Manifestos for World Thought 1783489529, 9781783489527

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Manifestos for World Thought

Future Perfect: Images of the Time to Come in Philosophy, Politics and Cultural Studies Series Editors: Michael Marder, IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy, University of the Basque Country, Spain, and Patricia Vieira, Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese, Georgetown University, USA. The Future Perfect series stands at the intersection of critical historiography, philosophy, political science, heterodox economic theory, and environmental thought, as well as utopian and cultural studies. It encourages an interdisciplinary reassessment of the idea of futurity that not only holds a promising interpretative potential but may also serve as an effective tool for practical interventions in the fields of human activity that affect entire countries, regions, and the planet as a whole.

Titles in the Series The Future of Europe: Democracy, Legitimacy and Justice After the Euro Crisis edited by Serge Champeau, Carlos Closa, Daniel Innerarity and Miguel Poiares Maduro Taming an Uncertain Future: Temporality, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Anticipatory Governance by Liam P. D. Stockdale The Politics of Virtue: Post-liberalism and the Human Future by John Milbank and Adrian Pabst The Future of Meat Without Animals edited by Brianne Donaldson and Christopher Carter The End of the World: Contemporary Philosophy and Art edited by Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback and Susanna Lindberg Manifestos for World Thought edited by Lucian Stone and Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

Manifestos for World Thought Edited by Lucian Stone and Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © Lucian Stone and Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh 2017 Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7834-8950-3 ISBN: PB 978-1-7834-8951-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stone, Lucian, 1972- editor. | Mohaghegh, Jason Bahbak, 1979- editor. Title: Manifestos for world thought / edited by Lucian Stone and Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh. Description: London ; New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd., [2017] | Series: Future perfect : images of the time to come in philosophy, politics and cultural studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017043387 (print) | LCCN 2017045013 (ebook) | ISBN 9781783489527 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781783489503 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783489510 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy and civilization. | Islamic philosophy. | Philosophy—Middle East. | Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. Classification: LCC B59 (ebook) | LCC B59 .M36 2017 (print) | DDC 109—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043387 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction: Outsider Imperatives Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh and Lucian Stone PART I: THEORY: PHILOSOPHY AND METHOD 1 Orient, Orientation, and the Western Referent: From Comparative to World Thought Andrea Mura

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2 Outside Philosophy Jason M. Wirth

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3 Global Thought: Lessons from Other Philosophers (and Artists) Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

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4 Colossomania: World Thought as Return to Immensity Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

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PART II: STATE: CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL TRAUMA 5 If Fanon Knew: On the Haragas Phenomenon—A Critical Political Fiction Réda Bensmaïa

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6 Dispersing Community: Diaspora and the Ethics of Estrangement Nanor Kebranian

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7 No State to Come Mahmut Mutman

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8 Toward Language and Resistance: A Breaking Manifesto rosalind hampton and Michelle Hartman PART III: TEXT AND AESTHETICS: LITERATURE, POETRY, AND ART 9 The 10-Point Nahdah Manifesto Stephen Sheehi

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10 The Aesthetic Imperative: History Poeticized Huda Fakhreddine

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11 A Vocabulary of the Impersonal: A Notebook from Shiraz Setrag Manoukian

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12 Architextualism: A Manifesto in and of the Margins Lucian Stone

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PART IV: EMBODIMENT: ARCHITECTURE, OBJECTS, AND TIME

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13 Architecture of Modulation: Resistance as Differential Vision Eyal Weizman

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14 One Foot in Front of the Other: A Physicality Manifesto Brian Seitz and Jens Veneman

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15 Seventeen Theses on History Wael Hallaq

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16 The Time of Critique Ruth Mas

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Bibliography 229 Index 245 About the Contributors

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Introduction Outsider Imperatives Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh and Lucian Stone

I. DISTANCE World thought must be understood as an immense distancing from all prior concepts of world, an outsider calculus of betrayal and defection leading us to tread elsewhere in search of new visionary occasions. Thus the immediate task of our current intellectual landscape is to stray from the false entitlements and impositions of older, unworthy gods; that is, to extract and illuminate those stranger fluctuations of thought that are occurring exterior to all artificial civilizational divides. This is not to be performed in the name of some pale reflex toward multicultural inclusion, for the manifesto permits no identitarian or nativist throwback, but rather because, in navigating the narrow epistemic fault line of East and West, one soon realizes that it is now perhaps only those laboring under the former designation who carry the capacity to elude, sabotage, and eventually abandon the withered paradigm of East-West altogether and its exhausted archetypal resuscitations. “World thought” here is thus not a monolithic province of inquiry inasmuch as it embodies the drastic forfeiture and recalibration of our epochal consciousness: the gulf, the abyss, the labyrinth, the desert. It is the overshadowed potentiality of unfathomed, unforeseen, and jaggedly incommensurate words (narratives of extreme disorientation). By extension, it is through an acutely relocated/dislocated focus upon the literary, philosophical, and artistic innovations of these voices (those of great exiles, rogues, migrants, drifters) that we bear witness to tactics that might shatter the very disenchanted prism of the modern imagination. Three steps into the conjectural dark. The manifestos here are therefore devoted precisely to the demarcation of these fugitive trajectories of the critical-creative instinct as it palpitates and grows across long-neglected horizons. Together they forge a formless vii

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constellation, each seeking an alternative archaeology of knowledge that arcs toward its own rare state of disturbance, and which therefore requires nothing less than a series of theoretical experiments to establish the scaffolding for a rising yet untimely era of fresh concepts, movements, and interpretations. A continual, pendulous maneuver between exodus and traversal, and with it the discovery of overlooked/emergent theaters of operation. II. SHIPWRECK Modernity died this evening, and there is no world left (more precisely, there never was a world). Thus world thought should not be confused with some geopolitical bordering; rather, it unmoors itself from these confining mythic vistas and takes us across the waters again. To this degree, world thought is merely a vessel in which the adventurous gather and exploit the possibility for crossing/passage, thus fastening us to a philosophy of shipwrecks. To perceive the manifestos collected here as shipwreck-writings is to seek a kind of thought that thrives amid the many layers of wreckage, the splintered beams and floorboards of something once run aground upon unforgiving shores and yet somehow now coasting again. The author, then, is less a pearl diver who salvages the precious artifact from within debris (going underneath) but rather the mosaic-maker who cobbles an age of fractured particles (elaborating outward). In this way, to ride upon myriad shipwrecks is to honor an architectonics of the displaced, the floating, the loosened and shattered vehicles that missed their destination, launched cruelly against the breakwater of an epoch doomed from its first gestures but now carried out by the tides once more to run limitlessly. Not a search for the isle (utopia) but for the waves again (withdrawal), with no trust in horizon or stars, no kindred signs of the rightly guided, only the temperamental vanity of the saltwater. And how does one survive the oncoming dread of an unstrung plane, of the rocking and undulating planks that form the thinnest barrier between mortality and the drowning that awaits below? Black infinity of the mind-at-sea, swaying and disappearing without fixity, loyalty, compassion—just the whirling of an impersonal vortex of possibilities that know but one law: to swallow being, whole and alive. Once more, how does one survive? Perhaps an answer rests in the understanding of the manifesto as the inflection of a certain guile. No doubt, the gliding ship cannot beguile the elemental power of chance or chaos at work in its surrounding ocean, but rather convinces only the mad navigator of the capacity to elude its touch of finitude. Not a tale of conquest/triumph but rather of evasion, cunning, stealth. The manifesto is a warrior’s costume or a sailor’s tattoo that sows confidence as one tempts the opulent, the hazardous,

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the many desolate tracts and melted spheres of the beyond. If world thought is the shipwreck now flung outward into embarkation again, then the manifesto marks the colored sails that grasp the winds and lend speed to the venture (a garment worn across the entrails). III. RADICAL UNREALITY The manifesto shuns realism, and in doing so allows a more severe, combative encounter with the many tyrannies of the real. Accordingly, such a genre overcomes all oppressive flirtations with a reality principle and instead opts to accentuate a will to foreignness and flagrant peculiarity from within a timescape of atrocity. Never a gesture of false transcendence but rather an active stratagem of distortion and wakeful eccentricity, one that must necessarily emanate from a wilder vantage far removed from the republic of legitimate structures. Thus we must unveil a ridiculous conspiracy that has taken hold of today’s academic culture, one that always privileges graphically “realist” texts and artifacts when searching for cultural productions beyond the so-called Western world. Though it is a clear empirical matter that the most iconic literary and aesthetic figures of the non-West are vibrant practitioners of illusion, dream, nightmare, mirage, hallucination, and shadow, still the Western imagination persists in encapsulating its othered counterparts as entrenched in a kind of ultra-realism of war, upheaval, and injustice. This is a nefarious impulse that must be called out and undone for two reasons: 1. That these endless fetishistic searches for stories of trauma, victimhood, mourning, testimony, and witnessing do not arise out of some genuine humanitarianism (itself a toxic discourse) but rather are opportunistic, parasitic attempts to drain some supposed last trace of authenticity from the non-West’s veins in a time when the West itself is becoming increasingly virtual, mediated, and simulated into existential oblivion. The citizens of the vanishing centers thereby purchase the feeling of being alive again from the sordid images and texts of native informants willing to let them bask leechlike in a memoir of personal transcontinental trials. Against their own disintegration into alienated images, these first-world audiences would rummage desperately through the third-world experience for some pathetic reality fix (a convenient tragedy to cure disenchantment). Thus the addictive arousal that takes place when they hear of the bloodshed and carnage at hand, always masquerading as sincere ethical concern or righteous political urgency but in fact trembling with the sick satisfaction of the junkie who just bought themselves another hit of a concrete, visceral universe.

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2. That these low-quality confessions extorted from the globally misfortunate, guided by the soft arrogance of the need to “give voice to the voiceless,” enable the Western audience to indulge its most abject motivation: that of pity. The social realism of the non-West is thereby geared toward generating a voyeuristic spectacle of false empathy, a whole playhouse of contrived gasps and tears that masks the three fatal defects of pity itself. First, that pity always originates from an imperial position of power; second, that pity assumes a consumptive knowledge of the other, some supposed moment of true comprehension that then allows whatever conformist sentimentality to take place; third, that pity is not an actual affect but simply the unspontaneous ideological façade of an affect, for the most extraordinary affects by definition must follow a criterion of the impersonal (to be immersed in scarcer moods). Power, knowledge, obnoxious melodramatic displays of depleted intensity: the final death throes of the West’s descent into sheer meaninglessness. We should damn their wretched heartache once and for all, at once so manufactured and uninteresting. Let it be known, then: the leaders of the literary and aesthetic vanguards of the non-West are no less than masters of abstraction. They are in turns macabre, phantasmatic, absurd, intoxicating, monstrous. They do not stoop to uninspired recitations of the obvious, for one must realize that it would be utterly obscene for a contemporary Iraqi author writing amidst today’s bloodbath to compose something of the nature of “My sister was killed today. She was fourteen. She played the violin. She was shot three times.” One must understand how such a piece would be met with nothing less than extreme scorn, disdain, and offense from a fellow Iraqi who perhaps shares the exact same story and for whom the redundant telling of bare fact would be experienced as pure vulgarity and insult to those who demand something higher of their poets: that is, power, delirium, incantation, magicality, or otherworldly conviction. No collective wallowing, no commiseration, for if the very essence of fascism is that moment when the state of emergency morphs into the state of normality, then certain brands of social realism (those that exoticize dire absence) do nothing but insidiously materialize this same deathly collapse of the abhorrent into the everyday. No, it is only in the West that one craves the indecent delineation of “life as it is over there.” Conversely, the non-West strives further, enjoining new tongues and games and carnivalesque forms of entrancement—never as a technique of escapism but rather as an ingenious assault against the absolutism of the present. To conjure modalities that exist beyond the event, just past the disaster’s maze, in order to challenge the claims to totality and permanence of whatever cruelty

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rules now. And the manifesto, in synchronicity with this “unrealistic” imperative, honors only the farsighted. IV. BOUNDLESSNESS The manifesto is expressive of movement. Movement, by definition, is not beholden to static desires, beliefs, habits, or commands. The hyper-realism of technocracy is a dead end—a catastrophe euphemistically cloaked as “truth,” “justice,” “humanitarianism,” “progress,” “scholarship,” “science,” and so on. The technicians are always three steps late to the event—an expertise anchored to hindsight and facticity. The ascendency and now entrenched supremacy of the applied sciences within the academy that have come at the expense of everything else— whether philosophy, literature, poetry, art, music, history, and so forth—is yet another manifestation of the regressive age of literalist fundamentalism. Their prognostications, when they dare to proffer them, are projections of the past onto the future: mere repetition. Being “right” is privileged over being transgressive, transformative, or overcoming. Citation of data is their selfassuring creed. As a creative act—or a call for boundlessness—the author of the manifesto experiments with illogic (which is not the same thing as advocating anti-logic). The imagination is freed from the restraints of “realism” in order to discover what might become, exposing the vagaries of reality during the process. The impact of dystopian novels, for instance, is not their literal accuracy at predicting the future as if it were a genuine attempt at correspondence theory/prophecy, but their metaphoric capacity to see anew what lies hidden or embedded within our past and present so as to foster a future that is otherwise. The manifesto is speculative and experiential, not merely empirical. What then is a manifesto for world thought? At its core, it is to cease caring about giving the appearance of truth as such—that is, about adhering/conforming to boundaries, identities, and categories. It is alchemy. The triangulation—naming, locating, and cross-referencing—of the sources is less vital than the elixir they produce. It is the basic recognition that thought, poetry, and art are not arrested by their immediate, or historical, social-political settings, yet alone disciplinary, so-called explanatory, frameworks. Thus, the manifesto is audacious and willful, just as is the premonition of thinking beyond our present confines—the divided world.

Part I

THEORY: PHILOSOPHY AND METHOD

Chapter 1

Orient, Orientation, and the Western Referent From Comparative to World Thought Andrea Mura A number of contributions have appeared over the last two decades which have framed the scope and limits of comparative political theory, highlighting its specificity in terms of both methods and substantive ideas. Andrew March, for one, has offered a systematic depiction of what, from different angles, has appeared to him as a generalized “project” calling for the constitution of a disciplinary sub-field of political theorizing.1 While problematizing the moniker “comparative” attached to this project, March has identified several motivations which, in his view, sustain existing calls for expanding the canon of Western thinkers and traditions. Explanatory-interpretative justifications have, for instance, highlighted new interpretative possibilities that non-Western texts are said to bring to common problems of both political theory and comparative politics. In a parallel direction, rehabilitative claims have challenged the rigid divide between contemporary Western standards and non-Western traditions, while epistemic reasons seek to overcome the spurious “universality” of the Western canon in favor of a more authentic universalism which includes non-Western perspectives. Finally, with a stronger political focus, global-democratic evaluations have taken cross-cultural efforts to be “imperative in a globalized world,” while critical-transformative claims assume that “existing liberal or Western concepts, categories, and truth-claims” are not just “insufficient for global theorizing, but part (or more) of the problem to be solved.”2 While all these aspects often implicate one another, this taxonomy should help delineate conceptual and historic determinants behind which debates on comparative political theory have developed. These are likely to evolve further in the face of present challenges. In one of the most passionate defenses of cross-cultural theorizing at the beginning of the new millennium, Fred Dallmayr has linked his quest for a comparative turn to the cultural 3

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challenges that September 11 had produced on a global scale. His work has thus instantiated what March defined in terms of a global-democratic claim. For Dallmayr, on the eve of 9/11, the congresses and studies falling under the category of “political theory” in Western academia evidenced little familiarity with non-Western authors and debates. They inadvertently illustrated “what Samuel Huntington termed the West’s exclusion of, or predominance over, the rest.”3 In line with the then zeitgeist, cross-cultural comparison was thought to be a preferable tool to engage, under the conditions of globalization, with the emergence of a “global civil society” while moderating conflict and polarization between cultures. From this perspective, comparative political theory was qualified by a synthetic function. It was able to resist and moderate the conflictual nature of the civilizational clash that the war on terror appeared to instantiate, a clash challenging the image of the peaceful global village that many had celebrated in the post-Cold War era. From a broad perspective, the irruption of global jihadism on the stage of world politics embodied a morphological negation. It cracked the logic of consensus and political adjustment that neoliberalism had endorsed in its advocacy of a post-ideological and post-conflictual world. At the same time, the very appearance of al-Qaeda on the international scene represented a threat to the illusion of full mastery that new economic forces, mainly under American and European influence, were said to uphold. This shift took place behind the image of the “new world order,” a term widely used by all sides of the political spectrum at that time, including neoliberal institutions, anti-globalization movements and even Osama bin Laden.4 Trapped by the tension between an idealized picture of a post-conflict multicultural society and emerging narratives of the clash of civilizations, the “Western” opening to “non-Western” thought was mainly driven by a de-centralizing force. It aimed to “remedy the Eurocentrism of the field of political theory,” thus enlarging conventional scholarly horizons of political thought.5 The context in which this broad endeavor took place was one in which public debates reflected the perception that Western cultural and political hegemony endured. Although some had begun to interpret Islamism as a sign of the increasing “erosion of eurocentrism” on a geopolitical level6, the latter was still deemed to provide a dominant framework, infusing globalization with its pervasive force. But is this still the case? What if, our contemporary scene no longer presupposes the operational function of the West as the analytical ‘centre’ from which reflections on non-Western thought emerge as modes of de-centralization of the Western canon and discourse? What scenarios would be disclosed if we were to interrogate the unitary and necessary status of this referent? To address this set of questions may prove important, not simply to detect key changing conditions and motives behind comparative projects. Resolving these questions may serve better to reframe debates on



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cross-cultural dialogue and commensurability, pointing to new possibilities of thought and action beyond the “cross-cultural” and the “comparative.” Our working hypothesis is that a full acknowledgment of the critical conditions currently traversed by the West as a historical-discursive formation enables us better to apprehend the contingent roots of the “Western” referent. Such a move would permit us to denaturalize the West, subtracting necessity and force from its discursive apparatus and thereby trace new horizons for the future of world thought. Hence, the structural relation between the West and the non-West should first be addressed, unpacking some of the tensions that continue to haunt the current debates on cross-cultural engagement. The Orientalist link between the two terms of the comparative approach, Western and non-Western thought, has amply been debated. Recently, Megan Thomas has emphasized how comparative political theory has come to repeat the projects of 18th and 19th century Orientalism. In their attempt to expand European intellectual horizons, both early Orientalist scholarship and comparative political theory essentially share a similar scope, using difference and commonality to compare traditions. In early Orientalism, two main tendencies have clearly emerged as modes of comparative methods, which would not be too dissimilar from the approach currently informing comparative projects. On the one hand stands the tendency to valorize equivalence through difference, recognizing an equivalent status for the structures, morals and values between the West and the “Orient.” On the other hand, there is a propensity to find value in commonality, therefore looking for some inner, pristine kinship between the two terms. Ancient India, for instance, was recognized by Schlegel as a relative of Europe, part of “one vast family.” An originary proximity between the East and the West was thus “rediscovered,” with the Hellenic tradition now assuming a transitional status, and losing its ancestral position as the mythical foundation of the European discourse: “the Greeks were not rightly seen as the origin of European intellectual traditions: instead their value lay in their being ‘an indispensable connecting link between the European imagination and Oriental tradition’.”7 According to Thomas, in striving to harmonize or tie Europe to the Asian world, these approaches would diverge sharply from Said’s canonical account of Orientalism. Said’s portrayal of Orientalist scholarship failed to appreciate the emphatic attitude of these early tendencies, mostly exposing imperial forms of domination of the West and pervasive processes of epistemological othering. This approach has ended up emphasizing and radicalizing differences between the East and the West. For Thomas, comparative political theory embraces Said’s negative characterization of Orientalism. It uses his critical approach to contrast essentializing and stereotypical accounts of Islamic civilization, which have become increasingly “significant after 9/11 and the intensified nationalism and Islamophobia that followed in the United

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States.”8 Yet, comparative projects would temper the more extreme effects of Said’s critique, addressing “difference while actively avoiding conclusions of utter incommensurability or irreducible difference.” Hence some sort of paradoxical position seems to affect comparative political theory, conditioned as it is between Said’s vision and its inability to “fully recognize that it shares qualities and questions with earlier Orientalist scholars.”9 We would agree with Thomas’s inspirational critique that early Orientalist approaches have genuinely attempted to broaden the scholarly horizons of Europe and promote some intimate link with the Asian world. Yet we wonder whether such an early opening concealed some subtle form of exoticization and discrimination, ultimately in line with Said’s censure. In one of his passing references to Schlegel, for instance, Said highlights the negative complexity of Schlegel’s portrayal, whose Orientalist style would evidence a multifaceted and hierarchical combination of enchantment and bias. Despite Schlegel’s “lifelong fascination” with the ancient Orient, nowhere did the German poet and philologist “talk about the living, contemporary Orient. When he said in 1800, ‘It is in the Orient that we must search for the highest Romanticism,’ he meant the Orient of the Sakuntala, the Zend-Avesta, and the Upanishads. As for the Semites, whose language was agglutinative, unaesthetic, and mechanical, they were different, inferior, backward.”10 Through Schlegel, an internal subdivision of the Orient is thus realized. It is one that counterposes the enchanted, romantic position of a familiar, ancient Orient— the locus of origin and mythical foundation—to the negative form of contemporary (Arab-Islamic) Oriental societies. Thomas also acknowledges that “the relationship of commonality that Schlegel drew” was not “one of parity.” Yet, her emphasis on early Orientalist attempts to valorize the non-West risks obscuring the structural link between enchanted and more discriminatory forms of Orientalism. It might be useful to highlight here the very function of Orientalism as a device of paranoid capture as well as a means of ensuring the self-representation of the West. At first glance, this requires exposing the position of the Orient as an object of modern knowledge through which “the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West.”11 This is certainly functional to the process of domination and control that imperialism and colonial rule have enacted, one that concerns more conventional approaches to the Orientalist debate. In this sense, the risk for comparative projects associated with early Orientalism is precisely the reinstatement of forms of knowledge production. Such projects might end up assuming the Orient to be an “object of modern inquiry, but not a source through which to construct legitimate knowledge of modern subjecthood.”12 In early Orientalist scholarship, particularly in German Orientalism, the tendency was to mobilize a modernist framework.



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The traditional, context-situated extreme of the modernist continuum was enlarged to include a complex hierarchy of geo-cultural others, each one displaying greater or lesser proximity to the modern-universalist position of the West. In relation to comparative political theory then, the risk is to reinstate the image of non-Western thought as an open and plain archive to be “discovered,” via comparison or commensurability. In taking this direction, Robbie Shilliam has insightfully warned against the tendency of Western academia to project and document “the fruits of its own (idealized) intellectual labours.”13 This approach would hence obscure the processual and transformative process that has allowed non-Western traditions to be constituted, betrayed, modified or reinvented in a critical engagement with colonial modernity. To be aware of this risk would permit comparative projects to invalidate “simplistic and universal” reductions of the non-West to either seeking resistance or assimilation to the West. An anti- or post-colonial engagement by the Western Academy with nonWestern thought requires the cultivation of a set of linked sensitivities. First, we must recognize the determining history of colonial/quasi-colonial cultural and political impingement/domination in modern thought. That is to say, quite simply, that if knowledge is always produced within particular contexts, then (the threat of) colonialism is a meta-context in which knowledge of modernity has been produced. But, second, we must nevertheless be sensitive to the differentiated nature of experiences of imperialism and colonialism.14

The array of individual contexts needs to be acknowledged in which experiences of coloniality and modernity are produced. As Shilliam notes, such recognition should guide any possible “reorientation towards the non-West.” Nonetheless, what still needs to be emphasized is the retroactive moment constituting the Orientalist imaginary in the distorting and essentializing projections of the West. The force of the Orientalist gesture rests not just in the violent transformation of the Western “outside” into the non-Western landscape of Oriental otherings. When moving from a plane of domination and accompanying structures of power to the production and distribution of subjectivities, it is the returned image of the self that should also be given emphasis, being that it plays a crucial role in sustaining the Orientalist representation. Here Orientalism works as a privileged mode of construction of the West’s (and Europe’s) self-image, allowing a phantasmatic relation with the Orient to hijack the “ex-centric” condition of the West (an inclination to be constituted in an ever-elusive relation with alterity). The phantasmatic character of this relation is given by the paranoid logic of reversion that Orientalism enacts at an embryonic level. This logic requires that the ontological constitution of the Western self – one containing all those inassimilable elements that,

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in different historical and geopolitical contexts, have challenged its self-representation – be ejected in the abyssal alterity of the Orient. While instantiating the construction of an Oriental excessive other, this phantasmatic relation permits, retroactively, the restitution of a unitary and integral image of the self. It is here that the Orient expresses what could be defined in terms of an orienting function of the Orient, enabling the West to orient itself at the level of its imaginary constitution along a principle of moral and cultural integrity. Hence, there remains a certain duplicity in the endless Orientalist production of discourses on ancient Asia, contemporary Asia, Asiatic despotism, Asiatic capitalism, Islamic culture. On each occasion, they reproduce in various ways the excessive character of the Oriental other, whether as a locus of sensual deprivation, historical obsolescence, cultural anomie, or rather bodily pleasure, sensuality, refined aesthetics and, in the Orientalist vision of Schlegel, pristine culture. It is here that those positive, passionate and fascinated portrayals of the Orient that Thomas identifies at the core of early Orientalism mark less of a rupture than a structural contiguity, involving more negative and biased Orientalist projections. Drawing on Bonnie Honig’s reflection on the interplay between xenophobia and xenophilia,15 Orientalism can be said here to function as both Islamophobia and Islamophilia. In each case, it mobilizes the Orienting function of an Orient assumed to be the imaginary point of origin and the location of Western discourse. As Foucault put it: “In the universality of Western Reason [ratio], there is a split [partage] which is the Orient: the Orient thought of as origin, dreamt of as the vertiginous point from which are born nostalgias and promises of a return.”16 It is this very phantasmatic aspect and the incommensurable distance from the oriental point of origin that retroactively allows the West to assert its ontological consistency, positivity, and necessity. Whether the Orient is to be taken as essentially singular or as assuming the empirical form of a hierarchical distribution of Oriental others (e.g., ancient India, contemporary Islamic societies, etc.) depends on the practical scope that any Orientalist projection serves in different periods. In any case, what needs to be ontologically preserved is the unitary, integral and necessary character of the Western or European self. The determination of this identity is particularly important when thinking of the status of comparative political theory and any invitation to seriously attend to the non-West. Any “reorientation towards the non-West” that is able to account, to say with Shilliam, for the differentiated nature of geo-political and geo-cultural experiences of nonWestern thought should also be able to de-essentialize the specular pairing of the non-West with the unitary and integral character of the West, so challenging this unity and depriving it of its salient necessity. Nonetheless, one widespread tendency in comparative political theory is to oppose the multifaceted and ever transformative nature of the non-West with its frequently monolithic



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and essentialized representation of the Western archive. Such an approach dismisses the long history of minor and silenced traditions, internal betrayals, and accidental assumptions through which the “West” has constituted itself. To our mind, the historical conjuncture confronting comparative political theory today reveals a changed international scene, which may help to expose the contingent status of the West as both a discursive formation and an analytical concept, so allowing its supressed internal complexity to emerge. From the 2007 international financial crisis to the Arab uprisings, the persistence of conflicts around the world, alongside the appearance of new geopolitical actors and projects, have disrupted any residual ideal of full mastery and Pax Americana. Meanwhile, the vulnerabilities of an enfeebled Western hegemony have been exposed. Moreover, the post-Westphalian conceptual apparatus of international law has been challenged by new political vocabularies and imaginaries, symbolized symptomatically by the assertive restoration of the ideal of the caliphate and the tension that Daesh mobilizes between “state” and “dawlah” (the latter usually translated as “state” but signaling an administrative province of the caliphate across several Islamic traditions). An enormous migration crises, years of austerity measures and attacks on social welfare have profoundly destabilized Europe. Social, political and territorial configurations had been shattering before and after Brexit, and ultimately threatening Europe’s self-representation. New historical conditions seem therefore to have emerged, promising the potential demise of the West as an analytical referent and historical formation. Earlier quests for comparative projects mostly retained both the West and the non-West identity components of the comparison, preserving the analytical value of the Western referent and its integral and necessary representation as a unitary and normative ideal. A new international scenario instead can perhaps motivate cultural openings to be organized along the lines of a “West-less” relational grammar. In this context, the current crisis of Europe might signal a wider crisis in the self-representation of the West. While certainly conducive of a traumatic moment of symbolic and imaginary dislocation, such moments could offer the opportunity of new relational attitudes to arise in world thought. WESTLESS EUROPE AND MINOR GRAMMARS Having recently been invited to comment on the “Dialogue of Civilizations” theme, Fred Dallmayr warns against the tendency to provide unilineal and monolithic representations of Europe which would isolate the Christian Middle Ages as “Europe’s essential core without which the term loses its meaning.”17 Drawing upon Gadamer’s and Derrida’s critical reflections on European identity, Dallmayr suggests that the risk is now for Europe

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to be “lost in translation.” As he puts it, there is a danger that Europe will ultimately be betrayed, precisely because it has stuck to “one-sided portrayals” of itself.18 Such monolithic representations threaten to conceal Europe’s fundamental “multivocity, the diversity of its meanings, the multiplicity of traditions held together in a loose symbiosis” – a plurality which has enabled Europe to stand as a diversified and “rich tapestry.” Drawing on the Italian terms traduttore / traditore (interpreter / traitor), Dallmayr envisages a linkage between translation and betrayal. We think that this linkage could more conventionally be rendered here through the etymological couple tradizione / tradimento (tradition / betrayal or treason). While both these terms share the common Latin root tradere (to hand over; from trans- “over” and dare “to give”), tradimento is associated to the idea of someone (a traitor) “handing over” to the enemy that which he or she was supposed to protect (the keys of a city, a fortress, or the holy scriptures). We might refer instead to tradizione as the handing over of doctrines, values, etc. across different ages. Standing as a doublet of treason in its etymology, “tradition” might then evoke the idea that, in the very handing over of beliefs and customs, something gets altered or betrayed. The risk for any tradition may be that it is “lost in translation” as Dallmayr puts it, but there is greater certainty that it will be “lost in transition.” This approach already finds fertile ground in the German theological school when investing the very concept of “archive” here assumed to be a “liminal zone” between memory and forgetting.19 To take for granted a certain homogeneity of the European or Western canon is therefore to pinpoint a particular facet serving as some central core from which tradition unfolds along its telos; meaning to side-line internal betrayals, ruptures, innovations and differences within the archive, while projecting a unified identity narrative of tradition.20 The cultivation of linked sensitivities about the specific contexts pluralizing the non-West as a referent, therefore risks being insufficient if it is not accompanied by a similar effort from the other side of the comparative project. Hence, exposing the contingent scopes and orienting positions in respect to which Europe and the West have historically essentialized their own narrative enables them to be opened up to minor grammars and trends behind their self-portrayal as a locus of authenticity and unicity. However, this approach may require that sites of emergence and decline in the idea of Europe be highlighted, so demonstrating how a process of appropriation of previous traditions (included the most represented ones as the Greek, the Roman, the medieval Christian) operates from within the narrative of necessity that Europe displays in its modernity. This is then to affirm that similar conditions of emergence, appropriation and possible lines of decline might be exposed behind the concept of the West.



