The look of the unfathomable. Gaping. Leveled. There is no browsing of this figure. The visitor or initiate can only brace before the overwhelming. Though it feels spontaneous, the sectarian actually studies in the extraction of this stripped posture of the supplicant (wrenched back toward bareness), using myriad techniques of hovering, intonation, timbre, refinement, and eloquence to leave one enamored with their own helplessness, disbelief, and breakdown.

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Automatic deconstitution. Weakening-to-zero. The adulation of the many now concentrated in the adulation of the one (the observer cannot leave the room). The basis of this hypnotic success, though, is counterintuitive: the sectarian does not establish himself as the center of the world but rather as the ultimate distraction that undoes the world, a disturbance or diversion in the continuum of the real that robs one of connection or anchor to the world. No one stirs from this non-place (without roots), not while he still speaks and prowls; no one contemplates return to the prior existence, for this is not a state of containment but rather already one of agitation and escape (this is how astonishment proliferates itself). It is not so much an imposition than abduction. To this end, the sectarian is not what should be seen yet instead what turns away from seeing, what cannot help but be viewed otherwise and in midglide, as a force of seemingly involuntary levitation, sailing, or enticement of the other. The ejective paradox of heaviness and lightness: that one feels chained down by the stare, and yet all the while drawn forward, outward, and beyond. 9. “The purgatory of these voices . . .” Deliver me from crouching and listening in the dark to doors being opened and shut and to boots that land on the ribs of my friends; deliver me, deliver us, from the purgatory of these voices and screams, deliver us from the dreams we dream in this catacomb . . . from these bloodthirsty specters bearing pistols, whips, and batons, despoiling our dreams and our awakenings, from these saw-wielding ghouls, these sons-of-bitches’ brains blocked with blood . . . (Reza Baraheni, “Amen to a God Who Is None but Man”)11 From this sectarian standpoint, an Azeri Iranian author describes the fate of captured members: to withstand the incessant shrieking of the torture chamber, the public hanging, the firing squad (attrition of the nauseated). If this harassment were not ongoing, then gradually one might turn to grieving, but instead the unyielding permeation of the brutal leaves one with only the recourse of lashing out. One flails and swears chaotically. Furthermore, as the executed pile higher, forming endless mounds and dunes of the once-stalwart, the sectarian must develop a solution to this anonymous massacre: the necromantic revaluation of the dying as the still living. Thus marks the formation of the sect of the dead. This related

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second sect pertains to those who have been killed and yet remain alive in the sense that they continue to enliven others—that is, to the extent that the thought of them holds sway over the officially living. And so here lifespan is measured by an alternative empiricism—the degree of effectuation on the remaining sectarians (the telling that incites the tremulous). This is not a business of memory or spirituality, but rather one of catalytic impact and provocation. Convulsive influence. The internal pulse is no longer the standard, but rather the external pulsation that unfolds a palpable authority from above and without. As long as the suggestion of the martyr’s form still stimulates, triggers, soothes, or prompts, as long as his account continues to marshal and convene, persuading through the contagious energy of the tale, then he is considered unstoppable in the world. Others covet this glamorous imprint (more than wraith), its revival and tactile seepage on the lips and attire of the reverent. The intimation, the example, the slope against which all present and future ventures are gauged. 10. “Between the shinbone and Achilles tendon . . .” The goats are bled differently, And skinning is harmless after slaughter: All you do is a vertical skin-slit Between the shinbone and Achilles tendon . . . . . . The animal is tight as a drum. Now the knife that slit the throat. Who knows what you’ll need skin for. —Fady Joudah, “Morning Ritual”12 From this sectarian standpoint, a Palestinian author describes a type of slaughter for which the notion of flesh is removed from the house of being and relocated to the dominion of the deed, the task, or the action. This frightens those who claim a sacred essence for the body: to meet the one who takes inventory, who sees nothing more than a catalog of meat, bone, and sinew. Most cannot stand such precision (to shave, scrape, pare, flay, or clip the slivers of a former unity). Beyond the surgical. The anatomy of men, beasts, and articles are made equal, subsumed into the now-commingling trades of the woodcutter, furrier, sculptor, mortician, blacksmith, or taxidermist. Everything is at the mercy of the scalpel, the cleaver, or the ax.

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Obviously, this method is not exclusive to the realm of sacrificial animals but rather encompasses the management of the enemy’s corpse as well. Dissection and vivisection become postbattle maneuvers. First the war garb, then the butcher’s apron. No strife, no reveling. The sectarian splits, amputates, or sews for one reason alone: to make useful. Whereas totalitarian governments typically strive for the full eradication of the enemy, turning being into unconditional nothingness—the repression of all memory and the sanitization of the diseased ones (erasure, dissolution, evaporation)—the sectarian salvages the parts of the former enemy being and reincorporates them as detailed, practical objects of help. The skin of the other becomes a canvas, apparel, jewelry, blanket, bowl, or parchment. The hair and scalp are plundered along with the spine, and all of them funneled through the same membranous economy of utility and sustenance. One might even slip on the face of the enemy as a mask or garment. Whatever works; whatever is of the greatest necessity (no shreds are wasted). For the sectarian is far less a purist than the modern power-assemblage; he will exploit the remainder without resentment or paranoia of infection. A schizoid-distribution of roles: to be at once the cause of death and the coroner, undertaker, craftsman, merchant; the wearer of the same dead. 11. “Showering pearls on dead men . . .” For I must wander On the deep sea bed Showering pearls on dead men Gathering shells And sweeping the shadows of passing boats With falling hair Across the sliding sands into a mouth full of hell. —Joyce Mansour, “Torn Apart”13 From this sectarian standpoint, an Egyptian author describes the odd fusion of beauty and destruction through which the enemy’s vessel becomes a shipwreck. She positions herself as an agent of terminal seduction, brushing the selected onward in effortless strides, one whose lyricism will transport mankind toward the gravel shores of her aisle (soft devastation). Gentle. Escorted-unto-hell. The sectarian can therefore serve as shepherd/courtesan to the kingdoms of both good and evil, conducting whatever despised passengers into the whirlpool, and enlisting sensuality

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therein as a steering-device onto the breach. Temptation, guile, arousal, the slanting body: all partake in the bewitching, the great slyness, through which the other is marooned and forever caught in the way station. For there is perhaps no more satisfying image to the sectarian than that of the skeleton of the enemy’s ship, now capsizing and tilting on itself, tipping into the abyss below, its once-arrogant masts no match for a lone madwoman’s subtlety, its planks and beams left spinning in a convolution of the sand banks, the barrier reefs, and the salt mines. The vehicle careens, beneath her cloak and wardrobe; the coastline itself is an inferno, and somehow none can swim. 12. “That you shiver there inside . . .” If instead of being hanged by the neck you’re thrown inside you’ll put your foot down and live . . . It may not be pleasure exactly, but it’s your solemn duty to live one more day to spite the enemy. —Nazim Hikmet, “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison”14 From this sectarian standpoint, a Turkish author describes an equation whereby the most elementary action (breathing) becomes the emblem of outermost defiance. In this light, mere existence is reconstructed as a deprivation of the enemy’s pleasure (malice for malice); to long for release is to admit defeat, as the surrender to oneself represents surrender to the other, and thus longevity becomes the equivalent of a symbolic taunt. One stays wretched in order to embitter the rival. One actively combats mortality itself, which is now taken away from the domain of an intimate struggle and reframed as the outwardly proclaimed sentence of the adversary (that he wants me to fall). This is what makes the sectarian a hard-line vitalist: that my death is no longer my own but rather the alienated prize of the opponent, and hence that life alone (desperate endurance) now proves the sole measure of autonomy. The refusal of all perishing—for every extra scrap of prolongation reinforces self-ownership. More than this, though, the counterinstinct to survive is then complemented by a morbid alchemy of value: that the denial of the enemy’s wish is all that matters anymore (to reap his absented will). The accumulation of further days carries the

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excitement of a gamble against the other’s delight; all time is aftermath, and therefore glory (one should have submitted long ago). And so the goal recrystallizes itself upon each new dawn in the prison, as the guard enters the cell to find a still-palpitating body: dissatisfaction, anticlimax, and infuriation before the one who remains for no other reason than to steal gratification from man and god. 13. “Widow of smoke . . .” We too have a story countless links lost in the dust of being, without history a few links, like a sweet dream, remembered by history then the cruelty of fire then the bursting of the dry and the damp then the breastbeating of the widow of smoke then a cold ash then . . . —Esmail Khoi, “Chain”15 From this sectarian standpoint, an Iranian author describes two manners of after-knowing: that of the witness versus the widow. The widow’s rule is that of anticonsideration, a strain of solitude and cyclical forgetting that ridicules the category of the witness (one parades a collective loss, the other wails alone). She shoulders the discomfort like no other, and does not eavesdrop on expired or transpired worlds. Testimony is no longer viable; trauma is indulgent. Eclipse (through elaboration). The witness is a figure of universality, speaking for and to everyone (experiential prostitution); the widow is a figure of exclusivity, for whom no one else can know the story, itself a luxury of the one who went through it (experiential hoarding). The witness is a figure of morality (righteous commemoration); the widow is a figure of amorality (the groove beyond law or fairness). The witness is a figure of monumentality (to build the obelisk); the widow is a figure of minimalist subversion (to raze her own libraries). The witness is a figure of transliteration (to turn anguish into archetypal language); the widow is a figure of withheld communication (to feast on her silence). The witness is a figure of totality (to encompass everything that happened); the widow is a figure of conscious selectivity and fragmentation (the broken puzzle, shards, ashes, whatever

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pieces suit her). The witness is a figure of distance (the perch); the widow is affixed to the tragedy (the veil that is its own quicksand). The witness is a figure of healing (redemptive hope); the widow is a figure of exacerbation (shrieking, laceration, the pounding of the chest, the tearing open of the cheeks). The witness is a figure of community (to bind in tribute); the widow is a figure of famished, uneven individuality (obscure even to oneself). The witness is a figure of hierarchy (the chosen, the heir, the pedestal); the widow is a figure of aberration (untrusted, parched, and thus left aside). The witness clarifies; the widow leaves enigmatic. The witness is a figure of closure (the dwindling of affect into sentiment, sentiment into memory, and memory into legitimate history); the widow is a figure of eternality (the hideous prolongation of the event, as that which forever recurs and is thrashed back again). Her way is the purging of the chronicle for the sake of retaining/embellishing the bruise (that it has left without her); no pages, no appeal, no incense; there is only the dehydration of her wrinkles to stand for this. 14. “You ruin your eyes . . .” You think you can be done with your fears by taking refuge in all the seaweed and kelp of your slavish thought, you’re insomniac, you wait for daybreak, you ruin your eyes . . . from afar you look like a bird of prey, up close you remind me of a baby, and there’s all this disorder, the disorder of the city, there’s all this tobacco smoke you inhale while the men of the city are sleeping, you cough and hack a little, you try and lick your wounds, all the rats of the city get up at the same time as you . . . (Réda Bensmaia, Year of the Passages)16 From this sectarian standpoint, an Algerian author describes the misanthropic tirade through which one subtracts or detaches the lingering parts of humanity within oneself (excision of the most anemic spheres). These are the rusted, nonrebellious dimensions that still clasp for the race, that find sanctuary in their settlements and extend misplaced pity toward what is brittle in their consciousness. Faint. Enervated. Inadequate. This flaw must be rejected. Hence, in order to achieve the liquidation/ dispersal of the fainter segments, the sectarians must employ language as a self-directed scourge, to rile themselves against themselves, to scold and reprimand whatever would stay behind; they rakes themselves over the coals for a hypothetical treason, blaming those angles of their being that

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might have prevented desertion. Disparagement, reproach: all play into the imperative to deviancy (to be incompatible with the rest). In this way, one must become a looter, the covert figure or dissident who stalks the perimeter of one’s own subjectivity, patrols for the milder aspects within, and then recalibrates the lattice of thought to remain seditious (against almost everything). No knots of diplomatic, sympathetic, or ambivalent tendencies. Instead, words of incensement are made to untie and unclot the ailment, as the riot and hail of ill-saying approaches the province of nonsense, rambling, babbling and frantic speech, the pinch and spit of expression, which in its vitriolic belt spares nothing of the delicate. 15. “And the earth winds to a halt . . .” A moment and then nothing night shudders beyond this window and the earth winds to a halt beyond this window something unknown is watching you and me. —Forugh Farrokhzad, “The Wind Will Take Us”17 From this sectarian standpoint, an Iranian author describes the moment that brings the world into standstill. Frozen interstice. It is in this stallinghour that rarified intensities grow attainable. It is also when one is most vulnerable to the gaze of the enemy: the rapid sensation of the being watched. Most importantly, however, the sectarian must decide whether this abrupt suspension of existence, the immobilization of its clock tower, is comprised of lapses that are spontaneous or determined. For, depending on the nature of this world-halting, there are three separate conceptual interpretations that come to mind: (1) truce; (2) anarchy; and (3) advantage. In the first case, that of the truce, the world is petrified with the intention of some hallowing: that is, the concealed ones who reign over the friction of sect and enemy have allotted a temporal slit for the observation of calmness. Thus the factions must bow before the call to subsidence. In the second case, that of anarchy, the world’s movement is temporarily leashed for the sake of an unleashing; once-rigid stipulations of conduct have somehow given way to an extemporaneous discomposed interim, and this desanctioning is itself taken as an opportunity to exercise the ravenous, the wicked, or the convenient short-cut. Thus the factions spring forward, given a platform for adventurism (infinite implementa-

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tion). In the third case, that of the advantage, the arresting of the world’s progression is neither an ordered lull nor a delirious freedom but rather portends a troubling shift in fortune; that is, the concealed ones have resolved to lean their favor and bend the game in a particular direction. A benefit is granted, whether by whim, temper, or diagram. The balance wavers; someone profits. Thus, the factions can only wait in speculation. 16. “Trap and poison shall become . . .” But if you happen to venture into that jungle on your own, night around you will only deepen; hear a serpent hiss in every whisper, see a foe in the friend’s eye. And in short, trap and poison shall become your lot everywhere you go. —Sargon Boulus, “Remarks to Sindbad from the Old Man of the Sea”18 From this sectarian standpoint, an Assyrian Iraqi author describes the unavoidable tax of the raider: that upon crossing the boundary into enemy terrain, his being will start to generate something unlike itself, a venomfilled supplement that improves with every further step. This attachment begins as a particle; with time it turns into a tentacle; with more time it turns into a full metastatic double. The longer he remains in their sector, the more it adds to itself and widens its residence within him, consisting of a viral mathematics of metamorphosis and amplification. No, it is not that the sectarian loses himself, but rather that “it” gains and thickens. Vituperation. Unwanted becoming. Neither is this a random vestige: rather, it is the projection of oneself in the image of the enemy, as the enemy, wrapped in the look and oath of the enemy. It is a feature of contrast (the unruly twin), of a counterconsecration that is desecration, the mockery and inversion that one feels curling throughout the lake inside oneself (though wishing to burst out). And yet this comes as no surprise to the sect’s elders who know the cost of espionage and slinking; they expect such discordant nodes to take hold on entering the other’s trench, and that the incursion demands it. More than this, they know that it is beyond the

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volition of the sectarian to avert its spiral, the birth of this farthest self, and that no spell of protection can prevent its onset. It is futile to contest in advance, to eliminate the conjoined one sooner than the moment of inception, before the genesis and accentuation, since contact overrides all preemptive attempts to obstruct or slow its mal-affection. As a result, one can only keep walking, without preclusion, allowing it to ensue and radiate, to ambush the lungs with its tainted air, to spread its bad counsel in the ears, and thus instantiate itself as this most remote contender to what one is supposed to have been. It is only upon flight that one can rid the outgrowth. 17. “Raising his hemorrhage to the sun . . .” Not a star, not a prophet’s inspiration not a pious face worshipping the moon, here he comes like a pagan spear invading the land of alphabets bleeding, raising his hemorrhage to the sun. Here he comes wearing the stone’s nakedness thrusting his prayers into caves. —Adonis, “Not a Star”19 From this sectarian standpoint, a Syrian author describes the substitution of a theory of expenditure for a theory of gift-affliction. In the second instance, one finds the same gushing subjectivity, its outright spill and cascade: to squander even the last drop of oneself. The wrists, the jugular, and yet here a generosity that is retribution—for there is no excess in this, no luxury or waste, just a relentless offering to the yawning need of the quest (it is never enough). The vase brims, shatters from pressure, and yet remains unfilled. Thus the gift of the sectarian is a paradoxical form of spending, one that brings no prestige or gain but rather deduction and even theft, one that is manufactured in the shantytowns of being and thus itself an affirmation of poverty. It is the gift forged in destitution, and that makes the world destitute. It is the gift that allows no reciprocity (hemorrhaging permits no exchange), since it cheats self and other of every last possession; it causes such depletion of this life that there can be no answering its rope. It is the gift that one cannot afford (though it is everything one has); the sectarian must graze the total bottom, making a present of his self-slashing ways amid pure scarcity and lack. And yet the void remains insistent. Indeed, the gift still leaves room