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For instance, in disclosing the contingent appearance of this discourse, Carl Schmitt pointed to the process of gradual replacement of the idea of “Europe” with the “West.” What appears at the beginning of the new millennium as a natural overlapping between Europe and the West is, for Schmitt, a substantial novelty emerging out of a critical battle between two poles. One of these poles, Europe, has played for some time an orienting function, standing as the Orient of an emerging American West. As problematic as this might be, such a reconstruction is useful as it shows the geopolitical intricacy and contrasting narratives that have informed the Western referent in the aftermath of WWII. In his 1950 study The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the jus publicum Europaeum, Schmitt refined his concept of nomos, identifying a relation between order and orientation through which the concreteness of legal and political orders may be revealed. A key theme in the book is the fundamental tension between the territorial distribution of power within the European nation-state order, organized around the juridical notion of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, and the emergence of a new political system modeled on the ideal of US liberal democracy and embodying a globalizing force which substantially reverses the logic of “orientation” and territorial appropriation of Europe: “The Western Hemisphere counterposed to the Eurocentric lines of a global worldview a new global line that was no longer Eurocentric, and called into question the global position of old Europe. The public history of this new line in international law began with the proclamation of the so-called Monroe Doctrine on December 2, 1823.”21 Schmitt describes how the notion of Western Hemisphere formalized in the Monroe Doctrine initially entailed the establishment of a line of separation between the old and the new continent. The expression Western Hemisphere was used in the Monroe Doctrine to instantiate a defensive strategy against the old monarchies of Europe, and the possibility that American territory be subjected to European land appropriations. In denoting the influence of American affairs within this new spatial order, this line has also signaled a fundamental tension. On the one hand, it presented the need of the Western Hemisphere to detach, isolate and defend itself from the old European powers. On the other, it expressed the “moral and cultural claim to embody the free, authentic and essential Europe,” standing in opposition to its old, corrupt system. This twofold movement was said to bring about a new status completely different from all former soil statuses existing in international law: “American soil would not belong to any soil status that European international law had recognized in the 19th century: neither soil with no master (and thus open for occupation in the former sense), nor colonial soil, nor European soil as the territory of European states, nor a battlefield in the sense of the old amity lines, nor a European sphere of extraterritoriality with consular jurisdiction, as in Asian countries.”22

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For Schmitt, this new status has entailed the celebration in international law of a new spatial order guaranteeing peace, freedom and law against the corrupt Old World which, until then, was taken as the center of the earth. It is intriguing to question exactly how the orienting function of the Orient had allowed Europe to stand as an occidental locus of rationality and law in the face of all contemporary forms of Asiatic despotism, notwithstanding the idealization of the Orient as a pristine cradle of civilization for German orientalists. Here, a close reading of Schmitt evidences how, for the German theorist at least, the Western Hemisphere was now accrediting Europe with its own orienting function. An emerging West could then emerge as a locus of “peace and freedom from a sphere of despotism and corruption”: Strangely enough, the term “Western Hemisphere” was opposed precisely to Europe, the old West, the old Occident. It was not opposed to old Asia or to old Africa, but rather to the old West […] The new West, America, would supersede the old West, would reorient the old world historical order, would become the center of the earth […] The center of civilization shifted further West, to America. Like old Asia and old Africa before her, old Europe had become the past. As always, old and new are used here not only in the sense of condemnation, but also, and above all, in the sense of the redistribution of order and orientation.23

For Schmitt, the history of the West is the history of the gradual movement of the line of the Western Hemisphere towards the East. This history concludes with WWII, when the old continent came to be absorbed within the new cultural and political space of the West, but was left forgotten in its wake. This shift in power entailed the end of the jus publicum Europaeum, the nomos of the Earth or a concrete order of the globe and the principle of which Schmitt had claimed to be the last representative. In Schmitt’s narrative of Europe, the jus publicum Europaeum was assumed to be the principle devised in modern international treaties for rationalizing international relations through the nation-state system amongst European actors. Such a principle was intended to allow for the institution of a principle of limited war across powers that mutually recognized each other as justus hostis; that is as enemies acknowledging their equality and mutual respect. This achievement was portrayed as the necessary application of universal principles of freedom, rationality, and equality, all of which were rooted in the cultural patrimony of European modernity, enabling Europe to constitute its self-image as the archive of accumulated Greek, Roman and Christian traditions. To demystify this narrative, Schmitt then disclosed the “appropriative” and contingent force leading to the formation of Europe. Far from standing as the necessary outcome of a rational telos that emerged with the Greeks, the jus publicum Europaeum was nothing but the concrete order resulting from



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a process of territorial appropriation and partition beginning with modernity. While effectively rationalizing relations amongst European nations, the jus publicum Europaeum primarily consisted of an order of divisions and separations. Despite any idealized reference to equality, the rationalization of conflict that the jus publicum Europaeum then celebrated was devised as a principle uniquely conceivable among “states,” which naturally limited its application solely to Europe. In fact, this rationalized system of equality and limited war was countered by “unlimited war” outside Europe, where no “states” were identified and recognized by the Europeans and where land (including American land) was qualified as res nullius (nobody’s property) and was thus subject to appropriation. In deconstructing Europe’s narrative as a necessary rational order, exposing its contingent roots (and orientation), Schmitt’s description of the Western Hemisphere also pointed to the emergence of a new space characterized by a lack of division and separation and by claims to absolute justice. In turn, this new space allowed for doctrines of just war to be recovered. For Schmitt, the replacement of the jus publicum Europaeum with the West was ultimately destined to propel the affirmation of a global and undifferentiated world, signaling the crisis of the modern state. The process of gradual subsumption of Europe under the West was in fact accompanied by the entrance of new actors on to the international scene, including Asiatic states, and most prominently Japan, which would contribute to expand “the community of European international law into a spaceless, universalist international law.”24 Under the force of this generalization, American liberal democracy and the West would themselves be destined to experience the terms of their own obsolescence: In relation to the new East Asian sphere rising in world history, the American continent was now put in the position of an eastern continent, just as one hundred years earlier old Europe had been thrust aside in the eastern hemisphere by the world-historical rise of America. Such an illuminating change would be a highly sensational theme for an intellectual history of geography. In 1930, under the rubric “rise of a new world,” it was suggested that America and China should unite.25

Despite any unlikely unification between America and China, more than sixty years after the publication of The Nomos of the Earth, the tension between the modern state at the core of the jus publicum Europaeum and the new world of space-less universalism (read economic globalization) is still the object of intense debate. The merit of Schmitt’s analysis, regardless of the fact of it being the expression of a German theorist who had adhered to the Nazi Party and happened to be aligned to those who had just lost the war against US

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liberal democracy, lies in its attempt to deconstruct the fundamental tenets of political modernity, exposing the tensions affecting its basic principles (i.e. equality) and unitary representations. By showing that political rationalization in Europe was made possible by complete irrationality outside, and by disclosing the concrete conditions that allowed referents as Europe and the West to emerge in respect to their geo-cultural counterparts, the hidden relation between order and political decision was thus brought to the fore in international politics. Schmitt was thus able to point to the fundamental groundlessness of Europe as both a unified discourse and a normative ideal. Far from being the expression of a necessary evolution of a certain canon or tradition, Schmitt showed that Europe carried within itself the trace of its own origin. In political terms, this meant conceiving of the system of the modern state less as the extension of European rationality than the expression of a real, concrete order, which at some point would emerge to serve a specific scope in respect to a historical orienting other.26 To look for the contingent roots of this order is, for Schmitt, to reveal what hides behind the discourse of the modern state i.e., colonialism and a politics of difference and appropriation rather than equality. Hence, in removing any necessity from Western concepts, Schmitt was thus able to write a counterhistory of philosophy and disclose internal tensions of the Western referent, whether between minor and dominant traditions, or in the historical battle between the jus publicum Europaeum and the lack of orientation of emerging spaces. At this point, we will reflect upon what has been called a “minor tradition” of political thought within the Western canon in an attempt not only to move beyond the logic of identity-belonging informing the narrative of necessity of the West, but also to escape the counter-history that Schmitt opposed. Such a move may help us to explore new possible horizons stretching from comparative to world thought. TOWARDS A MINOR EUROPE: BARUCH SPINOZA AND THE DISCLOSURE OF WORLD THOUGHT One of the great voices of modern thought, Baruch Spinoza, has frequently been relegated to a “minor tradition” in the European intellectual canon. In a 2006 essay dedicated to Talal Asad and appropriately entitled “Europe: A Minor Tradition,” William E. Connolly challenges common assumptions about the cohesion of the Western and European tradition. This is a cannon that most often identifies Christianity, the Judeo-Christian tradition in general and the modern construction of secularism as the essence of Europe. According to Connolly, what is missing from these accounts is the tendency for



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minor trends to have been obscured by central European orientations towards religion, morality, secularism and politics. In this account, for instance, Kant is normally assumed as the dominant interpreter of a homogenous Enlightenment tradition. Nonetheless, this tendency should not distract us from minor trajectories in Kant’s thought which do not necessarily conform to his overall contributions to the modern concept of conscience and the autonomous agent. For Connolly, the Enlightenment tradition is more the product of a contemporary retrospection by “Euro-American intellectuals” than “of the actual distribution of perspectives during the period in question.”27 To add, the sedimentation of the European and then the Western canon entails, for Connolly, a subjugation of a “minor tradition” behind the majority expression of the Enlightenment. Rooted in early forerunners such as Epicurus and Lucretius, this tradition was “reactivated” by Spinoza whose critical stance challenged mainstream perspectives at that time, those which included a “dominant religious tradition, the dominant voices of Enlightenment and secularism elaborated later, and even the scientific atheism that become another minor voice in the Enlightenment.”28 Spinoza’s inclusion within this tradition is sometimes ascribed to his (ethnic) minority status as a “Jewish philosopher.” Willi Goetschel, for instance, highlights the “disowning attitude” of contemporaries towards Spinoza’s work and his alien position within the dominant canon of modern political thought which otherwise runs from Machiavelli to Hobbes and Locke: “Suspiciously eyed as outsiders, Jewish philosophers, especially Baruch de Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn, would be granted admission to the discursive universe of modern thought only by way of an assimilation that would at the same time both assimilate and ‘other’ them.”29 Yet Spinoza’s qualification as a “Jewish philosopher” was always complicated by the “logic of double exclusion” which he experienced following the herem (permanent ban and excommunication) decreed by his Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam. Refigured as both a non-Jew for Jews and a Jewish philosopher for Christians, Spinoza’s peculiar position presents for Connolly “a new adventure of thought that offended all the ecclesiastical faiths of his day and continues to puzzle Euro-American secularists today.”30 Spinoza’s influence will be relevant to future “minor” philosophical voices from Nietzsche to Bergson, Hampshire and ultimately Deleuze, who identified his own minor tradition within the framework of pre-Kantian thinkers such as Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume and the post-Kantians Maimon, Nietzsche, and Bergson. One primary element in Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza – whom he characterizes as the “ever more worthy” but at the same time the “more maligned and hated” philosopher – is found in his great theoretical thesis combining atheism and pantheism under the idea of a single substance having an infinity of attributes. This ‘substance’ allows all “creatures” to stand as

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its modifications or attributes: “We may easily conceive the whole of nature to be one individual, whose parts, that is to say, all bodies, differ in infinite ways without any change of the whole individual.”31 Hence, by opposing dominant orientations to finalism and to strict dualism as the mind / body and God / nature, Spinoza elaborates a metaphysical monism through which substance is immanent in the order of things and their movement. However, while bearing a resemblance to Nietzsche, for Deleuze it is Spinoza’s work on his “practical theses” – the devaluation of consciousness, values and sad passions – that offers a new model to philosophers: the body. He proposes to establish the body as a model: “We do not know what the body can do…” […] We speak of consciousness and its decrees, of the will and its effects, of the thousand ways of moving the body, of dominating the body and the passions—but we do not even know what a body can do. Lacking this knowledge, we engage in idle talk. As Nietzsche will say, we stand amazed before consciousness, but “the truly surprising thing is rather the body…”32

Spinoza instantiated a central principle of parallelism here between body and mind. He does not reject any causality and primacy between the former and the latter, but states that any change in bodily state is accompanied by a parallel change in mind and thought, also working vice versa. An action taking place in the mind therefore implies an action in the body, while a passion in the body is a passion in the mind. While challenging the traditional approach to morality as a tool for consciousness to control the passions, Spinoza’s Ethics shows that the “body surpasses the knowledge that we have of it, and that thought likewise surpasses the consciousness that we have of it.”33 In such way, Spinoza was able to establish that a life involves a fundamental connection between ideas and affect which instantiates a whole order of the composition and decomposition of relations. Positive and negative encounters unfold between human beings according to complex laws affecting all of nature and reflecting “sadness and joy” as the two fundamental passions lying behind “affect” and its variations: “To the extent that an idea replaces another, I never cease to pass from one degree of perfection to another, however miniscule the difference, and this kind of melodic line of continuous variation will define affect (affectus) in its correlation with ideas and at the same time in its difference in nature from ideas. We account for this difference in nature and this correlation.”34 Hence, the trace that each body leaves upon other bodies as an effect of this modulation of ideas and affects is a trace that Deleuze assumes to be a key element in Spinoza’s philosophy. It is with reference to this trace that an affection of the body can be conceived and defined in terms of “the mixture of one body with another body, the trace of another body on my body.”



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Here, Spinoza’s philosophy expresses its profound relational and affective character, allowing life to reveal its assertive and vital force through a principle of multiplicity and ultimate relationality. Hence, we can observe the “potent anomaly” of Spinoza’s materialism within the dominant European conceptions of power, where a constitution-production unitary nexus and an immanent functionality of power as sharing and desire disengage from the “mixed-up ‘democratic’ soup of normative Hobbesian transcendentalism, Rousseauian general will, and Hegelian Aufhebung” that is often taken as the core of European modern thought.35 In this context, the dominant Western tradition grounded on its great dualisms – self-reflexive individualism and rationality and the metaphysical transcendence and unicity of modern power – counters with a minor tradition of powerful and democratic liberation of the mind and the body in which the subject figures as not the cause but rather the product of a constituent relation: Spinoza builds upon this nonreductionist break with dualism to articulate an ethic of cultivation, in which cultivation of the body contributes to the cultivation of the mind and vice versa, and in which a positive ethos of cultural composition is needed to inaugurate the vision of democratic pluralism he embraces even before later, less pluralistic ideals of democracy became popular in Europe.36

We believe that an insight into the intellectual vision of Spinoza will help us uncover the contested nature of the Western canon further. This approach would also permit us to emphasize the ambiguity of the Western referent, exposing both the endurance of its function as a normative ideal and the limits of any comparative project counterpoising the West to the decentralizing force of a non-West. Moving from comparative to world thought, a Spinozist framework would enable us to disclose the force of the “encounter” that a relational model of human personhood liberates as a fundamental capacity for being affected; that is, beyond the linear and unified spectrality that the Western referent would mobilize if retained. It cannot be just a pure nomenclature effort. A West-less space requires resistance to any attempt to consider world thought as a new crystalized “tapestry” of molar and totalizing traditions. Such traditions merely provide the hemispheres of the globe with their cultural form and orientation, locating their possibility of synthesis only in the intellectual tools of comparison and commensurability. We would rather assume world thought as a frontier space than a further separation line between cultures taking the shape of a border. Instead, it would be a constituent front area, a space within itself, in which traditions constantly re-produce themselves beyond any accumulation and identity logics of belonging. Here traditions are not pre-given, nor ordered

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in linear and teleological sequence, but are themselves the affective and relational expression of succession and variation of ideas and affects in multiple geopolitical and temporal locations. To define world thought as a frontier space means to account for this “difference in nature and this correlation” within and between traditions. It assumes the constituent and processual nature of their being in common but also their difference. We thus propose to traverse and produce world thought resorting to the creative and relational attitude of a nomadic thinking. In the refined conceptualization of Rosi Braidotti, such an approach shuns any deference to the authority of the past, proposing “the fleeting co-presence of multiple time zones, in a time continuum that activates and deterritorializes stable identities,” while also enlisting “the creative resources of the imagination to the task of enacting transformative relations and actions in the present. This ontological nonlinearity thus rests on a Spinozist ethics of affirmation and becoming that predicates the positivity of difference.37 More, by escaping any synthetic reduction of the relation that connects us, a nomadic journey into the frontier area of world thought would fully expose the complexity of our co-presence, rejecting any dualistic understanding of the mind and body. This approach would require us to account for the diversity of practices in which mind and body articulate their difference and correlation. It would require avoiding, as Jenco advocates, a certain comparative tendency to privilege texts and verbal expression: Practices that complement text-based interpretive traditions, or that constitute traditions of their own—practices like imitation, ritual, dance, or other forms of non-verbal expression—are rendered silent, passed over in favor of text-based reconstructions of individual utterances. As a result, the “voices” many crosscultural theorists hope to capture as a means of overcoming Western universalism and its implicit violence may mislead rather than clarify.38

While different, these practices resonate as interrelated expressions of our present, partaking of that “melodic line of continuous variation” constituting emotions in their correlation with ideas. As a mode of poetic suggestion, we assume the creative force of nomadic thinking as capable of navigating across all these differences and correlations, moving beyond the synthetic attitude of comparative thought towards a synesthetic sensitivity and thought. This navigation requires full disclosure of that capacity of non-verbal expressions to pervade philosophical concepts and produce some fundamental alteration in our experience of the present. Charles Baudelaire’s use of synaesthesia – where a sensation expressed by one of the senses triggers a sensation in another, allowing sensorial



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differences to be overcome beyond the individualizing grip of rational consciousness and in favor of an overarching correspondence between objects, senses and the spirit in infinity –traces a possible route in this navigation: There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children, Sweet as oboes, green as meadows — And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant, With power to expand into infinity, Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin, That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.39

As a frontier area, world thought should be able to valorize a synesthetic thinking allowing verbal and non-verbal expressions of world traditions to extol the profound correlation of ideas and emotions in our togetherness. This is a synesthetic thinking able to attend to the diversity and incommensurability of texts, rituals, dances and concepts, while exposing the fundamental intricacy and prospect of resonance of mind, passions and body sensations in the production of the present. It is also productive of the nomadic force, to say with Braidotti, of a “collectively distributed consciousness” now unfastened from any Western and European subject of knowledge. NOTES 1. Andrew F. March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?” The Review of Politics 71 (2009), 538. 2. March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?,” 540. 3. Fred Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory,” Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 2 (June 2004): 249–57. 4. Osama bin Laden, “Under Mullah Omar, 9 April 2001,” in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, edited by Bruce Lawrence (London andNew York: Verso 2005), 96. 5. Megan Thomas, “Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory,” Review of Politics 72, no. 4 (2010): 653–77. 6. Bobby S. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism (London: Zed Books, 1997), 155. 7. Thomas, “Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory,” 659–60. 8. Thomas, “Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory,” 664. 9. Thomas, “Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory,” 665. 10. Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 98. 11. Said, Orientalism, 20–21. 12. Robbie Shilliam, “Non-Western Thought and International Relation,” in International Relation and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and

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Investigation of Global Modernity, ed. Robbie Shilliam (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 13. 13. Shilliam, “Non-Western Thought and International Relation,” 16. 14. Shilliam, “Non-Western Thought and International Relation,” 21. 15. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 2001). 16. Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits, Tome I, texte n. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1961/2001). Quote translated by Andrea Teti in “Orientalism as a Form of Confession,” Foucault Studies 17 (2014): 189. 17. Fred Dallmayr, “The Legacy of Europe,” paper delivered at “Europe: Lost in Translation?” Conference, Berlin, May 15, 2014. See also, Fred Dallmayr, “Self and Other: Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Difference,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 5, no. 2, Article 9 (1993). 18. Critical engagements with the idea of Europe as never identical to itself include most notably Hans-Georg Gadamer, Das Erbe Europas: Beiträge (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1989); Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); and Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 19. See Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010); and David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 461–80. 20. A well-known attempt to expose the internal complexity of “non-European” traditions, showing the impasses of pure identity, goes back to Edward Said, and particularly his reading of Freud’s late work: Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2004). For an inspiring discussion linking Said’s essay on Freud and the non-European to Derrida’s reflections on Europe as an “open project,” see Engin F. Isin, “We, the Non-Europeans: Derrida with Said,” in Conflicting Humanities, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 229–44. 21. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2003), 281. 22. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 289. 23. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 290. 24. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 291. 25. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 292. A sentence in the English translation of this passage has been modified by the author (originally appearing as “in a position to displace an eastern continent”), hoping to reflect Schmitt’s own words better in the German text. 26. See Carlo Galli, Genealogia della politica: Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996). 27. William E. Connolly, “Europe: A Minor Tradition,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, eds. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 80.



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28. Connolly, “Europe: A Minor Tradition,” 81. 29. Willi Goetschel, “Voices from the ‘Jewish Colony’: Sovereignty, Power, Secularization and the Outside Within,” in International Relation and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigation of Global Modernity, ed. Robbie Shilliam (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 64. 30. Goetschel, “Voices from the ‘Jewish Colony,’” 83. 31. Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Edition Limited, 2001), 2p13L7s, 61. 32. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 17–18. 33. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. 34. Gilles Deleuze, “Lecture Transcripts on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect, Cours Vincennes 24 January 1978,” eds. Emilie and Julien Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/14, translated by Timothy S. Murphy, (accessed August 22, 2017). 35. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xvii. 36. Connolly, “Europe: A Minor Tradition,” 84. 37. Rosi Braidotti, “Complexity against Methodological Nationalism,” in Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 209–10. 38. Leigh Jenco, “‘What Does Heaven Ever Say?’ A Methods-Centered Approach to Cross-Cultural Engagement,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 4 (2007): 9. 39. Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondences,” in The Flowers of Evil, trans. William Aggeler (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1868/1954).

Chapter 2

Outside Philosophy Jason M. Wirth

My title is spare yet wide and open. What do I mean by “outside philosophy”? The phrase itself is intentionally ambiguous: (1) what is external to philosophy and (2) a kind of philosophical activity that I am dubbing, however paradoxically, “outside philosophy.” This is a manifesto in defense of outside philosophy as the positive and productive ambiguity of both senses. I begin with the first sense. How can we speak of philosophy’s outside? Of course, not everything is philosophy, so the outside is vast, comprised of anything and everything that we do not label “philosophy.” But where do we draw the boundary or build the wall between what is inside philosophy and what is outside philosophy? Although philosophers often act as if what “we” do as philosophers is somehow self-evident, this does not in itself count as a justification for establishing what belongs to philosophy. It simply asserts that philosophy is what “we” do as philosophers and thereby philosophy belongs to “we” philosophers and therefore non-philosophy is whatever the others do. If the latter wants “us” to recognize that what “they” do is philosophy, it behooves them to show “us” that “they” are somehow doing what “we” do when “we” philosophize. Either “they” find room in “our” tent, either by demonstrating that “they” are a compatible variation of “us,” or “we” somehow expand “our” tent to include “them.” In either case, philosophy remains the provenance of “we” philosophers. The inside is what “we” do and the outside is thereby also gauged by what “we” philosophically determine as non-philosophy. At the heart of what follows is a simple philosophical standpoint that governs in direct and indirect ways all of my analyses: the question of the nature of philosophy is one of philosophy’s most underappreciated, vexing, and consequential problems. What is it that “we” do when “we” do philosophy? Typically we adhere to the habits of thought that reflect our tradition, 23

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our training, and our privileges and entitlements. Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy? found it odd that the nature of philosophical activity was rarely raised as a philosophical problem and that professional philosophy often automatically assumes that it knows what it is doing. It does what it has always done and new problems are conducted within the tacitly operating and often self-assured (and dogmatic) “image of thought” that determines what kinds of questions and resources can be considered “properly” philosophical. I argue against this implicit resistance to self-interrogation and for a sense of philosophy that cannot altogether reconcile itself to its proper activity and whose operations remain for it a living and enduring problem, a wound that enables new and unexpected philosophical beginnings. To be sure: this wound is also fatal. Such beginnings do not issue from any center, any governing and unassailable idea or concept of what philosophy properly is. That has died. What follows is, for better or worse, strongly voiced, a manifesto of sorts, arguing in no uncertain terms for a renewal of philosophy born from nonstandard, heretofore scarcely “philosophical,” voices and sites of thought. It does so by insisting on the insuperable gap between the activity of philosophizing (open without end and beginning ever anew because it gathers new life precisely from its inability to reconcile itself to its own proper activity) and any particular philosophy (the result of philosophizing but not in itself philosophizing). Outsider philosophy, philosophizing emerging from nonphilosophy, is not therefore a niche within philosophy, but the living heart of the very urge to philosophize. Manifesto, originally an Italian word that in turn derived from the Latin manifestus, is to make public, to show or demonstrate plainly in the light of day, to bring to light and thereby render palpable, evident, and clear. In so doing, it justifies what has been done and what will be done; it establishes the center or inside of philosophy. Traditionally, as Antonio Gramsci has argued, this has been the exercise of hegemonic interests that govern our habitual attitudes, cultural myths, even our language. As both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein argued, one does not get rid of God until one disposes of grammar. Not only is this governance somnolent, dogmatic, and a mere habitual reflex, it is the hiding place for ideology and the subliminal machinations of hegemony, which, Gramsci argued, replace what we sense with what we are made to sense. This, then, is the trick of the classic manifesto: to privatize philosophical activity by making it appear as if you have done the opposite and made it a public good. Everyone philosophizes as if they were serving the public good, but unwittingly serve the interests of a few. Given this, I propose a different kind of manifesto: to make manifest the limits of philosophy’s capacity to make itself fully manifest; to decenter and



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thereby de-privatize philosophy by showing that there is no center to show and no one to own it. I The Western philosophical traditions have a long history of sincere and generally profound efforts not to be presumptuous and to avoid taking anything for granted. They heroically seek not to begin, as Hegel warned, as if it were shot out of a gun. Philosophy, or so we are told, patiently begins with first things, first principles, indubitable truths, and so forth. But what do such commitments, however valiant, nonetheless take for granted? How do they arrive at first principles? When a thinker shoots an arrow, unleashing “an event-thought, a haecceity, instead of a subjectthought,” Deleuze and Guattari ask, “[I]s it by chance” that “there is a man of the State . . . that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a target or ‘aim’?”1 How it that “we” assume that “we” can all recognize what most matters in thinking? Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, argued that “presuppositions are as much subjective as objective.”2 By objective presuppositions we mean concepts explicitly presupposed by a given concept. Descartes, for example, in the Second Meditation, does not want to define man as a rational animal because such a definition explicitly presupposes the concepts of rationality and animality: in presenting the Cogito as a definition, he therefore claims to avoid all the objective presuppositions which encumber those procedures that operate by genus and difference. It is clear, however, that he does not escape presuppositions of another kind—subjective or implicit presuppositions contained in opinions rather than concepts: it is presumed that everyone knows, independently of concepts, what is meant by self, thinking, and being.3

Although we may strive to be critically vigilant about all ideas, we nonetheless operate according to tacitly held subjective δόξα or opinion. In his catastrophic rise to power, Donald Trump, for example, claims to be a straight talker who avoids the obfuscating conceptual assumptions of the elite and simply sees things as they are; but he “speaks” and “thinks” in the prevailing clichés and myths of American culture.4 What is the form of the subjective assumptions of such δόξα-driven plain-seeing? “It has the form of ‘everybody knows.’”5 They idiotically say what “everybody knows” and “what no one can deny” and hence when “philosophy rests its beginning upon such implicit or subjective presuppositions, it can claim innocence, since it has kept nothing back—except, of course, the essential—namely, the form of

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this discourse. It then opposes the ‘idiot’ to the pedant. . . . The philosopher takes the side of the idiot as though of a man without presuppositions.”6 The idiot thinks naturally, innocent of objective presuppositions and opposed to the pedantic, but it is all a cover for a stealthier form of ideological pedantry. Furthermore, this pedantry is as encompassing as it is tacit. “Natural” thinking, common sense, and straight talk, all unabashedly assume the posture of what “everybody knows” and “what no one can deny,” consequently forming an immense, invisibly operating consensus that operates without publicly legitimating or defending itself. What is wrong with you? Are you not one of us, a person of common sense? Can you not see the obvious? Gramsci opposed the hegemonic force of “common sense” to the liberating force of “good sense.” The former serves the privatized assumptions of a privileged minority as if they were the obvious, indeed, the only, means of making sense of things. Ideology operates like Plato’s cave. By stealthily controlling the domain of sense, the cave is a great act of misdirection: the prisoners have no critical curiosity about their shadow world or about the chains that kept them bound to it, but they always come to preordained conclusions that they assume to be natural and obvious. Common sense hides the subjective assumptions that set the very terms for thinking. In this sense, common sense is always about power, but as such, it renders those subject to common sense philosophically impotent. My use of Plato’s famous allegory of education as the journey from the “cave” is not intended to celebrate philosophy’s long exodus to take we benighted ones to the sun of goodness and wisdom. While ignoring any commitment to the historically thick pitfalls of Platonism, it is rather an allegory for the contemporary institutions of philosophy. A certain idiotic common sense has prevailed for a long time in North American academic philosophical culture. The so-called analytic and continental divide, of dubious value as a philosophical problem, typically manifests with the analytic side characterizing the continental side not as wrong, or as operating from dubious assumptions, but as not in any meaningful way even philosophical. Power is the capacity to take one’s position for granted—it is what every “clear-headed” person knows to be philosophy—and from this stance it easily enforces its borders. The triumph of the “good departments” is not evidence of the best practices of philosophy prevailing. It is not the result of a long philosophical interrogation into the deepest possibilities of philosophy as such. “Good philosophy” is by fiat whatever the good departments do. What Marcuse once argued about “ordinary language philosophy” still obtains for the dominant style of what matters or counts as philosophy: Analytic philosophy often spreads the atmosphere of denunciation and investigation by committee. The intellectual is called to the carpet. What do you



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mean when you say . . . ? Don’t you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don’t talk like the rest of us, like the man on the street, but rather like a foreigner, who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you. We shall teach you to say what you have in mind, to “come clear,” to “put your cards on the table.” Of course, we do not impose on you and your freedom of thought and speech; you may think as you like. But once you speak, you have to communicate your thoughts to us—in our language or in yours. Certainly, you make speak your own language, but it must be translatable, and it will be translated.7

The prosecutory management of the common sense of philosophy keeps it within bounds. As such it is easier to spread—for we know what it is that we are spreading—while simultaneously diminishing the range and magnitude of what can possibly count as philosophy or a philosophical problem. Manfred Frank has recently delivered an encomium for the demise of German philosophy in Germany, which is no longer considered philosophy but at best as Germanistik, German language and culture area studies. If you want to study German philosophy, you increasingly have to study it outside the German-speaking world. Meanwhile the diminishment of the range of philosophical themes has made the new German version of philosophy—a species of analytic philosophy increasingly done not in German but in English—irrelevant to all but a few narrowly focused specialists. “Instead of great themes, instead of researches with great breadth, there is a micrology of argument analyses.”8 Since the inception of analytic philosophy, its philosophers are by and large trained to work within a deflationary sense of what even counts as a philosophical problem, and within that narrow array of philosophical tasks, it has generally contented itself to work on partial aspects of narrow problems. This tendency has become exacerbated in the last couple of decades as analytic philosophy reduces itself to ever-smaller micro-specialties and thereby works in ever-smaller and ever more insular circles, generally ignoring all other aspects of philosophy, even within their specialty as well as arguments in their micro-specialty that were written in languages other than English. The question of the relevance or worth of philosophy is too broad, perhaps even nonphilosophical, and in its place we find the incredible shrinking philosopher—or perhaps a new variation of “the conscientious in spirit [der Gewissenhafte des Geistes]” that Nietzsche prophesied in the fourth book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Absorbed in thought, Zarathustra steps on a truth seeker working in the mud, studying leeches—but not the whole leech, mind you, for that is too daunting a task, but just the brain of the leech. “How long I have been chasing after this one single thing, the brain of the leech, so that the slippery truth no longer here slips away from me. Here is my realm! For this I have thrown everything away, for this everything else has become the same.”9

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Alas, the continental side of the divide has its own prodigious share of problems. SPEP—the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy—has become a kind of Noah’s Ark for samples of all of the philosophical animals threatened by the floods of the Benjaminian mythic violence exerted by what John McCumber ironically dubbed the “good philosophy departments.”10 The latter are the largely wealthy, self-assured, self-validating, and self-warranting departments, whose philosophical privilege—the privilege to declare what matters philosophically—is largely invisible because it can always be taken for granted. While analytic thought does not have to establish its legitimacy—it de facto exercises a monopoly on philosophical legitimacy as such, as if analytic philosophy were a pleonasm—the continental strain struggles to do so. This is one of the reasons that it is exceptionally difficult to publish works that do not expound or vary the work of continental philosophy’s own mythic gods: the great European—yes, always European—masters. Original works—works dedicated to a philosophical problem, not to individual philosophers—seldom appear because they generally have not and likely will not sell copies. Continental philosophers are largely reduced to ventriloquists, speaking through the dummies of their masters. And all of this, in an age when higher education is considered an economic “investment” and the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) assert their superiority, is evidence of the general humiliation and marginalization of the humanities as worthy endeavors. European philosophy, once a great unquestionable pleonasm, has fragmented into the irrelevancies of analytic thought (at least as far as it exerts any extra-academic import and influence) as it guards against the increasingly globally scattered epigones of the continental masters. Nonetheless, the sinking ship of Western thought—now only propped up by the power of Western capital, wealth, and the residual habits of empire—is still the measure against which all world philosophy, if it is going to understand itself as such, is judged. Where is the space for the discourse traditions and philosophical subjects that do not belong to either pole of the divide? Classical American philosophy (Peirce, Emerson, James, Thoreau, Dewey, etc.) is always a hard sell. The editors of Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy lament that “many members of the academic philosophical community in the United Sates would be reluctant to classify Thoreau as a philosopher at all.” Indeed, “Thoreau’s work is seldom taught or studied in most American philosophy departments.”11 But where do we consider the immense and immensely variegated Buddhist traditions, or the many different kinds of philosophical enterprises that in South Asia stretch back long before the Greeks? Why is the former relegated to Buddhist studies or some variation of area studies or religious studies while even in analytic philosophy the Greeks are not sequestered to Greek studies or Mediterranean studies?