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because the sectarian’s own desire is infinitely outstretched; one projects the force of insatiability onto one’s goal (that it requires ever more than the hemophiliac extreme), and therefore feels oneself caught already in the overpayment of an impossible debt. More becomes less: time, breath, body—all are depreciating currencies before the call to nakedness. And so this award proves far more complex than sacrifice, which always proposes itself as culmination and unity, for it takes away instead; it bestows an incalculable hole and contributes a havoc beyond restoration, more an index of deletion, ripping, and the unrescued (the donation of that which cannot be saved). 18. “The end will come through magic . . .” Come and clamp down the manacle’s jaws, the slightest of touches and all your enigmas fall. The end will come through magic with just a touch of sorrow— my feet ascending toward the world on high: new orbits and calendars, one more touch and again fascination becomes a sign —Samih al-Qasim, “The Tragedy of Houdini the Miraculous”20 From this sectarian standpoint, a Palestinian Druze author describes a type of convex magic that is born of both fascination and sadness (and thus slakes the thirst for ending). This connection between the sectarian and a fatal sorcery is not to be missed: it commences with a single act of evasion, from the straitjacket or shackles, a miracle-performativity of the someone who galvanizes the voyeuristic stare of the everyone, and then crowns itself with the kindling of a certain dark-blue blaze. The satellite. The glowing one. The entertainment that camouflages a more devious incantation: if it amuses, then this is only in order to transfer them to the edge of irrevocability. Death-by-amazement. For as he mimes a sincere grappling with the cuffs, showcasing the inimitable test, the hyenas standing round topple right into the vial of his trickery. The carnival, the circus, the crucifixion: none compare to the cheering that greets the escape artist. They know not what they watch. He writhes; they

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grimace. He sweats; they fan themselves. He makes it out; they do not. Their noise drowns out the sound of their drowning, through the sieve of an allusion-turned-illusion. And still, this is an old charm: after all, how many mystics have been seen to survive their decapitation or burning, quick to pick up their own heads and run off with them? Thousands according to the accounts of eye-witnesses (across epochs and cultures). Hence, this is not the actual riddle to be solved—neither how it is done or why—but rather, for what reason such sectarian masters always speak of a link between conjuration and melancholy. Why is there a shade of unmistakable gloom behind this virtuoso damage of the other? What is the mercurial bond between genius, violence, and sorrow? The key, not remarkably, is nothing more than a matter of aesthetic misunderstanding: that the crowds ignore the true stunt of his deceit (and this omission is a thorn). They believe that he is clever because he sidesteps the disaster, or even supersedes it, and thus they miss the real swiftness of the switch: that it is never his neck at issue in the gauntlet to begin with. It is always a question of their own jeopardy (that which makes of the enemy a failed magician). 19. “A hidden assassin . . .” Nevertheless, being a murderer takes some getting used to. I can’t stand being at home, so I head out to the street. I can’t stand the street, so I walk on to another, and then another . . . After I took care of that pathetic man, wandering the streets of Istanbul for four days were enough to confirm that everyone with a gleam of cleverness in his eye and the shadow of his soul cast across his face was a hidden assassin. Only imbeciles are innocent. (Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red)21 From this sectarian standpoint, a Turkish author describes murder as the hallmark of wisdom. It is the circumstance that accompanies ripeness—that one now has a reason to kill—and thus the most consequential becoming (becoming guilty). It makes illustrious, this badge of dedication: to betray one’s reflexes and damn oneself for all time on behalf of the sect, the war, the future. Validation through self-defilement. It is the proof of a manifold consciousness—to be compromised, unapologetically covered, no longer one-dimensional humanity, beyond the axiomatic moral dichotomies of peace and the sanctity of life. What is called nefarious is often just multifarious. And so, mortification and enrichment stand together

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here: purity is deadweight; virtue is once again simplistic. Gaunt. Dyed. The sectarian prefers such diluted paths, and with it murderer becomes a subtitle to being, or rather to those who have been around long enough. This is a homicidal philosophy. More than this, the sectarian’s infraction against existence brings with it a new elitism. He perceives the stainless with a condescending attitude, faulting them for their immaturity (that they have not yet arrived at the life-taking nexus) or their nihilism (that they have no purpose to warrant such serious measures). He is unforgiving toward their hesitation and passivity, and considers it a mark of nondistinction (the aimless). They are naive in his weathered eyes, lacking vigor, resilience, courage, or affection for a vow; they have not discovered that one exogenous factor that brings about an endogenous turn toward coarseness (and then slaying). Anomalous. Siren. For this injective disposition is itself a kind of stamina, a symptom of sharpened responsibility for the one who would go that far (to unsheathe). He is aged beyond all of us. 20. “A man is both killer and killed . . .” He stares at them, sitting around him in a black circle. Yes, indeed, I am in a trial like the one witches hold for a person they imagine to be their executioner in some burning at the stake. How can I explain that a man is both killer and killed at every moment, that his fate plays havoc with him, and that he is neither white nor black but merely another gray man? . . . What worries me is this invisible dagger which slowly sinks more deeply into my chest and hurts me. Were it not for this, I would laugh at this nightmare. (Ghada Samman, The Square Moon)22 From this sectarian standpoint, a Lebanese author describes how past altercations run through the mind once more as scenes projected and looped across theatrical halls. Consciousness enters an almost cinematic zone, as prior unspoken clashes become part of a spectral infrastructure of reenactment and resurrection (images of various long-lost enemies are now everywhere). These impressions swathe and drape themselves in all directions, neither as a haunting (the psychic uncanny), nor as a hearing (mob retaliation), but as an allowed recitation and recounting of formative events. It is only the playhouse of a witch hunt. If anything, the sectarian willingly hosts this dramatic modulation, the clamor and

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phantom-return of intruders through which she then relives her ordeals and accomplishments. They met her once (in the false real), and now again (in an internally waged performance). And still, this re‒creation is unsafe. It is not stagnant, bandaged, or iced over like memory but rather each episode shoots an opening in the sectarian imagination through which once-fixed roles can be revised or amended. The echoes are therefore given a second chance in this pipeline of seemingly fictive orchestration; they can distort and even cure their former demise. Neither does the sectarian fear the commotion of these resuming fables, these comebacks and revivals searching to change the fallout of old contests, but rather views them with laughter and sporadic absurdity. These emanations are always with her (the elapsed are never far gone), and always with a probability of rewriting her successes, leaving her interiority in dice-throw states of fragility and striation. Some call this madness. But she accepts this potential fluctuation each time they come back for her; she accepts that they might win this time. This is how the sectarian can die in the mind. This is also how the sectarian comforts herself: that is, with the realization that she too might someday gain immortality in the private auditorium of another’s mind. Thus one comes to be both killer and killed. 21. “I keep practicing my obsession . . .” I keep practicing my obsession. Who knows when that manly moment may arrive that will tear open the shirtfront of this ordinary, civilized poem and disclose words of naked-eyed truth? Tears, breaking on the shore of vacant eyes, water the soil of darkness. Any remedy? The race of mediocrities— sever me from the legacy of its ages! —Aftab Iqbal Shamim, “Half Poem”23 From this sectarian standpoint, a Pakistani author describes a world of layering for which the only indispensable facet is caught between states of occlusion and occultation. The world itself is therefore not primary, or even a sovereign reality unto itself, but rather assists only to frustrate and hinder the detection of a superior vector. In the first instance of occlusion (blocking off), the world forms a preventative dome that shields

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and encrusts the ultimate; the sectarian is thus forced to somehow crack through its broad shell (wagering against solidity). In the second instance of occultation (screening off), the world places the ultimate behind an opaque mist; the sectarian is thus forced to somehow diffuse the vanishing (wagering against aeriality). Barricade or subterfuge. In either case, existence itself is but a servant to the impasse and the evanescence; it is a foreground and pretense for this other, more elegant thing. And what is this thing? Nothing less than an overture to utopia, never in the religious sense of concentrating the utopian in a single messianic being or in a transcendent pocket of the beyond, or in the philosophical sense of consigning the utopian to an abstract formulation of the idea, but rather as a more emphatic becoming-utopian (the will to rapture) through which the sectarian then gains an invaluable power: not that of perfection, but of the ability to rescind oneself. So it is that the sectarian must develop a certain archaeological/ miner’s expertise for peeling away the miscellaneous conglomerations, sheets, and films of this englobed utopia. Persistence is not enough; only obsession suffices. For it is obsession alone (the hammer, the scythe, the chisel) that leads to the breaking point, a repetition-pursuit that gradually shatters the frame, splintered in the throes of retelling, unstitched in the lateness of its expression, from the dawn to the twilight of a hardhearted journey. Over and again: to flirt with the combustibility of the pretext. 22. “Doomsday, too, must come . . .” Those in whom you have faith, they themselves admit that this excess of heat will last yet another six, seven million years or more. Let this be for those who come after: they, too, have to show up and display their cleverness—but how long will you and all the other self-absorbed sages remain oblivious to this? How much further can we take you now? . . . those in whom you have faith, they themselves say that it will once more converge to a point, concentrating and absorbing all its forces, seize all your galaxies, planets, and perverse systems, eras and eons, places and infinite spaces . . . Turn whatever page of wisdom you will, you will remain bereft of knowledge to the end. Doomsday, too, must come. (Jamiluddin Ali, “Orthography”)24 From this sectarian standpoint, a Pakistani author describes the divergent profiles of himself and the sage. Stated simply, the former is never the

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sage, whom he regards as a figure of amateurism, guesswork, and petty revelation, an informant consulted by paper kings and therefore commissioned by the sociopolitical realm to serve its underlying interests. The sectarian, however, is never asked to present his findings; instead he remains infamous, peripheral, disreputable to civilization. For they hold vastly incongruous proficiencies. If the sociopolitical was established mainly as a defusing of the individual consciousness of death, allowing its citizens to shun their mortal crisis by relinquishing themselves to the collective trance, signing into enslavement for a way out of this mere thought of conclusion, then one wonders what narcotizing presence the sage might bring to this procession of the blindfolded. Indeed, the sage seems all too easily assimilated at the centers of human delusion, called forward to share his visions for but one reason: that as long as he continues to disclose futures, there remains a future still (if even an injurious one). The sage thus skirts death altogether by beckoning to the flashes of particularity (an indiscriminate happening in store); his glances pave a way for continuation (in whatever looming form); his news gives them the extension of at least another day. On the other side, though, lies the sectarian (upon a more slender ladder-rung). If the sage speaks in serene, casual, or numbing words, then the sectarian is beholden to the most appalling speech impediment. For the latter does not even deal with the banned phenomenon of death; instead, he advances beyond it to the register of doom. Catastrophe. Oblivion. Immanent disquiet. No epistemes, no life-and-death binary, just the emancipated pitch-black. This is why he is never brought before the thrones to divulge; this is why he remains a person of notorious, unappreciated knowledge. If anything, they beg and ransom themselves that he might never impart what he has seen (soon, not to see). We call this the nothing-else. 23. “They are clay, these wayfarers . . .” Having erased all the past, each wayfarer walks as if on air or like a glinting dagger in the dark: No cry for help from the side of the road there is no blood it has now turned into wine. They are clay, these wayfarers, and they’ll pass as breezes pass. —Yusuf al-Khal, “The Wayfarers”25

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From this sectarian standpoint, a Lebanese author describes an innovation in the traditional prototype of the wanderer (infrared, dusk). It is no longer enough to simply pass from town to town, skulking in whatever back alleys or thoroughfares before the next evacuation. He must do more than quit and digress; he must take over more than just the ditch. Rather, he will impose the same vagrancy on them (wherever he treads); he will bring them vagueness. Exoticism. Impatience. Nonacquaintance: what was once most pacifying now wafts into the unusual; long-held customs and behaviors fall into estrangement. In this way, the sectarian inflicts the wandering itself on those who have come to love enclosures; he carries the draft of transience into their insular midst, and thereby reminds them that the first and last man are made of the same interchangeable, recycled clay. To hitchhike, elope, recoil (lesson of the transitional). Everything is in the haste of extradition. 24. “We remember him tonight . . .” God! You sent an orphan child into the world to stand up for the right, for what is just. He was kind to us, we remember him tonight. Aren’t we here to honor in mind all those without a thing in the world? —Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhoub, “Birth”26 From this sectarian standpoint, a Sudanese author describes an enthrallment with the orphaned: the one unborn-to-world, given no portion, no share or property, branded and unclaimed, and thus forced to will a following (the aggression of the one with no one). There is no shortage of jealousy here, and yet his sigh is itself an undertow bringing others toward his plight; though he is often conceived in baseness or lust, without seed or endorsement, there are those who will respond only to the bastardized, engrossed by his aloneness, by the exhilarating lack of his innateness (what could be intrinsic?), and thus strike on behalf of his declined birthright and radical openness. Indignation. Curiosity. The composite. And these cadres are to be feared—a thousand existential miles between the military and the militant—as it is already known that certain small garrisons can outmatch standing armies, especially those that advocate for the discarded, turning their irregularity and numberlessness into a mace. They borrow from the logic of the bereaved. They borrow

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from his grave irony: that the undocumented has become the messenger; that, against all odds, he has become a figure of allocation, reward, and the accolade. The once-untreasured. He speaks with firmness (even in heresy); he speaks of the virtual and the unfastened itself, and so it is that the thing with nothing must be upheld. 25. “Here in your stone prison . . .” You are here in your stone prison, on trails that twist, converge, and twist again whose prisoner never returns, dreaming of the world, of escape from the brutal silence, from tired imagination from a hoarse voice, from the grey footsteps visions that wither and desiccate —Mahmoud al-Buraikan, “Man of the Stone City”27 From this sectarian standpoint, an Iraqi author describes the objective of the labyrinth (no valor in its rows). Circumvention. Fatigue. Acceleration of the senses. Insanity of the senses. Its caverns form their own antifirmament, the going-somewhere that is nowhere, that upset and pick apart the five until derangement. The retinae strain, the eardrums strain, the adenoids strain, the fingertips strain, though most of all the palate (one yells too much here, scratches the larynx). No voice or taste left. In this respect, the labyrinth is oceanic: it files and launders consciousness through a crucible in which five separate blurrings are reached; it equalizes everything, and thereby harms equilibrium; it organizes the disorganization of self. One lunges, is left shirtless, the lunatic of the predicament. 26. “A hundred guests lost in a moment of desire . . .” I didn’t know how you could overpower these people here A hundred guests lost In a moment of desire As it ebbs and flows in yearning for A visitor who never came. —Nazik al-Mala’ika, “The Visitor Who Never Came”28

From this sectarian standpoint, an Iraqi author describes a seemingly failed appointment (with the overseer) that nevertheless fuels the anticipation of