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And what about the indigenous peoples of the Americas—why is there hardly any room for their voices in the philosophical practices that preponderate in what was once their home? Such ways of thinking remain securely contained in their philosophical reservations—who would dare speak at a conference on the teachings of the eagles or the salmon or the bears or the mountains? African philosophy for its part has spent much of its entire lifespan arguing that it even exists and that its name and project even made sense, balefully condemned to endless pedigree exercises.12 There is a niche for area studies in philosophy (philosophy in its regional variations), but so packaged they appear as afterthoughts, marginal applications and quaint and exotic variations of “what everyone knows is philosophy.” And what about the immense apathy that the official channels of academic philosophy inspire? Is this not the new triumph of a stubborn old center, albeit in its putrefaction? It no longer needs to crush good sense with common sense. The irrelevant ruins of philosophy’s idiotic common sense assure that philosophy will never significantly contest hegemonic interests. They no longer need to disguise themselves as philosophical arguments. “Conservative” political figures can flaunt their power, replacing the old dog whistles with the new bullhorns. Real power exempts one from any pretense of philosophy. The powerful can afford not to be philosophical; the “poor” and “powerless,” Fanon’s “damnés de la terre,” the wretched of the earth, cannot afford this luxury. Given that economically challenged students are generally encouraged to study more practical and “vocational” subjects, those who least appreciate the urgency of philosophy are often the only ones who have the opportunity to study it. It is in light of this situation that the positive ambiguity of outside philosophy gives rise to a basic procedural principle in order to begin exposing and severing philosophy’s tacitly hegemonic commitments: Philosophy should give initial consideration to voices who most cannot afford to eschew philosophy and whose importance and value has not yet found a language that can be readily heard. This is philosophy’s preferential option for the poor (in Rancière’s sense of the latter).13 II The immense cultural range of philosophy, including its increasingly varied sites and modes, nonetheless demonstrates that there is light outside philosophy’s self-exile to the cave of idiocy. The closed world of the cave cracks open in proportion to philosophy’s capacity to overcome the tacitly operating delusion that philosophy is the common sense expression of the universality of a subject. Such an imperious subject assumes that its world

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is the world. The great Kamakura Zen Master Eihei Dōgen (1200–1253), in his celebrated fascicle Genjō Kōan, exposed the delusion of the fixed subject position: To study the Way is to study the self, but to study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be confirmed by all beings, each of which is also without a fixed self. He likened the illusion of the fixedpoint subject to the illusion that the shore is actually moving when you see it from a boat: When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and essence are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing has unchanging self.14

There is no fixed or fixable subject whose experience is the measure of what matters in all thinking, experience, and history and the same is true for the objects of thinking. The contemporary Iranian-American philosopher Hamid Dabashi takes up Edward Said’s powerful project and brings it beyond Orientalism’s demand that the object, the “they,” the other, is always with or against the European subject. He notes that what Gramsci discovered “is what in Brooklyn we call chutzpah—to think yourself the center of the universe, a self-assuredness that gives the philosopher that certain panache and authority to think in absolutist and grand narrative terms.”15 This is philosophy’s complicity with hegemony and “an imperial frame of reference.”16 Dabashi, in dismissing the self-centered certainty of the European subject, ceases to be its object (the one known by the master knowing subject), and hence the “European knowing subject, to the degree that it is incarcerated within the dead certainties of being ‘European’ . . . cannot have a clue who and what we/they are.”17 As the master subject relinquishes, new “worlds emerge beyond ‘the West and the Rest.’”18 Philosophy, imperious yet largely irrelevant, can be liberated when its hegemonic privatization of sense gives way to thinking’s decentered relationship to its outside and therefore returns to the very people it had initially silenced. Thinking becomes, as Fanon argued, actional, rather than a trap in which some a priori value constitutes thinking in advance as if it were the unfolding of destiny. This remains the great intervention that was existentialism: the capacity of thinkers like Sartre, de Beauvoir, Césaire, Fanon, and contemporary thinkers like Rancière, to expose the retroactive constitution of the master subject’s world. An a priori value is asserted in such a way that it



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assumes what Benjamin called mythic violence: it asserts itself in such a way that it will always have been what matters. The pluralization and historical variability of the subject—its freedom if you will—also pluralizes the objects and themes of philosophy. The abdication of the fixed “I” in “I think” opens philosophy to an infinite range of matters, themes, questions, and problems. We cannot know in advance what will have been philosophical—or even all that could one day have been philosophical. Philosophy is not a known task to be administered by the good departments; it is, to use Schelling’s term, unvordenklich, unprethinkable, and, as such, creative. Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy?, presumably critiquing Habermas, did not seek the conditions of a rejuvenated philosophy in “the present form of the democratic State or in a cogito of communication.” They found no dearth of communication. “On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people who do not yet exist.”19 Speaking is, as they say in their Kafka book, “to use syntax in order to cry, to give a syntax to the cry.”20 This is not only the question of an immense and welcome plurality emerging in the subject position of the philosopher—the new people to come—but also of the liberation of the full range of possible philosophical themes. Philosophy becomes newly creative, the power to constantly reinvent the range and concerns of philosophy—the “whole earth without a speck of soil left out” as Dōgen powerfully set the bar. If philosophy is the expression of an inexhaustible earth and its new people (including its nonhuman animals), can one say that such an image of thought remains unrivaled in expressing the infinity of chaos without surrendering it in advance to the realm of concepts? I think that such a claim is unbecoming, yet, as Deleuze and Guattari insist, “We will say that THE plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within thought. It is the base of all planes, immanent to every thinkable plane.”21 This is not, however, to again lament the tribulations of finitude, but rather to unleash its forces. “Perhaps this is the supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane.”22 The new people, no longer les damnés de la terre but the fruit of a new earth, have begun to speak; in fact, they have long been speaking. It is “we” who need to learn better to listen, to create the conditions for the audibility of new voices and newly heard ancient voices. This belongs to the promise of a new earth, beyond its commodification into resource objects for an imperious subject; it looms high, like the moon of awakening.

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NOTES 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Masumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 378. 2. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129. 3. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. 4. There have always been Donald Trump figures, ascetic priests whose medicine is the cure to the disease that they promulgate. This essay was written during the rise of this consummate “non-thinker” but I do not want to exaggerate his relevance for the rest of the world or for world history. The real catastrophe of American culture in particular and globalization more broadly is American culture and globalization. Trump is a consummate symptom that further clarifies the rot of the ruling class and the establishment. The latter is the concern of this essay and no culture or economy has a monopoly on these problems. 5. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. 6. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 130. 7. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 192. 8. Manfred Frank, “Hegel Wohnt Hier nicht Mehr: Wer kontinentale Philosophie studieren will, sollte nach China oder Brasilien gehen. In Deutschland liegt das Erbe des deutschen Idealismus am Boden. Seine gedankliche Wucht versandet im Kleinteiligen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Feuilleton, September 24, 2015. “Statt großer Themen, statt Forschungen mit großem Atem ist eine Mikrologie von Argumentanalysen.” 9. Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, volume VI:1, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), 307–8. 10. See John McCumber, On Philosophy: Notes from a Crisis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 5ff. 11. James D. Reid, Rick Anthony Furtak, and Jonathan Ellsworth, “Locating Thoreau, Reorienting Philosophy,” Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy, ed. Rick Anthony Furtak, Jonathan Ellsworth, and James D. Reid (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 1. 12. See, for example, D. A. Masolo, African Philosophy in Search of Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 13. See Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, ed. Andrew Parker, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 14. Dōgen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye [Shōbōgenzō], ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2010), 30. 15. Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think? (London: Zed Books, 2015), 35. 16. Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think?, 36. 17. Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think?, 23. 18. Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think? 19. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Gra­ ham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 108.



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20. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 26. 21. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 59. 22. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

Chapter 3

Global Thought Lessons from Other Philosophers (and Artists) Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

Despite the institutionalized efforts to cleanse the Western archives from any impingement of the “other” during the Enlightenment period, there have emerged in the last decades intellectual movements that are reversing this “theft of history.”1 A wide range of critical theories and practice, from postcolonialism and post-structuralism to global history and comparative philosophies are reclaiming a seemingly lost intellectual mosaic that is spread out on a global canvas. Philosophy as an intellectual practice (and not as a structured discipline to be studied at the university), lends itself to such endeavor perfectly—philosophy simulates what is possible and it is in this way that it suggests a liberating impulse. It simulates another world in which ideas can be fostered.2 If philosophy is synonymous with the “love for truth” as the twelfth-century Cordobian-Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës) professed, then philosophy chimes with our innate quest for betterment of the human condition, at least when philosophy is forcefully freed from the shackles of conformity.3 Ibn Rushd followed a dotted line of philosophical thought from “Oriental” Greece to Persia and the Mediterranean. This chapter traces this loose intellectual itinerary and relocates it at the same time. There is a second reason why philosophy qualifies as “global thought” that escapes geographical confinement in the “West.” As an intellectual pursuit, philosophy (much in the same way as art) is located in historically contingent constellations that defy simple definitions. Of course there have been efforts to “define” philosophy, but the trajectory of ideas, their travel itinerary so to say, escape artificial encampment. As such, philosophy does not have an origin. There is no text or object that could be consolidated as foundational despite stringent efforts in the “Western” canon to that end. But even Eurocentric depictions that claim philosophy (and art) for the “West” have failed to mute the critical promise that many philosophers believe in. The emergence of the 35

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aforementioned critical theories and their concomitant practices are contemporary manifestations of this rather more inclusive trend. Hence, the systematic effort to reduce philosophy to the “West” and to gentrify its genealogy from the impact of the “other” has failed, exactly because philosophy has to escape the mold of (Western) “philosophy” in order to exist. Whenever a limit is defined for philosophers, it is immediately overturned. My rather abstract introductory suggestions will become clearer and more specific in the next paragraphs where I will explore the nexus of philosophy and critique with insights that are taken from several cultural loci. This is to show that the freedom that philosophy enacts and calls for is a universal sentiment and not merely “Western.” Every philosophical tract is an interregnum, a suspension, and an interruption and interference in the humdrum affairs of society. This is why they elicit emotional responses such as happiness, anger, or repulsion. In this way philosophy continues to entice despite the vulgar commodification of the university and the publishing industry.4 Once philosophy ceases to provoke, it ceases to exist as an intellectual activity. We have not reached this point yet. Today, the Western “self” and the “other” are engaged in a dialectic, which is productive and which creates novel forms of critique and negation. This dialectic has thrown a lifeline to the survival of philosophy as global thought. It is in this constructive interaction that philosophy is in the process of finding its true calling and hybrid “identity.” GOD AND CRITIQUE Philosophy as critique can be adequately engaged by focusing on the way classical Muslim philosophers dealt with contentious subjects such as religion and God. The confines of this chapter do not allow me to give a full account of these issues, of course. But I hope to sketch a forward-looking modality in classical Islamic philosophy, which I think is inherently critical and inclusive. In the philosophy and poetry of polymaths such as Abu Nasr al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, life takes on a forward-looking modality adequate to this idea of the capacity for change, which is always the prerequisite for any critical theory and practice. Their emphasis on learning and constant renewal created hope and possibility, an optimistic call for the betterment of human existence. In that vein, in his uyun al-hikmah Ibn Sina writes that al-hikmah (which he uses synonymously with philosophy) is the “perfection of the human soul through conceptualization [tasawwur] of things and judgment [tasdiq] of theoretical and practical realities to the measure of human ability.”5 Learned individuals are encouraged to follow a path of finding this supreme knowledge, not at least in order to transcend the humdrum affairs of their everyday reality and to attain a higher form of contentment or happiness.



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Ibn Sina went on in his later writings to distinguish between Peripatetic philosophy and what he called “Oriental philosophy” (al-hikmat almashriqi’yah), which was not based on ratiocination alone, but included revealed knowledge (it also set the stage for the influential treatises of Sohravardi, and here especially his kitab hikmat al-ishraq [The Book of Illumination]). There is a particularly striking poem by Ibn Sina about the fate of the human soul, which exemplifies this emphasis on the congruence between rational analysis and metaphysical opportunity that was central to the canons of the classical philosophers of Islam: Until when the hour of its homeward flight draws near, And ’tis time for it to return to its ampler sphere, It carols with joy, for the veil is raised, and it spies Such things as cannot be witnessed by waking eyes. On a lofty height doth it warble its songs of praise (for even the lowliest being doth knowledge raise). And so it returneth, aware of all hidden things In the universe, while no stain to its garment clings.6

The ultimate object here is the perfection of the intellectual faculties of the individual, who does not carry an exclusive identity, who is only presumed in his or her physical constitution. There is no realm of knowledge that is exclusive to Muslims in the writings of Ibn Sina, no discernible schematic dichotomy that permeates his narratives. Ibn Sina searches for a supreme truth, not a supreme civilization or race. He and many of his contemporaries managed to write their poetry and philosophy without the emergence of a discourse that would legitimate subjugation of the “other”—without a hysterical call for arms. In this sense, their message was not “identitarian.” Rather the contrary, their writings called for freedom of thought through the pursuit of knowledge, primarily in the form of philosophy. It has been established in the scholarly literature on the subject matter that all of this happened in close dialogue with the Aristotelian tradition and ancient Greek philosophy in general. Classical philosophers of Islam (falasifa) such as Ibn Sina, Ibn ‘Arabi, al-Kindi, Ibn Rushd, al-Farabi, and others employed complex methods explaining how “truth conditions” can be rationalized through the study of language, judgment, nature, syllogisms, deductions, and inductions. Falsafa (philosophy) was considered to lead to the knowledge of all existing things qua existent (ashya’ al-maujudah bi ma hiya maujudah) and philosophy itself was deemed to be the art (sind’ah) of arts and the science (‘ilm) of sciences. What came surreptitiously into existence in the writings of these philosophers, in short, was nothing less than the renewal of philosophy as a critical practice, worldview, and form of life.

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For Ibn Rushd these qualities of “wisdom” should not be thought the prerogative and purview of one “class of humans”: This opinion would only be correct if there were but one class of humans disposed to the human perfections and especially to the theoretical ones. It seems that this is the opinion that Plato holds of the Greeks. However, even if we accept that they are the most disposed by nature to receive wisdom, we cannot disregard [the fact] that individuals like these—i.e. those disposed to wisdom— are frequently to be found. You find this in the land of the Greeks and its vicinity, such as this land of ours, namely Andalus, and Syria and Iraq and Egypt, albeit this existed more frequently in the land of the Greeks.7

Before Ibn Rushd set out this rather more inclusive “history of wisdom” and by extension philosophy, the Persian-Muslim thinker Abu Nasr al-Farabi traced the lineage of philosophy from the Chaldeans to Iraq and to Egypt and thereafter to the Greeks from whom the Syrians and finally the Arabs retrieved it.8 In addition, Maimonides, the Cordoban-Jewish contemporary of Ibn Rushd, deemed the Persians, Syrians, and Greeks “the most learned and expert of the nations.”9 All of these classical (pre-European enlightenment) philosophers under scrutiny here were polymaths, both poets and scientists, engaged in theology and mysticism, interested in philosophy and “metaphysics” as much as in the empirical world. Yet despite their wideranging studies they did not advance a concrete concept of “identity” that could signify a monologue within the umma (Muslim community) or that would organize their contemporaries within a militant, coherently formulated ideology. Theirs was an emancipative philosophy almost entirely depleted of identity politics or a concrete and dichotomous notion of “self” and “other.” Hence their ideas qualify as “global thought” and they should be read and studied as such. In the case of these cosmopolitan Arabs and Persians, the historical circumstances they were writing in—the presence of functioning Islamic polities, the absence of a direct threat to their “Muslim identity”— did not merit or require them to write in a stridently ideological mode. Of course, the violence exercised over the Islamic worlds during the colonial period changed all that.10 Suddenly, the “age of identity” dawned with all the problems that the politics of “origins” bring about. Global thought had to be turned into an insurrectionary action in a grand effort to battle with the violent imperial system that was threatening the cultural, moral, and political fabric of the non-Western world. In this process, Muslim philosophy turned into radical Islamism as a reactionary prophylaxis against external intrusion into Muslim affairs. Undoubtedly, Ibn Sina would be disgusted by the Osama bin Ladens of this world.



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I have suggested that for the classical philosophers, in many ways up until Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), reality is not exhausted by explaining what offers itself to immediate knowledge and perception. The understanding of the surrounding world must also include an aspect of future potentiality, a utopia wherein the discrepancy between the present and the future opens up. This is why in the philosophy of al-Farabi and especially in Ibn Sina’s intricate danish-namaha-ye alai (Treatise on Knowledge) philosophy takes on a forward-looking modality adequate to this idea of the capacity for change as indicated. As Ibn Sina indicates, the contingent existent (mumkin al-wujud) is always relative to the necessary being (wajib al-wujud).11 Within such a dialectic one is alerted to criticize the present in order to bridge the gap between the ontology surrounding the individual and the transcendental promise that is relegated to God, without, however, forcing a total causality upon this process. The world Ibn Sina sees is secular, exactly because God is hived to another realm of human existence, not out of political expediency, but out of respect for the unknown. The world of the philosopher and poet Omar Khayyam (1048–1123) is a good place to unravel further how God was appropriated as an object of critical philosophy. The worldview of Khayyam can be called “critical” because of the liberating momentum that his concept of God elicits. To his mind, God was the necessary being or mumtani al-wujud in Arabic (Ibn Sina termed God wajib al-wujud as indicated). By necessity human beings were relative to this otherworldly constant. In the world portrayed in the poetry of Khayyam, there is freedom because in relation to God, reality is socially engineered. In the absence of the godly ordained, perfected order, we are at liberty to live our lives in pursuit of happiness. For Khayyam the necessary being, that is God, continuously entices the relative being, that is, the individual in one’s pursuit of such perfection. In Khayyam’s world, there is doubt exactly because in relation to God this world we are living in is disorderly, intransigently complex, and not comprehensible in its entirety. “Whenever it is said that such and such an attribute has a necessary existence in such and such a thing,” Khayyam writes, “what is meant is that it exists in the mind and the intellect, and not in reality. Similarly whenever it is said that the existence of such and such an attribute is dependent upon the existence of some other attribute, what is meant is existence in mind and the intellect.”12 Khayyam reveals himself here as an early critical theorist. He is convinced that our surrounding world is constructed because the realm of actual reality belongs to God. In other words, in his philosophy Khayyam alerts us to the fact that relative to God, the selfconcocted world surrounding us appears “unreal.” Khayyam expresses the momentum thus created—the critical effect that the unavailability of Godly reality created in him—in his world-famous quatrains:

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Since neither truth nor certitude is at hand Do not waste life in doubt for a fairy land O let us not refuse the goblet of wine For sober or drunk in ignorance we stand13

Khayyam’s quatrains and philosophy serve as a measure of what poetry (and art) might yet bring about in this irresistibly critical mode. Khayyam expresses his alien reality, thus giving the lie to notions of religion (including Islam) as a total system immune from the grim realities of historical events. Our surrounding reality, including claims about religion, are entirely relative to the truth conditions that are only accessible to God. Hence, truth has to be interrogated, exactly because it is rather more hidden than we think. It is not that the truth does not exist. Rather, Khayyam invites his readers to a continuous journey to interrogate the realities of life in order to approximate the ultimate truth that he conceptualizes as God. In his own words, Eternity! – for it we find no key; Nor any of us past the Veil can see. Of Thee and me they talk behind the Veil But when that parts, no more of Thee and me.14

The failure of Khayyam to redeem himself, the fact that neither his poetry nor his “drunkenness” can bring him closer to God, is also, paradoxically, the source of the critical merit of his poetry and philosophy. Khayyam presages that the individual is constantly obliged to bridge the gap between this alien world and the necessary and absolute Divinity designated as God. Yet this utopia is by definition unattainable; sameness with God is the “impossible ontology” or mumtani al-wujud in Ibn Sina’s words. In this way, Khayyam and the Avicennian tradition establishes “an ontology based on the ‘poverty’ of all things before God and their reliance upon the Source of all being for their very existence.”15 Mysticism (Sufism), poetry, the arts and above all (secular) philosophy become the inevitable routes to seek respite from the mundane world and to probe closeness with God. They hold out the promise, never to be kept, of a realm of consciousness where the individual can at last find an image of perfect equilibrium, of sensuous pleasure that would rescue her from the antinomies of her present existence. As such, philosophy and poetry embody a much more perfected form of ontological negation. The idea of God functions as a propeller for a productive form of criticism and as an incubator for progressive expressions of critique and philosophy.



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ARTISTIC EMBRACES OF SELF AND OTHER Let me expand and relocate this discussion. To my mind the music of Wagner, Bach, and Beethoven’s late style express the same power of negation, the ethos of a sensuous escape from the ontological order, that the radical philosophy (and poetry) of Rumi, Khayyam, Hafiz, Saadi, and Ibn Sina embodies. I will even go one step further, following Adorno. In the aesthetic expression of utopia the construction of dichotomous identities, whether of Orient or Occident, is minimized, because works of art with maximal aesthetic value are depleted of “tribal identities.” This is why Rumi, Hafiz, Khayyam, Bach, Wagner, and Beethoven are almost universally revered. Their art positions itself beyond categories. They give us a glimpse into the “Naturschöne,” the naturally sublime—a sign of reconciliation between self and other.16 The German Marxist thinker Ernst Bloch expresses a similar belief in aesthetic reconciliation especially with regard to the mediating power of music. “Only the musical note, that enigma of sensuousness,” he writes, “is sufficiently unencumbered by the world yet phenomenal enough to the last to return—like the metaphysical word—as a final material factor in the fulfilment of mystical self-perception, spread upon the golden sub-soil of the receptive human potentiality.”17 Bloch alludes to the dual constitution of music, which has both formal properties and transcendental ones. In this he concurs with other German thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who coined the term “musical ecstasy” in his The Birth of Tragedy. They all agree that music is “at once the most humanly revealing form of art and the form most resistant to description or analysis in conceptual terms.”18 From this perspective, music both rationalizes and mystifies; it has both mathematical structure and emotional power. If musical aesthetics could hitherto not negotiate between these two extremes, it is an indicator that music brings both to the fore, without reconciling them in a final, grand synthesis. There is no transcendence or unity, for what music potentially presages is a “figuringout in fonte hominum et rerum that is utopian and fermenting, in an area of intensity that is open only to music.”19 For Bloch, Beethoven’s compositions are especially anti-Hegelian, even contra-Enlightenment, because they do not mimic perfect harmony. Beethoven may touch and tease the irreconcilable, but he finally keeps them apart. In this, music is the most successful of the arts “succeeding visuality and belonging to the formally eccentric philosophy of inwardness, its ethic and metaphysics.” For Bloch this means that “[b]oth the existence and the concept of music are only attained in conjunction with a new object-theory, with the metaphysics of divination and utopia.”20 Thus the transformative force of music lies in its unreconciled vigor that defies capitulation to Hegelian totalities.

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Art expressed in this form is “trans-historical” without prescribing tribal passions. I get emotionally aroused when I listen to Wagner; so did Hitler. The pop singer Madonna is fascinated by the poetry of Rumi, so was Ayatollah Khomeini. It is in this sense that art embodies the potentiality of change without, however, falling into the trap of Hegel’s big promise that it can bring about the final reconciliation of opposites, the great myth of perfect harmony. This is art as continuous renewal that does not usher in a grand synthesis. For Adorno, there is more pleasure in dissonance than in consonance: and this repays hedonism in due measure. What is incisive is dynamically sharpened, differentiated from itself and from the monotony of affirmativeness, and becomes an attraction. This attraction, no less than a disgust with optimistic nonsense, leads the new art into a no-man’s-land that represents the inhabitable earth. . . . Negation is able to transform itself into pleasure, not into what is positive.”21

Once it is realized that the contrapuntal composition of art is not reconcilable, the Hegelian promise reveals itself as a fallacy. Here we can establish a nuance between Bloch and Adorno. Whereas the former professed the ability of music to effectively respond to emergent social and historical configurations, the latter’s negative dialectic is notably more pessimistic. For Adorno, the “promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical.” It is necessary because art unleashes irresistible transcendental powers: That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realised, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity.22

And it is hypocritical because it is with the advent of the modern “culture industry” that the emancipatory and redeeming forces of art are subjugated to the cult of consumption (e.g., pop shows such as the X Factor or American Idol). Instead of exposing itself to the intrinsic resistance of art to loosen the power of negation and critique, the culture industry pushes art toward conformity with the status quo; art as commodity and “obedience to social hierarchy. “Today,” Adorno writes, “aesthetic barbarity completes what has threatened the creations of the spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutralised.”23 The only way the critical theorist could escape this conundrum is to free himself from the determinations of his day and age, to seek the powers of negation, if necessary in music and literature (Beckett



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in Adorno’s case). It is true, that Adorno famously concluded that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. But this does not mean that he advocated cultural, political, and social apathy. As he later admitted in Negative Dialectics, “There is no getting out of this, no more than out of the electrified barbed wire around the camps. Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.”24 Like Khayyam, who tempered his despair by positioning himself within the realm of Islamic mysticism (if necessary by drinking a few carafes of wine), Adorno identified radical negation as the only means to prepare ourselves for the massive process of “final displacement” that will be brought about by the messianic utopia awaiting him: The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would appear from the standpoint of redemption. . . . Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.25

Critical theory reveals itself here as a prophylaxis to prepare humanity for the experience of the absolute realm of possibility, mumtani al-wujud, encapsulated in the “suridealistic” encounter with God. According to Adorno, this final encounter will evaporate all residues of our superstitious belief in an “orderly” world. As long as the poet, composer, artist, mystic, philosopher, and intellectual do not despair in their effort to bridge the gap between the status quo and that utopia, they are compelled to search for the “truth” that engenders a critical attitude toward the status quo. Adorno agrees with both Ibn Sina and Khayyam here. To their mind, it does not matter if it is History or God that constitutes the horizon, the place toward which all meaning strives in the quest for the “ultimate surideal,” the “end of history,” or “judgment day.” It does not matter if it is the dialectical materialism of Marx or Jesus’s “Kingdom of God,” the Buddhist Nirvana, or the Hindu Karma, that animates critique. It only matters when the continuous transformation toward a future potentiality is monopolized by the state, the party, or another polity, or when values such as equality, social justice, and human rights are compromised. It does not really matter which utopia inspires us, as long as it compels us to sustain a global impetus against reification, against quests for authenticity, against hegemony, against totalities, against the deification of power. As long as utopia holds out the promise of continuous transformation toward a better tomorrow, where the relation between knower and known is a dialectic potentially open for contrapuntal reimagining, it is not something that we should be afraid of.26

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It was Immanuel Kant who asked whether one should leave the comforting bosom of one’s own rationality and venture out to discover the “other.” After some serious critical contemplation, he remained where he departed from, in the comforting bosom of the Occident. Others did dare to venture further. Some of them paid a heavy price—delusion and insanity in Nietzsche’s case, melancholy and despair in the case of Khayyam. Optimistically, I do believe—and in my rather more recent writing have tried to demonstrate— that today we can appreciate the archives filled with the work of eastern and western, northern and southern thinkers in a truly comparative manner. It is not at least thanks to the availability of a counter-archive to Eurocentric readings of philosophy (and art), that we have enough knowledge at hand to free ourselves from the shackles of tribal thinking. So the next time we read a history of the “West” or “Islam,” we immediately ask how the “other” is represented; if she is not abused as a supplement in order to enunciate what the “self” stands for. Next time we attend a seminar or lecture, we should pierce the speaker with questions about the validity of categories such as race, nationality, religious confession, and so forth. We should ask her if it is analytically unproblematic to place ourselves inside such suspicious totalizations. No discourse is innocent, nothing in the social world is apolitical, and I hope that some of the ideas in the foregoing have indicated that all unities are dubious. Identity is not a safe haven, despite the current mantra of leaders, from Donald Trump in the United States to Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen in Europe, who have reinvigorated the divisive and xenophobic politics of “origins” and “identities.” Global thought and a comparative approach to philosophies stand against such uneducated propaganda. As intellectual exercises, such approaches shatter totalities into infinitesimally small pieces much in the same way as Omar Khayyam undermined the realities of his age—poetry and philosophy as intellectual insurrections for the peaceful appreciation of the “other’s” difference. Now, more than ever society has to be incited to that end. NOTES 1. This phrase was used by the late anthropologist Jack Goody (one of my intellectual interlocutors when I studied at the University of Cambridge). See his The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 2. On the emancipatory promise of art and philosophy see Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 3. On the qualities of a philosopher (who is synonymous to an “Imam” from the perspective of Ibn Rushd) see Averroes on Plato’s “Republic,” trans. Ralph Lerner (London: Cornell University Press, 1974), 72.



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4. See Adorno’s classic The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 2001). 5. Ibn Sina, Fontes sapientiae (uyun al-hikmah), ed. Abdurrahman Badawied (Cairo: n.p., 1954), 16. 6. Quoted in Richard Walzer, Greek into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 26. 7. Ibn Rushd, Averroes on Plato’s Republic, 13. 8. Ibn Rushd, Averroes on Plato’s Republic, 13. 9. Ibn Rushd, Averroes on Plato’s Republic, 13. 10. See Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, “A (Short) History of the Clash of Civilisations,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22, no. 2 (2008): 217–34. 11. See further, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Mehdi Aminrazavi, eds., An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 196ff. 12. Umar Khayyam, “The Necessity of Contradiction, Free Will and Determinism (Darurat al-tadadd fi’l- alam wa’l- jabr wa’l-baqa),” in Nasr and Aminrazavi, eds., An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia, 404 (emphasis added). 13. Quoted in Mehdi Aminrazavi, “Martin Heidegger and Omar Khayyam on the Question of ‘Thereness’ (Dasein),” in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ed., Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 281. 14. Tymieniecka, Islamic Philosophy, 283. 15. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Islamic Intellectual Tradition in Persia, ed. Mehdi Aminrazavi (London: Curzon, 1996), 81. 16. On Adorno’s use of the term “Naturschöne,” see Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 211ff. 17. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 120. 18. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory (London: Pinter, 1988), 31. 19. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 228. 20. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 130–31. 21. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, International Library of Phenomenology and Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 66–67. 22. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), 131. 23. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 24. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. By E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1981), 362. 25. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), 247. 26. The case for utopia has been recently revisited by Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili. See their edited volume Globalization and Utopia: Critical Essays (London: Palgrave, 2009). For the promise of critical theory see also Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution: Power and Resistance Today (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Chapter 4

Colossomania World Thought as Return to Immensity Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

We must return to the antique fables and pyramid walls filled with pictograms of enormous beasts and divinities. Their excessive frames generate a kind of wonderment exclusive to forces of the titanic, the engulfing, and the unconquerable. More than this, we might ponder the intellectual-experiential possibilities of falling beneath such monumental or disproportionate manifestations. This bids us to tread into the stories of hovering and gigantic beings: that is, those who possess such otherworldliness and cosmological stature that they can evoke intimidation, delirium, bewilderment, silence, ecstasy, or terror in their onlookers. Ten world authors, ten passages, each a glancing reflection on some colossomaniacal imaginary: the indecipherable, the foreboding; the outstretched and the overpouring; those of cryptic motions who persuade, enthrall, or devour at will. By focusing on these narratives of gargantuan prototypes—that is, scandalous creatures who can irradiate their moods or swell their limbs beyond the dominion of the law, the known, and the real—we can begin to contemplate how such strange movements toward immeasurability are in fact an attempt to render a counter-current to absolutism. Against paradigms of oneness or unity, here we are faced with multiple contenders to apotheosis: that is, giants and leviathans never inaccessibly removed but rather menacingly apparent in their unfathomable, towering presence. We must probe the secret of their loathing for the structures of humankind, the angered swinging of their arms, and their anti-mythic cleverness. In other words, we must read these tales of the colossus as subversive antitotalitarian gestures (tectonic shifts toward vulnerability and chaos). For it is beneath their shadow that one might dream beyond the enclosures of a world. 47

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1. It was as if the surroundings, the souls of all the dead, and the power of their thought, which was aloft over the crypt and the broken stones, had forced or inspired me, because things were no longer in my hands. I, who had no belief in anything, fell involuntarily to my knees before these ashes from which the blue smoke rose, and worshipped them. —Sadeq Hedayat1

We encounter our first colossomaniac as an archaeologist whose explorations have led him to spend the night among ancient faraway ruins. That evening he suspects a subtle animus within the stone formations that then escalates into a full-blown palpitation, as the former kings and gods resuscitate themselves in grand procession around the fire. Their sudden marching, breaking forth from the marble in a dynastic necro-festival beneath the stars, is the source of unsurpassed awe. Though they belong not to the archaeologist’s own cultural backdrop or belief system, their radical untimeliness overwhelm his faculties to the brink of reflexive colossomania (puppeteers of the imperative). The highest form of exoticism, whereby the outsider phenomenon turns one inside out, a foreigner’s gutting of subjective pillars. Perhaps the most crucial terminological quotient in charting this first typology of colossomania is the word “surroundings,” for it reveals that the colossus is experienced less as a figure looming above (transcendent divinity) and more as a current circulating around (electrical immanence). It is thus a question of atmospheric power above all else. Moreover, from the statement “the souls of all the dead,” we recognize two compelling and counterintuitive things: (1) that the colossus is in fact an entity comprised of many particularized legions; and (2) that the colossus is itself a spiritual conspiracy. This multifarious collusion is further confirmed by the phrase “the power of their thought,” for it then links this startling event of resurrected statues to the well-thought-out plots of a premeditative will (i.e., that they know what they are doing). The fact that this mysterious collective consciousness drapes itself “aloft the crypt and the broken stones” shows a sly ability to transmit vision onto other entities and supposedly inanimate objects, a sort of magical contamination set to enliven different taxonomies with the embers of a new mandate. Thus we are in the sphere of a command, one which “forced or inspired” in the sense of breathing spirit into one’s being without consent, as the enraptured archaeologist rightly notes (himself now excavated), for it is in fact an inspiration-by-force that now mobilizes his limbs to flail, his head to sway rhythmically, his eyes to roll backward into drunken oblivion. The colossus takes all without mercy or permission, reducing one to the last remaining realization of mind: that “things were no longer in [his] hands.”

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And this colossomaniacal subordination of volition, one must notice from the description, leads to a type of imitative worship that ranges even beyond the domain of belief, for our traveler recounts to us curiously that he “had no belief in anything” and yet “fell involuntarily to [his] knees and worshipped them.” It appears, then, that the colossal monuments of this empire abide by a foregone logic of practical sorcery rather than by some abstract tenet of theology: that is, they compel discipleship and seductively gain devotion through various trickeries of sensation, movement, and light—the primordial function of miracle itself. Though external to his ideological-geographic origin, and in fact because of this very drastic externality (that they are not him and yet greater than him), these figments are keen to wrap him in the blue smoke of their hallucination (the glory that demands passivity). To kneel, surrender, and undergo the going-under. [the colossus and the surroundings; dead souls; power; thought; force; inspiration; non-belief; worship]

2. In the attic I found an old card from North Africa, a glove that must have belonged to a giant, and an object that looks like a Neanderthal’s heavy club. —Réda Bensmaia2

We encounter our second colossomaniac in the attic rummaging through trunks and crates of old keepsakes, searching aimlessly for a token or relic to entertain the weary imagination. This kind of small curiosity typically occurs along a minimalist scale of enchantment, for it seeks a random pseudo-magical object to grant just a momentary release from everyday being. Thus the wistful gift from lost days serves as an anti-banalistic justification to retreat from the world, to isolate a minor pocket of autonomy for thought to rest, dwell, speculate, or convalesce. But what happens when one accidentally stumbles upon massive and disturbing items, no longer the harmless recollection of incidental and known things but the glaring interjection of bizarre and potentially cataclysmic forms? In effect, what particular crisis/schism occurs when one attempts a whimsical gesture but instead locates the storage containers of inexplicable elder races, millennially bound and appalling in nature? One can begin dissecting this act of colossomaniacal finding by taking seriously the spatial phenomenology of “the attic,” by definition a site intended for simultaneous abandonment and rediscovery. The attic is a throwaway realm comprised of waste and forgotten junk though also

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capable of providing occasional bouts of nostalgia and sentimentality, and thus our narrator apparently starts on the right track in his extraction of an “old card from North Africa.” This is just the right dose of oddity—a slight and weathered artifact, a remote locale, and some personal narrative therein (enough to satisfy the poor criterion of reminiscence). But it is the second object that troubles the rafters and timbers of the attic’s otherwise indulgent psychology, for then we come upon “a glove that must have belonged to a giant,” a phrase of deductive reasoning that nevertheless leads to a ridiculous conclusion. We thus detour from casual searching into the pure severity of a revelation unwanted: for this accessory of the oversized glove then organically lures the imagination toward a vision of the hand within it, and the hand to the startling forearms, and onward, and onward, an inescapable bodily sequentialism that will cause the attic-goer to necessarily build the entire physiology of the giant to completion. Now he stands before the most thorough, daunting crystallization; rather than achieve the initial goal of some narcissistically simulated self-image of past times, instead the mind finds itself clouded by the insane apparition of the colossus (without identity). But it is the third object that compounds this misfortunate trek up the attic stairs beyond its own outer limits of tolerance: that is, something resembling “a Neanderthal’s heavy club.” The implications are unmistakable, for the club is an instrument of violence (survival, war), and the Neanderthal is not the far-off or deceased relative whose souvenirs typically haunt the attic but rather the very ancestral origin of the species. Not the intimate relation who traveled the world but the hostile, unnerving precursor who confronted the ghastly infinite; not the lighthearted sojourn into a historically irrelevant moment (whereby the attic buries/encloses the most useless memory) but rather the grasping of the cruel emblems of prehistoricality (whereby the attic opens onto the most essential shame/fear of the race’s inception). And what does this forebear portend? And why do we still possess the glove and the club? A violation perhaps, the unnatural theft of the colossus’s weaponry in order to spite their clear supremacy. Or not envy, but the desperate preservation of a last conduit, a mimetic shroud or article that would lead man back to the vigor of the progenitors. Or just as likely packed away in anticipation of a return, awaiting the instant when they come back to take what belongs to them (the chieftain’s claim). Nor does the influence go away easily, for the author who trespassed upward into the ageless speaks elsewhere of a “Gigantomachia of sentences at high speed in the Marseilles-Nice Express, the Phocean. I’ve got to do everything in my power, and while there’s still time.”3 Hence language itself begins to emulate the gigantism, speed, and power of the old exemplars, and with it the creative urgency of those who give “everything” and fight

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“while there’s still time,” to write with the bludgeoning cane of once-colossal leaders . . . before their inescapable resurgence. [the colossus and the attic; the artifact (the glove, the club); the ancestor; the origin; return]

3. He comes unarmed like a forest, like a destined cloud. Yesterday he carried a continent and changed the position of the sea. He paints the back of day and creates daylight out of his feet, borrows the night’s shoes and waits for what will not come. He lives where the stone becomes a lake, the shadow a city—he lives and fools despair, wiping out the vastness of hope, dancing for the soil so it can yawn, for the trees so they can sleep. And here he is speaking of crossroads, drawing the magic sign on the forehead of time. —Adonis4

We encounter our third colossomaniac through the portrait of a whirlwind figure of extraordinary features and attributes. He arrives with emancipatory abilities that blur or supersede the established boundaries of reality itself, deranging and rearranging, forming and malforming, at a breath’s notice. With almost fantastical grace, this someone emerges to wrench apart the borders of definition and seamlessly cast his touch across the surface of all existing things . . . so as to invite the inexistent. With this passage, one stands at the heart of a centrifuge (too many dimensions in simultaneity) and therefore can only attempt to distill the potential elements at stake in isolated succession. Thus the fact that we are told first that “he comes unarmed like a forest” reflects either a state of pure vulnerability (masochistically baring himself before danger) or pure invincibility (incapable of being wounded), or perhaps a sleek combination of both whereby the more damaged he becomes, the more immortal. There are stories of such gods who thrive in their laceration. With that said, we are then told that he is also “like a destined cloud,” marking the second time this apparently human form is referred to more as a forcible modality of nature (forest, cloud) while then also adding the twisted complication of destiny. The notion of his being “destined” means that there is fair warning of this colossus’s turbulent entrance onto the scene, no longer an anomaly or rupture but a long-awaited storm, but even more importantly one wonders whether this implies a self-inflected fatalism (i.e., that he sends himself forward) or whether he is just the extended arm of a still-higher entity (i.e., that he is sent by another). The next articulation—that “yesterday he carried a continent

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and changed the position of the sea”—speaks to his aggressive capacity to carry out mammoth transpositions of unworlding and re-worlding. And that he does all this while “painting the back of day” and “creating daylight out of his feet” showcases it as an act of cosmic aesthetics rather than as sacred requirement. More exactly, he is an artisan-colossus who waves a chiasmic brush to reverse whatever colors and shapes in his path, just as he “borrows the night’s shoes” in a gentle reciprocity and can “dance for the soil so it can yawn.” A painter, a dancer; he is a being of artistic rejuvenation who does not anthropomorphize the earth but rather levels the protocol of former classifications obsolete with such radical freedom that anything can take on any trait (trees that sleep, night that walks). This is also the secret behind his dual powers of transfiguration and aggrandizement, for it is worth noting that he “lives where the stone becomes a lake, the shadow a city,” thereby sealing the ingenuity with which this particular colossus makes all things colossal in kind. He widens, orbits, and magnifies the extant beyond their former finitude in an expenditure so concrete that it serves as enemy to the far-fetched axioms of both “despair” and “hope.” For in the place of petty existential conditions that always await “what will not come,” we find him stationed boldly at “the crossroads,” conscripting the oncoming, making silhouettes turn against their own accord, and “drawing the magic sign on the forehead of time” with inventive extravagance. Thus signals the interval of unstoppable alterations, and yet conveyed through a smooth manipulative grip, where nothing is allowed to remain as it once was upon meeting the playful hands of a roaming master sculptor set to unhinge, refashion, and revel in the grand plasticity of foundations. [the colossus and the forest; the unarmed; the destined; change; creation; despair; hope; dancing; the crossroads; the forehead; magical sign; time]

4. Anxiety holds the heart With its tiny iron hand Mud stirs in the belly of a giant woman5 In the shower with their giant drops6 Here The naked sultan whimpers under his silken eyelids Unhappy By walled-in-giants in ether Who no longer carry their whips in hand —Joyce Mansour7

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We encounter our fourth colossomaniac amid three separate juxtapositions of bodily experience, each tied to a distinct organ or appendage depending on the specific impulse in circulation. What this teaches us is that the colossus should not always be perceived as a unified creature, neither overall nor throughout, but rather often emerges as a compartmentalized assemblage whose sovereignty is tied to a single branch, extremity, or area of musculature. To this end, there are thousands of folkloric and even prophetic examples of exceedingly strong beings for whom their very dominant functionality resided in some exclusive piece of themselves (the hair, the eyes, the left hand). If the unleashing of colossomaniacal potential here requires an acute sensory trigger, then we can look to the first stanza’s reference to “the heart” and “the tiny iron hand” alongside the “belly of a giant woman,” wherein it appears that a certain combative animosity arises between different portions of the human composition. Thus if anxiety is found triumphing in its constrictive clutching of the heart, then the colossus’s manic overture must revolt against the heart by selecting the stomach as its ideal anatomical sphere. Moreover, rather than align with some sacred property such as blood, this colossus (the giant woman) is found stirring mud in the belly, a foul yet highly corporeal substance from which swampland offspring emanate to feed or sleep (those who slither and burrow) rather than their angelic counterparts who apprehensively institute/engrave the law in the cardiac cores of the fearful (those who perch and impose). “Stirs” (as a method of fluidity) versus “Holds” (as a method of constraint). In the second stanza, we again see this turn toward liquidity over solidity in the wake of a “shower with their giant drops,” reflecting a certain kind of colossomaniacal experience that embodies a torrential downpour. Thus the skies are no longer pristine metaphysical kingdoms or even self-contained holy provinces but rather porous arenas of surge, deluge, and inundation. Colossomaniacal skies are therefore envisioned as perpetually streaming and soaking the ground below (the feeling of immeasurable rainfall, incalculable wetness). Lastly, the third stanza freezes us in yet another negative existential state, arrested before the “unhappy” visage of a “naked sultan” who “whimpers under his silken eyelids.” Again a conflict emerges in the rift between human society (born of self-regulating technologies) and the colossomaniacal unbound (born of overabundant instincts to lash and flow). But in this fabled context we see an injustice transpiring, a perverse inversion of hierarchy, such that a pathetically fragile humanity has appointed itself to some fabricated political superiority while the beautifully lavish aristocracy of giants now finds itself “walled-in” and deprived of their timeless “whips.” And it is beyond important to recognize that the new prison house of the colossus is that of the “ether”; that is, a fictitious “upper air” contrived by philosophical

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charlatans incapable of mastering the terrestrial plane. So it is that the onceplentiful colossal entities are now held captive in the ethereal smoke-and-mirror confluence of discourses, their ample tendons tied down from flagellating the false king who cries in pitiful loathing for his own nudity and yet rules with phantom ornamentality over the world they built with coarsest hands. Nakedness (the human disgrace of Eden) versus Bareness (the ecstasy of titanic universes). And yet, given a fair chance, they would seize their right to punishment; they would flog the stark artificiality of the impostors. [the colossus and the belly; stirring; mud; the shower; bareness; the walls; the whip]

5. The crow which flew over our heads and descended into the disturbed thought of a vagabond cloud and the sound of which traversed the breadth of the horizon like a short spear will carry the news of us to the city. Everyone knows, everyone knows we have found our way into the cold, quiet dream of phoenixes we found truth in the garden in the embarrassed look of a nameless flower, and we found permanence in an endless moment when two suns stared at each other. —Forugh Farrokhzad8

We encounter our fifth colossomaniac amid a covert exchange of affection for which immensity is experienced as a forbidden transaction in some secret garden. The colossus here, then, is the fugitive domain of lovers whose rendezvous occurs in a forgetting act beyond the dialectic of judgment and sin (no world left to obstruct). And yet they are quickly detected, found out and condemned by the arbiters of morality, dogma, and custom. Thus the war between colossus and human here is equivalent to a struggle between spontaneous affirmation (ethos of private desire) and systematic negation (ethos of public obedience).

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The colossomaniacal lovers of this passage are in search of a runaway exteriority in which they can garner some measure of euphoric time-space apart from the otherwise stern keepers of social chronology (the orchard, the forest, the grove). Thus the remarkable significance of the statement that “we have found our way” (i.e., an eloper’s path), whereupon they expose themselves to the “cold, quiet dream of phoenixes” (i.e., mythic creatures of immolation and regeneration). And still, the lovers’ sanctuary is always under incursion, incessantly stalked by the black-feathered “crow” who punctures their “vagabond cloud” and “carries the news of us to the city,” taking word of their prohibited meeting back to the sanctimonious jurisdiction of the temples. They are in fact betrayed by the explosive utterances of their own pleasure, the sonic incriminations of their sighing, moaning, and panting that then “traversed the breadth of the horizon” to the dire extent that now “everyone knows, everyone knows.” With this established, the colossomaniacal experience here can be defined across two intersecting axes: (1) the pandemonium of sound that escapes their throats/lips in the moment of erotic seclusion; and (2) the vastness of the lush hideaway they construct. Note that, in either instance, their affective potency does not reside in some transgressive exhilaration; they are not enticed by their own unlawful disposition nor does the overhanging possibility of rumor, stigma, and criminality intensify the affair. Quite the opposite: they do not revel in the status of being offenders, but rather perfect an alternative colossal technique of shielding—that is, they become temporarily neglectful and absentminded in the illicit trade of “embarrassed looks”; they effectively block out the numbing recitations of the social world and fall charmed beneath their own incantatory union. This is how they win a certain lyrical immunity, at least for a short while that stretches like “an endless moment,” and this stolen “permanence” is of such delightful grandeur that it turns them both from mortal individuals into celestial bodies of solarity (“when two suns stared at each other”). And so it is that the garden becomes its own tiny shelter for an infinitizing passion, an antidote and amoral lair to ward off the deadening scarcity of the people left behind. [the colossus and the garden; the vagabond; sound; traversal; horizon; knowing; permanence; solarity]

6. In time he began calling the wadis and chasms and mountains by the names of the figures painted on their rocks. This was the Wadi of Gazelles, that the Path

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of the Hunters, that the Waddan Mountains, that, again, the Herdsmen’s Plain; until, finally, he’d discovered the great jinni, the masked giant rising alongside. . . . There a cluster of caves stood, crowned by mighty rocks; and these were flanked by that one towering rock that stood like a building soaring toward the sky, like a pagan statue fashioned by the gods. The masked jinni, with his sacred waddan, covered the colossal stone face from top to bottom. He stood long gazing at the tableau, then tried, vainly, to climb the rocks to touch the great jinni’s mask. —Ibrahim al-Koni 9

We encounter our sixth colossomaniac in a desert valley of representational images and vaulting iconic likenesses. A labyrinth of incredible caves, rock formations, painted aspects of an unknown nomadic mysticism, and at their center a tremendously formidable, carved figure known as the masked jinni. He is an alarming shape, one of stern and incomparable striations, that rises dreadfully upward and watches over the gorge with eyes demanding veneration. A young tribesman is charged with the sacred duty of standing guard in the chasm’s basin by day and by night, holding vigil before the perplexing statue to screen against the rancor of modern man and his destructive tendencies. Here we have a literal colossus etched in elevated stone, and an intuitive youth divorced from family and clan as he accepts the role of caretaker to this exquisite form (of which he knows almost nothing). Thus his first initiation to this presence is one of ever-mounting bewilderment, as he stares obsessively and grows transfixed by its enigmatic quality (at once austere and riotous). This is the acrobatic tightrope of all idolatry, and yet here it is accentuated to overbearing levels. Nor is it incidental that this all takes place in utter solitude, with no one to offer answers or doctrines that might correspond with the statue’s initial purpose, for the young man is then compelled to draft his own totemic account. In the vacancy of given chronicles, he is exempted from truth-telling and proceeds unburdened to “begin calling the wadis and chasms and mountains by the names of the figures painted on their rocks,” and this discreet naming act alone seals him into the alluring chamber of the valley and its many boulders, footholds, talismans, and granite inhabitants. He devises an esoteric storytelling and by extension a confidential relation to each manifestation, including the animals (waddan) believed to hold hallowed ties to these revered plateaus of the herdsmen and the hunters, and yet it is the masked figure above all others who reigns over his perception with harshest sway. In fact, so enamored is the young guardian that he even brilliantly assumes the “masked giant” to be an object “fashioned by the gods” themselves, thus amplifying his task through the idea of a positive contamination: that is, that the statue has been directly forged by deities, and hence

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itself carries the residual trace of godliness. From here, the next stop in his thinking is completely logical to mania: the increasing urge to “climb the rocks to touch the great jinni’s mask.” Beyond all conventional paradigms of prayer or pilgrimage, here we see the most strident fanaticism at work, the true summit of active supplication, as the youth begins (in complete aloneness) to scale the rock face in quest of ephemeral contact with the colossus. Though not to touch the face, but rather just the mask, for this layering is its own necessarily arcane mediation (pure immediacy would bring instant annihilation). The colossus is thus even more threatening in its transparent obscurity, more mesmerizing in its impenetrable cloaking, for it is not the absence of an impossibly distant, unseen god sending messages but rather the inscrutability of a hyper-visible master who commands unconditional absorption and astonishment amid wordlessness. It is not surprising then that our young shepherd at once grows more tranquil and more paranoid throughout the tale, infused with an almost catastrophic calmness that signals his own inevitable martyrdom (jugular slit before the graven image). Colossal adoration demands colossal finality. [the colossus and the chasm; painting; stone; gazing; the statue; the mask]

7. To search to discover and then to choose of one’s will and to project the essence of oneself into a fortress —Ahmad Shamlu10

We encounter our seventh colossomaniac engaged in a profound meditation on death and its several prospective avenues. To this end, the poetic interlocutor speaks of fearing not death itself (the indeterminate claws of terminality) but rather dying in an unworthy homeland, a damnation that he extends universally to encompass all nations. In effect, nowhere among human terrain is there sufficient nobility to meet death on right terms, though not that he holds this phenomenon in any great standing, for earlier in the same poem he says that its “hands are more brittle than banality itself.” Rather, bare life has itself grown so contemptuous in its obscene routinization that he despises the thought of “dying in a land where the wages of the gravedigger are worth more than human freedom.” The rebel poet therefore remains preoccupied with somehow ensuring an honorable negotiation of the end in an otherwise dishonorable world, and finds no recourse beyond starting the journey toward a becoming-colossus.

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Only the colossus dies well. A seemingly unadorned stanza above, and yet there is a meticulous formula lain out here from searching to discovery to willed choice to projection to fortification that aspires to successfully prepare the manic individual for a superior perishing. More than a philosophical prescription, it is nothing short of a regimen of existential training that must be decoded, internalized, and executed to fulfillment. Consequently, we start from an injunction “to search,” a simple premise on the surface but one that requires an often-agonizing self-realization that one’s identity stands incomplete. To search is therefore to confess the gaping hole of irresolution, leaving a blood trail wherever one walks from that point onward. From this first step of extreme susceptibility, we then advance to the second degree—“to discover”—which would ostensibly overturn the anguish of the first condition of the searcher. But one must beware the misleading glow of a quick cure, for this writer often warns that most “discoveries” are but ideological baits that throw one down the well of further afflicted iterations of identity. To discover is hence to discover many prevailing forms, the majority of which entrap subjectivity in further binding quarters of weakness, alienation, or even enslavement. And so what is the protocol of differentiation, of sifting through the garbage heap of possibility in order to find the diamond conviction? Unaccounted for still, though maybe a clue resides in the next line, for those who survive this bitter phase of the trial are by right those who correctly “choose of one’s will.” At last, now we enter the landmine-ridden theoretical territory of the decision, for the author clearly does not mean some simple declaration of responsibility (only the most backbreaking measure will suffice). No, we are in the presence here of someone who himself stood before firing squads and torture chambers, thus pointing to a caliber of alertness that inscribes itself at often horrid costs. Not merely to die for the choice “of one’s will,” but to guarantee that this willed death also produce a colossal illumination for the living; to somehow exploit the nothing as an incandescent missive to future sacrificial searches and discoveries, the basepoint of what might be called a death-in-free-form. This is what is meant by the final convulsive line—“and to project the essence of oneself into a fortress”—a colossomaniacal decree whereby the forfeiture of a single essence can impair the centers of the many by launching upward the citadels of the elite few. To die in colossal form is therefore to distribute an energetic ration: on the one side, to maim and paralyze with spectral impact those who live as if already dead; and on the other side, to rouse further those who have already learned the way to turn their deaths into the maximal instantiation of living, into bastions, never more deliriously alive than when the blade falls upon them. Half-sabotage; half-propulsion. The unparalleled laughter of those who build their camps in the borderlands of slaughter.

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[the colossus and searching; discovery; projection; the fortress]

8. But in a flash we all understood the significance of what had happened. Some sniper had fired a shot at the rope and in doing so had demonstrated his prowess for everyone in the neighborhood to see. He’d said to us all: I’m capable of hitting any target, however tiny or delicate it may be. Every one of your hearts is within my range. I could put bullet holes through your arteries one by one. I could aim inside the very pupils of your eyes without missing the mark. I can aim my bullets at any part of your bodies I choose. —Ghada Samman11

We encounter our eighth colossomaniac back in the throes of civil war, as the tenants of a sprawling city remain locked away in their apartments (Arabic hisar, meaning “siege”). Their collective helplessness is palpable, facing either eventual starvation or grenades shattering through windows, each barricaded within the four walls of a home-turned-prison with no ensured release in store. The city itself is continually trampled by marauding sects who keep close and constant surveillance, every street an incendiary battle-in-waiting, and poised above the rooftops stands the unique colossal force at stake for our inquiry: the sniper. In this passage, we are taken into the almost mechanical mind-set of the gunman, an expert who understands time and space only through the crosshairs of a target and whose topographical vision of the metropolis filters itself through the black sight of a rifle. This colossus is anonymous; this colossus is brutal; this colossus is non-interchangeable; this colossus is infallibly accurate. They cannot go outside; they cannot test his aim, made hostage to the purgatorial sentence of an all-viewing firearm. The fact that the caged city-dwellers “in a flash understood the significance of what had happened” illustrates the spine-rattling velocity with which the sniper makes his point, his ammunition conveying ultra-awareness of their predicament (strandedness) with the blazing speed of near-instantaneity. Moreover, that he seizes this occasion to “demonstrate his prowess” transports us back to an epoch of marvelous performativity when shamans and soothsayers deigned to flaunt their might in competitive displays. To somehow be both esoteric and brazen, wearing prescience in barefaced form (the sibyl, the clairvoyant, the telepathist). And like all cunning figures of divination, his message is delivered with unmistakable resonance: that he is “capable of hitting any target, however tiny or delicate it may be.” Hence the sniper’s dark exceptionalism rests in a double-edged talent: (1) the transversal of spatial distance, able to reach across the separation and the in-between to strike with invasive perfection;

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and (2) the dominance of miniature entry points, able to navigate the thinnest, the frailest, and most narrow straits of being. Colossality is therefore framed here as an occult endowment of both unmatched scope and precision, the peerlessness of a micro-focus culminating in a long record of perforated veins and sinew: for “I could put bullet holes through your arteries one by one.” This is what such a gifted inclination to piercing seems to tell us, and yet it is his next intrusive warning that stands out—that “I could aim inside the very pupils of your eyes without missing the mark”—for it suggests an ironic interplay of omniscience: namely, that the one who sees everything savors his ability to blind all others. Scrupulous; well-trained; ghoulish—his clarity becomes their convolution. [the colossus and the city; flash; prowess; the target; the mark; aim; the sniper]

9. On the slope, higher than the sea, higher than the cypresses, they slept. The iron sky erased their memories, and the dove flew away in the direction of their pointing fingers, east of their torn bodies. . . . They sleep beyond the limits of space, on a slope where words turn to stone. They sleep on a stone carved from the bones of their phoenix. Our heart can celebrate their feast in nearly no time. —Mahmoud Darwish12

We encounter our ninth colossomaniac staring upward in the certainty that inestimably large beings take residence at high altitudes. Immensity here, then, is experienced as a stratospheric phenomenon, aloft in farthest astronomical space, their torsos cushioned in azure or obsidian firmaments. And yet, what is impressive about this descriptive rendering is the suspicion that such giants are in actuality forces of radical idleness, forever reclining or sleeping in states of forgetful resignation. They are anti-athletic sages whose restfulness and hush alone permeate the void, bereft of urgency or awakening . . . the colossus-in-cessation. The poetic voice begins by situating us “on the slope,” offering us a precarious grip at best wherein the base might easily slide into disequilibrium. We should wonder why this particular experience of the colossal, then, must be accompanied by such imbalance, or even worse whether these slumbering figures might soon drop unknowingly from their platforms to come crashing down upon their counterparts below. That they exist in spiral chambers “higher than the sea, higher than the cypresses” only augments this danger of their potential slippage, making gravity’s pressure an enemy as we imagine the collisional shock of their impression striking the dust or ourselves (the

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awful brunt of the fall). Furthermore, that they have lain themselves down in some unbreakable repose makes them intrinsically unreliable overseers; they have quit or renounced the game of creation itself, deserted the scales of Being to grow rusted. We cannot count on those who abide by a non-code of utmost dormancy and irresponsibility; we are left undefended amid their carelessness. Even more, the colossal ones have seemingly entered a condition of amnesic tranquility, for “the iron sky erased their memories.” But why commission a metallic cosmos to purge all traces of our remembrance, and why order the dove (emissary of peace) to “fly away”? What malice or detrimental wisdom is at work here, as they close their eyes gradually to our existential plight? No, this docility is purposeful; otherwise, they would not have selected for their bedroom a highly insular cocoon “beyond the limits of space,” just as the dove was clearly ordered to flee at the guidance “of their pointing fingers.” Rather, this is a deliberative ejection/default of wild proportion, the retraction of the ceiling away from our breathing, restive forms, one the colossal figures speak into sealed fate as their “words turn to stone.” It is a planned gesture toward insensibility (elected unconsciousness), whether a vindictive or just weary conspiring-unto-blackout, but nonetheless a soundproof limbo purchased and confirmed at high expense. “They sleep on a stone carved from the bones of their phoenix,” we are informed. And this is no innocent pillow, for the sacrificial mutilation of the phoenix (mirroring the gashes on their own “torn bodies”) in itself marks the extinction of all possibility for rebirth. The colossal ones will not allow their own revival (no embryonic return, no way back from the comatose slouch), and thus leaving us to a hollow ritual “to celebrate their feast in nearly no time.” Their stupor becomes our insomnia; their disregard consigns us to the desolation of the being-on-our-own, hailing seismic collapse, our last resort tied to the improbable chance that they might one day turn into sleepwalkers. [the colossus and the slope; height; sleep; memory erasure; celebration; the feast; the sleepwalker]

10. The same dream recurs every night. There’s a need for this ancient music, and yet how many of these timeless death stories have disappeared? What eternal naivety there is in tales about our beautiful death! These little stories that are pointed like a toothbrush. Why did we contrive to complicate these death stories? A giant shadow poses these questions to the man in the dream. —Hassan Blasim13

We encounter our tenth colossomaniac in an absurd scenario, waking one morning to find a soft smile etched across his face for no reason. It is

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uncontrollable; it overtakes the mouth and then the entire persona. A oncenormal individual, this trivial supplement of the smile begins to cloak him in a deviant aura. It alienates those around him; it courts anger among the narcotized masses; it causes havoc in every communal setting (part provocation, part veil). His mad look offends a cinema audience, grinning through a tragic film; he is exiled from a bar of right-wing zealots, his beaming interpreted as a kind of partisan mockery. A lone impractical detail that now swathes and ravages his interrelational dynamic with the whole exterior world, and ending badly amid a barrage of concussive blows, a gang of bitter men now leaving him to die bleeding and beaten in a wooded clearance. And the source of this expressive contortion? A colossal shadow, we are told. The excerpt above is taken from the night before the smile’s emergence, one that like all others is infested with a particular recurring dream, that of a woman brushing her teeth (set to die four years later) and a man tumbling down a well while sitting at the bottom of a staircase. When our narrator awakens, the smile that will later persist even into his autopsy makes its introduction, as if surgically attached to the teeth. Does it stem from some serpentine of this “same dream that recurs every night,” a vestige of its repetition-compulsion? The next line (seemingly disjointed) speaks of a “need for this ancient music,” as if the smile is the reactive remnant of a listening act to some inaudible melody, a rustling in nocturnal folds that then slinks into his daylight hours, though perhaps most important is this qualification of such primeval music/dreaming as a matter of lethal necessity. He continues in a strange lament over the disappearance of such “timeless death stories” and the “eternal naivety” they granted, damning modern consciousness for its attempt to “complicate” these otherwise “beautiful” fatal narratives. But it is precisely here in the paragraph that we hit an abrupt dead end, for we are told that these death-stream musings are not even comprised of his own self-spoken words but rather echo the interrogational questions that a “giant shadow poses . . . to the man in the dream.” According to this accusation, the colossus is therefore a herald of inauspicious turns, one who creeps and scratches into sleeping minds to restore a different legend of the last breath. The vague smile, in turn, is the logo of this pact between death and dreaming, responding to the nightly whispers of some hulking form who creates a new gravitational field of doubt in the ears and across the mouth. And still, what is the exact intention of this giant shadow, its wrathful distrust and revenge against the decorated word/image of disaster? Why does it strive to maintain the simplicity of ancient death tales? Is there a sacred orthodoxy of finality that must be upheld, without embellishment or metaphor, for which the failure to do so is then penalized through the frivolous imprint of a smile that remains only to draw hatred (its own mark of Cain)?