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the guests. In this millenarian atmosphere, the faith-holders have congregated at a certain hour, on a long-awaited night, to behold and welcome the one of destined arrival. And yet the celebration is to no avail, thus leading one to ask how exactly the sectarian handles the default of a leader, spirit, prophet, or god—in essence, how is the nonappearance internalized by the expectant?—and whether she registers a sudden draining of belief in the wake of an abortive encounter. The sectarian zone always runs along an unforeseen arc, however: instead of downgrading confidence, it reseals the trust in eventuality. No crisis, no exhaustion of vigilance; they remain watchful, in suspense before the option of a later entrance. To be neglected is merely to postpone the ecstatic fulfillment, which thus can only heighten the experiential volume in the meanwhile; if anything, it enhances the magic of the whole affair beneath a masochistic logic of the abused. But things do not remain unchanged by this delayed advent: rather, it gives rise that same night to a race of evening conversationalists aching to reconfigure the date: the initial narrative now coils and grows like vines, gaining new branches and spikes in a furious course of discourse-multiplication, not with the neurotic tone of justification but with the maniacal tone of cryptography (there must be reasons why). New explanations abound in the chasm of a forestalled event of perfection. For the gaze is never retrospective (asking what went wrong), but rather endlessly prospective (asking what hidden complication necessitates another installment). Yes, the offense is just an invitation to invent the next phase, to rant and rave again, to turn from stationary devotees to animated storytellers, cosmic mathematicians, and reckoning philosophers once more. The vacant seat at the table therefore encapsulates a full void: overflowing accounts, visions, numerologies, and recalculations (of the still-inescapable). Better that he never came. And so, their conviction remains unbeaten. 27. “Herds of men with strange horns . . .” I screw my eyes tight shut to keep the image out, or rather they shut by themselves, out of sheer fright, as I see herds of men with strange horns growing out of their heads coming to destroy everything, including me, this little heap of bones. A nightmare, my friend. (Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, The Colonel)29 From this sectarian standpoint, an Iranian author describes the great flood of semblances that rush forward in a waking nightmare of the world. One must shut the eyes when this happens, for it is perhaps too much to survey the human species in its transfigured aspect of beastliness. Hereaf-

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ter objective reality becomes a perceptual assault, the picture of banality and everydayness itself enough to grip the sectarian as if caught beneath the stampede of voracious herds. A single face on the corner becomes a pack of the horned and the fanged ones. Mouths hang open amid the hallucinogenic charging of these men-turned-carnivorous; for their most stark nature, beneath the smokescreen of names, languages, and structures, is one of clawing and biting alone. They ache to growl and draw blood; their primary organs are not the idealized mind or the heart, as they would sell it, but rather the yellowed nails and the teeth. One must recall the pagan association of the godly with animality, and the medieval association of the demonic with animality; indeed, both good and evil have worn the heads of rams, cats, sphinxes, serpents, birds of prey, and thus torn through the earth with tusks or beaks. This totem of the creature has not gone away. Instead, the sectarian now imports such ageless physiological transmutations into the age of men, for this later organism too merits its own monstrous hieroglyphs and cave paintings. So it is that in each defamiliarized social gesture the sectarian sees only the curvature of a talon. And the result is nothing less than a specialized form of insomnia (double-pronged) that reverses the typical actuality-divide: for here one is either constantly fleeing the living terror by receding into darkness (self-blinding) or into sleep (never-waking). 28. “Swept fallen stars like dead leaves . . .” Black marble city bordered on one end by a mosque, on its dome a round moon resting; at the other end, a cathedral, the winter sun sitting on its steeple. A street sweeper I recognized from our old neighborhood swept fallen stars like dead leaves, while the arms of the tower clock did not stand still for a moment but moved clockwise and counterclockwise with the rhythm of medieval dancers. (Leonardo Alishan, “The Black City”)30 From this sectarian standpoint, an Armenian author describes a unique ability to restratify the tiers of the cosmic order (dimensions have fallen into one another). There are several ways to read this astronomical reshuffling of planes, where sky collapses into earth or earth floats into sky, where stars crash down into dust and skin can brush against once-transcendent ethers, and each with its own dire consequences. The sectarian is often sure that this event is occurring before his very eyes, watching over the fast liberation of borders, the tumbling of plateaus (altitudinal collision),

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for which the upper floors have plunged into the basement and all lunar and solar schedules are hurled off-course. At these infrequent seconds, one stares at no less than the rearranged components, scaffolding, and seams of creation itself. An alternate physics, and with this a practical reverberation for the makeup of being and relationality. It is neither a matter of conflation nor hybridity, but rather the instillation of certain previously unavailable properties to symbols/items that had once been limited by their universal locus: namely, it launches a sinuous transaction between above and below, an outlawed marketplace where stellar artifacts can now be sold and traded at cheap prices. Celestial products lose their archetypal sweep, just as mortal products lose their mundane luster, woven into a new enchantment of proximity and transformation, amid this piercing of quadrants, everything strung out across an immeasurable surface free of regulation. The sectarian therefore becomes a scavenger of the dropped sacred, sifting and foraging the soil for traces of otherworldly debris; more than this, they compose schematics of portals, for one can now access the once-barred vaults. Neither is this revolution constrained to the realm of objects or geologies, but rather strikes a profound existential chord as well (no longer what one was before): indeed, one must score the sheer fervor of that moment when the metaphysical becomes physical (gods can be cut into) and the physical becomes metaphysical (men can manipulate thunder). Tidal vertigo, disorientation, euphoria—once graceful deities stumble as they acclimate to new footing, just as the human soars in bizarre ascendance. This notwithstanding, many questions remain for this paradigm of amalgamation: are there no casualties amid the convergence of material and immaterial ranks? For certain, there are those for whom the migration proves unbearable, for whom the imbalance of embarkation and commingling spelled too much openness (and thus were no more), and so it is not unconventional to find sectarians who notice and lament this demolished aristocracy, who pray or even fight on behalf of dead gods. Those who were submerged by the disappearing in-between. And what of Hell (is it not also then raised)? 29. “Like the forehead of my dead child . . .” Dead motherland, dead God, The scream of the dead woman—you long for, Is dead in me. My burden is buried into your plains. Keep for yourself my bread—explosive, A piece of a rock, the hatred—taken out of my heart. —Lela Samniashvili, “A Poem of a Chechen Girl”31

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From this sectarian standpoint, a Chechen author describes the paradox through which death becomes an explosive mechanism, the hate gathered in stillness now channeled elsewhere and externalized against the victor. There is no mourning, just the plotted safekeeping of an anger that must compartmentalize itself in both a spatial lowland and modest article, the customary place/object that goes unnoticed yet which now stores a pathogenic drive. The intent is clear: that the sectarian must extricate the agony of facing nothingness as an interior experience (pulled from the heart), deterritorialize it from the habitat of its true source (the brow of the rotting child), and embed its severity into the valleys that surround, into the rocks that the enemy traverses and the bread of which the enemy partakes. Dust, stones, air, metal, vegetation (what is not ammunition?): all are made into punishing accomplices, warehouses of the travesty and its horrid backlash. The expected scream of the self is dead, she tells us, for it has since filled another cartridge, stabbing deep into the same earth that the enemy would trample and conquer, and thus becoming an accursed inheritance, an eruption-in-waiting for those who would not expect a woman to braid her worst trials into the vengeful capacity of the thing. 30. “He went to war as a child . . .” Then with timid terrified children it [my childhood] went to hide in a cellar But a valiant pilot dropped a bomb on the house My son never saw his childhood He went to war as a child. —Apti Bisultanov, “Childhoods”32 From this sectarian standpoint, a Chechen author describes the rare visitations that one entertains with innocence itself, such that each generation under-siege is afforded shorter intervals of encounter with the child’s existence. His grandfather is given three sightings, his father two, himself one, and his son deprived of the occasion of crossing/meeting altogether; instead, he is thrown into an unnatural wisdom of the horror of things. It is the last iteration to whom we must devote our greatest focus, the one conceived in and as violence from the origin, since he represents the full consummation of the becoming-sectarian: not even a split-second in some concept of a tranquil world before being implicated

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in the perpetual rain of bombs. The demanded speed of realization (that one is a fighter): instantaneous. The first sensation is therefore not one of harmony, but of demarcation (lines are drawn across the infant’s own torso). Born-into-war. 31. “The chain of bullets clink . . .” He goes back to the tent. He puts on Ammo vests and chains. He then moves. He puts his finger with pride On his dagger. —Ezatullah Pezhand, “Mujahed of the High Mountains”33 From this sectarian standpoint, an Afghani Taliban author describes the return of a militant figure to his tent in preparation for another oncoming round of warfare. He rifles through his weaponry and armor, reveals a careful infatuation with the accessories on display, strokes them lightly with the left hand, equips his body with these extra appendages, and then marches back across the field of danger. In the tent, there is no time for convalescence; thoughts of healing pale before the urgency of the confrontation. For the tent is in fact an antidwelling; it forces one outward and into the perilous exterior; it is no haven, but rather it rotates and expels, following the architectonics of a revolving door. Moreover, the tent is a space of personal ritual: the fingerprint, the etching, a blessing across the dagger. Touch is everything here—a ceremony of potential farewell, staged in unadulterated solitude, before the departure into horrendous conflict once more, for which this foreclosing contact already acknowledges the lurking of vultures. One therefore salutes the threshold of the end. And yet, it is in this single leave-taking that the sectarian takes on a more acute significance: beneath the folds, he becomes a simulacrum of Adam, and the tent a microcosm of Eden itself, though in a counterfactual past whereby the first man is also the last man. Martyred instead (by design). Devoured by the world, no progeny, no second chance, no race of men to follow, a different fall, one that honors rather than violates, scarred throughout and thus avoiding the one scar of damnation (to be deployed as heaven’s armament). He keeps his word this time, at the expense of a bloodline, of the tribes and their future, and exits the garden with pride.

Chapter 7

Sectarianism II Final Delineations of the Sect

To glimpse a Middle Eastern rendition of the postmodern is to dedicate oneself to the multiple dimensions of sectarianism, following it into its lower webs of imagination and vein (where it has its own poetics). It allows one to explore a new domain for radical thought (where the literal necessitates dying, killing, or at least some blood) by tracking the impassioned yet ominous phenomenon of the sect as an insider-outsider formation that threatens all reigning ideologies. For the sect redefines not only preestablished concepts of time, space, subjectivity, language, and reality, but also interjects its own variables in the relation between life and secrecy, ritual, fanaticism, and martyrdom. It is perhaps the last remaining extremity: that which is oriented toward an ever-crystallizing fatalistic vision, the one outlook that binds apocalyptic desire and insurgent practice in an often lethal combination, effectively collapsing the boundary between the emergence of an abstract idea and its immediate execution within the world. There are many names that such factions can assume: underground movements, secret societies, forbidden associations, cult gatherings, artistic circles, urban gangs, rebel cadres, and terrorist units. There are many forms that such factions can take as they banish themselves and plan their hostile-ecstatic return to the surface: revolutionary, criminal, religious, mystical, magical, military, and avant-garde. This closing section will interrogate the vast principles and discourses that circulate in the sectarian realm, and then question their profound significance for the future of an increasingly fragmented age. The conceptual corridors here are also many—delirium, murder, hallucination, whispering, doom—each an electric compartment that fuses the minimal (elitism) and the excessive (universality), for it is this perilous encounter (the self-chosen against the world) that allows the sect to seize upon the finality of our existence as a gateway to its own immortality. One must fear those who say “we,” though never meaning everyone, only some

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others, a small drove capable of anything, willing to do anything, so as to overturn the totality. To speak of the fanatic as a necessary evil in this age is to overshadow the more essential statement: that all evils are necessary. Evil as a force of liberation, beauty, complexity (even in its horror, especially in its horror). Accordingly, a specific rendition of the sectarian figure is rising from areas that defy all precedents.1

1. Separation 1. The sectarian must leave the others, a figure of abandonment and misanthropic slits. 2. The sectarian invites persecution (becoming-cornered). 3. The sectarian undertakes the weight of pure desperation. This scenario is telling: that one is imprisoned in a room for several years, without access to a mirror over the decades of incarceration, and then one day reemerges to encounter their aged reflection. The reaction is one of intense shock, reeling at the withered version that now stares back at them. And yet this radical surprise should be unfounded—after all, this individual surely realized the inescapable fact of their transformation over the course of their experience; they must know that this had to happen, that this was happening all along, and that the face should bear testament to the effects of this downward process. And so why the gesture of repulsion and negative awe? It is because there was still a last recourse in the victim’s mind, an underlying expectation for a different outcome that would overturn even the combined forces of destiny, science, corporeality, and mortality. There was, in essence, a remaining investment in the prospect of sheer luck. And thus now, standing before the mirror, the curtain lifted, they enter the farthest rows of despair: the terror of having exasperated even fortune, chance, and the windfall, beyond the breath of all improbable turns. This figure once locked away had hoped all the while for some counter-fatalistic anomaly (the longest shot), cheating wisdom in the wake of some freak coincidence that might yet occur (to be the one that somehow evaded the unavoidable). In their most far-reaching thoughts, they had retained the

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illogical image of a dice-throw with the exception, an antimathematical gamble with the bizarre, setting a table for the arrival of impossibility at their door, the irrational twist that might (against all odds) have saved them. But no longer, for now they encounter the undeniable deterioration of the skin, the sunken eyes, the graying hair, each a checkpoint of inevitability’s wrath, each aspect signaling to them that there is no other ending to this story (there never was a switch). What emerges, then, is the feeling of being abandoned even by the impractical (the most remote haven of spirituality), where even faith in an accidental redemption is violently denied. Listen closely, it says: there is no exemption (nothing watches over, and nothing intervenes). Here one remains the decomposed, the vanquished, the unrescued. One keeps a fallen status, and the marks therein; one cannot cower above the event, cannot shift beyond the touch of affliction, disappearance, and slow catastrophe, where even an outsider immunity goes ungranted and the long sought-after power of the somehow has been forever banished. Nevertheless, it is precisely this emerging fatigue, the collapse of a dream-potential to which one had no right in the first place, that will serve as the springboard for some extraordinary task—despair soon evolves into its higher form of desperation, fueling one to throw consciousness and the body into the abyss of a dangerous action. An odd mixture of surrender, spite, and the virile will. The sudden retraction of the unlikely from the world (where even rarity will not take one’s side) results in the weirdest and most sinister behavior (weariness becomes strangeness, and strangeness becomes severity)—for when all authentic miracles have been exhausted, one must actively invent or induce the miraculous.

2. Microhostility 1. The sect laces itself together as a ring of distemper: the tighter the segment becomes—that is, the more intense the fortification and interiorization of the cell—the more angered it grows (the terror of small things, exacerbated particularity, where the slightest differences are now

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punishable by death). Its specificity is its fragility (none can live up to its rules), and this fragility is the underlying key to its self-clotting anatomy; the narrowness of the sect invites things to be seen as chronic displays of heresy, which in turn must be avenged. 2. The sectarian is guided by dislike: contempt for the predecessors (those who came before but did not go far enough), and contempt for the pretenders (those who would compete for the name). This thriving discontent leaves one peaceless. 3. The sect enlists its inner violence against the outer violence of the world (bitterness that cleanses). 4. The sectarian channels the alarming vibration of the “we” (the one who becomes many, the one who foresees many, the one who has many behind them, a league in waiting/ ambush). They will all die for one another, though it is just as likely that they will all kill one another (terminal intimacy). Such is the most definitive concept of friendship. 5. The sect often dines together, staging the banquet (whether of books or food), the secluded festival of this devouring-apparatus.

3. Conquest-Desire 1. The sect occasionally allows the opening of the closed circle, reforming as a straight line that penetrates the world of others, to inculcate the rest, raining down on them with a phantom imperative to entirety. Yet as they strive beyond, seeking new practitioners, they realize that there is no conversion or redemption of the outside, that they remain unsalvaged, leaving only a trail of necessary reckonings. That which cannot be saved or taught must be undone. 2. The sectarian will relinquish nothing (just as a god gives nothing away, no corner or split second). 3. The sectarian views all conquest as mercy killing (in which murder is decency). 4. The sectarian will grant forgiveness to the offender only in death, and then not even.

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4. Pronouncement 1. The sectarian basks in declarations of war and death (shortterm and long-term assignments), murder treatises, and manifestos. 2. The sectarian appreciates the delight of seriality (the domino effect), smiling in the wake of gravity’s pull, as pieces fall one after another in consecutive agonies. 3. The sectarian employs its own kind of ingemination: reiterations of the word, the idea-under-persuasion, that then become guarantors of the unyielding task (what is spoken has already been done). 4. The sectarian uses language to seal a leaden promise between himself and the listening one (where the author cages the reader in each verse), one for which all recipients become dragged as futural ghosts (bound to echo the fury of the originator, obligated to the same vendetta).

5. The Artificial Sacred 1. The sectarian engages in the constant construction of sacrosanct objects, iconography, symbols, and narratives. One looks to their emblems, their tattoos and braided hair, and other markings, for they harbor concocted destinies (the retroactive building of the foretold). 2. The sectarian enlists a unique geometry (angulation), where the contour is everything. 3. The sectarian carries a certain animism that leads to paranoiac dialogues: the language of things (communication with the inanimate); concert with sacred beasts (oracle snakes, animal spirits, the uncooperative figures of nature); warnings of extraterrestriality (those of faraway sentience); and the murmurings of superstition (the fifth column: beyond god, man, fate, and chance). 4. The sectarian appoints a caretaker of temples and articles—the one who maintains the grove, waters the garden, sweeps the shrine’s floor, dusts the statues, lights the incense, prepares the juxtaposition of ritual objects, and

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carries out the seemingly menial duties that nevertheless generate the appearance of the sacred. This acute form of attendance (to the ancillary details) is its own relation of worship (one should not underestimate the simplicity of the task).