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[the colossus and the recurring dream; necessity; the ancient; music; the death story; the question; the shadow]

*** We can picture the islands where the first colossal forms were sculpted: the Invictus, the unvanquished, the astral festivals and golden armor, the sun cults who forged a luminescent god with arrows, crown, torch, and chariot; his three children—dusk, night, and dawn; the halogen rays streaking from his hair. Many images flood the mind: the passenger arriving by boat who sails beneath its waist and kneels to gain safe passage; the metalsmith collecting endless bronze plates required to hammer out the abdomen alone; the caretaker responsible for polishing the broad shoulders, calves, and eyelids; the poets who harmonize their odes of frenzy and splendor; the earthquake that one day sent the legs crumbling into the ocean, and the sunken faces of the people watching the subsidence of their localized divinity (amazement of the beholder-in-loss). The incommensurate; the unequaled; the fragile apotheosis. The will to immensity tempts immense wreckage. The colossus as paragon for world thought accomplishes many outcomes. It would lead us to seek out a paradoxical technique at once enveloping and yet highly acute, convinced and yet amoral, surreptitious and yet manifest, flagrant and yet unrelatable, iconic and yet iconoclastic, irrelevant and yet severe. It is to become unwavering though still emitting heretical waves; it is to simultaneously inflict possibility and intrigue. It is to situate the otherworldly concretely in the world, as a blank slate of both extreme power and masochistic vulnerability, a prism of infinite superstition or ideational minefield through which we rediscover epic and unrelenting notions. Stature that spellbinds, beguiles, frightens, agitates, and even possesses. Hardest trance; hardest enchantment. World thought as approximation of the unbearable—a return to giant idols. NOTES 1. Sadeq Hedayat, “The Fire Worshipper,” in Three Drops of Blood, trans. D. Miller Mostaghel (London: Alma Books, 2013), 43. 2. Réda Bensmaia, The Year of Passages, trans. T. Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 76.6. 3. Bensmaia, The Year of Passages, 52.3. 4. Adonis, “Psalm,” in Victims of a Map, trans. A. al-Udhari (London: Saqi Books, 2008), 107.

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5. Joyce Mansour, Essential Poems and Writings, trans. S. Gavronsky (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2008), 301. 6. Mansour, Essential Poems and Writings, 327. 7. Mansour, Essential Poems and Writings, 331. 8. Forugh Farrokhzad, “Conquest of the Garden,” in A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Poetry, trans. M. Hillmann (New York: Three Continents Press, 1987), 96. 9. Ibrahim al-Koni, The Bleeding of the Stone, trans. M. Jayyusi and C. Tingley (Northampton: Interlink, 2002), 5. 10. Ahmad Shamlu, “On Death,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from Majmu’eh-ye Asar-e Ahmad Shamlu (The Collected Works of Ahmad Shamlu), (Tehran: Zamaneh Press, 1381/2002). 11. Ghada Samman, Beirut Nightmares, trans. N. Roberts (London: Quartet Books, 1976), 7. 12. Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, trans. M. Akash, C. Forche, S. Antoon, and A. El-Zein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 16. 13. Hassan Blasim, The Madman of Freedom Square, trans. J. Wright (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2010), 86.

Part II

STATE: CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL TRAUMA

Chapter 5

If Fanon Knew On the Haragas Phenomenon – A Critical Political Fiction Réda Bensmaïa

1

Harragas (from Arabic), ḥarrāga, ḥarrāg, “those who burn” (the frontier) are North African migrants who attempt to illegally immigrate to Europe or to European-controlled islands in makeshift boats. The word Harraga is from Algerian Arabic, designating “those who burn.” The Harraga is the action of “burning the borders” [or burning one’s identification papers (ID card, Passport, etc. . . .)]. On the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan harragas typically hope to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in order to reach Spain, specifically the Spanish regions of Andalusia, Ceuta and Melilla. Additionally, harragas also sometimes manage to complete the voyage from Africa to the island nation of Malta, or the Italian island of Lampedusa. From here they often go on to emigrate to other regions of Europe. On the Atlantic coast of North Africa, Mauritanian and Senegalese harragas set off in hope of reaching the Spanish-controlled Canary Islands in small, flat-bottomed boats referred to in Spanish as “patera,” or in rigid or inflatable rafts, (such as “Zodiac” rafts), or even paddle boats. Obviously, boats such as these are not designed for ocean crossings and the death rates for harragas are very high. The motivations for undertaking this extremely risky act are twofold: profound economic poverty and extreme political repression, both widespread throughout North Africa.2

Although he had devoted most of his work as a psychiatrist and a political activist to a critique of colonial alienation mechanisms, Fanon never confused the anticolonial struggle with decolonization. For Fanon, colonialism has always referred to the different forms of alienation that the colonial system had inflicted on the colonized peoples. But he knew that independence would not automatically lead to the end of the system’s influence on the values and representations of the colony. Unlike Albert Memmi, who contended 67

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decolonization was a matter of concern for the former-colonized peoples, Fanon thought that it was the responsibility of both the former-colonized and former-colonizers. That is why he spent so much work and effort as a psychiatrist to dismantle the colonial alienation in progress and, as a political activist, to analyze the different forms that “alienation” had already taken in the colonized countries—particularly in Algeria. This is what led to Fanon’s famous analysis of the “parasitic” national bourgeoisies, the status and responsibility of the postcolonial political parties, the role of the “leaders” of the “national” armies and their responsibility in the process of emancipation, and the development of a truly “national” culture. Because he died prematurely in 1961, Fanon was unfortunately unable to continue the work he started in that direction. So it is up to us to take over, and, based on some of the theoretical indications that he left us, to identify some of the issues which for him had to be addressed: “The colonized intellectual who wants to do authentic work, he said, must know that the national truth is, first, the national reality. He must push to the boiling place where knowledge is foreshadowed.” And immediately after this, Fanon warned us, “Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is there that our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light.”3 These “boiling” places, these places of “occult instability,” where can one locate them today? What would they be for Fanon had he had the opportunity to celebrate fifty years of independence of the country he loved? For reasons that will appear gradually in this chapter, I think one of the events that would have interested Fanon is that of the so-called Haragas—a phenomenon that may seem contingent in relation to other economic or social “major problems” that many African countries are facing nowadays, but which if viewed from a critical angle, proves to be a structural feature of the situation that many postcolonial countries have been experiencing for a number of years now. Algeria, the country that seemed less prone to see its youthful dream to migrate to France, was indeed among the first countries to see this phenomenon develop.4 Suffice it to say that the Haraga in question is no less than a symptom that must be understood, not as a marginal or passing incident, but as a “total social fact”5 (fait social total) in the sense that Marcel Mauss gave to this notion. The Haraga can be considered a “total social fact” because it refers to an inherently differential situation that always involves economic, cultural, religious, symbolic, or even legal dimensions and can never therefore be reduced to only one of these aspects. Two other factors have led me to embark on this theoretical experiment: the first is the speed with which the phenomenon spread and led to the production of a multiplicity of works in all genres: novels, poems, and critical essays, but also fictional films as well as documentaries. Overnight, talking and/or writing about the Haraga would



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become “a forced detour” or even a moral obligation for many researchers, but also artists, writers, and filmmakers.6 The other “factor” relates more directly to Fanon: the first works he published were devoted to what he didn’t hesitate to call the “African syndrome” and were linked to “the experience of the Black man” that Fanon analyzed as “total social fact” and a symptom of the powerful colonial grinding machine and more broadly to the dark history of slavery, racism, and economic exploitation. But, far from being limited to the psychological aspects, his analysis would soon take on a more “global” political dimension: “Since I was born in the Antilles, my observations and my conclusions are valid only for the Antilles—at least concerning the black man at home. Another book could be dedicated to explaining the differences that separate the Negro of the Antilles from the Negro of Africa. Perhaps one day I shall write it. Perhaps it will no longer be necessary—a fact for which we could only congratulate ourselves.”7 As it is known, this study would not be useless and will prove inaugural. All the texts that will form the Sociology of the Revolution (L’An V of the Revolution)8 will find in this statement the premises of their implementation. My last “element,” probably the most risky, is, in a way, more strictly experimental. We remember perhaps the opening remark that Frantz Fanon was ironically addressing to himself about the “methodology” that would be implemented in Black Skin, White Masks: “It is good form, he wrote, to introduce a work in psychology with a statement of its methodological point of view. I shall be derelict. I leave methods to the botanists and the mathematicians. There is a point at which methods devour themselves.”9 This statement is all the more ironic given that Black Skin, White Masks is probably the text where Fanon shows the most direct attention he had for the advance theoretical research of its time (especially in the work done by a psychoanalyst like Jacques Lacan or philosophers like Hegel or Jean-Paul Sartre). It is indeed in this text that we find the most important and direct philosophical and literary references in his entire work. It is in this text where one can have the best idea of Fanon’s philosophical and literary references and identify the theoretical questions that would serve him to develop his ideas about colonial alienation and to produce the work that would make him one of the major political and theoretical references in the fight against colonialism. Isn’t it in that text where Fanon mobilized references to Nietzsche, Freud, and Sartre, and also Jacques Lacan (already), Octave Mannoni, Pierre Naville, Francis Jeanson, E. Minkowski, or even G. W. F. Hegel, in short, virtually anything that held the upper theoretical hand at the time? If I bothered to reminisce these few elements of “methodology,” it is not in order to impose any particular philosophical or critical allegiance that Fanon10 might have had vis-à-vis the thinkers and researchers that he mobilized in his

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work, but rather for a very simple, “practical” reason that I could summarize with the following question: what authors Fanon would have chosen to address the issues of the Haragas had he been able to witness it today? What are the philosophical and political issues, concepts, philosophical trends that would have attracted him and that he would have viewed as the best way to approach the analysis of the “Haragas syndrome”? This is what led me to name this inquiry a “critical political fiction.” One could also speak of a critique that takes the form of a “critical-projection”: that is to say, a critique that tries to imagine how Fanon would have reacted to the Haragas phenomenon and what kind of theoretical tools he would have produced to analyze it. Or, what kind of theoretical allies would he have chosen for such a daunting task? I found an incentive to get into such a projection in the future perfect tense in the tribute that Edward Said had paid to Fanon in his essay, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered,”11 where he “imagined” that Fanon had probably read Lukács while he was writing The Wretched of the Earth. I have chosen to take the Haragas phenomenon as a springboard for this manifesto because it invites us to think about culture beyond national and disciplinary boundaries by engaging in a reflection that displaces Eurocentric paradigms of knowledge. It also seemed to me that imagining what a thinker and political militant like Frantz Fanon would have thought of such a phenomenon was the best way to explore issues that have “not yet been foreshadowed, extracted, or elaborated”12 as of yet. I must begin by noting that before writers and filmmakers became interested in the Haragas, it represented one of the most tragic and disturbing phenomena. During the period from 1983 through February 2011, more than 13,444 migrants died at the borders of Europe. In the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, more than 9,700 would-be migrants lost their lives, while in the Strait of Sicily 3,163 persons died in transit between Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Malta, and Italy, and several hundred lost their lives along the new routes between Algeria and Sardinia. Numerous observers have noted the determination of those embarking on the Haraga to reach another shore of the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, whatever the risk to life and limb. As bluntly stated by Idrissa Guiro in his documentary film on the Haragas, Barça ou Barzakh (Barcelona or Death), what is extraordinary is that the young people who wish to make the crossing are ready to die rather than to give up their “dream” of reaching a European country. For some observers, the phenomenon resembles a sort of collective hypnosis that suddenly besets thousands of men and women who, from one day to the next, set out toward the spaces of migration: deserted beaches, landing places, the external borders of destination countries (Spain, Italy, Lampedusa, Melilla, and so forth). Some interpreters even describe a phenomenon of the same order as what occurs in the infamous Invasion of the



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Body Snatchers, where the inhabitants of a city, having fallen asleep near a mysterious plant of unknown origin, wake up the next morning completely metamorphosed into zombies. But what seems most striking to me is the scarcity of analyses that go beyond reasons of economic hardship or repressive regimes. Very few analysts venture a hypothesis that might lead to a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. One of the many questions that cry out for answers is this: what Fanon—the psychiatrist and the political militant—would have thought of this kind of denial of reality that the Haragas experience? Further, how Fanon would have explained the fact that at a certain point in their lives so many young men and women, particularly from the former French colonies, have as their sole aspiration—as an obsession in most cases—moving to the country of their former colonizers? As the Tunisian sociologist Hassène Kassar has noted in his study of social change and clandestine migration in Tunisia, if migration has traditionally resulted from the primitive accumulation of wealth as a consequence of colonial economy and postwar conditions, “contemporary migration, in contrast, is the result of the unlimited internationalization of the economy and of values.”13 In the same study, Kassar refers to an article by Saskia Sassen that shows that new economic factors linked to the creation of a transnational space of circulation have resulted in the creation of an increasingly complex and flexible transnational labor market. A further element that Sassen identifies is the way in which economic internationalization has brought local employees into contact with European technicians for outsourcing firms, thus facilitating emigration. Kassar also explains how the Westernization of systems of higher education fosters the mobility of highly skilled workers toward Western nations and reinforces movements of acculturation. Even though this phenomenon is not new, it takes varying forms today, given the growing interdependence of South and North, and the existence of global businesses and global markets. In these conditions, the economic precariousness experienced by southern countries has been continually exacerbated, especially since the first American war against Iraq, with severe effects on fundamental economic sectors such as tourism and hydrocarbons. This instability has created a sense of insecurity, at once personal and professional, which is evident in the behavior and speech of the Haragas, particularly the younger ones.14 Clandestine immigration in its current form, frequently leading to deadly outcomes, no longer follows the patterns that prevailed in times of economic prosperity in the host countries, but results rather from the drastic changes in legislation and regulations governing border crossings in Europe as well as Africa, particularly the Maghreb. By closing borders to would-be immigrants, and by building a virtual wall around the countries of the Mediterranean—at the very moment when the world’s capital, commodities, and ideas were

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becoming highly globalized—these public measures impelled the younger population of the South to find novel ways of entering the North. Before the borders were “completely” closed, one could travel to Europe as a tourist and settle there while awaiting legalization. At present, control has become standardized. By requiring drastic reductions in the number of visas granted and much stricter border controls, the treaties signed in Barcelona along with other legal protocols were to place thousands of young lives in danger by forcing them to take far greater, often fatal, risks. The legal arsenal of the Schengen Agreement (1985) brought about profound changes in the European situation: except for those belonging to a privileged elite, the only hope of crossing the Mediterranean was to “burn” one’s way. If we add to this mix the image of the quality of life in Europe or the West, promoted both by the media and by émigrés returning for vacation, potential “burners” finds themselves with very little room to maneuver. To reach their goal—to leave at any cost—the Haragas are ready to make unimaginable sacrifices. In the Haraga, clandestine migration has assumed a radically different form: no longer simply a quest for work and a better material life, it has now become an “act of bravura” in which friends band together to defy the State, which becomes a synonym for failure, corruption, repression, and anarchy.15 And this is what brings us to the other aspect of our problem, that is to account for the Haragas phenomenon from a Fanonian perspective: If we consider the motivations behind the Haragas, how can such “madness” be explained? What prompts such a profound desire to leave one’s country, village, and family regardless of the accompanying dangers? Why the desire to reach Europe when it is clear that one will not be welcomed there? Why leave the place where one’s struggles are really rooted, that is, one’s home ground? What explains the fact that, directly after the “Tunisian Spring,” hundreds of Tunisians rushed to board fishing boats or pleasure craft to attempt the crossing to the island of Lampedusa? In Fanonian terms, what, in short, is the Haraga once one no longer characterizes it as pure and simple “impulsivity” or “temperamental originality,” but the product of a colonial “alienation”?16 As I have tried to suggest, the form taken by the Haraga has moved far beyond classical immigration, even in its clandestine forms. Potential Haragas are not necessarily unemployed, not the victims of political persecution, most of the time they do not qualify as “political refugees.” The typical Haraga is someone who is haunted, driven by an obsession with taking off, leaving his country of residence in order to reach an adjacent European country whatever the risk. The goal, ideally, is to live in Europe and, but for the language problem, the Haraga would be ready to head for any European country. What appears to be key is the “image” or representation that one has formed of the country where one “dreams” of living. A “representation” of



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the country involves a certain “lifestyle,” certain customs and values—not always well defined—that seem to the Haraga to embody “real life.” A virtual “wild ontology,” as Jacques Rancière calls it,17 governs the elaboration of images making up the Haraga’s Eldorado vision of França, Spagna, Barça, Ettaliane: I use the names given by the Haragas to France, Spain, Barcelona, or Italy to show, as Walter Benjamin brilliantly observed, that the difference between words such as Barça and Barcelona is a matter not only of denotation or referent, but also of connotation or a “way of seeing” (Benjamin’s “Art des Meinens” or “mode de la visée” [or “mode of intention”]).18 We should recall that for Benjamin, it is the translator’s task to capture a text’s “mode of intention.” The many novels, stories, and films that portray Haragas or give them a voice show that the difference between their perception of the world and the “native’s” perception lies not in the referent but in the medium—not to say the media—that condition(s) the system of values according to which they conceive of the world where they live as well as the world where they wish to live. These two incompatible but quite real worlds curiously illustrate all the characteristics that Michel Foucault attributed to “heterotopias,” described as “spaces of crisis and deviance, concrete arrangements of incompatible places and heterogeneous times, socially isolated but easily ‘penetrable’ systems,” and finally as “concrete machines of imagination” that create “a space of illusion that exposes as illusory all real space, all the emplacements within which human life is confined.”19 Thus the translation of “words” and of the “mode de la visée” they convey in the discourse of Haragas is central to our comprehension—from a Fanonian perspective—of what motivates the behavior of these men and women who hurl themselves into an adventure as reckless as the Haraga appears to be. What, in sum, is the Haraga? What would allow us to understand this seemingly “irrational” phenomenon without resorting to psychological or purely economic explanations? To deal with this so-called irrationality, which authors would Fanon summon? In seeking the best way to translate the Haragas’s words and actions, as well as the “mode of intention” they embody, I first thought not of Boualem Sansal’s or Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novels20 or Merzak Allouache’s film,21 but of Jean Rouch’s film Les Maîtres-Fous.22 I turn to this film because it so clearly illustrates a profoundly troubling phenomenon: when the participants in the ritual documented by Rouch enter into a trance and become possessed by their Hauka (spirit), they identify not with their ancestors, or with a local deity, saint, or powerful animal, but with one or another representative of colonial power. While one participant may identify with the British governor, another will adopt the identity of the colonial police chief and still another may be transformed into the wife of a colonial doctor.

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In filming these men in their spirit trance, as a steady reader of Fanon, Rouch has not attempted to reconstitute the small, closed world of the professional ethnologist or, to put it otherwise, that world which would allow the ethnologist to replenish his stock of “disinterested” knowledge, “internal laws,” “constitutive systems,” and other “symbolic expressions.”23 On the contrary, it is around the personage (and personae) of the British “governor” that the Hauka ritual is organized, and the film’s alternating editing makes it perfectly obvious that what we are witnessing is neither strange in itself nor foreign to us but is indeed the rehearsal—la répétition générale—and thus the “theatricalization” of a situation in which, owing to colonialism, men risk madness and death every day; madness and death that are acted out in order to be conjured up and made survivable. One may well ask: how does this relate to the Haragas? What would Fanon have found important in Rouch’s demonstration? I contend that it is this: like the participants in the Hauka ritual, the Haragas are caught up in a kind of theater, but theirs is performed on a much larger scale than Rouch’s portrayal of the Hauka ritual in the bush. This theater evokes the “society of the spectacle” as explored by Guy Debord, another author whom Fanon would have thought of in an analysis that was too readily taken as limited to the Western world. What we can see now, and what is made cruelly plain by the impact of what Debord terms the “generalized dictatorship of economic production,” 24 is that the “spectacle” in question does not stop at the borders of Europe but today extends over the entire earth. As Debord writes, the “growth of the dictatorship of modern economic production is both extensive and intensive in character.” He continues: “In the least industrialized regions its presence is already felt in certain star-commodities in the form of imperialist domination by those areas that lead the world in productivity.”25 As soon as we understand that for Debord these “star commodities”26 are not limited to the consumption of “material” goods, but represent a “social relationship between people that is mediated by images,”27 we can better grasp what leads to this sort of captatio imaginaris that hijacks the minds of the young men and women whom the media wars have increasingly left feeling like the flotsam and jetsam of the globalization process. They end up seeing and participating in a very narrow slice of the world—what is conveyed through pirated DVDs, YouTube clips, and television series from France, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, and above all the United States. To gain a deeper understanding of the Haragas’s apparent obliviousness to the dangers awaiting them and of their possession by the notion of Europe’s “anywhere else,” we may delve more closely into Debord’s analyses in



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The Society of the Spectacle, particularly in the sections he devotes to “spectacular time” and “environmental planning.”28 Debord shows that the socalled “peripheral countries” are subject not only to economic domination, but are affected—one could even say infected—by domination in all fields of activity: cultural, social, familial, political. The society that brings the spectacle into being does not dominate underdeveloped regions solely through the exercise of economic hegemony. It also dominates them in its capacity as the society of the spectacle. Modern society has thus already invested the social surface of every continent—even where the material basis of economic exploitation is still lacking—by spectacular means.29

This is confirmed in the case of the Haragas, in whom a certain view of the Western world has supplanted their view of the world as well as of their country (which they see as deficient, backward, inhuman, unstable, etc.). Even their memory is affected, along with their tastes in clothing, film, and culture in general. Without any countervailing model that is powerful enough to oppose the “spectacular model” promoted by the “concrete machines of imagination” continuously secreted from the millions of satellite dishes sprouting from the walls of apartments in Algiers, Oran, Casablanca, Tunis, or Dakar, the “spectacular” model originating in European countries prevails. In such a context, I cannot resist the temptation to cite what Susan BuckMorss so elegantly stated in her essay titled, “The City as Dream World and Catastrophe”: As a power structure, the connecting grid of urban space is being made obsolete by the “information highways” of electronic communication. Dreams, too, have entered into this electronic space. Children’s fantasy resides there as well. . . . Electronic media provide mass reproduction of the image, not the object. . . . As actual cities disintegrate, the image of the city gains in market appeal. Like an echo of the call for social utopia, like a mirage of the existence of collective desire, the city-image enters the domestic landscape.30

This “mirage of collective desire” is indeed at the core of what motivates the Haragas and shapes their “desire for Europe.” They are pursuing not “objects” (of consumption) but rather images (of what “real life” is). These images imported from “elsewhere,” by becoming more “real” than the “real” that their spectacle has shattered, end up becoming more desirable than the reality they were supposed to represent. It is through these images that the Haragas envisions life, like a virtual “optical flâneur” (to borrow another figure from Susan Buck-Morss),31 and embarks on the “mad” adventure of the Haraga.

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CONCLUSION Rouch, Debord, Buck-Morss, these are some of the theoreticians that I believe Fanon would have certainly mobilized when addressing the vexing question of the wild migration of former colonized people to the very countries that their fathers and mothers fought against. To conclude, let us recall that, in considering the relation to the Other in terms other than moral(istic), Rancière takes as a point of reference what he calls the “Franco-Algerian nexus.”32 Here I take as my reference the nexus hyphenating the Haraga with the desire for Europe, because it allows us to analyze the constellation of figures of alterity (homelessness, immigrants, marginalized, fundamentalists, humanitarians, refugees, etc.) that now define “our political field or lack thereof.”33 In what sense, other than morally, is the Haragas’s cause—their trial by fire, some might say—our problem? In what sense, in other words, is it also our political “cause”? If it is true that the sight of Haragas washed up on Lampedusa or scrambling over barbed-wire fences at Melilla in Spain or the so-called Jungle in Calais, France, can provoke moral indignation, even suffering on behalf of others, along with anger aimed at those who avert their gaze and act as if nothing extraordinarily inhuman were taking place right before our eyes, it remains that, to quote Rancière, “fear and pity are not political sentiments!”34 What then are the conditions for a political and not merely moral grasp of the phenomenon and fate of the Haragas? As Rancière has clearly demonstrated, this can be achieved only through a “political subjectification” (as opposed to a moral one) that takes place through a double dis-identification: a de-solidarization with respect to the destination states and to the panoply of legal measures they have erected against the migrants; but also, at the same time, a dis-identification with respect to the Haragas’s States of origin and these States’ complicity, according to the principle that the political recognition of the other’s cause is first of all “a dis-identification with respect to a certain self.” It is indeed strange that at the very moment when Édouard Glissant was creating the Institut du Tout-Monde with Patrick Chamoiseau, Régis Debray was publishing a book in praise of borders.35 The failure and incapacity to address the so-called Refugee Crisis in Europe and in the United States— along with the reactive action of the English people vis-à-vis Europe during the “Brexit” event—demonstrate that the power of images affects with blindness both the citizens of former colonies and also the heirs of their former colonizers: France, England, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and so forth. These countries too are subjected to the spectacle’s hold (“Emprise”). This shows that it is an idiosyncratic conception of a (threatened) identity that dominates the political and cultural scene in Europe and that opens the way



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to the emergence and the re-enforcement of the most extreme right-wing movements. It is the same spectacle that makes citizens of former colonial powers dream of leaving their countries for Europe and that makes citizens of European countries feel threatened by people who once where “subjects” of their countries. Repression (refoulement) and sheer ignorance of the dark legacy of the history of colonization make the rest! What ought to be noted in fine is that the phenomenon of expatriation and immigration does not stop at the Haraga, the exodus has also affected many academics, scientists, and intellectuals in recent decades as part of an unequal globalization—a phenomenon that already brings into crisis the southern states and questions the educational and socioeconomic policies that prevailed until recently both in the West and the former colonies.36 These phenomena call into question the status and the very definition of “strategic knowledge,” the ideological, social, and economic perspectives these countries use when dealing with migratory questions. If the networks are an essential component of the international migration landscape, they are characterized by a vast diversity. For one, by their size, which varies from one region to another, by the means that the groups organizing the networks are able to mobilize, and, finally, also by the norms and values they adopt in the organization of their “traffic.” As a specific and sui generis entity, these networks tend to define what sociologist Mehdi Mabrouk characterized as an “Underground Society.” What the Haraga movements help us to understand is that the Migrant is certainly a manifestation of the new political and social “figures of solidarity”; it suffices to recall the various solidarity events that we have witnessed over the last two decades all over Europe—starting with the trip of Pope Francis to Lampedusa and Lesbos, his adoption of a Syrian family, and the various networks of solidarity and support that appeared in France, England, and in multiple locations throughout Europe and elsewhere. But, at the same time, what is worth noting is that the Migrant appears also to be the best representative of the figures movement: the movement of an indeterminable number of people across the globe and more generally speaking movements and transformations within the ideologico-political form of the nations involved. In fact, what strikes one most when one tries to come to grips with the determinants of what is nowadays characterized as “minor”—like in minor literature, minor cinema, minor politics (which goes beyond the political activities of minorities)—the figure of the Migrant proves to be a formidable test operator (opérateur d’analyse) for two principal reasons: firstly, as Thomas Nail has shown beautifully in his book on The Figure of the Migrant,37 the Migrant has always been understood from the perspective of stasis and perceived as a secondary or derivative figure with respect to place-bound membership. As Nail puts it forcefully, “The ‘emigrant’ is the name given to the migrant as the former member or citizen and the ‘immigrant’ as the would-be member or

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citizen.” What should then be noted is that “in both cases, a static place and membership are theorized first, and the Migrant is the one who lacks both.”38 The second reason (that makes the figure of the Migrant the best test operator of issues related to minority) is that he or she has also always been predominantly understood from the perspective of the State. One doesn’t need to mobilize Walter Benjamin’s theses on history to say that the State has all too often—if not always—written history leaving no space for the migrant—a migrant who appears as a figure without its own history and social force, a “victim” and never an “actor” of social change and culture. This is certainly not to say that all migrants are always stateless but, as Nail has noted, “the history of migrant social organizations has always tended to be subsumed or eradicated by State history.” One finds the same radical perspective in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: What is called a nation-state, in the most diverse forms, is precisely the State as a model of realization. And the birth of nations implies many artifices: Not only are they constituted in an active struggle against the imperial or evolved systems, the feudal systems, and the autonomous cities, but they crush their own “minorities,” in other words, minoritarian phenomena that could be termed “nationalitarian,” which work from within and if need be turn to the old codes to find a greater degree of freedom.39

Elsewhere in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, explain that the power of the minorities should not be measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt within the majority system, nor even to reverse the necessarily tautological criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the non-denumerable sets, however small they may be. The issue is not then at all anarchy versus organization, nor even centralization versus decentralization, but a calculus or conception of the problems of non-denumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. This means that for Deleuze and Guattari, whom I follow here, women, for example, or “nonmen,”—and certainly the Migrant—as a minority, as a non-denumerable flow or set, would not receive an adequate expression by becoming elements of the majority, in other words, by becoming a denumerable finite set. Non-whites would receive no adequate expression by becoming a new yellow or black majority, an infinite denumerable set. And this is mainly because, according to Deleuze and Guattari, what is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the non-denumerable, even if that minority is composed of a single member. Henceforth, if we want to develop a political theory of the Migrant itself and not the Migrant as a “failed citizen” (Thomas Nail), we need to interpret his or her movement and status first and foremost according to his or her



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own defining features: that is his or her movement(s) as a non-denumerable entity and as actors of the production of new axioms,40 which work from within the states and renew the codes that excluded them. In a political sense, the theory of the migrant, viewed from the primacy of movement, presents a more inclusive model of international relations than citizenship currently does. And in this sense, as I tried to substantiate in this article, the Haragas should no longer be considered as an empirical entity (their numbers or their origin) but primarily as a new model of political membership and subjectivity. Given the impact they are having on the main structure of the States that they leave and the ones they seek to join, the meaning and potential of their “movement” extend beyond the current ideological representations one tends to have of them. The production of a “kinopolitics,”41 as a politics of movement, is at stake. NOTES 1. Translated by Jennifer C. Gage. 2. “Harragas,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harraga (accessed January 5, 2017). 3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Constance Farrington (Grove Press, New York, 1963), 225. 4. As we know, so have many other postcolonial African countries (Senegal, Mali, Libya, Tunisia, etc.). It is worth noting that the notion of the Harag as a “road burner” has been coined and popularized by Algerian journalists. 5. “In his classic work The Gift, Marcel Mauss argued that gifts are never ‘free.’ Rather, he noted that human history is full of examples that gifts give rise to reciprocal exchange. His famous question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was: ‘What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?’ The answer, according to Mauss, was simple: the gift is a ‘total social fact,’ imbued with ‘spiritual mechanisms,’ engaging the honor of both giver and receiver. In this way, a ‘total social fact” (in French fait social total) is ‘an activity that has implications throughout society, in the economic, legal, political, and religious spheres’ (Peter Sedgewick, Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts [New York: Routledge, 2002], 95). ‘Diverse strands of social and psychological life are woven together through what he [Mauss] comes to call ‘total social facts.’ A total social fact is such that it informs and organizes seemingly quite distinct practices and institutions’ (Andrew Edgar, Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers [New York: Routledge, 2002], 157). The term ‘total social fact” was coined by Mauss’ student Maurice Leenhardt, after the concept of the ‘social fact,’ regarded by Durkheim as the basic unit of sociological understanding” (“Marcel Mauss, New World Encyclopedia, http://www.newworldencyclopedia. org/entry/Marcel_Mauss [accessed January 5, 2017]). 6. See, for example, the list of films devoted to immigration on the following websites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Films_about_immigration_to_Italy; http://

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www.migrantcinema.net; https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/europe-smigration-crossing-points-captured-six-films; and http://www.movingpeoplechangingplaces.org/identities-cultures/migration-in-film.html. 7. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 34. 8. A book that includes important texts like “Algeria Unveils,” “Women in the Revolution,” “This is the Voice of Algeria,” “The Algerian Family,” “Medicine and Colonialism,” and, last but not least, “The European Minority in Algeria.” 9. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 14. 10. Everyone knows Fanon’s “debt” vis-à-vis J.-P. Sartre (for example, on the issue of anti-Black racism), vis-à-vis Engels (on the “theory of revolutionary violence”), vis-à-vis Mannoni (for a critique of the so-called dependency complex of the colonized), or vis-à-vis Hegel (on the “deconstruction” of the Master-Slave relation and generally for the development of his problematics that can and should be the “disalienation” of the colonized). This did not affect the specificity of his thinking and the radical novelty of his work. 11. Edward Said, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 436–52. See also his original essay, “Traveling Theory,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226–47. 12. As stated in the prospectus of this volume. 13. Hassène Kassar, “Changement sociaux et émigration clandestine en Tunisie,” as found at http://iussp2005.princeton.edu/papers/52581 (accessed January 15, 2017). The information about the economic and sociological aspects of the Haragas phenomenon that follows owes a lot to Kassar’s and Saskia Sassen’s analyses. See also the important works of Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, La question migratoire au XXIe siècle, Presses de Sciences Po (P.F.N.S.P.), 2014; and “Postcolonialisme et immigration: nouveaux enjeux,” in Ruptures Postcoloniales, Les nouveaux visages de la société française, Cahiers Libres, (La Découverte, 2010). 14. Saskia Sassen, “Géo-économie des flux migratoires,” Esprit no. 300 (Paris, December 2003): 102–13. 15. Cf. Mahdi Mabrouk, cited by Hassène Kassar. 16. Let us consider here the fantastic work that Fanon did to deconstruct what is presented as a form of “atavism” of the Algerian or even a “mental disorder,” or “neurosis” (see “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” in The Wretched of the Earth, 366: “The criminality of the Algerian, his impulsiveness, the violence of his murders are not the result of an organization of the nervous system or of a temperamental originality but the direct product of the colonial situation.” 17. Jacques Rancière, introduces this concept in Aux bords du politique (Paris: Editions Osiris, 1990), esp. 112ff. 18. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 74. 19. Georges Didi-Huberman, “Atlas de l’impossible, Warburg, Borges, Deleuze, Foucault,” in Michel Foucault, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Frédéric Gros, Judith Revel (Paris: L’Herne, Cahiers de l’Herne no. 95, 2011), 256.