6. Secrecy 1. The sectarian blurs the concepts of dissimulation and hallowing (hiding as mission)—the subterfuge of the blessed denial and disowning, and the will to anonymity. 2. The sectarian embodies the unknown pockets in reason: that which configures itself in patterns, possesses an internal continuity, lives by code, but cannot be deciphered or analyzed. He inhabits and incarnates the dark zones of the rational, the imperceptible domains of sense, the unlit cellars and corners of a calculated, methodical existence that nevertheless leaves one undetected (assassins who are inflexible, precise, and systematic to the highest degree, and traceless for this very reason). The sectarian is rigidity, though fashioning a kind of predictability that cannot be followed, the formula that slithers its way off the radar. This is the greatest fear of power: that even a disciplined construct, a force of order and regulation, a controlled entity, one of tightened and automatic movements, constrained by finite and meticulous actions, could somehow remain inexplicable and invisible. 3. The sectarian exploits the overlooked senses (smell, sound, touch) as modes of cloaked and underhanded communication, able to transfer missives across these outlawed corporeal planes “(against the social world that eradicates awareness of their presence, for they remind of the ungoverned body, the accidental, and death). Consultations, exchanges, and even heraldic announcements must occur beneath the cover of pure stealth.

7. Deprivation 1. The sectarian is a figure of some asceticism, though it constitutes no surrender, no wallowing within absence, but

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rather the overindulgence of nothingness (to feast on void), as one leaves oneself gaping. The luxury of the drift, and of the several holes (some wells of calmness, some pools of disturbance). 2. The sectarian is always susceptible to the mockeries of divine meaninglessness (the trick or the riddle from above). One can be fooled by the constellations and stars.

8. Visceral Abstraction 1. The sectarian invents a type of active esotericism (to kill for the spirit), the harshness of linguistic indexes that give orders, formal dialects of death, prophetic numerologies that demand execution, cruel interpretation (hermeneuticsunto-violence), and a pact with ghostliness that equates meaning with bleeding. The ethereal must meet the flesh. 2. The sectarian is often found in the throes of a becomingvessel: inhalation, frothing, panting, shrieking (the demolished and the absorbed), drowning, sinking (into the cleft), waves of irradiation, outstretched on one’s back, amid the strangulation of divine love (to be wanted, and so used). And then, let go of by the fleeing god (the discourtesy of the poor host), which inflames such longing all the more (sudden lovelessness). 3. The sectarian can have spasms and fits of the uncontrollable (one cannot stop one’s own hands), a figure of sheer momentum, undulation, and propulsion. 4. The sectarian can believe that they bring the lightning.

9. Rumor 1. The sectarian cultivates a successive arc toward the legendary, often through disappearance and insinuation (the recession from the spectacle, avoiding contact so as to proliferate the image of oneself). 2. The sectarian posits the “deception of incensement” against the “deception of pacification” offered by social, political, and cultural systems (the aggravated versus the subdued).

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Both sides enlist artifice, rhetoric, fable, and saga, but whereas those of the state tend toward antiaffective outcomes of anaesthetization, narcotization, paralysis, and numbness, those of the sectarian are intended to rile, churn, and stir the individual to either hysterical or convinced motion. It is a question of lies that hold in place and lies that dislodge the listener toward a panoramic lashing-out. 3. The sectarian uses tonalities of subsidence, for it is the most soothing grain, the subtle pitch and cadence, which lulls one into acceptance (birth of the charlatan). 4. The sectarian relies on manipulative turns, and thus will often intentionally misjudge the follower, for the one who is misjudged will attempt excessively to correct this perception (seeking vindication) and thereby only deepens the most foul estimation. 5. The sectarian finds routes of extortion (one pays back the unaffordable). 6. The sectarian hires the informant (there is always eavesdropping here).

10. Mastery 1. The sectarian exercises notions of discipleship, existential aristocracies, and a journey of improvement that leads finally to impersonation (of the master’s guise). At this stage, the sectarian allows the underling to imitate (to assume the inimitable voice) when necessary. 2. The sectarian distills awe (devotion, emulation, fainting, vertigo). The crucial operation of wonderment: that one is asked to stand across the cliffs, to marvel and lose breath in the face of what lies above and beneath, so as to become the scribe. 3. The sectarian instructs others to gradually surpass the leader (through trials of ascension), and thus makes of oneself the canvas, practice zone, or thing on which new dominance is trained.

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11. Miracle 1. The sectarian engineers a kind of “perplexing universality”—to stage the fantastic, the incompatible sight, which nevertheless holds an all-encompassing resonance. Only the incommensurate is irresistible. Diabolical unity (the crowds gather around the unseen), circumscribed by unexpected turmoil, the attractive twitch of the alien/the unusual, the binding principle of geo-bewilderment. 2. The sectarian adjusts self-perception across frontiers of the liquid, the solid, and the aerial. 3. The sectarian fluctuates between periods of inspiration, possession, premonition, revelation, incarnation, and manifestation.

12. Fanaticism 1. The sectarian is filled with the impenetrable belief, with a certain cause entrenched behind colorless walls, and lunatic consistency. 2. The sectarian justifies insolence by prevailing upon others that the enemy has committed ancestral violations (the eternal unleashed against the temporal). 3. The sectarian turns fanaticism into patience. 4. The sectarian turns fanaticism into hunger. 5. The sectarian turns fanaticism into triumph. 6. The sectarian refines the ownership and spreading of doom as an atmospheric pressure, attained by releasing the valve of eventuality. 7. The sectarian combines two outlooks: that of ultimate desire (to want everything) and ultimate death (to fear nothing). The pure fantasy of the sectarian: to rule over a dead world. In the meantime, they strive for/against the living, but the far-reaching orientation is to reign over an expired planet (the already-perished).

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13. Vigilance 1. The sectarian holds vigil, as a simultaneous elongation, conservation, and evolution of energy, staying the pulse until the moment of acceleration and spilling, wherein waiting turns to quest, and the quest turns to crusade (to become unfailing). 2. The sectarian operates beneath a mantle of total exoneration (there is no blame even when in the midst of a beheading)—no matter how crooked or cold-blooded, it is always a compensation-response to the severity of some overhanging situation (the retaliated). One walks away pardoned by the concept of necessity. One is always the object of siege and malevolent circumstance, and therefore acquitted (“made to do it”).

14. Ritual 1. The sectarian enters into chanting, trance, swaying (movements of assurance) 2. The sectarian seeks the implanted instinct (to make the unfamiliar seem natural). 3. The sectarian discovers the relation between language, music, and mutilation. 4. The sectarian depends on technique; the hardness of doctrine, creed, and fellowship is contingent on the correct application of the gesture, and thus the skill of injection.

15. Initiation 1. The sectarian directs the training of the swarm: to preside over indoctrination, the coagulation of the fringe, and the maturation of the follower. 2. The sectarian fabricates a matrix of several paradigms, raising and assembling the followers in multiple silhouettes: the war sect; the erotic sect; the nothing sect; the solar or lunar sect (those protected by sun or moon); the barbarian sect.

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3. The sectarian dispenses the gift less as a force of entrapment or indebtedness than as a showing of energetic transference (one holds the master’s heart in the box), turning the follower into the guardian. From this point forward, one must validate the entrustment. 4. The sectarian demands that one continually uphold one’s right to remain (the test), all the while rapid mobility is granted according to how notorious one is willing to become (viciousness is rewarded with promotion).

16. Instrumentation 1. The sectarian selects the special artifact that endows supernatural ability (stones, lanterns, amulets, swords, knives, axes, carpets, talismans, scrolls, astrolabes). Even the hides and scalps of others will suffice. 2. The sectarian monitors the sliding scales of enchantment and disenchantment (at the outer limit of one, thought slips through a portal into the other)—in an enchanted condition, objects can perform the unanticipated and the impossible (new traits); in a disenchanted condition, objects are depleted of even their normal functions (old promises). 3. The sectarian might juxtapose uneven adornments: the admixture of chaos and order in appearance (the ironed uniform complemented by the disheveled beard).

17. Banishment 1. The sectarian intimidates the followers with the prospect of becoming-unchosen (the frail thread of belonging must be exploited, and thus there is always the overhanging threat of exclusion). 2. The sectarian officially drafts the grudge, hurled against the one who is “never to set foot here again.” 3. The sectarian at times prefers to send the follower into the representational over the actual (to turn the other into the painting, sculpture, or poem) so as to enshrine them in the neighborhoods of the limitless and the eternal.

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4. The sectarian can rob the other of the right to destiny, forswearing the imminent (the dissatisfaction of the undying).

18. Imperceptible History 1. The sectarian believes in a different history of the world, one wherein the dominant narrative just masks the essential calling (conviction atlas), and which must conclude with an apocalyptic mirage. 2. The sectarian often refers to earth-bound reality as a dreamscape or shadow-version, for this smoke-like redefinition allows its mistreatment (it is only a sleeping state that one punctures). 3. The sectarian might sometimes refer to the derailment of a historical fate or even the error of creation itself, a doctrine of all-perversion, mistake, and degrading fault for which existence itself is nothing more than the testimony of a lesion (the indication that things went wrong). For this reason alone, one can advance against life without remorse, for all decimations are just further violations of the original violation (one cannot make things worse). 4. The sectarian considers oneself the sole reason for which existence was founded, though born in hostility (the target), a conspiracy within which one is forever hunted and ravaged (the crucifixion object), wanted by the world with the most hideous intentions. 5. The sectarian believes that not all humans are of the same species (multiple dissonant origins, conflictual genealogies), and thus enabling rotating hierarchies.

19. Martyrdom 1. The sectarian knows that someone must fall. 2. The sectarian builds a partnership with the overwhelming. 3. The sectarian makes offerings on behalf of the martyred (to pour wine on the earth), as a procedure of intentional waste that crosses the border between the physical plane and the

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immaterial plane; this seeping is an irrational premise of consumption to most, an abnormal forfeiture for the sake of nothing (why hand over presence to absence?), but in fact suggests an even stranger thought process: that the dead still have a body, and can thus somehow drink the tribute. This uptake is not a matter of sentiment or metaphorical honor, but rather an invisible absorption (that they still enjoy potions from the grave). 4. The sect expands through harassment (exterminations do not decrease the numbers—others will stream forward, attracted to follow when the first ranks slip away).

20. Evil 1. The sectarian perceives evil as cosmological force (throughout the expanse), dislocated from moral dialectics, and yet the antidote to sociopolitical tyranny (the one who wields evil against historical oppression). 2. The sectarian asks to be taken to the place of misery (massacre sites), and then illuminates the atrocity through words and facial expressions—the reaction that is not a witnessing but the glare of overenunciation. 3. The sectarian welcomes accusations of vileness (the disease of the elect), for to become despised is its own prestige. 4. The sectarian holds authority over the denial of mercy (though showcasing its ever-present possibility). Beyond this, the sectarian can cite a plague-theory of justice whenever convenient: that an entire family or nation, backward and forward, is responsible for the crimes of the one (the desecration of enemy graves, the vandalism of affiliates’ homes, and the collection of the firstborn).

21. Ecstatic Improvisation 1. The sectarian is capable of acute rupture, where to reach the height is to grow convulsive, to swing across the frenetic ledge, the infusion that is consummated through wildness, deviation, and schism.

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2. The sectarian can never conceive a full orthodoxy, for it is an approach that requires continual embellishment (breaking into tongues). 3. The sectarian notices the unconscious particularity in the newcomer, the trace or specialized detail of which everyone else is unaware, and claims this inborn quality as a mark of the deserving (that something brought one here). 4. The sectarian identifies the virtue of the follower, weaponizes this trait, and aims it against the enemy (the particular talent determines how the story plays out). For this, one must develop an attunement to the peculiar strength of the disciple and then devise the context in which it can attain its maximal use-value (the manufactured backdrop against which the particle might shine).

22. Sensory Attraction 1. The sectarian holds a calligraphic relation to the body (ingraining the corpus): color (blackness, whiteness, redness); scent (fragrances, aromas); sound (prayer, eloquence, voice); clothing (robes, scarves, necklaces, charms). 2. The sectarian leader exhibits a constant oscillation of mood: from episodic anger to indifference, from recoils into stillness, silence, and fainting to bouts of sweetness, affection, and exclusive understanding (the gentleness of the smile, or even weeping for the other). Their hypersensitivity is what draws the follower, for they alone understand the plight, can mirror and etch the signs of despair, steering an empathic transmission that allows them to share another’s suffering and to manifest its immensity on their own face. The traversing work of the demagogue.

23. Space 1. The sectarian develops an existential connection with terrain, as each scene provides a forum for instruction: the desert, the mountain, the valley, the cave.

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2. The sectarian knows the profit of both underground channels (meeting, waiting, studying) and rooftops (running, hiding). 3. The sectarian fortifies their zone through interior spaces (the garden, the courtyard, the library, the fortress, the headquarters). 4. The sectarian fortifies their zone through outer spaces: cosmology, astrology (staring, counting, mapping). 5. The sectarian watches the world from a supervising pedestal (the overview, the elevation, the perch), while the followers must be capable of winding through the hated everyday (the gutter, the marketplace, the caravan). 6. The sectarian is transfixed by the revolution of doors (schemes of entrance and exit).

24. Pain 1. The sectarian experiences painful self-corrosion: sobbing, unnatural aging, infamy (the backlash of the mob); the loneliness of the unparalleled (for none can join him at this level); the backbreaking responsibility of the extraordinary; and the chasm between his thoughts and the others (is there an occasional desire to be thrown down, to exist like the rest?). Such is the existential penalty of all who would become the archetype and the paragon. 2. The sectarian faces the problematic of synchronizing multiple destinies (do they compete? can one determine the sequence?), which then leads to the tormented pondering of early and late conceptions of oneself (is one too early or too late? how does one know which pathway is ripe or unripe?). 3. The sectarian dispenses self-flagellation in order to accumulate inauthentic anger (inflictions of the wound aid in the escalation of ferocity). Such is the nature of the dealing (all damage will be repaid later). 4. The sectarian toys with the fear of imbalance.

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5. The sectarian will commit random violence (so as to keep the syndicate tense). 6. The sectarian often carries a disfigurement—the scar, blindness, or dismembered portion—which somehow never spoils her magnitude, but rather ratifies the gleaming (those who are marred are sanctioned, as hurt patches become pictograms of affirmation).

25. Adoration 1. The sectarian fuses the love of the gaze and the fear of the gaze (telescopic sight). 2. The sectarian experiments with varied methodologies of becoming-God (procedures of exaltation). In this way, one is made effectively diagonal—as the augmented motor of one’s own message, bound to the operational-perpetual, and forever set to execute the alternate commandment/ gear—by splitting identity across several voices (the roles of the divine, the prophetic, and the messianic housed in one psyche, as separate yet conversant chambers). 3. The sectarian entertains recurring dreams of flight (transportation into heavens), often through vehicles (on horseback across skies), often through a metamorphic course of becoming-winged (levitation, soaring), cutting specialized lanes and inroads through miasma. Weightlessness. 4. The sectarian posits an alternative principle of individuality: unlike the modern humanist definition, whereby the self must remain primary, autonomous, and responsible only to its own presence, the sectarian’s singularity is fully enhanced by the sense of lineage (one is somehow made more special by virtue of being the thousandth practitioner of the way). One does not feel secondary or derivative, but rather included within the stress of ages. For here one finds a key logic of accumulation (the aggregate strength of the network, the clan, and the tradition): the distinction of the title is accentuated by the hovering shadows of others who have passed before and held the same station (they are the prelude to one’s own). The sectarian (similar to prophets) gains vigor from being the descendant of a bloodline,

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for the savior itself (in most faiths) is nothing more than the accomplishment of the utmost power of collectivity, a congealment won through spiraling intensifications of a repeated strain. It is therefore not the generic, unconditional sovereignty of all individuals that one settles for (the rights of men), but rather the outlandish sovereignty of the one who has been awarded a chance by worthwhile elders.

26. Oblivion 1. The sectarian plunges the followers into a vacuum: to act as the last ones on earth, sometimes an antagonistic front (against the outsiders) but also sometimes the unchartered isle, the exclusive grouping, born of complete irrelationality (there are no others). 2. The sectarian wades through many states of haze. 3. The sectarian often computes a negation-calculus through which one’s own loss is measured in terms of the erasure of several others (destructive worth). Not the value of human life but of human death, a subtraction-principle that gauges one’s own existential currency through the vanishing of the enemy. 4. The sectarian is the luminary of an antiethics: dying-forthe-other (the willful demise), so as to begin the hauntingof-the-other (to return against the enemy as phantasmatic anger).

27. Irreversibility 1. The sectarian, even when disbanding his temporary pack, will in every new encounter resume the cataclysmic sensibility (one cannot rid the complex). 2. The sectarian must be guided by overreaction: the idea, the word, the image are injected with the radioactive power of the literal. The flesh must burn and jolt at whatever offense, making of the body a lost cause in service of the articulation-under-siege.

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3. The sectarian makes the followers pass through incremental rings of transgression, forcing them to gradually extend their moral banister, farther and farther, until there is less and less that remains forbidden or unthinkable. 4. The sectarian becomes an expert at taking things too far (and making one go too far within oneself), for he is led by the consequential judgment that the human race has itself already trespassed into an improper phase, in which case there is open license to seek whatever means will take one to the outside of the acceptable amount. The bottomlessness of the feud. There are no scales or calibration left; only the immoderate and the temperamental remain, as the prior insults of one side validate the rising meanness of the other (reciprocal vehemence).

28. Regicide 1. The sectarian is entertained by regicidal thoughts—the killing of kings—not for ideological purposes, with no interest to take the throne, but out of pure gamesmanship (the head of majesty is a high prize). It is an issue of amusement, challenge, the merger of aesthetics and athleticism. 2. The sectarian believes that the anemia of the king can only be undone by the will of the draconian. 3. The sectarian builds the sect in opposition to the operational basis of the state: where the state is motivated by victory (for immediate preservation), the sect is motivated by survival (to prevail in the last round); where the state is weighed down by a sense of finality (for it clings to the now), the sect is inexhaustible (for it waits after the forever); where the state presumes absolute freedom (flaunting the empire), the sect requires only partial freedom and can therefore sustain itself on lesser holdings (we need only our black mountain).

29. The Mercenary 10. The sectarian will often negotiate with another anomalous type—the mercenary—for they share an essential honesty and precision (the righteous can admire the fiend).

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11. The mercenary does not boast, since there is no hypothesis of virtue or accomplishment (nothing is truly graceful). 12. The mercenary believes that anyone can pay the price of humanity’s crime (interchangeable verdicts). 13. The mercenary believes that the system must pay for the atrocity born of or against the individual (ultimate democratic fantasy: that one person could overthrow the whole order of things, because of the betrayal caused by one or out of revenge for one maimed soul). 14. The mercenary possesses the humility bestowed by a close knowledge of accident (that one dies by random fortune). 15. The mercenary engages in hollow expenditures (gambling, drinking, erotic trade), frequenting the tavern, the den, and the alley only so as to maintain their asceticism—they spend the money won through blood almost immediately, conserving nothing, saving nothing, funneling all sums into hyper-material blasts of indulgence, always through sensual transactions that are short-lasting and with figures who are cutthroat and mechanistic in their temporary alignments (the dealer, the prostitute, the fellow player), so as to drain themselves of material belongings, though there is no great intoxication in these ventures. These episodes are utilized so as to regain an existential balance, to prove that there is neither want nor need for anything in their makeup, and hence seeking the exorcism brought by wasteful nights, and which transition them back to the seat of war more efficiently. 16. The mercenary is a non-traumatic and non-addictive figure, for they go back to the same plots of crisis and yet are untouched by the variations each time (the settings, characters, temperatures, strategies, and weapons are substituted with fluidity). They stand without guilt, shame, regret, judgment, or pleasure, and thus require no repetition compulsion. 17. The mercenary is the ultimate practitioner of equality (all can be taken down for a price), since he is a servant of death and war (the only genuine forces of unification). One thinks of the horror story, where the accursed beings who haunt were themselves either killers or killed (notice

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there is no difference here—the child who was slaughtered and the serial murderer are given the same fate in the afterlife, both condemned to return in monstrous form, though one supposedly represents pure innocence and the other pure malice. How is this formulation of equivalence possible, when these identities conceivably rest at opposite ends of the ontological spectrum? What does it mean that the genre places them in the same lake of destiny, the same consortium of obligation, both made to carry out wicked modes? It shows that we understand the mercenary’s proposition more than we might admit: that it does not matter what side of violence one occupies, only that one is touched by it, contacted and wrapped into its contamination, fastened to its web and thus forever bound to become its carrier). Killer and killed are the same here, shouldering the same damnation, suffering the same price, strapped with the same burden for all time, for all that matters is the killing. 18. The mercenary perceives their role in the violence of the world as a circular scale of placement and displacement: that is, they are not moral violators since they fully anticipate that one day they will be on the other end of the bullet, that a certain evenness will resume once they are shot (there is too much correspondence to evade the backlash). They expect no exemption and accept without reluctance that death their master will make its claim on their heads in similar fashion. If they seem to advance with an air of invincibility, then this confidence comes only from the exact inverse assumption (that the end is always there, within striking distance): they are resolved to the fact that they will gasp in the field or street one night, within aloneness, and badly—of this much they are certain. 19. The mercenary holds a self-image of neutrality, even and especially amid horrendous actions carried out by hand (they did not originate the conflict, after all, and they exist only for the sake of those who demand their services). They are the extended arm of an action decided elsewhere, by circumstance and payment, such that none

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can be called victims, and none called perpetrators, as all players find themselves implicated in the same undifferentiated movement. They are harvested into this business; not ruthless, just dedicated. This is a seamless amoralism, neither sadistic nor masochistic, for neither delight nor obsession has currency here, though they continually experience both aspects of infliction (to harm and be harmed, to hunt and be hunted). The ethics of care and the accusation of wrong are both misplaced here. Pain alone is immanent (without forgiveness), subjugating all beneath its dynamic. 20. The mercenary abides by another brand of mysticism (renouncing the social world and seeking annihilation through nature); this is how they endure the most bare conditions of deprivation (hunger, thirst, solitude, scarcity of sleep, starkness of landscape). 21. The mercenary is always capable of suicide, as a reflex against captivity (they will not be caught). 22. The mercenary is not the vigilante, though capable of vigilantism—while operating outside the law, there is no sense of justice guiding the way. 23. The mercenary is not the hero, though capable of heroism—while prone to extraordinary deeds, there is no grandiosity in this pursuit, only valiance without glory. 24. The mercenary is not the criminal, though capable of criminality—while often requiring acts of transgression, and using illicit channels to secure whatever object, there is no overall goal (it is never enough) or temporal limit (there is no deadline) or finitude (it is never the last job) that can interrupt one’s duty to the insatiate will that commands. 25. The mercenary is not the soldier—though mired in battle adversities, there is no weeping or celebration, no camaraderie or ideology, and with it no memory (whether nostalgic or tormented) of the event. 26. The mercenary bears a strange relation to the collective and the individual: they will risk and destroy to amazing

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extremes on behalf of others who prove vital to their momentary task, yet feel no belonging or enduring bond beyond the instant (there is no guild); they also never think or speak of themselves and have little respect for subjective concerns (even less for the communication of their histories), though it is not privacy but rather the modesty of blankness (there is remarkable intelligence, but no interiority to excavate). 27. The mercenary perfects coldness, training oneself in the suspension of emotion so as to remain unaffected by whatever changes in the conditions. 28. The mercenary grants no concept of the future but beholds the game of violence as something indefinite.

30. The Idol 10. The sectarian’s idol is a material embodiment (the god is the object, the object is the god) that allows no institutionalization (there is no need for a temple when the actual deity is there) and no textuality (there is only scripture in a symbolic universe where the voice is sealed away in transcendent lairs). It engages directly, through vision and touch. 11. The idol is formidable because of its brittle composition— it can be broken or buried, lost or fractured, but also reinvented and reconstructed (always capable of return). 12. The idol is most communicative in its silence, inviting perception to work itself into delusion through the unspoken (that one starts hearing things), and thus spawns revelation. 13. The idol instigates constant rivalry through the violence of interpretation, leading its followers into internal schism, for anyone can claim to be the authentic listener/teller, challenging the reigning oracle and demanding a new stratum. This cycle of protest and competition ensures the highest standard of freedom for the sect, for here power is always vulnerable, trapped in a shapeless political culture for which every configuration is susceptible to the same

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threat of reversal and renewal, the same prospect of siege (the sect is the most revolutionary model). 14. The idol seizes on the force of locality (the regional god), for belief intensifies in smaller and more constrained circles: while universality breeds weak bonds (the unconditional diffuses itself in increasingly dim orbits), held together only by faint routines of superstition and fear, the specificity of the idol breeds the strongest bonds, allowing for no banalizing metaphysics but rather tightening the vise of devotion by keeping the numbers low, for this limited geoscape brings the most extravagant loyalty. 15. The idol does not hide its constructedness: all know that it was built, with origins in a blacksmith’s forge, but this artifice only exacerbates its mystique (for it called itself into being through the possessed/inspired body of the artist, convening the choreography of hammer, fire, and mind). It is therefore not the god who creates but the force that demands creation. More than this, it is “the thing” that somehow thinks, conspires, and acts. 16. The idol inverts the dominance of created and creator: in a monotheistic framework, the creator has nothing that precedes (it rules only over its emanations), whereas the made aspect of the idol implies that it can command backward in time as well (to rule over those who craft it into existence). No builder of the idol dares to say that he holds control over the object, for the second it emerges it forms a ring of time, reverting to the first thought of its construction to lay claim over chronology (thus becoming both creator and created simultaneously). And one can do nothing but bow before an entity that wills its own dawning. But what this arrangement also implies, necessarily, wherein the created supersedes the importance of the creator, is that the worshiper also surpasses the idol. It is the conviction of the believer—as it grows, fuels, and shoots outward—that holds unparalleled significance and vitality. This is why, when one goes to destroy the idol, one does not fear the wrath of the clay statue but rather the crazed look of its protectors (one must cross a river of mad disciples).

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17. The idol rules not through clarity but through paralyzing bewilderment, proving that inscrutability and perplexity generate their own attachments (the militancy of the unknowable). The enigmatic has its partisan, at once uncompromising and maniacal, though no fundamentalist (for there is no foundation), amid a zealotry born in mist. 18. The idol allows one to contemplate diabolical hybridity, often a combination in its look of animality, humanity, and monstrosity, melding the torso of one with the head of another, and thus carving out a new mythic taxonomy. 19. The idol favors appearance over depth, since it is itself apparitional (it suddenly arrives, and often goes missing); its influence therefore derives not from what it stores inside but from how it looks out (the scowl on the world conveys everything). The muscularity of the image . . . where all that matters is that it watches. 20. The idol installs a regime of echoing, as each utterance of the follower is upheld as a resonance of its own inaudible tongue. 21. The idol can enter into pitch-blackness and flee the land it once guarded/menaced; this is not to be understood as the evacuation of the spirit from its casing, leaving some empty shell from which the divine essence has escaped (one must remember that there is no within, that the stone and glass and iron are not a covering but rather the immediate properties of its authority). At this moment, then, when the idol’s radiance has flown away, the eyes no longer glistening as before, the followers have four options at their disposal: to redefine themselves as a nowabandoned group, riddled with narratives of lamentation and betrayal (the faculty of orphanhood); to pray for a resurgence, hanging from the hope that it might come back and pleading each day toward restoration (the faculty of supplication); to devise another item, some alternative semblance (the faculty of ingenuity); to chase after the extinguished idol’s rekindling, not by searching for

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it elsewhere (it has not physically gone anywhere) but rather by exploring the province where it might reignite (they forage after signs of its revisitation, matching coordinates with the extent of its light)—they recognize the fault as that of their own position (the idol was mislaid where they remained), and so they become nomadic, carrying the idol with them from territory to territory until it flickers again. To map where it exudes once more, and the new settlement is established there, on the exact axis of reawakening (the faculty of illumination). 22. The idol is often kept at half-elevation, at the level of the follower’s chest, preferring an intestinal invasion over a vertical subordination (it forfeits being above for being midaerial, and hence able to snake through the organs and the maze of veins, nerves, and arteries). It apportions to itself not the gap between celestial and earthly but rather the direct incision-trajectory leading into the entrails. Not to take station in the heavens, but to reside in a straight pathway to the guts (one crouches before the altar). 23. The idol is given all kinds of ornamentation (gold rings, jewels, feathers, flowers), though not as supplements to its rule; rather they are antidotes to the fright caused by the idol’s simplicity (its bareness is intolerable). Only decoration can soothe those who cannot stand the implications of its nakedness. 24. The idol demands the allegiance and sacrifice of its followers even in the afterlife, for we must imagine gods who continue their battle beyond the arches of death (why would cosmic strife not extend into the cosmos?). This existence alone does not determine some eternal reward (the game is prolonged), for heaven and hell remain open and contesting portals, throwing its citizens back and forth, taking the animosity of deities into an ultramaterial beyond. 25. The idol is withheld from the sight of most, available only to its circle (visual exclusivity), those who have been

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granted such partial rights, and due to this minor prism of beholding is known to the world mainly through allusion (they whisper of the shrine and its contents). 26. The idol incites such bouts of suspicion and paranoia that all negative occurrences are seen as punishment (no misery is random; all harkens to a malevolent intention). All droughts signal its bad favor. 27. The idol is a figure of immensity, indomitable and colossal, because of its miniature size: here we confront the terror of little things (what does it mean to worship something smaller than oneself?), where astonishment is magnified in the face of its disproportionate scope (how can it shake so much and reach so far?).

Conclusion: The Sectarian Ladder Such are the peculiar ingredients of the sectarian gaze: its often unmentionable reformulations of eroticism (combination, reproduction), honor, prophecy (the language-trigger that does not mean but tells-unto-agitation), unreality, hate, shrillness, and retribution (how does one decide what deserves smothering or response?). It establishes new bonds with the pilgrim, the friend, the herdsman, all the while adjusting the paradox of irrelevance (all things are possibly irrelevant to the leader, but the leader is never irrelevant to anything else)—yes, the world itself is contingent on the sectarian’s existence, all the while this same being retains a penchant for existential disconnect. And then there is also its perilous shift from mythology to ideology—particularity to universality, the aesthetic to the political, the mountain to the street, sublimity to everydayness, storytelling to history—for this transition is a symptom of both expansion and decline (the numbers increase, the message dwindles). This is why one must watch after its window of intensity, the slope and arc of its duration, before it makes a desperate effort to reenergize the idea by taking the sect public. Another way, then, where this devaluation does not come to pass. Let it end by their fire. And so, in search of an Eastern gradation of the postmodern, we must climb the rungs of the sectarian ladder, to endure its sanctuary, helix, thawing, and chimera, for it holds bottled within itself the calendar for

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another passage across. It is in this regard that the once-anorexic ones now become the most omnivorous: that those long left unseated at this epoch’s spread, eating only of the nothingness therein, now plot their appropriation of the next everything. Let them be well, and shown favor.

Notes

Introduction 1. It should go without saying that this text does not present itself as an exhaustive, comprehensive, or all-inclusive narrative on some absolute notion of Eastern postmodernism. It is a theory that does not speak for the East (a construction) but rather an East (a radical illusion). Rather, it spreads its critical gaze across several cutting-edge domains of inquiry and thereby offers careful insight into singular, distinctive episodes of thought and writing in the Middle East over the last century. If anything, the very fractal nature of the title, composed of four separate subject-positions, should point to the exceptional diversity and heterogeneous makeup of Middle Eastern cultural imaginaries over the past hundred years. These form a schismatic subset of exceptions that cannot be subsumed into one experiential rule. As such, there are no massive generalities at play here, for even the four existential figurations that outline the manuscript harbor many further voices within themselves: the insurgent carries a hundred masks within one, the poet a hundred more, the mystic a hundred more, and the sectarian a thousand. 2. There is no unifying consensus that designates one central feature of modernity, and so the latter is typically met by a multitiered definition: the transition into a self-naming historical epoch that redefines/fuses the exercise of power and knowledge and for which the Enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, technology, humanism, ideology, simulation, and the domination of instrumental reason become the main pillars of subjectivity. 3. Ayatollah Khomeini, selection from speech delivered to the representatives of Tabriz and Qom, September 19, 1979. Accessed November 7, 2013, quoted in http://www.iran-heritage.org/interestgroups/government-article2.htm. 4. Ahmad Shamlu, “Dark Melody,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from the original Persian, Majmu’eh-ye Asar-e Ahmad Shamlu (Tehran: Zamaneh Press, 2002). 5. Samih al-Qasim, “The Will of a Man Dying in Exile,” in Victims of a Map, trans. A. al-Udhari (London: Saqi, 1984), 81. 6. Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, “Winter,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from the original Persian, Zemestan (Winter) (Tehran: Morvareed Publishers, 2000), 99.