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20. Cf. Boualem Sansal, Harraga, trans. Frank Wynne (London: Bloomssbury, 2014), and Tahar Ben Jelloun, Partir (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Both novels are about leaving home, emigrating, going into exile, and taking leave from family and friends. 21. Cf. Merzak Allouache, Haragas (2010). The film can be seen on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRJOGyip378, accessed January 15, 2017). 22. Cf. Jean Rouch, Les Maîtres-fous (1955). The film deals with the Hauka movement. The Hauka movement consisted of mimicry and dancing as a means to being possessed by British Colonial administrators. The participants performed the same elaborate military ceremonies of their colonial occupiers, but in more of a trance than true recreation. See also the analysis of the film I proposed in “Jean Rouch: Les Maîtres-Fous or the cinema of Cruelty,” in Building Bridges, ed. Joram Tenbrink (London: University of Westminster, Wall Flower Press, 2007). 23. Cf. Claudine Vidal, “Des Peaux Rouges aux marginaux: l’univers fantastique de l’ethnologue,” in Le Mal de voir: Ethnologie et orientalisme, politique et épistémologie, critique et autocritique, Contributions aux colloques Orientalisme, africanisme, américanisme, 9–11 mai 1974, Ethnologie et Politique au Maghreb, 5 juin 1975 (Paris: Union générale d’Editions, 1976), 11–71. 24. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), paragraph 64, p. 41. 25. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, para. 42, p. 29 (my emphasis). 26. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, para. 65, p. 42. 27. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, para. 4, p. 12 (my emphasis). 28. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. These are the titles of chapters 6 and 7. 29. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, para. 57, p. 37 (emphasis altered from original for my emphasis). 30. Susan Buck-Morss, “The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe,” in October 73 (Summer 1995): 25. She later published and expanded book length study, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). 31. Susan Buck-Morss: “It was Adorno who pointed to the station-switching behavior of the radio listener as a kind of aural flanerie. In our time, television provides it in an optical, non-ambulatory form” (“The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 [Autumn, 1986]: 105). 32. Rancière, Aux bords du politique, 202ff. 33. Rancière, Aux bords du politique, 203. 34. Rancière, Aux bords du politique, 251 (my emphasis). 35. Régis Debray, Éloge des frontières (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). 36. See, for example, the recent decrees taken by Donald Trump concerning the refugees (from Syria and other countries of the world) and on immigration. The new “laws” will do no less than “to publicize crimes by undocumented immigrants; strip such immigrants of privacy protections; enlist local police officers as enforcers; erect new detention facilities; discourage asylum seekers; and, ultimately, speed up deportations” (Cf. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/us/politics/dhsimmigration-trump.html?_r=0). See also what is said about the so-called selective immigration policies in Canada, Australia, and very soon in the United States. These

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“policies” completely change the rules of hospitality, shifting from a policy based on civic values to one governed by commercial logic. What has to be kept in mind is that the so-called selective immigration policies are proliferating worldwide as governments try to attract scientists, highly skilled engineers, medical professionals, and information technology professionals. Selective immigration policies can be grouped into three ideal-typical models: “the Canadian ‘human capital’ model based on state selection of permanent immigrants using a point system; the Australian ‘neocorporatist’ model based on state selection using a point system with extensive business and labor participation; and the market-oriented, demand-driven model based primarily on employer selection of migrants, as practiced by the US” (Cf. http:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/imig.12136/epdf?r3_referer=wol&tracking_ action=preview_click&show_checkout=1&purchase_referrer=search.tb.ask. com&purchase_site_license=LICENSE_DENIED_NO_CUSTOMER). 37. Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 38. Nail, The Figure of the Migrant, 3. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Masumi (London: Continuum, 1987), 454. 40. See the developments Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc gives to this theoretical perspective in Politique et État chez Deleuze et Guattari, Essai sur le matérialisme historico-Machinique (Paris: PUF, 2013). He writes, “A Becoming-Minor works simultaneously against the empty universal of the hegemonic norm and against the inclusive and/or exclusive particularization of the minority as an underlying system” (200). 41. I borrow this concept from Thomas Nail’s book, The Figure of the Migrant, 236 seq.

Chapter 6

Dispersing Community Diaspora and the Ethics of Estrangement Nanor Kebranian

BY ANY OTHER NAME Shortly before accepting a gold medal honoring his work, a Turkish-Armenian writer evoked the appeal of a wrongly convicted man. “I am no Diaspora,” he claimed. “This is a terribly ironic experience.”1 He was, along with fourteen others, about to receive official recognition from the newly founded Armenian Ministry of the Diaspora (2008) during a May 2011 award ceremony hosted by the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul.2 The unprecedented event marked an early gesture by Minister Hranush Hakopyan to strengthen Turkish Armenians’ ties with their “homeland,” Armenia. But, the ensuing debate among Armenians worldwide questioned this gesture’s legitimacy and animated a long-standing debate over the meaning of diaspora and its current applicability to the estimated sixty thousand Turkish-Armenian minority population.3 The debate, centered primarily on definitions of autochthony and indigeneity,4 revolved around the question of whether the Turkish-Armenian minority, itself the subject of Turkey’s assimilationist policies, qualifies as an Armenian diasporic group or, instead, as the demographic remnant of another, if not the, historic “Homeland.”5 Such questions are not, contrary to reigning assumptions, the manifest symptoms of a contemporary moment. They echo up from the very depths of Armenian diasporic thought, predating the Diaspora Minister’s Istanbul visit by almost a century. Their recent reemergence not only indicates their unanswerability, but it also and more importantly, vindicates the inaudibility of foundational answers from a century past, answers that remain to be heard in today’s future. Such deafness has afflicted the vast majority of the diaspora’s interlocutors, Armenian and much beyond, given the “endless discussions” ensuing from “the expansion of the semantic horizon of the word” and the 83

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disagreements regarding its “real boundaries.”6 As a term with a vast constellation of referents engaging displacement or unbelonging,7 diaspora has, nonetheless, become constrained by assumptions “about who shall and shall not belong,”8 serving as a veritable category of authentication among historians and sociologists.9 Even currents, such as much of anti-essentialist cultural studies, which approach diaspora as a matter of positionality and a politics of process or practice,10 still treat the term and idea as “a political tool of cohesion”11 to rhetorically organize social units that remain otherwise excluded or marginalized by the still dominant paradigm of nation-statist sovereignty. Though such approaches have proven to be epistemologically fruitful in discursively decentering the normative force of capitalist patriarchy, what they reimagine as non-hegemonic circuits of power and representation remain bound, nonetheless, to a fundamentally normative conception of diaspora as community. If “Diaspora” now refers to any displaced group bound by a common identity and may consist of extrinsic/intrinsic features, coercive/ voluntary conditions, and a slew of other criteria involving, among other factors, migration, identity, memory, and the contestation of the nation-state model, its iterations betray a primarily communalist outlook epitomized by the still unquestioned and ubiquitously employed expression, “diasporic community.” This imposed paradox treats “diaspora”—a term and concept that unequivocally evokes a group’s scattering or dissolution—as a collective body to which individuals belong or the space where this corporate entity exists and functions. Despite its myriad attributions as a “new” modus of “(dis)order,”12 “Diaspora” currently constitutes yet another derivation of “community,” that most originary and rooting of sociopolitical orders.13 In which case, far from suggesting a radical misconstrual, the word’s most contemporary use by governments, such as the Republic of Armenia or the African Union,14 “to manage their relationship with their nationals abroad,”15 demonstrates a coherent fulfillment of its communalizing grasp. ROOTING COMMUNITY, A LONELY GOD Overwhelmed by diaspora’s permutating proliferation, numerous commentators have sought refuge in etymological returns to the term’s source, often going astray en mistaken route. Stéphane Dufoix convincingly traces such errant arrivals on the one hand, to linguistic ignorance and the reliance on inaccurate precedents, and, on the other, to disciplinary biases and ideological agendas.16 Diaspora curses. Diaspora saves. Diaspora kills. Diaspora births. Diaspora cuts. Diaspora links. But always, without exception, diaspora remains community,17 a collective who or a what, situated here, there, and everywhere. This Septuagint neologism, diaspeiro, then, meaning



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“dispersion,” “diffusion,” “casting out,” “impulsion,” “squandering,” “shattering,” and “distribution”18 has been forced to cleave to its veritable semantic and conceptual antithesis. The reason that perceptions of diaspora have “remained embedded in the language of community” may, to some extent, be traced to the universalizing legacy of nineteenth-century nationalisms and their naturalization of historically constructed sociocultural units.19 This observation goes some significant way toward explaining the still predominant tendency to interlink diaspora with homeland and/or a primary social unit; but it falls short of fully elucidating the historico-ontological circumstances resulting in subsequent revisionist accounts’ continued delineations of diaspora as yet another form of community. Among the latter, the anxiety of dispensing with diaspora’s purported communality is perhaps more effectively traced not to the nineteenth, but rather, to the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, when “the image of man” became “the people, and not the individual,”20 in other words, when communal belonging became a prerequisite for enjoying one’s inalienable, unimpeachable singularity as a human individual. To become one, the individual first had to have a recognized place among the many. This paradox begins, by Hannah Arendt’s compelling account, with the revolutionary French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). At this historical “turning point,” when “Man, and not God’s command or the customs of history” became “the source of Law,” the “inalienable” rights of man would find their guarantee and become an inalienable part of the right of the people to sovereign self-government. In other words, man had hardly appeared as a completely emancipated, completely isolated being who carried his dignity within himself without reference to some larger encompassing order, when he disappeared again into a member of a people. . . . As mankind, since the French Revolution, was conceived in the image of a family of nations, it gradually became self-evident that the people, and not the individual, was the image of man.21

The unprecedented populations of stateless persons issuing from World War I is proof for Arendt of this fundamental alteration in the human individual’s status into an abstraction; into one, who, though, purportedly, possessing his or her own unimpeachable sovereignty as a human individual, can only claim and receive this status through the mediation of communal belonging. What she exposes through her critique of human rights’ juridico-political failings is a new world order founded upon an uncompromising existential compulsion to belong or not to be; since “whether we like it or not, we have really started to live in One World. Only with a completely organized humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion

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from humanity altogether. . . . Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.”22 The specter of this expulsion or metapolitical exile—the “nothing but human” reduced, in Arendt’s famous terms, to “the abstract nakedness of being human”23—haunts the vast sphere of diasporist discourse. Hence, on the one hand, diasporist theorists’ still persistent and influential overemphasis on abstractions about subjectivity and identity, wherein the personal becomes political, and the diasporic subject becomes “a figure for [a shared] double and multiple consciousness.”24 And, on the other, the equally persistent and influential view that posits diaspora as an organized and/or mobilized dispersion,25 requiring, among its active members, “collective practices” that underscore not just differences from the host culture, “but also their similarity to each other, and their links to the people of the homeland”26 and “other diasporic segments.”27 Whether advocating for identitarian transnational coalitions of variable and multiple subjectivities or asserting the primacy of “practice[s] of diaspora”28 toward communitarian ends, these proponents betray a unanimously shared anxiousness to redress the threat of metapolitical exile by ensuring their chosen diasporans’ inclusion in the fabric of humanity.29 This anxiety becomes symptomatic through diasporist discourse’s unacknowledged but intimate alignment with human rights discourse. Diasporist discourse, in scholarship and beyond, routinely demonstrates profound investment in matters of civil, political, social, and economic rights constitutive of the International Bill of Human Rights; such that, throughout a variety of studies on diaspora(s) past and present, emancipatory movements (anticolonial, feminist, racial, religious) or experiences of immigration and minority citizenship feature as ubiquitous subjects.30 This propensity is perhaps best exemplified by the Armenian Ministry of the Diaspora’s own “main objective” “to protect the fundamental rights, liberties and legal interests of Armenians in the historical Homeland or abroad . . . within the framework of international law.”31 To the extent that such discourses employ “diaspora” as a measure of communal inclusiveness to uphold forms of collective sovereignty, they ostensibly attempt to guard against what Arendt identifies as human rights’ potentially, if not always actually, dehumanizing de-communalization. And yet, the term’s original32 usage enshrines “powers of diaspora”33 envisioned as the antithesis of sustained communal integrity. This conceptual kernel becomes recognizable, first, by disaggregating diaspora from its oft-conflated counterpart, galuth. While, as Dufoix demonstrates, galuth “belongs to the realm of men—men are exiled by other men—‘diaspora’ belongs to the realm of the divine,” since “diaspora” signals God’s threat to punish the Jews for disobeying the divine commandments.34 Diaspora, here,



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refers to potential, and not, actual dispersion; and, moreover, it “possesses a purely religious and biblical meaning” that evokes the promise of a redemptive future. “God is the one who disperses but God is also the one who gathers the dispersed.”35 If, as Howard Wettstein asserts, “[t]he aspects of divinity a literature emphasizes reflect salient features of the community’s experience,”36 then what features here is a profound ambivalence and doubt about the nature and value of community. For, this God, who represents the very ethos of community, is quite consistently willing, nonetheless, to dismantle its cohesive bonds; this, despite requiring such cohesion to terrestrially actualize Himself.37 Diaspora’s Septuagint evocations thus present the will to community as an inherently tenuous endeavor. Such ambivalence about the possibilities of communal constitution arguably also colors the Talmudic “idea that after the churban, God Himself enjoys only an exilic existence, that the divine presence resides in galut.”38 In addition to and beyond empathy, this anthropomorphic quantum leap,39 wherein God Himself shares His people’s exile, starkly exposes the limits of community. Not even God, perhaps the most communal of all gods, seems capable of successfully realizing the project of collective sovereignty. Indeed, His favored project precipitates catastrophic consequences, leaving him bereft (“Woe is Me!” He cries in Proem 24 [of the Midrash], “What have I done?”40); lonely (“I burnt My house, destroyed My city, exiled My children among the nations of the world, and I sit solitary”41); “exposed to the elements”42; and reduced to “divine dislocation and a constricted existence.”43 Insofar as His “project for humanity . . . , the repair and redemption of the world, has been thwarted,”44 this metaphysical failure can only be His own as the God of community. The divine will itself thus appears to cast community (God) as exile (God); a (seemingly) paradoxical intersection that ultimately surfaces in galuth’s interpretation as both “exile” and “community”45 simultaneously. The God of community therefore reveals Himself in antithesis, as a god of dispersion, willing the world in diaspora. THE QUESTION OF WE, ETHICAL STRANGERS In 1931, a manifesto of and for dispersion appeared in Paris—then “capital of the men without a country”46—that eschewed the term diaspora altogether. It announced, instead, a “we” that also served as the title of its fifteen signatories’ cofounded literary journal, Menk (We, Paris 1931–1932). These “Paris Boys,” as they have come to be known, were among “the Jews and the Armenians,” that, as Arendt observes, “ran the greatest risks . . . [,] showed the highest proportion of statelessness . . . [, and] proved . . . that minority treaties . . . could also serve as an instrument to single out certain groups for eventual

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expulsion.”47 Barred from reentry to their place of origin, they had arrived in postwar France as double-refugees both from the Ottoman Empire’s genocidal programs (1915–1918) and the subsequent anti-Armenian persecutions of the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1922).48 They counted among the approximately sixty thousand Armenian metapolitical exiles, which flooded France during the ensuing decade as a much welcome low-income workforce to help resolve the country’s war-induced labor shortage. “[W] ithout passports or visas and with no obvious country of origin,”49 however, they were left adrift among the republic’s precarious sociopolitical shores. In 1924, these Armenian apatrides (stateless refugees) finally received juridical status as legal persons50 mainly to further France’s relentlessly integrationist policies. But, in response to a presumed Soviet threat in the 1930s and, given the Soviet status of the only existing Armenian territory, they became subject to close police scrutiny for their assumptive pro-Soviet sympathies and supposed revolutionary and/or anarchist inclinations. Expulsion, and hence, the threat of yet another course of dehumanizing statelessness (read also rightlessness), loomed over their French reception as the state’s right of sovereign self-preservation.51 This refugee population’s vast majority, consisting mainly of formerly Ottoman rural artisans, laborers, and merchants, responded to the reigning xenophobic anti-refugee climate pragmatically, by avoiding unnecessary visibility or striving to assimilate. Those seeking to maintain and restore communal ties turned to church life, political parties, youth groups, and compatriotic organizations,52 which uncritically (and by necessity) promoted French civil integration while also fostering ethnonational and cultural preservation. Identifying these options as politically disingenuous and ethically unsound and their mandates for communal belonging as existentially threatening, the group Menk and its eponymously named journal launched a critical intervention. Conventionally interpreted as “nothing other than an attempt at community and the first effort to establish a place abroad and to transform oneself into Diaspora,”53 the journal was instead an experiment in anti-communal collaboration and coexistence. David Kazanjian describes such kinship without community as a “kinship of the moment,” whereby “interactions are effective but without ground,” constituted of “common acts” that are “uncommon (‘both different and alike’),” and, most importantly, where “we no longer know precisely to whom ‘our’ [or, in Menk’s case, ‘we’] refers.”54 Menk’s “we” pronounces just such an uncommon kinship constructed through and as a catachrestic subjectivity, a “figure without an adequate literal referent.”55 Rather than community, Menk envisioned diaspora precisely as (anti-communal) dispersion, one enacted deliberately through an ethics of estrangement. While pronouncing a project of “genuine solidarity” “in the service of Armenian culture,”56 its brief introductory manifesto emphatically asserts the



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members’ right to be strangers. To that end, it prioritizes its members’ individuality over and above their commonality, by twice repeating their overriding right to their “personalities’ free and full development.”57 Predating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ Article 2958 by two decades and a second world war, this insistence on each personality’s freedom, in light of the postwar Armenian refugees’ plights of belonging in France and the world at large, promotes freedom precisely from community and the dangers of its obligatory similitudes. The manifesto echoes this reservation in its close, where it undermines its own cumulative effect by declaring Menk’s project an “open coalition”59 in search of “a [future] general manifesto” that may form “in time.”60 This search itself is contingent on finding those “features, inspirations, and concerns”61 that await discovery—but that cannot be presumed a priori to exist—as common links tying the group’s members and affiliates to the same people. This future manifesto begins to take shape, in much sharper terms than its relatively timid introductory antecedent, through the journal’s various writings, ranging from literary criticism, polemical essays, and autobiographical ruminations to short stories and poetry. Differing greatly in perspective, tone, and quality, they nonetheless unanimously contest the legitimacy of communing as a modality of diasporic coexistence. They self-consciously uphold, instead, a dissociative individualism cognizant of the “One World” effect, wherein a “completely organized humanity” ensures that the loss of home and polity expels Man from humanity altogether.62 This non- or anti-communal disengagement employs a four-pronged strategy of estrangement, reflected in the four overarching themes organizing the short-lived journal’s five issues.63 These themes comprise critiques of orientalism (Menk 1); denouncements of identity politics (Menk 2); the redemptive potential of self-hatred (Menk 3); and foreignness as a mode of survival (Menk 4–5). The first issue’s critique of orientalism and the Eurocentric vision of an East/West divide features most poignantly in two illustrative essays appearing in sequence by Shavarsh Nartuni (né Ayvazian, 1898–1968) and Nigoghos Sarafian (1902–1972). Blaming their predecessors’ Eurocentric, especially Francophilic, orientation for their political fate, both authors call for a reorientation toward their territorial, linguistic, and cultural neighbors’ histories and cultures (Iran, Turkey, the Arabic-speaking world). This insistence stems as much from their recognition of a tremendous epistemological lacuna as their self-reflexive engagement with their unprecedented juridicopolitical status as refugees, or, in their terms, “postwar men”64 made irrevocably different from their prewar precursors. Their main contention refers to their predecessors’ political inspirations and aspirations drawn directly from the French revolutionary ideals of constitutional governance with national sovereignty and equal citizenship. These ideals, they assert, constituting

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“fake goods,”65 were uncritically transmitted to their generation as the “universal”66 model of sociopolitical organization; and, in that respect, resulted in their sociopolitical disorientation as postwar refugees still threatened with statelessness in the very birthplace not only of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, but also, of man conceived as citizen. “Think about our position,” writes Sarafian, “about our political circumstances, and about the factories where many of us are suffering.”67 The representative resolution for both Nartuni and Sarafian consists of an understated anarchism, subtle enough as to elude the then ultra-vigilant French authorities’ notice. Aiming for a “literary politics”68 and a “spiritual fatherland,”69 they espouse pursuing an unremitting individualism that cannot be subsumed under any political aegis; that does not presume any given ethno-cultural links; and, most importantly, that contests the very juridico-political structures contributing to their existential precariousness as apatrides. In that vein, Sarafian, speaking on the group’s behalf, determines, “Forced not to trust anyone and to live most of all according to our own individual comprehensions, we bring a great self-love that has nothing to do with egotism.”70 It is through such self-love that Zareh Vorpuni (né Euksuzian, 1902–1980) declares in his anarchistic rumination, “Pocket Notebook” (“Krbani Dedrag”), his profound contempt for the French “citoyen,” who “believes he lives in the infinite expanse of absolute freedom.”71 Vorpuni’s suggestively titled sketch, where the starving refugee’s pocket notebook replaces the overfed citizen’s passport, denounces, furthermore, French populism’s “hypocritical”72 philanthropy for glossing over the individualism intrinsic to every (creative) act. Contesting populist philanthropy, Vorpuni pronounces his hatred for the people as such, calling its forms of argumentation a “weapon” and its forms of ignorance a perennial “right.”73 “And I,” he states, “hate it [the people], because I know it better than they [the populists]. All hatred is born out of love. There’s no hatred without love. The greater the hatred, the greater the love it assumes. I prefer my hatred, which is liberating and healthy.”74 Menk’s third issue further reemphasizes this salubrious freedom to hate, redirecting the sentiment from French populism to Armenian parochialism. Nshan Beshigtashlian’s (1898–1972) scathingly satirical “Compatriotic Unions” (“Hayrenagtsagan Miyutyunner”) disparages post-genocide regional unions for their respective claims to Armenian purity at the expense of, and with open hostility toward, their Ottoman-Armenian counterparts. Beshigtashlian’s equally satirical “The Actor Shahkhatuni’s Speech” (“Terasan Shahkhatuniyi Jarě”) derides Armenians’ opportunistic instrumentalization of genocide survivors’ suffering, vividly illustrating the monstrously disfiguring consequences. Shahan Shahnur’s (né Kerestejian, aka Armen Lubin, 1903–1974) notorious short story, “The Cuckolds” (“‘Buynuzlu’nerě”), criminalizes the nationally hallowed figures of anti-Turkish Armenian



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resistance fighters. And Harutyun Frengian’s short story, “A Suicide Attempt” (“Antsnasbanutyan Ports Mě”), depicts an Armenian pseudo-anarchist’s suicidal self-loathing. This litany of Armenian self-hatred concludes at a quasi-explanatory junction in the third issue’s final essay, “My Dear Hrant” (“Sirelit im Hrant”) by Arsham Dadrian (1909–1956). Addressed most probably to fellow writer, Hrant Nazariants (1886–1962)—also an important benefactor for Ottoman-Armenian refugees in Italy—the essay argues against the insularity of post-Ottoman Armenian communal reconstruction, citing especially the “borrowed”75 Eurocentric terms serving, paradoxically, to reinforce such isolationism. Dadrian incites Hrant, instead, to pursue knowledge rather than preservation through foreign(izing) affiliations, identifying such estranging linkages as the only legitimate course of complete self-actualization, and, in this instance, survival. “You remain in yourself, lonely and gloomy, like an island,”76 Dadrian writes. “One ought to construct steamships and make journeys. One ought to establish commerce and amity with other countries,”77 he continues, concluding that, without such endeavors into foreignness, one risks death itself.78 “[E]very difference,” on the other hand, “is life,”79 claims Dadrian. And he furthers his point by unexpectedly juxtaposing Gustave Le Bon’s treatises on crowd psychology with the work of French medieval poet-criminal, François Villon. Le Bon here becomes the unethical paragon of “scientifically” naturalized communalism that reduces the individual to “a machine,” “an animal” governed by “instinct.”80 Having already cited Mussolini’s purportedly reciprocated penchant for Le Bon’s theories,81 Dadrian goes on to identify their efficacy as a supporting “formula” for the preservation of national(ist) sovereignty, certainly “suitable for an army” such as those of the French and English.82 The refugee Dadrian then countermands Le Bon’s hateful “system”83 by claiming to find himself in and through Villon—“Villon is in me. In my books.”84—as a catachrestic figure, who, unlike Le Bon, “has no path, no objective” as “[h]is path and his objective begin and end in him.”85 Suggestively reiterating Villon’s status as a “man” who is “awfully humane,”86 Dadrian’s identification with Villon allows him to reclaim his humanity, amid the “quagmires of my shame,”87 as a dehumanized refugee. This kinship renders them, in Villon’s words, “frères humains,”88 transcending time, space, language, and nationality, and, in the process, articulating a subversive route of anarchical affiliation between the French medieval poet-criminal and the always potentially criminalized modern Armenian apatride. Dadrian’s diasporist vision tellingly deviates from diaspora’s conventional conception as a community by explicitly requiring forms of ethically grounded estrangement. This entails seeking dispersal not with other “compatriots” but rather, away from their zones (psychological, epistemological, even geographic) of belonging. It necessitates appropriating

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a catachrestic status (à la Dadrian-Villon) that defies socialization, organization, and juridico-political designation. Dadrian’s philosophically self-conscious essay thus evokes a nascent metaphysics of strangeness; one that underlies the entirety of Menk’s writings and manifests, especially, in the various works’ understandably understated references to anarchical tendencies. Bedros Zaroyan’s (1903–1986) short-story, “Excerpt” (“Hadvadz”), in the journal’s final issue, further elaborates this diasporic outlook, beginning with its protagonist Berj’s internal monologue precisely about being: “Where to search for my own meaning. Of my person, my existence. Berj’s meaning. I had it doubtless; had it, in the past perfect indicative mood. And now? And tomorrow? I don’t have it. But is there anyone who has it indefinitely, whose inner and outer manifestations flow always into his present?”89 Along with Dadrian’s critique of Le Bon and Vorpuni’s critique of French populism, the question reveals an attempt to uncover a metaphysical universal that upends the assumed truth of a necessarily collective human experience, of humanity experienced primarily as society or community. Echoing Vorpuni, the story suggests, furthermore, that the law of, in Vorpuni’s words, “organizing men”90 inevitably precipitates violence, not strength.91 “Have you heard the latest news?” asks Berj’s friend, Mardiros, to his congregation of Armenian friends. “The Gypsy uprising . . . Two buildings seized and set ablaze,”92 he states, alerting them to prepare for armed assistance in what appears throughout the story as a general workers’ strike afflicting its setting, Marseille. Although sympathetic, Berj nonetheless remains politically inactive, cognizant that “sympathy is a sign of incapacity and the expression of the weak”; but by asserting that he “still hasn’t been given the means”93 to achieve anything else, he also subtly indicates the existing proletarian resistance’s inadequacy. The story concludes in anticipation of a much more radical unknown superseding the available categories and methods of human inclusivity. Symbolizing this unknown is the “invincible” mistral that overtakes Berj— “from within or without?”—calling his name, churning his insides, rendering him speechless.94 Having described the effects of this strange cold wind that regularly makes the warm Mediterranean Marseille foreign to itself, the story’s last line ironically states, “Marseille (son soleil, son ciel bleu).”95 Zaroyan here naturalizes strangeness in the phenomenon of the unfamiliar and defamiliarizing wind. And as the invincible element of dispersion itself, one that entirely overtakes the protagonist, he thus equally naturalizes the phenomenon of dispersion. The answer to Berj’s opening metaphysical queries regarding the search for his own meaning, his person, his existence, appears at this moment. Although only suggestive in form and incomplete in content, the ending presents the universality of being in dispersion and strangeness as