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7. Ahmad Shamlu, “Beginning,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from the original Persian, Majmu’eh-ye Asar-e Ahmad Shamlu (Tehran: Zamaneh Press, 2002). 8. Ahmad Shamlu, “Anthem for the One Who Left and the One Who Stayed Behind,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from the original Persian, Majmu’eh-ye Asare Ahmad Shamlu (Tehran: Zamaneh Press, 2002). 9. Ahmad Shamlu, “Anthem of the Supreme Wish,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from the original Persian, Majmu’eh-ye Asar-e Ahmad Shamlu (Tehran: Zamaneh Press, 2002). 10. Ahmad Shamlu, “Banquet,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from the original Persian, Majmu’eh-ye Asar-e Ahmad Shamlu (Tehran: Zamaneh Press, 2002). 11. Nima Yushij, selections from “Night, It Is,” “On the Riverbank,” and “My House Is a Cloud,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from the original Persian, Majmu’ehye Kamel-e Asha’ar-e Nima Yushij (Tehran: Mo’asaseh Entesharat Negah, 1996). 12. Ahmad Shamlu, selections from “Nocturnal” and “In this Dead End,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from the original Persian, Majmu’eh-ye Asar-e Ahmad Shamlu (Tehran: Zamaneh Press, 2002). 13. Shamlu, “Banquet.”

Chapter 1 1. Secondary Literature. For the record, this project is not intended as a work of area studies, though it is certainly informed by the body of work of other Middle East specialists. Instead, it attempts to break through the well-guarded gates of critical theory, existentialist, poststructuralist, and postmodern philosophy, postcolonial studies, and literary-cultural criticism so as to offer aggressive new voices to an East-West debate over the nature of our epochal standing. To this end, it stages an intellectual conversation about the most forceful concepts and themes at play in contemporary Middle Eastern thought, so as to explore their relevance across the topography of world thought at large. Note, then, that there is in fact an exceptional range of secondary literature cited in the manuscript to complement the primary references, but that these are taken not from areastudies scholarship on Iran or the Middle East but rather from theorists of the region (alongside their Continental counterparts). This in turn forms the relevant archive from which the manuscript borrows, and marks its axis of engagement with preexisting interventions. A favored conceptual methodology, and less an empirical one, in order to escape disciplinary insularity and productively deterritorialize such traditions. A wide range of secondary texts would grant further acquaintance with the political, social, and cultural history of the modern Middle East. For scholarly works on Arabic literary criticism and cultural studies, one might strongly consider the following: Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics (Saqi Books, 2003); Tarek El-Ariss, Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham University Press, 2013); Khaled Furani, Silencing the Sea:

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Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2012); Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (Columbia University Press, 2009); Hoda Elsadda, Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt, 1892‒2008 (Syracuse University Press, 2012); Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (Zed Books, 2012) and Corpus Anarchicum (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Ihab Saloul, Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Noha Radwan, Egyptian Colloquial Poetry in the Modern Arabic Canon: New Readings of Shi’r al’Ammiyya (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Muhsin Jassim al-Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (Brill, 2003) and Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (Routledge, 2006); Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (Columbia University Press, 2007); Hala Khamis Nassar and Najat Rahman (eds.), Mahmoud Darwish, Exile’s Poet: Critical Essays (Interlink Publishers, 2007); Mara Naaman, Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature: Portraits of Cairo (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Duke University Press, 2006); Réda Bensmaia, Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb (Princeton University Press, 2003); and Nouri Gana, “War, Poetry, Mourning: Darwish, Adonis, Iraq” (Public Culture 22, no. 1 (2010): 33‒65). 2. Adonis, “Body,” 125. 3. Martin Heidegger. “The Concept of Chaos,” in Nietzsche: Volume III (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1987), 82. 4. Ibid., 82. 5. Ibid., 85. 6. Ibid., 83. 7. Jean Granier, “Nietzsche’s Conception of Chaos,” in The New Nietzsche. ed., D. B. Allison (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977). Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). There has been a longstanding debate over Nietzsche’s formulation of what might be called a becomingchaos. For some examples, one can look to Jean Granier’s “Nietzsche’s Conception of Chaos,” wherein he writes: “The primitive text of nature is thus the chaotic being that manifests itself as a significant process. Its figures delineate not a system or a cosmos, but, precisely, a mask. Nature and mask determine phenomenal being, the phenomenon in its being, as chaos” (137). In a different vein, Gilles Deleuze interprets Nietzschean chaos as a philosophical overture toward “the pure unformed,” of which he writes: “The new discourse is no longer that of the form, but neither is it that of the formless: it is rather that of the pure unformed. To the charge ‘You shall be a monster, a shapeless mass,’ Nietzsche responds: ‘We have realized this prophecy.’ As for the subject of this new discourse (except that there is no longer any subject), it is not man or God, and even less man in the place of God. The subject is this free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their personality. ‘Overman’ means nothing other than this—the superior type of everything there is. This is a strange discourse,

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which ought to have renewed philosophy, and which finally deals with sense not as a predicate or a property but as an event” (107). What might separate the Eastern insurgent’s participation in the chaotic from these stances, then, occurs along the further forfeiture of such terms as nature (there is no natural) or pure (there is no purity), which then allows a more apocalyptic response to become available. To rid whatever semblances of nature and purity might cause hesitation on the trigger. 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 129. 9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 413. 10. Ibid., 92. 11. Ibid., 210. 12. Ibid., 212. 13. Ibid., 239. 14. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, 534. 15. Hardt and Negri, 214. 16. Ibid., 412. 17. Adonis, “The Pearl (Dream-Mirror),” in Victims of a Map, trans. A. al-Udhari (London: Saqi, 1984), 129. 18. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Arabs Are Democracy’s New Pioneers,” in The Guardian (February 24, 2011). 19. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 354. 20. Adonis, “The Desert (The Diary of Beirut Under Siege, 1982),” in Victims of a Map, 135. 21. Adonis, “An Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings,” in A Time between Ashes and Roses, trans. S. Toorawa (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 21. 22. This argument is forwarded most explicitly in Hamid Dabashi, Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (London: Routledge, 2008). 23. Adonis, “Body,” 129. 24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet, ed. W. Goetschel (Passagen Verlag, 1999). 25. Ibid., 78. 26. Ibid., 50. 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, trans. P. V. Cohn (New York: Macmillan Company, 1913), in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Vol. Seven), ed. O. Levy, 200. 28. Adonis, “An Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings,” 41. 29. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 310. 30. Ibid., 311. 31. Ibid. 32. Adonis, “An Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings,” 41.

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33. Ibid., 61. 34. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 401. 35. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface” to The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 10. 36. Adonis, “An Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings,” 7. 37. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 110. 38. Ibid., 176. 39. Adonis, “This Is My Name,” A Time Between Ashes and Roses, 105. 40. Mahmoud Darwish, “Other Barbarians Will Come,” in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, trans. M. Akash, C. Forche, S. Antoon, and A. El-Zein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 20. 41. Adonis, “This Is My Name,” 115. 42. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 270. 43. Adonis, “A Mirror for the Twentieth Century,” Victims of a Map, 91. 44. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 44. 45. Adonis, “Psalm,” Victims of a Map, 109. 46. Adonis, “Prophecy,” Victims of a Map, 105. 47. Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975). 48. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 118. 49. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 90. 50. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 292. 51. Adonis, “Psalm,” 109. 52. Adonis, “An Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings,” 49. 53. Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 1979), 2. 54. Jacques Derrida, “Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 4 (1989): 821. 55. Adonis, “An Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings,” 51. 56. Adonis, “A Mirror for the Executioner,” in Victims of a Map, 89. 57. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishers, 1977), 25. 58. Adonis, “The New Noah,” in Victims of a Map, 125. 59. Adonis, “The Wound,” in Victims of a Map, 117. 60. Ibid., 115. 61. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 708. 62. Adonis, “Song,” in Victims of a Map, 103. 63. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 542. 64. Adonis, “The Desert,” 149. 65. Ibid., 161. 66. Ibid., 39.

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67. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 262. 68. Ahmad Shamlu, “At the Threshold,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from the original Persian Majmu’eh-ye Asar-e Ahmad Shamlu (Tehran: Zamaneh Press, 2002).

Chapter 2 1. Secondary Literature. For scholarly works dedicated to a general overview of modern Iranian history, one might consider the following: Hamid Dabashi, Iran, A People Interrupted (New Press, 2008); Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 1982); Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2003); Said Amir Arjomad, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (Oxford University Press, 1989); Arshin Adib Moghaddam, Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic (Columbia University/Hurst Press, 2008); Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804‒1946 (Princeton University Press, 2000); and Homa Kaotuzian, Iranian History and Politics: The Dialectic of State and Society (Routledge, 2003). For various intellectual histories of modern Iran, many of which engage the actual question of an Iranian perspective on modernity, one might consider the following: Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Democracy in Modern Iran: Islam, Culture, and Political Change (New York University Press, 2010), and Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment: Philosophies of Hope and Despair (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse University Press, 1996); Ali Gheissari, Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century (University of Texas Press, 1997); Negin Nabavi, Intellectuals and the State in Iran: Politics, Discourse, and the Dilemma of Authenticity (University Press of Florida, 2003); Farzin Vahdat, God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity (Syracuse University Press, 2002); Ramin Jahanbegloo (ed.), Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity (Lexington Books, 2004); Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent (Transaction Publishers, 2005); Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution: Power and Resistance Today (Bloomsbury, 2013); Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (I. B. Tauris, 2000); and Michael Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 2. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1984), 13. 3. Ibid., 44. 4. Ibid., 17.

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5. Ali Shari’ati, Reflections of Humanity: Two Views of Civilization and the Plight of Man (Houston, TX: Free Islamic Literatures, 1980), 27. 6. Ibid., 19. 7. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 25. 8. Ibid., 167. 9. Shari’ati, Reflections of Humanity, 29. 10. Ibid., 30. 11. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 67. 12. Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 97. 13. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 61. 14. Shari’ati, From Where Shall We Begin? 44. 15. Ibid. 16. The work of Edward Said in this vein is of obvious staggering importance: in particular, his informed critique of nationalist, civilizational, and identitarian mythologies in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism holds resonance for the elaboration of Iranian revolutionary myths and these movements’ confrontation with the discursive strongholds of modernity. Nevertheless, while Said ultimately attempts to recuperate the humanist Enlightenment values of a modernity-gone-wrong, this project seeks a different outcome altogether (one that catapults the wrong beyond itself). 17. Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 59. 18. Shari’ati, Reflections of Humanity, 24. 19. Ibid., 25. 20. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in The Wretched of the Earth, 7. 21. Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 58. 22. Shari’ati, Reflections of Humanity, 36. 23. Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 104. 24. Ibid., 133. 25. Ibid., 73. 26. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Last Will and Testament (Washington, DC: The Interest Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1990), 146. 27. Ibid., 156. 28. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London: Sphere Publishers, 1968), 26. 29. Shari’ati, From Where Shall We Begin? 41. 30. Khomeini, Last Will and Testament, 157. 31. Noam Chomsky, “What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?” in Studying the Media (Woods Hole, MA: Z Media Institute, June 1997), 2. 32. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 185. 33. Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 168. 34. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 64.

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35. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Captive Public (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 86. 36. Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 64. 37. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154. 38. Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 133. 39. Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (New York: South End Press, 1989), 5. 40. Shari’ati, Reflections of Humanity, 21. 41. Gholam Hossein Sa’edi, Dandil: Stories from Iranian Life (New York: Random House, 1981), 17. 42. Ibid., 18. 43. Ibid., 21. 44. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 23. 45. Sa’edi, “Dandil,” 28. 46. Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, “Adamak” (Stick-Figure), trans. J. Mohaghegh from the original Persian, Dar Hayat-e Kuchik-e Pa’eez, Dar Zendan (In the Small Garden of Fall, In Prison) (Tehran: Bozorgmehr Press, 1961). 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 178. 51. Shari’ati, From Where Shall We Begin? 48. 52. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 242. 53. Hamid Dabashi and Peter Chelkowski, Staging a Revolution (New York: Routledge Press, 1999), 34. 54. Ale-Ahmad, Occidentosis, 96. 55. Ali Shari’ati, Marxism and Other Western Fallacies: An Islamic Critique (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1980), 31. 56. Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 419. 57. Benjamin, 234. 58. McLuhan, 299. 59. Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, quoted in H. Dabashi, Theology of Discontent, 202. 60. Ibid. 61. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 234. 62. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 285. 63. John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 141. 64. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 241.

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65. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 7.

Chapter 3 1. Secondary Literature. There has been minimal criticism and even translation efforts dedicated to new wave Persian literature, particularly with regard to the poetic works of Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, Reza Baraheni, and Ahmad Shamlu. Some examples are as follows: Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity in Iran (University of Utah Press, 1995) and Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry (Brill, 2004); Hassan Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature (Ibex, 1996); M. R. Ghanoonparvar, Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran (Mazda, 1984) and The Neighbor Says: Letters of Nima Yushij and the Philosophy of Modern Persian Poetry (Ibex, 2009); Fatemeh Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran (UNC Press, 2007) and Recite in the Name of the Red Rose: Poetic Sacred Making in Twentieth-Century Iran (USC Press, 2006); Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Harvard University Press, 2012); Kamran Talattof, The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature (Syracuse University Press, 2000); Michael Hillmann, Iranian Culture: A Persianist View (University Press of America, 1990); Nasataran Bandehkhodaei, “Auden and Shamlou’s Subversive Discourses on Martyrdom and Militarism: A New Historicist Study,” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 2, no. 10 (Special Issue, May 2012); Leonardo P. Alishan, “Ahmad Shamlu. The Rebel Poet in Search of an Audience,” Iranian Studies XVIII, nos. 2‒4, (Spring‒Autumn, 1985); Hamid Dabashi and Golriz Dahdel, “Ahmad Shamlu and the Contingency of Our Future,” in Intellectual Trends in Twentieth-Century Iran: A Critical Survey, ed. Negin Nabavi (University Press of Florida, 2003). Secondary scholarly works involving Sadeq Hedayat and Forugh Farrokhzad will be listed in later chapters. In addition to these volumes, there are several anthologies that contain translated selections from such Iranian authors, including: Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry (Westview Press, 1978); Mahmud Kianush, Modern Persian Poetry (Rockingham Press, 1996); Nahid Mozaffari and Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak (eds.), Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (Arcade, 2013); Firoozeh Papan-Matin, The Love Poems of Ahmad Shamlu (Ibex, 2005); Reza Aslan, Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East (W. W. Norton, 2010). 2. This segment of the chapter was first published as a book chapter of the same title in Iranian Identity and Cosmopolitanism: Spheres of Belonging, ed. Lucian Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 3. Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, “Winter,” trans J. Mohaghegh from Zemestan (Winter) (Tehran: Morvareed Publishers, 2000), 99. 4. Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, “Lament,” in An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry, trans. A. Karimi-Hakkak (Boulder: Westview Press, 1978), 88.

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5. Ibid., 88. 6. Ibid., 88. 7. SAVAK is an acronym for the Persian Sazeman-e Ettela’at va Amniyat-e Keshvar, which can be translated as the Organization of Intelligence and National Security. 8. Reza Baraheni, “An Epic in Reverse,” in God’s Shadow: Prison Poems (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 29. 9. Ibid., 31‒32. 10. Ibid., 33. 11. Ibid., 30. 12. Ibid., 35. 13. Ibid., 31. 14. Ibid., 29. 15. Ibid., 31. 16. Ibid., 47. 17. Ahmad Shamlu, “In This Dead End,” trans. M. Hillmann from Taranehhaye Kucheke Ghorbat (Little Songs of Alienation) (Tehran: Mazyar Press, 1980), Iranian Culture (University Press of America, 1990), 234‒235. 18. Ibid., 234. 19. Ibid., 235. 20. Ibid., 234. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 235. 25. Akhavan, “Winter.” 26. Baraheni, “The Underground Man,” in God’s Shadow, 81. 27. Ahmad Shamlu, “In the Struggle with Silence,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from Majmu’eh-ye Asar-e Ahmad Shamlu (Tehran: Zamaneh Press, 2002). 28. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001), 3‒4.