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the concurring response to Berj’s question about the (im)permanence of having “it”—belonging—as an enduring presence. DISPERSING COMMUNITY A philosophy of diaspora with an emphasis on the metaphysics of strangeness remains to be conceived as a veritable ethical project. At stake is the very possibility of (nonviolent) coexistence. Such a conception can begin from the Menk generation’s acutely experienced sense of coexistence as immanently dispersive rather than communal. And philosophical critiques of community readily support these formerly minoritized exile-refugees’ lived wisdom, especially in exposing community’s nothingness. It has been shown, contrary to assumptions, that instead of a commonly held property or a “belonging to the same totality,”96 community consists of a relationship of mutual obligations and debts, resulting in the expropriation of one’s own “initial . . . most proper property, namely, . . . subjectivity.”97 Community’s “members . . . are constitutively exposed to a propensity that forces them to open their own individual boundaries in order to appear as what is ‘outside’ themselves.”98 Consequently, as Roberto Esposito reveals, these subjects forced into constant otherness become “but a chain of alterations that cannot ever be fixed in a new identity.” And the community purportedly consisting of these desubjectivized others becomes merely the habitus of absence; “not a ‘thing’ or rather . . . a thing defined precisely by its ‘non.’ A ‘non-thing.’”99 Community suddenly begins to appear as that which, in joining, divides. Instead of a locus, a possibility, or a promise of collective and participatory integration, it consists of intrinsic voids and constitutive separations that result in constant loss: “that of losing, along with our individuality, the borders that guarantee its inviolability with respect to the other.”100 Communal belonging requires, therefore, that members resign (from) themselves to a perpetual state of potential violence, one necessitating the self’s dissolution or assimilation into an endless other, into the void of perpetual alterity, an externality, a no-thing with no end. May this not be the worst of all dispersions, a net loss to an unnamable outside that is the voiding of oneself? Based on that observation, thought cannot arise from, in, or through community, for community requires precisely that which cannot be thought— namely a singular, unpredictable event—but what must always rather be thought-as-replication. As such, the community’s replicate-thought persists outside futurity, being an unchanging reiteration of a perpetual present-past, and one kept stable in form by being emptied of content. Never born, but replicated, it cannot have a life, nor can it finally die after exhausting whatever significance it may have exhibited. What we encounter as thought, and

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should seek out as such, is and has always been the unexpected, the stranger in/as word and image, in other words, the diasporic. Such thought arises as a matter of existential necessity, certainly for the thinking agent’s being, but, as importantly, for the being of thought itself. For that reason precisely, as existential necessities inevitably change, diasporic-thought cannot be expected to remain unchanged, or even to survive. Its transformation, indeed its mortality, is what ensures its futurity. If there is a future for world thought, then, it cannot be anticipated, let alone enshrined and codified. NOTES 1. “Diaspora değilim” [“I Am Not a Diaspora”], Hürriyet.com.tr, 10 May 2011. 2. Gayane Abrahamyan, “Diaspora Minister in Turkey: Official from Yerevan Addresses Concerns of Istanbul Armenians,” ArmeniaNow.com, May 10, 2011. 3. This estimate tends to exclude the roughly ten thousand to thirty thousand migrants from Armenia. Studies conclude that many are seeking Turkish citizenship and that one of out of three does not intend to return to Armenia. See Ayla Jean Yackley, “Armenian Migrants in Turkey Live in Shadow of Century-Old Massacre,” Reuters, April 24, 2016. 4. Discussions of Armenian indigeneity in Turkish society have become increasingly complex in the past decade with the emergence of third- and fourth-generation grandchildren of female Armenian genocide survivors. On the reintegration of women and the politics of Armeno-Turkish demography, see Vahé Tachjian, “Mixed Marriage, Prostitution, Survival: Reintegrating Armenian Women into Post-Ottoman Cities,” in Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman Urban History, ed. Nazan Maksudyan (Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 86–106. 5. For an overview of this debate, see Vartan Matiossian, “Bolisě Spyurk Ē tē Voch?” Armeniaca, July 2, 2011. 6. Stéphane Dufoix, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Diaspora’: A Study in Socio-Historical Semantics,” in Transnationalism: Diasporas and the Advent of a New (Dis)Order, eds. Eliezer Ben Rafael and Yitzak Sternberg (Boston: Brill, 2009), 47 (emphasis added). 7. See Dufoix as well as Brent Hayes Edwards, “Diaspora,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, eds. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 81–84. 8. Dufoix, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Diaspora,’” 47. 9. Edwards, “Diaspora,” 84. 10. Edwards, “Diaspora,” 84. 11. Dufoix, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Diaspora,’” 47. 12. See Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg, Transnationalism: Diasporas and the Advent of a New (Dis)Order (Boston: Brill, 2009). 13. See, for example, Bano Murtuja, “The Bubble of Diaspora: Perpetuating ‘Us’ Through Sacred Ideals” in Returning (to) Communities: Theory, Culture, and



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Political Practice of the Communal, eds. Stefan Herbrechter and Michael Higgins (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006): 293–311. 14. Dufoix, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Diaspora,’” 71. 15. Dufoix, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Diaspora,’” 57. 16. Dufoix, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Diaspora,’” 54–55. 17. For a very brief discussion of diaspora’s communalization, see Haris Exertzoglou, “Reconstituting Community: Cultural Differentiation and Identity Politics in Christian Orthodox Communities during the Late Ottoman Era,” in Homelands and Diasporas: Greeks, Jews and Their Migrations, ed. Minna Rozen (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008): 137–54. 18. Dufoix, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Diaspora,’” 49–53. For a more thorough reading of diaspora’s origination and occurrences in Jewish scripture and thought, see Erich S. Gruen, “Diaspora and Homeland,” in Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity, ed. Howard Wettstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 18–46. 19. Exertzoglou, “Reconstituting Community,” 138. 20. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1951), 288. 21. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (emphasis added). 22. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 294–95. 23. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 294. 24. Khachig Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 5.1: (1996): 28. For a valuable critique of diaspora’s dehistoricized and depoliticized over-abstractedness in black cultural studies, see Brent Hayes Edwards, “Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 19.1, no. 66 (2001): 45–73. 25. Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 29. 26. Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 30. 27. Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 29. 28. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 29. Much has certainly changed favorably regarding the legal status of refugees and stateless persons since Arendt’s critique in The Origins of Totalitarianism. For a discussion of these developments’ limitations, however, see Jacques Derrida, “On Cosmopolitanism” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001): 3–26. 30. For some prominent examples, see Oxford Diasporas Programme 2011– 2015, University of Oxford, July 12, 2016; Maria Vincenza Desiderio, “Supporting Immigrant Integration in Europe? Developing the Governance for Diaspora Engagement,” Migration Policy Institute, May 2014, July 12, 2016; Jirka Taylor et al., “Mapping Diasporas in the European Union and the United States,” IZA.org, July 12, 2016; Any Freitas, “Diaspora Groups in Peace Processes: Lessons Learned and Potential Engagement by the EU,” ISS.Europa.EU, European Union Institute for Security Studies, May 29, 2012, July 12, 2016. For an overview of diaspora’s social scientific privileging as a “logic of mobility” deployed for “denunciations of nationalism,” see

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Khachig Tölölyan, “The Contemporary Discourse of Diaspora Studies,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27.3 (2007): 647–55. 31. “About Us,” MinDiaspora.am, Ministry of Diaspora of the Republic of Armenia, July 12, 2016. 32. Edwards, “Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora,” American Literary History 19, no. 3 (2007): 689–711. 33. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 34. Dufoix, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Diaspora,’” 52. 35. Dufoix, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Diaspora.’” 36. Howard Wettstein, “Coming to Terms with Exile,” in Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Experience, ed. Howard Wettstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 51. 37. Roy Rosenberg, “Exile, Mysticism, and Reality,” in Diaspora: Exile and the Contemporary Jewish Condition, ed. Étan Levine (New York: Steimatzky/Shapolsky, 1986), 37–39. 38. Wettstein, “Coming to Terms with Exile,” 52. 39. Wettstein, “Coming to Terms with Exile.” 40. Wettstein, “Coming to Terms with Exile,” 51. 41. Wettstein, “Coming to Terms with Exile.” 42. Wettstein, “Coming to Terms with Exile.” 43. Wettstein, “Coming to Terms with Exile,” 52. 44. Wettstein, “Coming to Terms with Exile,” 52–53. 45. Dufoix, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Diaspora,’” 61–63. 46. Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Shadow of Shadows,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11, no. 1 (2003): 11. 47. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 280. 48. Tessa Hoffmann, “Armenian Refugees in France Since World War I,” in The Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present, eds. Klaus J. Bade et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 237–39. 49. Maud Mandel, Armenians and Jews in the Aftermath of Genocide (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 4. 50. Mandel, Armenians and Jews in the Aftermath of Genocide, 21. 51. Mandel, Armenians and Jews in the Aftermath of Genocide, 38. 52. Mandel, Armenians and Jews in the Aftermath of Genocide, 8. 53. Krikor Beledian, Cinquante ans de littérature arménienne en France: du meme à l’autre (Paris: CNRS, 2001), 117 (emphases added). 54. David Kazanjian, “Re-flexion: Genocide in Ruins,” Discourse 33, no. 3 (2011): 384. 55. Kazanjian, “Re-flexion: Genocide in Ruins,” 385. 56. Nshan Beshigtashlian et al., “Mer Hankanagě” [“Our Manifesto”], Menk 1 (1931): 3. 57. Beshigtashlian et al., “Mer Hankanagě.”



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58. For an important discussion regarding UDHR’s Article 29 and the Robinson Crusoe debate concerning its enshrinement of human personality, see Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 45–55. 59. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 22. 60. Beshigtashlian et al., “Mer Hankanagě” [“Our Manifesto”], Menk 1, 3 (original emphases). 61. Beshigtashlian et al., “Mer Hankanagě.” 62. See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 63. For a history of the journal’s emergence and dissolution, see the authoritative study by Krikor Beledian, Cinquante ans de littérature arménienne en France: Du meme à l’autre (Paris: CNRS, 2001). 64. Shavarsh Nartuni, “Menk’, Menk’, Menk’ . . . ” [“We, We, We . . . ”], Menk 1 (1931): 39; Nigoghos Sarafian, “‘P’aravoni mě mējēn Vardi Sermer Gtan, Or mě, Hnakhuyznerě. Ts’anelov Zanonk’ Stats’an T’arm Varder. Yerku-Yerek’ Hazar Tarineru K’unē mě verj, Tsaghiknerě Bats’in Irents’ Srterě” [“Archaeologists Found Rose Seeds, One Day, in a Pharaoh. Planting Them, They Received Fresh Roses. After a Two- or Three-Thousand-Year-Old Sleep, the Flowers Opened Their Hearts”]. Menk 1 (1931): 42. 65. Nartuni, “Menk’, Menk’, Menk’ . . . ,”39. 66. Nartuni, “Menk’, Menk’, Menk’ . . . ,”40; Sarafian, “‘P’aravoni mě mējēn Vardi Sermer Gtan,” 41. 67. Sarafian, “‘P’aravoni mě mējēn Vardi Sermer Gtan,” 43. 68. Nartuni, “Menk’, Menk’, Menk’ . . . ,” 40. 69. Sarafian, “‘P’aravoni mě mējēn Vardi Sermer Gtan,” 42. 70. Sarafian, “‘P’aravoni mě mējēn Vardi Sermer Gtan,” 43. 71. Zareh Vorpuni, “Grpani Tetrak” [“Pocket Notebook”], Menk 1 (1931): 34. 72. Vorpuni, “Grpani Tetrak,” 35. 73. Vorpuni, “Grpani Tetrak.” 74. Vorpuni, “Grpani Tetrak.” 75. Arsham Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand” [“My Dear Hrant”], Menk 4–5 (1932): 180. 76. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand,” 181. 77. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand.” 78. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand.” 79. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand,” 187. 80. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand,” 81. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand,” 185. 82. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand,” 187. 83. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand.” 84. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand,” 188. 85. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand.” 86. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand.” 87. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand,” 189. 88. Dadrian, “Sirelid im Hrand.”

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89. Bedros Zaroyan, “Hatvats” [“Excerpt”], Menk 3 (1932): 252. 90. Vorpuni, “Grpani Tetrak” [“Pocket Notebook”], 35. 91. For the distinction between violence and strength, see Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970). 92. Zaroyan, “Hatvats” [“Excerpt”], 256–57. 93. Zaroyan, “Hatvats,” 258. 94. Zaroyan, “Hatvats.” 95. Zaroyan, “Hatvats.” 96. Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 2. 97. Esposito, Communitas, 6–7. 98. Esposito, Communitas, 138. 99. Esposito, Communitas. 100. Esposito, Communitas, 139–40.

Chapter 7

No State to Come Mahmut Mutman

In 1998, in two consecutive special issues dedicated to studies of the official ideology of the Turkish state, the socialist monthly Birikim described it as a “heyûlâ.”1 A heyûlâ is a specter or spook, a horrifying image constructed by the mind. But it is a sizable and paradoxically “spectacular” specter, one that overwhelms the human mind by its haunting presence, and yet to add another paradox, without any real consequence, if we follow the Turkish idiom strictly. The target of Birikim’s ingenious translation of classical Marxist rhetoric into its national context is the concept of the benevolent “Turkish state tradition,” branded by the mainstream political scientist Metin Heper, in a work with the same title.2 In another critique of this tradition, which follows its social track, Faces of the State, Yael Navaro-Yashin provided a moving reading of the popular ritual of “the soldier’s farewell”: relatives, friends, and neighbors gathered in the central bus station of the town to bid a proud and joyful farewell to their soldiers-to-be.3 While this is the only way of putting some meaning to a traumatic separation for the young men and their relatives (traumatic because of the war in the Kurdish region, not to mention simply of being enlisted in a harsh disciplinary regime), it is also one of the ways in which the most aggressive state propaganda and nationalism is daily reproduced by the real victims of it, the working poor people of shanty towns. Despite our psychoanalyses, our theories of ideology, of consent or identification, there is perhaps something that remains enigmatic in the bond that fastens the state to its people, turning it into a nation, and in nationalism, that statist construction of a people as sovereign. As if marking the riddle, the Islamist ex-prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu once said, “for me, the state is confidential [mahrem],” and his Kemalist opponent responded by emphasizing that he had the same cultivation. In context, Davutoğlu could well have 99

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said “an official state secret is sacred to me.” If he instead decided to associate the state with the concept of mahrem, which means intimacy and privacy as well as confidentiality, he might have been calculating an effect that was precisely difficult to put into words. In a reversal of meaning, the state which is the protector must also be protected as you protect your intimacy [mahrem]. The citizen addressee is surely male.4 How is the state identified with the site of the home, the familiar, the intimate, love, secrecy, and confidence, in a word, the ethical? Would this identity not require an immense violence, a violence unimaginable in its recklessness? Hasan Ali Toptaş’s recent novel Reckless is a literary investigation into the origins of sovereign violence.5 The original Turkish title Heba literally means “waste,” for the simple fact that everyone is wasted in the novel, while the English translators read the same relationship from the side of the translated language as recklessness. We are called to respond to heba, this reckless wasting, as it engulfs everything including the most sovereign violence itself in its words, its figures and its dreams, in its excessive reality felt so strongly that it becomes unreal.6 If we often observe a continuity in spite of the hostility between nationalism and Islamism, it is in the concept and institution of the state that this uncanny continuity is unfolded. Eminent scholar of the Middle East, Sami Zubaida offered a careful historical and sociological tracking of the structural link between these two competing paradigms in a number of essays.7 I will read Toptaş’s literary investigation into the origins of sovereign violence as a supplement to Sami Zubaida’s work. Toptaş’s literary sensibility enables a tracking of violence on the level of subjectivity and affectivity and allows us to achieve the necessary break with the Hegelian sittlichkeit (moral society) in all its historical variations. My further contention is that such a tracking produces discontinuity rather than contradiction. If the intimate is allegorized in and by the apparatus of the state, it is through the obliteration of the difference it embodies that the state inscribes its language of homeland or motherland. The supplementary act of critical reading of the literary must make the obliteration legible so that the author’s painstaking questioning of sovereign violence is not lost in human truth writ large, but pushed further than the frontier he avidly takes us to. THE MATTER OF VIOLENCE Toptaş offers a devastating critique of state violence in his narrative account of the military life of ordinary conscripts on the southern border of Turkey. He seems to find the roots of this sovereign violence in the culture at large,



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or perhaps in our very humanity, rather than in the state as such. The state is no doubt the most striking crystallization of it, and Toptaş does not show the slightest trace of naiveté about this, as the oppressive class nature of the state is made clear in the novel.8 But violence does not stop there. Moreover, in the final analysis, as unacceptable as violence might be, it remains enigmatic. It arises within human subjects, without any apparent reason. But its reasonlessness does not explain violence; it does not become reason for violence as if one can eliminate it by reclaiming the powers of reason. It is violence itself that is enigmatic, so much so that it appears as an answer to its very own question. A most ruthless, brutal lieutenant, who beats people for no reason, is described as follows: And then he would resume his stroll around the edges of the training ground, nodding now and again in agreement with his invisible companion, stopping here and there to kick a few soldiers. But not because they’d done anything wrong. It was almost as if he kicked them so as to understand why he did so.9

Toptaş chooses to leave us with the question. Indeed he puts the following two lines from Avni of Yenişehir, a marginalized Sufi poet of the nineteenth century, as an epigraph, an allegory of the following story in the beginning of the novel: No one has comprehended the meaning of our laws We too are wonderstruck by this meaningless cause10

I must also underline that the concept of heba is not lacking in Sufi connotations. In an Islamic theological and philosophical context, it signifies “dust,” understood as primal modality of matter (or perhaps “dark matter” in the language of modern physics) out of which the known material universe is made. If heba is both waste and a kind of creative energy, we are perhaps facing an enigma greater than that of violence. Or better put, violence is part and parcel to an enigma that involves the laws of the universe itself, especially its genesis, that is to say, the becoming-matter of the matter, its very mattering. One may speculate if Toptaş has a Sufi philosophical framing in mind, but we do not have sufficient textual evidence other than scattered signs here and there. In a more explicit reference, the novel’s last chapter, in which the protagonist Ziya is killed, is titled “Fena.”11 This is a direct reference to tasavvuf, that is, the philosophy of Sufism, as fena is the last station on the Sufi path to reach God. It refers to the annihilation of nafs, that is, self (but also breath, ego, life, spirit), which is often described as dying before death. However, none of these allusions to Sufism imply any giving up on the criticism of violence. At no point in the text does Toptaş give any sign

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of naturalizing violence, or placing and stabilizing it in a philosophical or theological explanatory framework. Does Sufism present an alternative for Toptaş? Rather it might be one way in which the riddle is thought or conceptualized. Perhaps Sufism itself is part of the enigma, another folding of it, rather than its solution or alternative to it. As a last test of this, I should also refer to another significant passage in the novel. Hulki Dede (a wise old man in the village, who is implied to be a Sufi) gives Ziya a long speech on Numan’s passionate obsession with Nesrin, who is not interested in him at all. At some point, he describes Numan as someone who fails to settle accounts with the monster inside him. Then he immediately adds, But settling accounts with the monster doesn’t mean killing it, of course. He who kills the monster inside him turns to dust.12

This last sentence is also Toptaş’s second epigraph in the beginning of the novel, taking a fictional character and his sentence out of the space of fiction, to allegorize the fiction itself. Is this the lesson of violence, Toptaş’s solution? Rather than killing the monster, Hulki Dede continues in the narrative, Numan must have talked to it and must have taught the monster to accept loss as human need, but he could not. The result is “confusing the monster’s breath with his.” But this is not so obvious as an answer. For why and how does Numan fail in the story? Further, although the similarity between the Sufi concept of nafs and the figure of the monster remains obvious, the monster is a unique literary figure.13 In fact, what Hulki Dede presents as a clear separation between two options is destabilized by the figure of the monster, which remains on the move: while he who kills the monster turns to dust, that is void, talking to the monster inside him would only take the moral person to another kind of void, the loss of love. On the one hand, the moral person has lost love at the expense of controlling violence and is left with a monster apparently subdued—yet still a monster. On the other hand, if he refuses to be moral or fails to talk with his monster, he is left with violence directing his behavior, now himself subdued to the monster. The linking of violence and love in the figure of the monster presents a paradox. Who will separate the two, which seems to have been born linked? Who is so wise or skilled as to catch the monster and keep it in proper place? A sweet old man giving advice and magically disappearing over the wall, as in the story? Might he indeed be escaping from his own monster of a figure, hurrying up to leave the scene of the paradox of a monster he produced? It is noticeable that, by choosing only the above italicized sentence from this long passage as an epigraph, Toptaş shifts the emphasis to keeping the monster inside in order to avoid turning to dust or desert.14 A decision is made, still without making it: read the story,



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which I have also allegorized for you, the author says: the question of violence is not a question of killing the monster inside you, even if it is, yes, a monster. For otherwise, why write this novel instead of simply being satisfied with such a wise saying? Although this is not meant to naturalize violence but rather to sustain the possibility of love, nothing seems to be guaranteed here. THE STORY ITSELF Time to tell the story. Our protagonist Ziya has decided to leave the big city for an idyllic life in a faraway village. His living arrangement there is made by his friend Kenan, with whom he shares horrifying memories of military duty on the southern border, where they had become close friends. The memory of his pregnant wife who died in a terror attack has also never left Ziya. The narrative begins with Ziya’s returning the key of his apartment to his landlady Binnaz. In the following chapter, Ziya remembers his childhood in a similar village. In the next two chapters, he arrives in Yazıköy and is met by his friend Kenan, who made all the living arrangements for him using the money Ziya sent. As Ziya is getting settled in his new place, we are introduced to a number of characters: Kenan, his mother, his nephew Besim, his young sister Nesrin, his close friend Kazım the Bellows Man, young Numan who is obsessed with the idea of marrying Nesrin, the wise old man Hulki Dede and others. As we get familiar with the social dynamic in a closed village, Ziya also makes long trips in the beautiful forest nearby the village, strolling in nature like a Lenz of sorts and fighting with memories haunting him.15 As those memories take him to the days of military conscription, we have a new chapter (the longest one) in which Ziya and Kenan go through a series of horrible events and experiences of sheer violence. They only manage to survive an extremely harsh and inhuman military system, where the rules are replaced by the commander’s arbitrary power, and where they have guard duty every night protecting the border from the smugglers crossing it, often getting involved in skirmishes. This is where Toptaş presents a brilliant critical account of military life and state violence. In the last two chapters, we are back in the village and events develop rather fast. Kenan is stabbed by his friend Kazım and dies. We find out that in the beginning Kenan actually borrowed money from Kazım and could not pay it back. The money sent by Ziya was not sufficient to buy and prepare a place for him. But Kenan, who felt in debt to Ziya for saving his life on the border never told this to him and acted as if all was fine. When Kazım insists that he must tell Ziya and ask for the money he must pay back to him, Kenan is upset for being forced to put into words a good deed that’s being done. (I will return to this question of moral debt and the feeling of gratitude below.)

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They get into an argument and Kazım stabs Kenan in the heat of it. This is another occasion where violence arises spontaneously and the agent finds himself suddenly in it without any understanding: And then, I have no idea how, but there in my hand was that infidel knife. It was almost as if someone had come and put it into my hand on purpose. . . . Or my hand wandered off like an animal, without my knowledge and came back with that knife. I still haven’t found a way to understand this part of it. . . . It was as if someone else had control of my hand, and it was only afterwards that I had any idea what I’d done. To tell the truth it was only after I saw blood spurting from Kenan’s leg that I’d realized what I’d done.16

Although I have said above that Toptaş never naturalizes violence, does this passage not precisely naturalize violence, constructing it as a spontaneous, instinctual emergence of an act? But in Toptaş’s text, violence is always narrated in a singular manner, which makes it radically unjustifiable. Interestingly, although Toptaş does not ignore the victim’s feelings, what makes his criticism so effective is precisely his focus on the perpetrator at the moment of violence. Violence is an event, which comes as a shock to its own agent as well. The enigma of violence is folded in its perpetrator’s shock. At the extreme, the enigma is staged, again and again, by the perpetrator to understand what violence involves, like the lieutenant who exercises it to understand why he does so.17 Following the death of Kenan, there is a serious change in the villagers’ attitude toward Ziya. His affinities toward Kenan’s family, especially the affection he expresses to Besim because he is about the same age as his unborn child, as well as Nesrin’s presence as a young, attractive, unmarried woman, give birth to all kinds of gossip and dirty rumors behind his back. The situation is further complicated by his outright rejection of Numan’s proposition that he talks with Kenan to express Numan’s wish. While Numan talks behind his back accusing him of having an affair with Nesrin and abusing Besim, the villagers imagine a multitude of scanadalous scenarios, going so far as suggesting that Ziya poisoned his friend Kenan while in fact he was in the process of healing from his deadly wound. The novel ends with a group of villagers led by Numan and his brother chasing Ziya into the forest and clubbing him to death. GRATITUDE, SECRET, KEY If reckless violence is enigmatic, appearing at one stroke, arising from within, it also seems to emerge in a world run by reciprocity or sociality, or perhaps



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their continuous failure and breakdown. What are the powers of the socius against this reckless violence? On the one hand, socius seems to be the only force to stop violence, on the other it is too weak because of the very forces and relationships that compose it. It would appear that, for Hasan Ali Toptaş, this is the world of friendship, especially of male bonding under difficult circumstances, but it is also the world of multiple forms of exchange and reciprocity that construct sociality or ethos.18 More importantly, violence is not external to these forms; on the contrary, there seems to be a specific kind of violence that accompanies social relationship. Given this, the first chapter can be read as a preamble that signals or opens the ethical problematic of the Reckless. Leaving his apartment in the city, Ziya has to return the key to the landlady Binnaz. Neither her accountant nor her maid accept the key. It must be handed over to Binnaz herself. Ziya feels that he is forced to respond to the nonsensical demand of an inaccessible bureaucratic power. But a completely different story emerges behind the distance and mysterious authority of the landlady. Although Ziya thinks he can just drop the key and leave as a free man, Binnaz demands that he sit and exchange a few words for the sake of all these years’ acquaintance. They must give and receive blessings, forgive each other any injury or hurt done knowingly or unknowingly. The return of the key seals the fair exchange, settling the deal. The ritual ending turns out to be an obligation to listen to Binnaz’s life story. Her father was killed when she was young and she had to work as a prostitute in bars all her life. One day, a customer suggests that, instead of saving her money in a box, she should buy cheap land in the outskirts of the city. She does so, and with the land gaining value over time a contractor makes an offer to build two big blocks and give one to her. This is how Binnaz becomes the rich landlady. She feels an immense gratitude for the customer who gave her the advice to buy land and looks for him everywhere to thank him in person, though to no avail. On further reflection, however, she realizes that it is not his advice that made her rich but her own years of hard work as a prostitute. That customer was a broker who must have given that advice to everyone: [A]nd that was when I remembered that that money in the chocolate box was my own. I had paid for this building with wasted youth spent hopping from lap to lap. Once I understood that, Ziya Bey, I was no longer willing to let tenants surrender their keys to my accountant when they vacated the premises. What I mean to say is that I came to see my tenants as having occupied my own lost years, and that is why I decided they should, at the very least, come and give me the key themselves.19

While talking about her hopeless search for the customer who advised her, Binnaz describes gratitude as a “terrible thing” that turns one into a slave:

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“the havoc it wreaks is something only the sufferer can understand.”20 There is then a violence that is specific to the feeling of gratitude. The question of gratitude or debt is also at stake in the relationship between Ziya and Kenan. Binnaz symbolically reappropriates her wasted youth by having everyone return the key to her. Interestingly she finds the solution when she realizes that there is no one to whom she is in debt but herself, that is, the deep feeling of gratitude she felt was nothing but her own construction, a misrecognition of her own wasted life. It is therefore imperative that she tells her story to those who lived in her building, as they must listen to it and must recognize the violence with which they have become complicit by benefiting from its result. The key the tenants return opens the narrative of her wasted youth. Surely the damage has already been done, it is irreparable. But perhaps some of it is paid back in words, in the silent confirmation of the other to whom they are addressed—is this the key to the story that follows? When Binnaz finds out that Ziya is leaving the city for the countryside, she likens his love of nature to praying and warns him by a proverb: “he who wishes to pray should also carry a stone to throw.”21 As for Kenan’s gratitude, he expresses it to Ziya by telling him that he saved his life, but he refuses to explain where, when or how. As Ziya does not remember anything, he will learn it from Kazım only after Kenan’s death. Contrary to Binnaz’s revelation of her secret, Kenan produces one. According to Kenan’s moral reasoning, which also prepares his tragic end, a person who does good is not supposed to mention it, as any mention or putting into words would be marking the act as having a special significance, and this would destroy the spontaneity and naturalness of the good-doer’s act by turning it into an artificial performance done for show or egoistic calculation. A truly good person would never speak of his or her good deed. This is why Kenan and his mother find it hard to believe that Ziya has forgotten the good he did (even though Ziya really cannot remember); his natural “modesty” elevates him even higher in their eyes.22 For them, the act of bonding that cements sociality must not be put into words, it must remain secret—though an open or public secret, as everyone who is involved knows it but refrains from articulating it. This moral certainly does not stop violence. Binnaz’s warning proves to be true in the end of the novel. While her warning was not specifically about the feeling of gratitude, she described her own experience of it as terrible, turning one into a slave. Indeed Kenan has become a slave to the gratitude he felt toward Ziya by refusing to ask for the extra money he had to borrow from Kazım. Reciprocity or friendship has collapsed on all sides; it cannot stop violence. Ziya will not find the peace he looks for in nature, as he forgets, perhaps, to carry a stone to throw. Will this stone not reproduce violence, though?



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One feels that, despite this powerful criticism, for Toptaş there must be something else that moves in the opposite direction, something that saves one from the vicious circle of exchange, or at least something that goes against its violent, slaving aspect. This is revealed in Ziya’s helping the poor Syrian dervish Mensur who mistakenly crossed the border at night and was arrested by the commander who has decided he must be a smuggler because he wanted to catch one. Ziya risks heavy punishment by feeding Mensur while tied up to a column. As Ziya frames this in terms of hospitality, the text evokes here a moment of absolute giving without expectation of return, without future.23 The possibility of ethos, of sociality, lies in the act before gratitude, that of a giving before its reciprocation in exchange, without any expectation of return—an absolute giving or gift in Derrida’s sense.24 As Derrida argues, however, any actual gift is already part of the economy of exchange for its recognition as gift means that it is reciprocated (Mensur thanks by smiling and nodding his head).25 It is this impossible act of an absolute giving that creates social bonding. By refusing to name the good deed, Kenan marks the ethical moment outside and before exchange, while his very marking cannot escape being marked (Kenan cannot not mention that there has been a good deed) and thus enters into speaking and hearing, reading and writing, that is, exchange. This is producing sociality but also simultaneously the violence of gratitude. Toptaş wants to have trust in Ziya, Kenan, and Mensur without blinding himself to violence. But, beyond his good will, there is a real surprise waiting for us in the major ethical instantiation of the narrative, Ziya’s saving Kenan’s life. The ethical moment is stranger than it looks for it is always a prior moment that happened without happening: Ziya saves Kenan’s life without expectation of return, without future, in a completely spontaneous submission to what he feels he must do, almost embodying an absolute giving. As we find out at the end of the story, however, he does not remember it because he was drunk then. Can we overlook this narrative detail, or treat it as simple causality, especially when it fits so perfectly with the lack of consciousness that seems to be demanded, at least theoretically or implicitly, as a requirement of the character of the good-doer?26 If this is the act that institutes the social bond or ethos, Toptaş’s literary wit, better than his own good intention of describing a man helping another man in need, discloses it as an act that is achieved outside consciousness, without memory. POWERS OF LITERATURE This difficulty to separate violence and sociality seems to hit us at every moment. As I have already demonstrated, Toptaş is not naïve about this, even though he never gives up criticizing violence in instances of ethics or ethos.