Chapter 4 1. Secondary Literature. For scholarly works dedicated to the literary corpus of Sadeq Hedayat, and particularly his novel titled The Blind Owl, one might consider the following: Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Literature of an Iranian Writer (Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer (I. B. Tauris, 2000), and Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and His Wondrous World (Routledge, 2007); Michael Beard, Hedayat’s Blind Owl as a Western Novel (Princeton University Press, 1990); Michael Hillmann (ed.). Hedayat’s The Blind Owl Forty Years After (University of Texas Press, 1978); Iraj Bashiri, Hedayat’s Ivory Tower: Structural Analysis of the Blind Owl (Manor House,

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1974); Michael M. J. Fischer, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (Duke University Press, 2004); Nasrin Rahimieh, “A Systemic Approach to Modern Persian Prose Fiction,” World Literature Today 63 (1989); Yasamine C. Coulter, “A Comparative Post-Colonial Approach to Hedayat’s The Blind Owl,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.3 (2000); Sina Mansouri-Zeyni, “Haunting Language-Game: Baudrillardian Metamorphoses in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl,” Iranian Studies 46, no. 4 (2013); Marta Simidchieva, “The Nightingale and The Blind Owl: Sadeq Hedayat and the Classical Persian Tradition, Edebiyat 5 (1994); and Michael Hillmann, “Hedayat’s The Blind Owl: An Autobiographical Nightmare,” Iranshenasi (1989) and “The Blind Owl as a Modernist Fiction,” Daftar-e Honar 6 (1375/1996). 2. Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl, trans. D. P. Costello (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 49. 3. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 52. 4. Ibid., 156. 5. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. A. Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 75. 6. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 217. 7. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 9. 8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press-Macmillan, 1951), 96. 9. G. W. F. Hegel, “Letter to Karl Windischmann,” in Letters, trans. C. Butler and C. Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 561. 10. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 329. 11. Ibid., 41. 12. Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 92. 13. Karl Marx, The German Ideology ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 42. 14. Ibid., 95. 15. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 3. 16. Jean-Paul Sartre, “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 37. 17. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1951), 143. 18. Ibid., 144. 19. Ibid., 145. 20. Ibid., 144‒145. 21. Ibid., 145.

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22. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256, 262. 23. Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” in Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 302. 24. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 44. 25. Sadeq Hedayat, “The Message of Kafka,” trans. H. Katouzian, in Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Literature of an Iranian Writer (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1991), 16. 26. Ibid., 12. 27. Ibid., 14. 28. Nietzsche, “Notes,” in The Portable Nietzsche, 458. 29. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. M. Clark and A. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 1998), 2. 30. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. A. Collins (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1957), 9. 31. Sadeq Hedayat, “The Benedictions,” trans. G. Kapuscinski and M. Hambly in Sadeq Hedayat: An Anthology, ed. E. Yarshater (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979), 77. 32. Sadeq Hedayat, Hajji Agha, trans. G. M. Wickens (Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 1979), 107. 33. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 270. 34. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 100. 35. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 264. 36. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 35. 37. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. M. Holquist (University of Texas Press, 1981), 163. 38. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 19. 39. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, 602. 40. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 660, 127, 548, repectively. 41. Hedayat, “Buried Alive,” trans. B. Spooner, in Sadeq Hedayat: An Anthology, 161. 42. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 9. 43. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 1. 44. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3. 45. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 145. 46. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 39. 47. Ibid., 14.

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48. Foucault’s own redefinition of radical action in his conversation with Deleuze, titled “Intellectuals and Power,” complies partially with the process of annihilation by alluding to a form of interminable subversion without recourse to meaning-formation. 49. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, in The Portable Nietzsche, 481. 50. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 42. 51. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 45. 52. Ibid., 17. 53. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 76. 54. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 218. 55. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995), 13. 56. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 155. 57. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 35. 58. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 326. 59. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 137. 60. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1979), 37. 61. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 79. 62. Heidegger, Being and Time, 104. 63. Ibid., 372. 64. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” 106. 65. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, 60. 66. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 258. 67. Ibid., 262 68. Benjamin, “The Critique of Violence,” in Reflections, 297. 69. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, 83. 70. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, 223. 71. For the most in-depth comparative interpretation of the HeideggerBenjamin distinction vis-à-vis temporality and the everyday, see Harry D. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 72. Hedayat, 94. 73. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255. 74. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 23. 75. Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 11. 76. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 48. 77. Ibid., 2. 78. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 258‒259. 79. Ibid., 246. 80. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 250.

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81. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 41. 82. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 50. 83. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 21. 84. Ibid., 164. 85. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (New York: Verso, 2003), 61. 86. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), 7. 87. Baudrillard, Seduction, 72. 88. Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 7. 89. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 164. 90. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, 486. 91. Jean Baudrillard, Passwords (New York: Verso, 2003), 39. 92. Ibid., 92. 93. Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 49. 94. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (New York: Verso, 2000), 29. 95. Jaques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292. 96. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 116. 97. Ibid., 27. 98. Ibid., 92. 99. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 271. 100. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 1. 101. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 58. 102. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 361. 103. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181. 104. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 216. 105. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 36. 106. Ibid., 37. 107. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 280. 108. Ibid., 550. 109. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 3. 110. As an aside, this is also expressly taken up in Foucault’s reanimation of genealogy as a mode of analysis that abstains from the hazard of judgment, though he does not go as far as to assess that all engagements with the past (and in fact the present and future) must by nature be acts of ahistorical fiction. Again, this is not only to accentuate the more tempered Nietzschean conviction of perspectivism (for which all texts are but autobiographic memoirs) and an already-formulated “hermeneutics of suspicion” (for which Dionysian pessimism becomes synonymous with active nihilism), but to expand the enterprise to include a deauthorization of every relation of consciousness to the world as transparently unreal. 111. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181.

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112. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 3. 113. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 93. 114. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. L. A. Boldt (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 74. 115. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits, New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1‒2, 93‒94. 116. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 111. 117. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 331. 118. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 49. 119. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 101. 120. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 114. 121. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (London: Bantam Books, 1962), 109. 122. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 128. 123. Ibid. 124. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181. 125. Ibid. 126. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 202. 127. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 123. 128. Ibid., 42. 129. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 83. 130. Ibid., 82. 131. Ibid., 83. 132. Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, 49. 133. Emmanuel Levinas, “Humanism and An-Archy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis (The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 129. 134. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 8. 135. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 412. 136. Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 37. 137. Ibid., 109‒112. 138. Ibid., 47.

Chapter 5 1. Secondary Literature. For scholarly works dedicated to the subject of Iranian cinema, one might consider the following: Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future (Verso, 2001) and Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (Mage, 2007); Farhang Erfani, Iranian Cinema and Philosophy: Shooting Truth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian

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Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (I. B. Tauris, 2002); Michael M. J. Fischer, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (Duke University Press, 2004); Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic (Routledge, 2009); Hamid Reza Sadr, Iranian Cinema: A Political History (I. B. Tauris, 2006); Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Vol. 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941‒1978 (Duke University Press, 2011), A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Vol. 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978‒1984 (Duke University Press, 2012), An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001); and Negar Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (Duke University Press, 2008). For scholarly works dealing with the poetics of Forugh Farrokhzad and other Iranian women authors, one might consider the following: Michael Hillmann, A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Poetry (Three Continents Press, 1987); Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (Syracuse University Press, 1992) and Words Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2011); Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (University of California Press, 2005); and Kamran Talattof, Modernity, Sexuality, and Ideology in Iran: The Life and Legacy of Popular Female Artists (Syracuse University Press, 2011). 2. Esmail Khoi, “Limbo,” An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry, trans. A. Karimi-Hakkak (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978), 180. 3. Given this description, we must discard the theoretical tendency to view third world cultural formations through the degenerative lens of a community. In light of the severe limits that this term conveys, any Eastern postmodern gathering would frame itself as a banished space, avoiding communal logic for these reasons: a. There are so many alternative categories that express the potential for “relationality”—that is, configurations, swarms, packs, assemblages, constellations, alignments, circles—that are based on multiple vantages of intersection, convergence, and also possible points of divergence within those crossings, whereas community tends to evoke an essentialist claim. For any of the former concepts, there can be endless rationales for interface and encounter, different angulations and procedures, and each with a different trajectory and implication, but with community there is typically some centralized discourse of unity, some absolute principle that binds everyone. This makes it too linear a structure, incarcerated in a one-dimensional narrative of innate sameness, whether based on a collective historical experience or ideology, and thus will manifest a reductive outlook in the end, strangling the possibility for deviation. b. Community often functions as a self-enclosed and exclusionary phenomenon, one that breeds insularity and protectionism. Rarely are they vulnerable, permeable, and susceptible to transformation, new complexities, or intensification/expansion/reinvention. Such marks the difference between a community, as a conceivably static and closed group, and a riot crowd, which in its open fever and

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pulsation is always searching out new formulations, new exteriorities to traverse, and therefore remains restless, agitated, and insatiate. To this end, communities eventually offer abstract representations of their lived experience (becoming symbolic), whereas the riot crowd remains material, visceral, a carnivalesque sensation, and therefore formless. As such, one should rather set the stage for collapsible gatherings, impermanent spaces of convening and dispersal, where there is an equal potential for return or abandonment, for perforation, invasion, relocation, and fracturing, at once autonomous and susceptible. We should not build anything with the intention of it lasting; nothing deserves to stay “as is.” c. Communities are conventionally identitarian, supplanting stale archetypes of the knowing subject with equally stale archetypes of the collective knowing subject (the conformism of “the they”). And the clarification of “difference within the community” is not enough to alleviate this symptom, since it still forwards the deathly delusion that there is a “within” to begin with (this is why liminality is still a jailhouse, the periphery still a prison, because even in its own removed site it circumscribes a sacred boundary). Hence this project prefers those of an exilic consciousness, those who always motion across, to safeguard the prospect of “dangerous individuals” and anomalous thinkers who are in fact beyond the constrictive parameters of subjectivity’s need to dominate existence. What makes the exile so much more fascinating than the knowing subject, something that lies at the root of the latter’s violence, is that it does not need to exist. The community is desperate to exist, wants to stake its claim to Being, which is why it degenerates into totalitarian declarations of its rights and its goals, obsessed with constructing mythologies of presence and being represented, whereas the exile/the animal/the child/the shadow/the monster/ the machine/the thing/the contagion carries none of the anxiety of ontological authenticity. They come and they go, as impersonal, nameless, and continually metamorphosing Bedouin creatures, never too long in the same place, always with some new game or secret to pursue. d. This leads to the final point: that communities, unlike any of the other terms of interalliance that were advocated, are distinctly human constructions, and, even more than this, distinctly humanist (importing a kind of micro-universality). They carry the mournful aftertaste of a decrepit humanist ideology at their core, laden with oppressive suggestions of an inborn ethical obligation (the disease of the good). Though cloaked in seemingly progressive notions of justice and revolutionary agency (both originally Enlightenment concepts), this morality soon becomes the source of judgment, which leads to taxonomies of power, which leads to disenchantment, alienation, genocidal payback (one knows the old story, and that it never ends well). This is why, even if community is employed in the service of a subaltern group, it follows a purely social logic, which is inherently toxic, the death sentence to its mutability and actual freedom. Instead, one should prefer that these movements avoid the trappings of a social framework, with its false codifications of ethical responsibility, and seek more elusive pathways of dialogue and juncture, even those that threaten the movement’s stability, allowing

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for strategies of internal deception, impurity, transgression, fatal creativity and playful betrayal to emerge and inflect themselves at will. This is how one can simultaneously create an interior sense of belonging, for a time, while in the same stride remaining an outsider event, a deserter’s strait, with strong points of departure, using treachery for the sake of vitality. 4. Alberto Cavalcanti, “Sound in Films,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. John Belton and Elizabeth Weis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 109. 5. Andrea Truppin, “And Then There Was Sound: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky,” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 248. 6. Jean Rouch, Cine-ethnography (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 6. 7. Bela Balazs, “Theory of the Film,” in Film Sound, ed. John Belton and Elizabeth Weis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 122. 8. Jeffrey K. Ruoff, “Conventions of Sound in Documentary,” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice, 224. 9. Ibid., 1992, 221. 10. Ibid., 1992, 233. 11. Ibid., 1992, 128. 12. Ibid., 1992, 228. 13. Ibid., 1992, 234. 14. Fred Camper, “Sound and Silence in Narrative and Nonnarrative Cinema,” in Film Sound, 380. 15. Camper, 371. 16. V. I. Pudovkin, “Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film,” in Film Sound, 87. 17. Truppin, 1992, 244. 18. Camper, 1985, 372. 19. Truppin, 1992, 246. 20. Balazs, 1985, 118. 21. Ibid., 1985, 119.

Chapter 6 1. Mahmoud Darwish, “Eleven Planets at the End of the Andalusian Scene,” in If I Were Another, trans. F. Joudah (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 60. 2. Secondary Literature. For a political and intellectual history of radical sectarian movements in the Middle East, one might consider: Fawaz Gerges, Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Mariner Books, 2007), The Rise and Fall of al-Qaeda (Oxford University Press, 2011), and The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (Cambridge University Press, 2009). By far the most compelling

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theoretical work on sectarian movements of the Middle East is that of Faisal Devji, including: Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Cornell University Press, 2005) and The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (Oxford University Press, 2009). One might also consider the following: Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Duke University Press, 2006); Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (Verso, 2006); and Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (Verso, 2012). 3. Nima Yushij, “Woe and Wellaway,” in An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry, ed. A. Karimi-Hakkak (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978), 37. 4. Sadeq Hedayat, “The Benedictions,” trans. G. Kapuscinski and M. Hambly in Sadeq Hedayat: An Anthology, ed. E. Yarshater (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979), 78‒79. 5. Mahmoud Darwish, “The Earth Is Closing on Us,” in Victims of a Map, trans. A. al-Udhari (London: Saqi, 1984), 13. 6. Mazen Maarouf, “Hand Made,” in Artscape: Poets of Protest, Al Jazeera. Accessed October 17, 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/poetsofprotest/2012/08/2012829111914434307.html (September 12, 2012). 7. Amal al-Jubouri, “Baghdad, After the Occupation,” in Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation, trans. R. G. Howell and H. Qaisi (Framington, ME: Alice James Books, 2011), 105. 8. Saadi Yousef, “The Wretched of the Heavens,” in Nostalgia, My Enemy, trans. S. Antoon and P. Money (London: Graywolf Press, 2004), 63. 9. Ahmad Shamlu, “Elegy,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from Majmu’eh-ye Asare Ahmad Shamlu (The Collected Works of Ahmad Shamlu) (Tehran: Zamaneh Press, 1381/2002). 10. Ghassan Zaqtan, “A Carving,” in Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me: And Other Poems, trans. F. Joudah (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 44. 11. Reza Baraheni, “Amen to a God Who Is None But Man,” in God’s Shadow: Prison Poems (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 71. 12. Fady Joudah,“Morning Ritual,” in The Earth in the Attic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 50‒51. 13. Joyce Mansour, “Torn Apart,” in Essential Poems and Writings, trans. S. Gavronsky (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2008), 183. 14. Nazim Hikmet, “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison,” in Poems of Nazim Hikmet, trans. R. Blasing and M. Konuk (New York: Persea Books, 2002), 43. 15. Esmail Khoi, “Chain,” in An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry, ed. A. Karimi-Hakkak (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978), 178. 16. Réda Bensmaia, Year of the Passages, trans. T. Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 128.9. 17. Forugh Farrokhzad, “The Wind Will Take Us,” in An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry, ed. A. Karimi-Hakkak (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978), 141.

322

Notes to Chapter 7

18. Sargon Boulus, “Remarks to Sindbad from the Old Man of the Sea,” in Knife Sharpener: Selected Poems (London: Banipal Publishing, 2010), 118‒119. 19. Adonis, “Not a Star,” in Adonis: Selected Poems, trans. K. Mattawa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 24. 20. Samih al-Qasim, “The Tragedy of Houdini the Miraculous,” in Sadder Than Water: Selected Poems, trans. N. Kassis (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2006), 105. 21. Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red, trans. E. M. Gokner (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2010), 15. 22. Ghada Samman, The Square Moon, trans. I. J. Boullata (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 91. 23. Aftab Iqbal Shamim, “Half Poem,” in Modern Poetry of Pakistan, ed. I. Arif and W. Khwaja (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), 177. 24. Jamiluddin Ali, “Orthography,” in Modern Poetry of Pakistan, ed. I. Arif and W. Khwaja (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), 151. 25. Yusuf al-Khal, “The Wayfarers,” in Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, ed. S. K. Jayyusi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 296. 26. Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhoub, “Birth,” in Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, ed. S. K. Jayyusi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 326. 27. Mahmoud al-Buraikan, “Man of the Stone City,” in Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, ed. S. K. Jayyusi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 191. 28. Nazik al-Mala’ika, “The Visitor Who Never Came,” in Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, ed. S. K. Jayyusi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 334. 29. Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, The Colonel (London: Haus Publishing, 2011), 6‒7. 30. Leonardo Alishan, “The Black City,” in Flash Forward Fiction, ed. R. Shapard and J. Thomas, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 122. 31. Lela Samniashvili, “A Poem of a Chechen Girl.” June 19, 2008. Accessed October 17, 2013 from http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/lela-samniashvili/ a-poem-of-a-chechen-girl/. 32. Apti Bisultanov, “Childhoods” May 12, 2009. Accessed October 18, 2013 from http://www.waynakh.com/eng/2009/05/childhoods-by-apti-bisultanov/. 33. Ezatullah Pezhand, “Mujahed of the High Mountains,” in Poetry of the Taliban, ed. E. S. van Linschoten and F. Kuehn (London: Hurst Publishers, 2012), 54.

Chapter 7 1. Conceivably, it is clear enough how this chapter marks a kind of conclusion: bonded together by the rigidified forms of a manifesto or fatwa, and hence emulating the tone/genre of militancy known to such factions, it embodies a necessary culmination and coalescence of the many bracketed arguments of the

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manuscript—that is, that the sectarian identity is itself a fusion of the figures of the insurgent, the poet, and the mystic, and thus perpetuates these three prior legacies with a new and heightened voracity. However, with this established, what is perhaps most significant about the positioning of the sectarian at the outer badlands of an Eastern postmodern turn is that the main ethical concern differs from that of Western thought: for when confronted by the sectarian’s fixed gaze, the question is no longer one of finding the proper response before the face of the other, but rather asking how one might respond before the mask of the other (the ethics of the fatalistic illusion).

Index

Abe, Kobo, 204 Adonis, 2, 25, 31–74, 243, 260–261 adoration, 13, 131, 196, 290–291 Adorno, Theodor, 3, 26, 51, 64, 81, 84, 94, 96, 113, 117, 146–151, 168, 169, 175, 177, 179 affect, 13, 38, 39, 51, 53, 54, 56, 86, 100, 110, 167, 175, 192, 200, 218, 221, 227, 237, 257, 282 affective overreaction, 33, 74–80 ahistoricality, 36, 42, 83, 139–164, 169, 316 imperceptible history, 286 Akhavan-Sales, Mehdi, 2, 26, 82, 103–105, 107, 118–127, 136 Al-e Ahmad, Jalal, 2, 25, 82, 83, 86, 87, 89–91, 95–97, 109 Ali, Jamiluddin, 265–266 Alishan, Leonardo, 270–271 annihilation, 12, 34, 53, 68, 74, 104, 118, 121, 139, 151, 160–162, 164–172, 191, 193, 194, 196, 199, 201–209, 218, 237, 295, 315 apocalypse, 2, 4, 15, 48, 79, 112, 119, 131, 149, 152, 184, 185, 235, 238, 275, 286, 306 Appadurai, Arjun, 114, 321 Arenas, Reinaldo, 204 artificial sacred, 279–280 avant-garde, 2, 4, 13, 26, 50, 76, 113, 117–121, 139, 172, 237, 275

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 159, 187 banishment, 120, 217, 247, 275, 285–286, 318 Baraheni, Reza, 2, 26, 117, 122, 127–131, 134, 136, 252–253, 311 Barthes, Roland, 185 Bataille, Georges, 37, 45, 66, 169, 202 Baudrillard, Jean, 3, 37, 64, 67, 70, 102, 106, 159, 188–189 beastliness (the herds), 124, 253, 269–270, 279 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 26, 64, 77–78, 107, 110, 114, 117, 151–152, 158, 172–173, 177–180, 182 Bensmaia, Réda, 257–258, 305 Bisultanov, Apti, 272–273 Blanchot, Maurice, 141 Blasim, Hassan, 204 Boulus, Sargon, 259–260 al-Buraikan, Mahmoud, 268 chaos, 2, 26, 33, 79, 117, 139–209, 285 chaotic departure, 33–39 child, the, 43, 60, 62, 76, 118, 203, 246, 272–273, 294, 319 Chomsky, Noam, 93–94, 97 coldness, 10, 31, 33, 54–58, 74, 296 colonialism, anti-colonialism, 2, 40, 42, 64, 83–85, 98, 103, 106, 110, 303

325

326

Index

community, 14, 52, 83, 100, 176, 222, 257, 318–320 conquest-desire, 278–279 cyclopean approaches, 10–17 Dabashi, Hamid, 40, 108, 109, 305, 306, 308, 311, 317 Darwish, Mahmoud, 60, 61, 64, 243, 246–247 Deleuze, Gilles, 37, 45, 51, 161, 203, 305–306, 315 deprivation, 128, 167, 184, 255, 280–281, 295 Derrida, Jacques, 59–61, 64, 66, 68, 69, 136, 190–191 disappearance, 3, 9, 12, 79, 92, 170, 213, 222, 234, 238, 277, 281 divinity, divine fatality, 201–209, 227 doom, 6, 12, 57, 132, 203, 206, 209, 247, 265, 266, 275, 283 Dowlatabadi, Mahmoud, 269–270 earth, 11, 19, 24, 53, 64, 67, 113, 123, 136, 197, 218, 239, 246, 258, 270, 272, 286, 291, 299 East-West, 3, 31, 39–40, 82, 117, 139, 304 ecstasy, 10, 14, 25, 46, 77, 131, 154, 170, 184, 187, 206, 218, 221, 235, 238, 269, 275, 287–288 enemy, the, 6, 56, 68, 73–75, 83, 114, 243–248, 250, 254, 255, 258, 259, 262, 272, 283, 288, 291 Enlightenment, 12, 19, 36, 39, 40, 44, 46, 49, 51, 52, 54, 68, 81, 82, 89, 96, 130, 133, 148, 149, 154, 155, 169, 178, 198, 303 eternity, 15, 60–66, 77–78, 131, 156, 158, 163, 171, 172, 184, 187, 207, 237, 283, 285 everydayness, 3, 13, 20, 40, 63, 79, 95, 112–113, 122, 123, 129, 143, 148, 167, 172–183, 214, 215, 250, 270, 272, 289, 300

expenditure (gift-affliction), 13, 75, 221, 229, 260–261, 293 extremism, 2, 4–17, 74–76, 276 evil, 46, 78, 125, 134, 148, 169, 184, 217, 254, 270, 276, 287 freedom, 16, 17, 33, 46, 54, 70–74, 95, 130, 141, 149, 150, 259, 292, 296 fanaticism, 6, 11, 15, 75, 77, 127, 275, 276, 283 Fanon, Frantz, 57, 85 Farrokhzad, Forugh, 3, 26, 117, 118, 119, 120, 213, 223–225, 228–234, 236, 243, 258–259 Foucault, Michel, 36, 37, 45, 51, 64, 69, 145, 154, 315, 316 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 206 Granier, Jean, 305 Guattari, Felix, 37, 45, 51, 151, 203–204 guest, the, 24, 136, 137, 268–269 Hardt, Michael, 35–39 halting, 187, 258–259 Hedayat, Sadeq, 2, 26, 64, 117, 139, 147, 152–154, 156–161, 163–167, 170–172, 182, 184–188, 190–195, 198–201, 204–208, 245–246 Hegel, G.W.F., 32, 43, 44, 46, 65, 67, 109, 141–142, 144, 154, 168 hegemony, 2, 22, 63, 84, 97, 103, 107, 114, 134, 148, 183, 192, 220 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 26, 33–34, 51, 64, 71–73, 117, 142–144, 146, 158, 168–169, 172–178 Hikmet, Nazim, 243, 255–256 Huyssen, Andreas, 106 idol, the, 20, 50, 112, 296–300 image, the, 76, 105, 106, 113, 114, 118, 203, 206, 213, 225, 226, 228, 229–231, 233–235, 259, 269, 281, 291, 298

Index

individuation, 12, 17, 25, 33, 39, 43–53, 56, 125, 146, 150, 173, 222, 257, 290, 305 initiation, 284–285 instrumentation, 285 insurgent, insurgency, 4–10, 31–80, 121, 127, 155 irreversibility, 15, 180, 200, 291–292 Islamic ideology, 81–114, 131–134 Joudah, Fady, 253–254 al-Jubouri, Amal, 248–249 Kant, Immanuel, 142 al-Khal, Yusuf, 266–267 Khoi, Esmail, 118, 120, 217, 256–257 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 2, 5, 25, 82, 91, 93, 109–112, 135 Kierkegaard, Soren, 53, 188, 208 killing, 9, 26, 70, 73, 101, 134, 135, 170, 181, 248, 263–264, 275, 278, 292, 293–294 Lacan, Jacques, 88, 203 ladder, the, 48, 76, 130, 266, 300 lamentation, 20, 44, 105, 122–124, 126, 179, 244–245, 271, 298 Levinas, Emmanuel, 54, 208 Maarouf, Mazen, 247–248 machine, machinism, 2, 79, 82, 83, 84, 87, 90, 98, 106, 127, 182, 203, 226, 319 magic, 4, 104, 106, 132, 181, 261–262, 269, 275 Majdhoub, Muhammad al-Mahdi, 267 al-Mala’ika, Nazik, 268–269 Mansour, Joyce, 254–255 Marcuse, Herbert, 93, 146, 177 martyrdom, 7, 26, 122, 124, 194, 253, 273, 275, 286–287 Marx, Karl, 37, 58–60, 64, 67, 76, 83, 84, 87, 89, 127, 144–146, 150, 151, 179

327

mastery, 33, 44–49, 54, 85, 119, 148, 154, 162, 170, 173, 184, 192, 282 McLuhan, Marshall, 86, 110, 113 media, 81–114 mercenary, the, 44, 119, 292–296 micro-hostility, 277–278 miracle, 6, 16, 73, 182, 236, 237, 261, 277, 283 mithridatic approaches, 4–10 mood, 12, 33, 39–40, 42, 77, 133, 142, 191, 233, 288 Motahhari, Ayatollah Morteza, 112 mystic, mysticism, 3, 10–13, 60, 82, 177, 213–239, 295 Naderi, Amir, 3, 26, 98, 213, 223, 225–228, 231–234, 235–236 Negri, Antonio, 35–39 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 26, 33–37, 43–46, 50–53, 56–57, 61–64, 66, 73, 77, 78, 117, 147, 149–150, 152–167, 170–172, 184–201, 204–206, 208, 305 nihilism, 12, 24, 43, 77, 156, 164, 168, 177, 184–188, 189, 192, 198, 201, 206, 238, 263, 316 oblivion, 12, 25, 79, 160, 168, 201, 207, 217, 266, 291 occlusion vs. occultation, 9, 44, 123, 173, 264–265 oracle, the, 11, 182, 251–252, 279, 296 orphan, the, 129, 220, 223, 267–268, 298 otherness, otherlessness, 31, 33, 40–45, 47, 49–58, 60, 69, 73, 77–78 outsider, the, 2, 3, 17, 33, 36, 39–43, 89, 100, 107, 151, 180, 181, 236, 275, 277, 291, 320 pack, the, 219–222 pain, 3, 10, 56, 131, 142, 167, 194–196, 226, 289–290

328

Index

Pamuk, Orhan, 262–263 Pezhand, Ezatullah, 273 planetary construction, 47, 50–53, 135, 247–248 poet, poetics, 38, 72, 117–137, 157, 185–187, 275 post-colonialism, 4, 17, 23, 31, 40–55, 82, 114, 180, 181 post-modernism, 3, 14, 18, 25, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 48, 52, 56, 61, 65, 67, 70, 76, 79, 106, 117, 121, 132, 137, 139, 162, 177, 178, 180, 201, 204, 213, 217, 222, 237–239, 275, 300 the prison, 7, 9, 11, 64, 111, 118, 122, 127, 130–131, 137, 153, 233, 255–256, 268, 276 pronouncement, 279 purgatory, 252 al-Qasim, Samih, 6, 243, 261–262 regicide, 292 resistance, 2, 4, 20, 31, 32, 35–38, 44, 49, 52–53, 63, 81, 82, 83, 90, 96, 107, 114, 121, 127, 179, 180, 194, 234 reversal, 33, 49, 66–70, 87, 124, 127, 297 revolution, 4, 7, 9, 13, 25, 31–32, 34, 35–36, 39–42, 50, 59, 65, 67–68, 77–78, 81–114, 118, 119, 124, 127, 131, 134, 145, 146–147, 162, 172, 180, 182, 208, 217, 223, 271, 275, 297 ritual, 3, 38, 39, 50, 64, 67, 123, 156, 179, 181, 218, 222, 237, 248, 250, 253, 273, 275, 279, 284 ruin, 62, 105, 132, 178, 194, 217, 257 rumor, 281–282 Sa’edi, Gholam Hossein, 82, 99–103, 107 Said, Edward, 309

Samman, Ghada, 243, 263–264 Samniashvili, Lela, 271–272 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 53, 56, 57, 66, 72, 73, 88, 147 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 140–141, 142, 150, 151, 162, 179, 208 secrecy, 76, 133, 167, 215, 275, 280 sectarian, sectarianism, 10, 13–17, 243–301 sensory attraction, 288 separation, 68, 193, 218, 232, 276–277 shadow-becoming, 171, 201–202, 208–209 Shamim, Aftab Iqbal, 264–265 Shamlu, Ahmad, 1, 2, 6, 26, 62, 64, 75, 78, 117–122, 131–134, 136, 243, 250–251 Shari’ati, Ali, 2, 25, 81, 82, 84–89, 93, 96–99, 106–107, 109 shipwreck, the, 71, 231, 254 shivering, 57, 158, 255 silence, 1, 6, 12, 79, 122, 124, 156–157, 184, 186, 192, 198, 214, 230–231, 235–236, 245, 256, 268, 288, 296 skin, the, 43, 70, 124, 181, 193, 234, 250, 253, 254, 270, 277 sound, 110, 124, 156, 198, 213–239 asynchronous, 228, 231 imperceptible, 231 incidental, 223, 225–226, 228, 231, 235 soundscape, 213, 228, 231 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 46–52 space, 158–159, 214–219, 288–289 exilic space, 215–217 minimalist space, 217–219 subterranean space, 108, 118, 129, 214–215 stars, 182, 270, 281 storm, the, 6, 77, 118, 177, 181, 232, 250–251 suicidal violence, 72, 74–75, 136, 160, 167, 194, 295

Index

329

third world, 17–25, 31, 32, 35, 39–40, 42, 45, 49, 53–54, 63, 68, 69, 77–79, 83–109 (non)transcendence, 35, 83, 126, 139, 141, 144, 153, 163, 164–172, 217, 223, 238, 265, 270, 296 tower, the, 146, 245–246, 270 trap, the, 20, 59, 74, 82, 90, 153, 165, 246, 259–260 tribalism, 219–223, 273

vigilance, 7, 14, 135, 172, 269, 284, 295 visceral abstraction, 281

unreal, the, 3, 64, 78, 141, 150, 155, 159, 162, 163, 166, 171, 179, 183, 184, 186, 188–201, 208, 224, 234, 262, 300, 303 urban violence (the city), 117–137

Yousef, Saadi, 249–250 Yushij, Nima, 117–120, 244–245

warfare, eternal war, 33, 38, 58, 61, 73, 79, 195, 209, 248, 273 wayfarer, the, 266–267 widow, the, 256–257 wounding, 5, 58, 72, 160, 188, 196, 250, 289 wretchedness, 21, 36, 144, 162, 237, 249

Zaqtan, Ghassan, 251–252 zero-world, 79, 237