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How is this instantiation enabled textually, other than as a description in the text (as we have in the instance of Ziya’s helping Mensur)? Perhaps the greatest lesson of Reckless is that ethical feeling or thinking does not come from religion or the discourse of human rights as the two major contestants but from the strange fold of language we call “literature.” In the first part above, I have referred to Toptaş’s approach to violence as something that remains enigmatic in that, as a spontaneously appearing event, it happens first to the agent, who is shocked or puzzled by what he is involved in. Contrary to naturalizing violence in the sense of justifying it, this style of narrating renders it radically unjustifiable. But what is this style of narrating? I will offer examples from the second chapter, titled “The Dream.” Ziya remembers the events of his childhood, especially his shocking experience of stoning a bird. They are in the forest as a group of children, everyone with a slingshot in their hands, after birds. The first one who hits a bird is the eldest boy: He hit his target, sending it flailing to the ground. Running over to retrieve his prey, he promptly cracked his neck. For a moment he went pale. The bird’s warmth must have mixed with his own somehow, found some way to his heart, touching whatever tenderness he had left in him. Or perhaps it was the bird’s last song that had responded to his touch; perhaps it was this song that made the boy shutter. It seemed almost that he was going into shock, but then, most abruptly, the boy pulled himself up. Taking the bird by its wing, he held it up for all to see. With a nasty, pompous smirk, he tossed it high into the air.27

Once more, the focus is on the effects of the boy’s own violence on himself, his struggle to repress the message of life that still comes from the bird he has just killed. In a more striking instance that we may call literary as such, Toptaş’s criticism of violence further investigates this strange moment of the relationship between violence and its agent. From the eldest boy, we turn to Ziya: he suddenly finds himself alone in the middle of the forest, while his friends are running after birds. He sees a bird silently sitting on the branch of a tree. He watches the bird and fears that one of the boys may show up and kill it. Indeed, in the next couple of minutes a couple of boys appear and disappear through the trees, with slingshots in their hands targeting here and there. As the last one vanishes in this dreamlike scene, Ziya suddenly finds himself taking aim at the bird: That was when Ziya noticed he had raised his own catapult and taken aim at the bird. This shocked him, of course. It frightened him too. He began to tremble like never before. It was as if those boys were now inside him, running just as fast. He could hear their footsteps echoing inside him. The louder they became, the more Ziya wanted to lower his catapult, but he couldn’t. In fact, quite the



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reverse. Without even realizing he pulled back the band. Then—who knows why, or how—he loosened his grip on the leather strand and knocked the bird off its branch. As it fell, it stayed silent and serene. Only when it hit the ground, did it begin to struggle for its life. Ziya froze. Then something came over him. His ears began to roar. Throwing down the catapult, he ran towards the bird. He could hardly believe it. “May God save the poor thing.”28

If we approach this passage in terms of a first reading, we might have said that it articulates an instance of sociality that is truly uncanny. While Ziya silently watches the bird so that others will not kill it, how does he find himself involved in the same act? All of this happened as if in a dream? The chapter is titled “The Dream.” But the difference between dream and reality and the constant passing of one into the other is so vastly employed by Toptaş that after a while it loses its significance, except showing that reality itself is inseparable from dreams. What needs to be emphasized here is Toptaş’s unique problematization of violence. It finds its best and perhaps most intriguing instance in this passage. “The boys running inside Ziya” refers to the frightening power of suggestion, or suggestive influence, which, as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s seminal work has shown, led Freud to give up the method of hypnosis (to hit the same problem only in the concept of transference later).29 But the uncanny power of suggestion works on the level of the body, which must be understood in Merleau-Ponty’s terms: “insofar as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose.”30 The kind of “suggestive mimicry” in question here works by the participation of Ziya’s muscles in contraction and dilation, and in anticipation of the next move or moment, in sum, by the involvement of his body in tension (or intensity, if you like). Such a reading is incomplete, however, unless we realize that it is the folding of language, that is, literature, which can unfold it. I would like to argue that the first paragraph in the above passage is a species of free indirect discourse—a major literary device discovered by Volosinov in his classic work.31 In a highly philosophical employment of the concept, Deleuze emphasizes an aspect we can observe in the passage above.32 For Deleuze, free indirect discourse is not simply a question of the form of reporting, which involves two fully constituted subjects (the reporter and the reported): “it is rather a case of an assemblage of enunciation, carrying out two inseparable acts of subjectivation simultaneously, one of which constitutes a character in the first person, but the other of which is present at his birth and brings him onto the scene.”33 There is a division in the same subject: As soon as Ziya is

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raising his catapult and taking aim at the bird, another subject appears within him (or another enunciation within his statement), one who is witness to him. This is what Deleuze calls the “cogito of art”: “an empirical subject cannot be born into the world without simultaneously being reflected in a transcendental subject which thinks it and in which it thinks itself.”34 For Bergson, whom Deleuze quotes, this division is rather “an oscillation of the person between two points of view on himself, a hither and thither of the spirit.”35 Deleuze’s interpretation of free indirect discourse can show us the singularity of Toptaş’s literary problematization of violence: it is a problematization of violence that is free from all moralism (in spite of the author’s various references to folk wisdom), because the critical edge takes place precisely at the moment or in the experience of violence, and not simply in its consequences. As a literary (un)folding of the experience of violence, it is a criticism that does not separate itself from it, and it has no claim to transcend it. For exactly the same reason, however, that is to say because of the inseparability of violence and literature, it becomes a very powerful criticism. This is perhaps why we should talk about Toptaş’s literary audacity: the subjectivation that is produced by the experience of violence is met on its own ground. UNAVOWABLE SOVEREIGNTY As I have already said, in the chapter titled “The Border,” Toptaş makes a moving and powerful criticism of state violence but knows that this criticism cannot be limited to the state. This is why the narrative keeps turning back to various moments or experiences of violence and puts them under literary scrutiny. In a way, Toptaş’s narrative repeats the lieutenant’s move: thinking itself in a subjectivation that it has given birth to, thus effecting another in us readers. But after all is said and done, violence is not individual. One feels that, for Toptaş, no one is violent by themselves, but violence happens to them (that includes even the worst, the most evil character in the novel). Is it therefore originated in society, in the structure of social relations? This remains to be discussed. Violence can, however, take a collective form, and when it does so, no one would be able to stop it. The village community first start a rumor about Ziya and then bust into his house and lynch him at the end of the novel. Is this what Toptaş sees lying behind state violence? The most fearful violence of all, that of the community itself? We cannot say. Nevertheless, to the extent it can be read as such, I am reminded of Jacques Derrida’s disturbing formulation: “The unavowable in community is also a sovereignty that cannot but posit itself and impose itself in silence, in the unsaid.”36 If much is said about Ziya before killing him, what is said is based on the unsaid: his alleged



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illicit desire for Nesrin and Besim. This is a clear misreading in the case of the latter, as Ziya loves Besim because he sees his own lost son in him. But we are not told much about Nesrin, Kenan’s young sister. She is there but discontinuous with the story. Indeed she appears only in two occasions in the whole narrative, and does not even say more than a couple of words. While she is at the margin of the story as “an undeveloped character,” in the end she becomes one of the reasons why the villagers turn against Ziya. Rural poor and woman, hence twice removed from the center, is her presence obliterated nonetheless not a narrative requirement? Would it be an “overinterpretation” to say that she is the figure in silence, in the unsaid, one whose difference is what is unavowable in the sovereignty of the community, which is always male, always one of brothers (or sons)? Having read this incredible story of state violence, borders, debt, secret and friendship and betrayal, I still wonder what Nesrin’s story is. Will the figure in silence become another wise woman in the end, one who exchanges words for a key, like Binnaz, only after a wasted life, before a narrative she already knows too well, without the power of preventing it from happening? Who is it that must not be killed, who must be talked to? A monster? In this wasted writing of the earth named strangely “Middle East,” recklessly wasted by our states, are we not all written in her unwritten story? Let us make this then the novel’s ethical instantiation in obliteration or annihilation (fena), and turn it into a call for action: the reader, go further than the frontier this story took you to! Imagine her, imagine her response (to his brother’s death, to Ziya’s death)! What would she, the figure in silence, have said? Perhaps then, in that response, no state but a freedom to come. NOTES 1. “Official Ideology: A ‘Heyula,’” Birikim, No. 105–106, January/February 1998 and No. 107, March 1998. 2. Metin Heper, State Tradition in Turkey (Walkington: Eothen Press, 1985). 3. Yael Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 4. The opponent K. Kılıçdaroğlu actually said that he had “devlet terbiyesi”— another highly respectable expression in the language of the Turkish political-bureaucratic elite. It means “state training/morality.” Some part of this hegemonic web of meaning is exposed by Aslı Zengin in her fascinating research into prostitution and violence: İktidarın Mahremiyeti: İstanbul’da Hayat Kadınları, Seks İşçiliği ve Şiddet [Intimacy of Power: Prostitutes, Sex Workers and Violence in Istanbul] (Istanbul: Metis, 2011). Zengin explains how she could not properly conduct her research because the state apparatus, from the police to the hospital of venereal diseases, would not allow her to interview prostitutes, not even to approach them. By employing

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Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the state of exception, she demonstrates how the state renders prostitution mahrem (intimate, private) and thus a field of exception. Zengin offers a series of brilliant discussions from the ethnographic concept of field to the concept of silence. Taking this further, we may argue that the state’s rendering the field of intimacy exceptional is also valid for licit relationships. Despite the court decision, women are never protected from their violent husbands by the police. The number of murders of women is very high in Turkey. 5. Hasan Ali Toptaş, Reckless, trans. Maureen Freely and John Anglis (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015); and Heba (Istanbul: Iletişim, 2013). 6. “‘Do you know?’ said Ziya, turning to look at Resul, ‘I can’t believe that what we’re living through here is really happening.’ ‘When reality becomes too much to bear, it never does seem real’ said Resul” (Toptaş, Reckless, 246). 7. See Sami Zubaida, “Turkish Islam and National Identity,” Middle East Report, No. 199 (1996), 10–15; and especially his meticulous survey, “Islam and Nationalism: Continuities and Contradictions,” Nations and Nationalism 10, No. 4 (2004), 407–20. 8. “Which of us deserves this miserable life we’re living?” says Hayati, a private, “I’ve been here now for thirteen months, and I’ve done time in every station in the company, and I’ve met each and every one of the men working in them, but I haven’t seen a single rich boy” (Toptaş, Reckless, 205). 9. Toptaş, Reckless, 158. 10. The above is my translation of Avni’s famous lines: “Kimseler fehmetmedi manasını davamızın / Biz dahi hayranıyız dava-yı bi-manamızın.” Although my translation is probably not the best one, I believe it gives Avni’s sense better than the translators’ rendition of the verse. For, with due apologies to Maureen Freely and John Angliss, it is hard to make sense of their translation, which is so frustrating that one wonders if they have translated another text by mistake: “Why must we suffer? We search in vain / the key to this mystery, even as it consumes us.” This really has nothing to do with Avni’s words or their meaning, let alone his characteristic dark humor. Freely is Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s translator, Angliss has won a translation award. With his long sentences and vertiginous narrative, Toptaş is surely a very different species of writer. But this does not quite explain a number of mistakes, the most striking of which is in the first chapter where Binnaz says, “[W]e create a father” (“insan illaki bir baba yaratıyor” [Heba, 27]), the translators make her say “[I]t’s our father who creates us” (Reckless, 17), completely changing the meaning of the passage. The seventh chapter title is translated as “The Debt,” while the original title “Minnet” simply means “Gratitude” in English (rather than borç, which is the Turkish word for “debt”). Indeed minnet is precisely the word Toptas’s poor peasant characters would use in that context. This has some significance as we shall see below. It is also very difficult to understand why the translators insist on translating tokat as “punch” (which is yumruk in Turkish), when any dictionary would give them the simple equivalent of tokat as “slap,” and when especially in the Turkish military a commander does not usually punch a private, but they surely slap them in the face. A routine after all! 11. The translators’ choice is “Shadow” instead of a direct translation of fena as annihilation because this word is passing in the dramatic final scene: Ziya’s shadow



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watching the villagers chasing and clubbing him to death. It would have been wise to look at Sufi translations of fena in English. An obvious choice is “annihilation,” which is close to the spirit of the novel’s moral allegory (wasted, annihilated). 12. Toptaş, Reckless, 291 (my emphasis). 13. If we regard the fıgure of “monster” as a metaphor for the Sufi concept of nafs, Hulki Dede seems to offer a negotiation with the monster, while in Sufism one cannot negotiate with the monster but must kill it, make it completely ineffective. This is what the concept of fena means, the title of the last chapter in which Ziya is killed. This is his physical annihilation, even though his own soul or shadow is watching it. Toptaş seems to employ Sufi metaphors, but Sufism does not constitute an alternative or solution to the question of violence. 14. The original text says çöl, that is literally “desert,” which implies dryness of a life without passion or love. 15. I am referring to Georg Büchner’s well-known novella: Lenz, tr. Richard Sieburth (New York: Archipelago Books, 2004). I do not mean that Toptaş makes a conscious reference to the German romantic author, whose text is nevertheless considered to be a precursor of modern literature. The place of stroll in modern literature might be an interesting question in itself. 16. Toptaş, Reckless, 312. 17. Would it be too far-fetched to argue that there must be millions of unaccounted and unaccountable violences that keep happening to us, and through us every day, and that we are capable of identifying only a few, which pass a certain threshold? 18. In this respect, Toptaş is the writer of a rural community perhaps, even though he is urban and metropolitan from top to bottom. This kind of writing presents the unique formation of a “constant transfer,” to employ Victor Segalan’s well-known metaphor (this also reminds us of the director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s early work). 19. Toptaş, Reckless, 37. 20. Toptaş, Reckless, 35. 21. Toptaş, Reckless, 41. 22. As Kenan’s mother puts it to Ziya, struggling to recognize the good deed in words without naming it: “‘I just know’ she said. ‘Refined people like you are always like this, you forget your good deeds, and even if they are not forgotten, you never speak of them. So it seems you have forgotten. . . . But who knows, it could also be that you do not wish to speak of it. But in the face of such modesty, I honestly don’t know what I can say now. Let’s leave it there. The last thing I’d want to do would be to make you blush by embarrassing you needlessly. But I hope you’ll permit me to say one last thing: I know that my son owes his life to you’” (Toptaş, Reckless, 123). 23. “‘I couldn’t let you go hungry,’ he said, as he pulled back the spoon. ‘You’ve come from another country. You count as a guest. Don’t you think? Whether they know you or not, everyone in this country can count you as a guest.’ He gave him another spoonful. ‘And it’s not just the people. Every animal in this country can count you as a guest, as well. And every plant. Every fruit tree, and poplar, and every worm and every bird, and every insect” (Toptaş, Reckless, 266). 24. Jacques Derrida. Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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25. As he puts it, “A gift must never appear in a present, given the risk of its being annulled in thanks, in the symbolic, in exchange or economy, indeed of its becoming a benefit” (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf [New York: Columbia University Press, 1989], 149). 26. Nor can we ignore the details of what he did: one night Kenan had guard duty but he was very sick. Ziya took his rifle and substituted for him, putting Kenan into his own bed. During the patrol, there was a skirmish with the smugglers that went until early morning. If Kenan were on duty in his ill condition, he likely would have been killed. Thus, Ziya saved his life: an impossible substitution in the face of death. 27. Toptaş, Reckless, 53. 28. Toptaş, Reckless, 56. For those who have read the novel, obviously I am not interested at all in the role played by this bird as a “symbol” of Ziya’s wound, in its return in several instances of the narrative, and so on. 29. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, Affect (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993). 30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 511. 31. V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York and London: Seminar Press, 1973), especially chapters 3 and 4. 32. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 71–76. 33. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 73 (my emphasis). I am well aware that this is an unorthodox use of Deleuze’s approach, who deals with cinema and not literature as such. 34. Deleuze, Cinema 1. 35. Bergson as quoted in Deleuze, Cinema 1, 74. 36. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 100. Derrida’s context is the UN Security Council.

Chapter 8

Toward Language and Resistance A Breaking Manifesto rosalind hampton and Michelle Hartman

BEGINNING IN THE BREAK . . . Manifestation, manif: action, event; symptom, sign (of ailment); demonstration; protest manifaction: “a demonstration leading to an unannounced blockade or disruption of a strategic location.”1 manifest (spread) action expanding the break Breaking into capitalist temporality manifest. clear reveal, disclose, demonstrate, declare, express, evince distinct, unmistakable, patent evidence open, visible, conspicuous palpable To manifest, to break open—the opposite of obscuring, concealing to manifest, to spread to expand MANIF CHAQUE SOIR This manifesto started at a manif. That’s how people in Montreal refer to a demonstration, short for the “proper” French word, une manifestation. It is an example of ideas born from protesting and resisting, from the space created by walking in the street emptied of its daily traffic and filled with the energy 115

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and movement of masses of people. Ideas are born from the space created when people come together to claim political rights. In the spring of 2012, Québec experienced the longest student strike in Canadian and Québec history. Commonly referred to in French as the printemps erable (maple spring), a wordplay on the printemps arabe (arab spring), from February well into the summer hundreds of thousands of students and their allies took to the streets of Québec daily and nightly, an anti-austerity movement that would eventually topple the government. We walked and talked, in English and French, on demonstrations every night for more than one hundred consecutive nights, delivering on a commitment—a threat, a promise, a chant: manif chaque soir, jusqu’à la victoire (a manif every night, until we win). In Québec, language is always patently and manifestly political. We discussed politics and language and our manifesto on language and resistance is born of these manifestations of/as resistance. To manifest is to break open, to spread and to expand. This opening, as Alia Al-Saji writes, is “a non-linear opening of time, a way of holding open present and past for future inscription. This instantiates a politics of the future, where the future is not read from the present but, in its unpredictability and newness, holds the promise of reconfiguring the present.”2 What follows is a sort of manifesto for how we can use and think about resistance and language, resistance in language today and what the future—as well as the past—can offer us. Manif chaque soir At night, over night in the break A collective break, breaking, in the break

LANGUAGE, RESISTANCE, AND THE BREAK Break. disrupt the order of, interrupt, violate, transgress, rest. a chance. destroy, smash, stop, solve, exceed, surpass.

Morning manifactions and manifs de soir during the student strike were strategies for interrupting, disrupting, breaking capitalist time and business as usual. A contested tactic and form of expression within these movement strategies was minor property destruction, conceptually, visually and sonically symbolic of surpassing the bounds of what was deemed acceptable. The sound of shattering glass enters an emerging multilingual language of chanting, stomping, screaming, yelling, singing, soaring.



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However, in the politically charged context of Québec language use, interactions between Arabic, English, and French were and are complex and contested. The printemps erable/printemps arabe was more of a sonic gesture than a shared politics. Shared sounds created the links, but the solidarity of sound evinced in the erable-arabe link was shown in the end not to be deeply meaningful. This became particularly evident in the extreme, outward Islamophobia manifested in Québec the following year with the newly elected government proposing to forbid certain clothing, deemed religious, in the public workplace. How then, can we push below the sounds to the feelings of deeper solidarities? How can we take wordplay beyond words, to play a little more seriously? Historically marginalized within mainstream francophonie worldwide, and oppressed by English-language hegemony, Québécois French is the spoken language of the majority of people in Montreal and Québec. This French was the language of the strike, the language of the majority, and hence the language of the vast majority of chants, slogans, propaganda, meetings, and negotiations. French Québécois cultural, historical, political sensibilities thus framed the movement and shaped most of what it said and what was said about it. Attempting to create a new vision of society ([g]rève général illimité) activists were challenged to see and to hear one another across linguistic differences, gaps in communication, breaks in meaning. Better yet, to sit in those breaks and create new meaning. Chant: A- [break] anti- [break] anti-capitalisme! A- [break] anti- [break] anti-colonialisme! A qui le Québec? A nous le Québec (Whose Quebec? Our Quebec!) A qui le Québec? Aux Autochtones! (Whose Quebec? Indigenous peoples’!)

The sounds and repetitions of these chants harness power, power in the break. Words being worked through and worked over. Breaking is progressive, occurring over time. The repetition, tapping on and working the fault lines, breaking through, breaking in. The shift from “à nous le Québec” to “aux autochtones!” represented an attempt by some activists to move beyond their entitlement as citizens and beyond the limits of settler nationalism that characterized earlier struggles of the oppressed Québécois majority. It represented efforts to decenter settler demands, recognize Québec as colonized territory and acknowledge Indigenous Peoples’ land claims. The call and response: A qui le Québec? A nous le Québec! Tap, tap, tap

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A- , anti- , anti-colonialisme! A- , anti- , anti-colonialisme!

The response breaks: A qui le Québec? Aux Autochtones! But to break the chant is to ask a different question. Not to whom does Québec belong, conceiving of the nation state as a thing that is rightfully owned, but to imagine Québec as the people; as dynamic, fluid, ever-changing relations. Break the ideology. So it’s not about ownership, but relationality. Not: Whose Québec, but Who’s Québec. There is no property in the break. There is possibility. There is manifestation. Different ideas are expressed when we use different languages. Though we might be working through or on the same questions, or breaking (with) the same concepts, they are made different when defined through words. Languages—words and sounds—can work together to make or break a break. If language is to become resistance, it requires bending, blending, contorting . . . breaking. Why are these manipulations necessary? Because words don’t always mean the same things. As June Jordan reminds us in her examination of Black English, “languages are not interchangeable. They cannot, nor do they attempt to, communicate equal or identical thoughts, or feelings.”3 Consider the difference between rioters and casseurs (a French word that translates literally as those who break, from the verb casser). I remember the first time that I heard the word translated into simple, logical English, coming from my mother’s mouth and landing perfectly in my gut: rioters. She said she’d heard it on the news. “They aren’t rioters,” I told her, “they’re casseurs.” “So what do they do?” “Break things.” “So they riot,”’ she said. No, there’s more to it, I’ve felt it, there’s something in the air here, something is coming. I explain it to other Anglophones like this: a rioter is and can only ever be part of a riot but a casseur, well, a casseur is part of a manif, part of the physical manifestation of something.4

The strike was always breaking. Breaking from capitalist temporality, breaking with normative State-defined respectability and possibility, breaking waves of protesters flowing through the city streets. Poet Fred Moten encourages us to understand “temporal-spatial discontinuity as a generative break, one wherein action becomes possible, one in which it is our duty to linger in the name of ensemble and its performance.”5 And as long as the strike was breaking—or itself was a break—the state and government could not break it. However, as the movement increasingly reconnected to the State and its



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language—of ownership, settler nationalism, and party politics—it moved outside of the break. The spaces of possibilities opened by mass mobilization were shut down slowly as Québec saw a surge of Islamophobia in the explicitly anti-Muslim proposal, “The Charter of Quebec Values” that would ban the wearing of the hijab (as well as other religious clothing deemed “ostentatious”) for all government workers including doctors, nurses, teachers, daycare workers, and others. This was not a random connection, the strike targeted the Liberal government and replaced it with one led by the Parti Québécois, which mobilized xenophobic nationalism in its proposal of this charter, building on and exploiting the divisiveness of earlier debates about the “reasonable accommodation” of “minorities.” The superficially sonic solidarity and imagery of erable-arabe was exposed; the lack of a deeper connection was betrayed. Though the charter was indeed defeated, a Liberal government was reinstalled and there was nowhere near the collective unity and outrage amongst the Québécois. Arab-Québécois, Muslim-Québécois, and many identified as “others” are still questioning: Whose Québec? and Who’s Québec? LANGUAGE IN THE BREAK Words can fix meanings and words can resist meanings. Inside language there are also spaces between words and what they are meant to refer to; it is in these breaks that we can understand more potential spaces of resistance. Moten has carefully thought through the spaces where “words don’t go” in his philosophical inquiry into Blackness and the social-political work of the Black radical tradition through a deep examination of Black art, particularly jazz and poetry.6 He tries to understand what can and cannot be said, noting how words and sounds (screams, moans, music) function differently; that sounds are not constrained by the predetermined meanings that words carry.7 The break. The space between words, the space between signifier and signified, a space of experimentation and of the creation of new possibilities; of new sounds, new languages, new ways of knowing and being. meaning taking and meaning making ontological and epistemological residue improvisation, moans, moves, shrieks, scratches slaves jazz blues krump untamed tongues contort distort exceed the capacity of words

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BROKEN LANGUAGE AND BREAKDOWNS Breakdown: failure to function [as intended]. failure to work [how, where intended] Collapse, decompose Check the speed force intensity of: break my fall, your fall, our fall. Collapse, decompose Language Broken Language

Things that are broken may have had a breakdown—maybe they don’t work anymore. Maybe they just don’t work as expected or intended to. Maybe they don’t want to. Being broken is usually assumed to be negative, broken languages are evaluated similarly. Black American writers like James Baldwin and June Jordan have addressed these issues powerfully and eloquently since the 1970s, in relation to Black English. As Baldwin explains, “The other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.”8 Hence the creation of Black English—what Claude Brown in 1968 called “Spoken Soul.” Black people claimed and claim their breaking Black Power in this language. They resisted, refused, rebelled . . . resist, refuse, rebel: “the rules of a language are dictated by what the language must say.”9 They’re not rioters, they’re casseurs.

June Jordan’s brilliant 1971 short novel, His Own Where, is written in this powerful language of Black uprising. Reflecting on the dynamics of Black and White Englishes in a later essay, she testifies, “The problem is that we are saying language, but really dealing with power. Politics is power. Language is political. And language, its reward, currency, punishment, and/or eradication—is political in its meaning and in its consequence.”10 The other is refusing to be defined by a language that does not recognize her. Refusing to be defined by a language that brands people with blackness as wicked dirty darkness, that brands land as property; a language that understands value as capital as the center of government and governance. We need languages that can say (how) Beautiful NourbeSe Is. If not If not If Not If not in yours In whose



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In whose language Am I If not in yours In whose In whose language Am I I am If not in yours . . .11

English fails the Black woman ontologically: in whose language am I? It refuses the possibility of Black go(o)dness: in whose language am I I am? It refuses the possibility of Black beauty: If not in yours In whose In whose language Am I If not in yours Beautiful.12

In whose language (read, now that you have stolen mine)? Breaking down these ontological linguistic entrapments is the activity of those who refuse to be broken by language. Studying with Rastafari taught me (rosalind) about word-sound-power. What we say and how we say it—the sound of it—matters. It holds power, the power of life. Rastafari “Dread talk”13 is the explicit rejection of the “Proper English” imposed on the colonized and the confusion it creates through attaching meanings to words that are inaccurate or that contradict their phonetic implications. The downpressor does not uplift [as suggested in the sound of oppressor, “uppresser”]; he presses us down. We can reify relations of domination and subordination through the repeated uttering of colonizing word-sounds and ideas, hence the importance of Indigenous language revitalization as well as language creation, to express alternative experiences, ways of being and ways of knowing. The defiance of a society must include the defiance of its dominant language/s.14 Language can manifest resistance; language can be resistant; language can resist. A creative break and breaking. When we break with some of our ideas about what languages should be: word-based, cohesive, whole, universal, rational, fixed, mastering and masterable—we can understand and affirm them as always already breaking.

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“THERE IS NO POETRY IN THIS”: WHEN LIFE BREAKS After September 11, 2001, many people in New York were in a state of collapse, in a breakdown. Lives were broken and people were broken. When she “saw those buildings collapse on themselves like a broken heart,” poet Suheir Hammad cried and wrote, “[T]here is no poetry in this.”15 But the poem she sent out to a relatively small group of people on email started circulating and went viral. That’s how she came to famously perform it on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, a few months later. She testifies “there is no poetry,” but she finds language and words. They are about breaks and being broken. There is poetry in her writing on destruction and death; she mourns death while remaining focused on the living and what will need to be done to resist the United States’ inevitably forthcoming imperial incursions. Her politics is one of steadfast solidarity. i do not know how bad a life has to break in order to kill. i have never been so hungry that i willed hunger i have never been so angry as to want to control a gun over a pen. not really. even as a woman, as a palestinian, as a broken human being. never this broken.16

This poem uses language to reverse meaning, the meanings we give to broken and breaking. The broken life, the one that has killed, is written here in the present tense, the active voice, “how bad a life has to break.” Her question is not posed in the past tense, but as a present tense question. This makes it current, urgent, and general. “How bad” does it have to break? She uses vernacular English to underline a question to which we can never really have an answer. But we know to be broken it must be bad. What is in the end a critique is always posed as humble and questioning. Hammad claims that she does not know: she has never been so hungry or so angry. This means she cannot understand how hungry or how angry. But at the same time she does not know, she does know: she knows what it is to be broken, defined again in the reverse as positive. When she invokes the negative notion of being “a broken human being,” she assigns qualities to this, her being “a woman” and “a palestinian” by definition. Those two together make her “a broken human being.” This itself reverses the definition because clearly it is her being as a woman and a Palestinian that Hammad claims and manifests her power. She is broken, but never this broken.



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BREAKING GROUND, BREAKING LANGUAGE, BREAKING POEMS Cut into and turn over the surface of: break the soil Break new ground to sound like a broken record is to keep repeating the same thing, referring to scratches [hairline breaks] on records that cause the needle to jump back and repeat double, doubleback, repeat, extend the break: the breakbeat build a movement in there A broken record repeats: it skips, it extends the break. Like breaking the soil, breaking bread, and breaking new ground, the breakbeat is positive energy, movement that prepares for something new to emerge. Breaks to (re)create from pieces and residues, turning over what appears, break it down, break it open, share it build a movement in there

Suheir Hammad infuses her breaking poems with this sort of innovative breaking energy.17 Every poem is titled “break” and every poem is engaged in finding the sounds between the words, finding the breaks in the words and the languages. She uses words in Arabic to go where words in English won’t go and the reverse. She writes sounds as well as words, she makes new meanings. Her poems all operate within a politics of solidarity—created as a soundscape as much as a collection of poems. But sound solidarity here is not superficial, shared struggle is the basis for work and collective power. Sound word confusion, collusion, and breaks start in the title, “(wind) break (her)”: an item of clothing used to protect against the weather, and what the wind might do to a person. Too many allusions to explain and unpack, the break is everything in the first stanza, Arabic and English, sounds and alliteration, double and triple meanings, names and places, people and geographies, lines that stop and continue, all break. One line of this poem reads, “voice diwan detroit divine.”18 Hammad places words together here to emphasize sounds, she uses line breaks to suggest a stopping point, even as she shows lines do not stop. The words “diwan detroit divine” similarly invoke a multiplicity of meanings. A “diwan” is a place to sit or gathering, but also a collection of poetry that sounds almost identical to the English word “divine,” which recalls something that is godly, heavenly or fantastic, but also invokes seeking things under the earth. Detroit separates them, a city that is known today primarily for its majority African American population and also its large concentration of Arab American immigrant communities, as well as for being a mecca for the creation of new sounds (Motown, hip hop, house, techno). In the United

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States it is a location concretely connecting these communities. There are many more connections to make in the following lines. She uses the words “Jordan,” “black,” “June,” and “in Jerusalem.” June is a month, and it is a month in the Arab collective imagination of the devastating war of 1967 (also known as the June war). Placed so close to the word Jordan, it must also be understood as calling the name of the poet, June Jordan. Jordan is a country, and one created out of the same devastation in which Palestine was lost. The words “black june” thus describe both the poet and allude to the Black September massacres in Jordan, which recur as a theme in the poetry collection. This is made all the more prominent because it is placed near the word “sabra,” clearly invoking the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres. The shortest breaking poem, “break (me),” is instructive in how it uses breaks to work through what is broken: “ana my language always broken all/ ways lost ana my language wa.”19 Hammad’s signature use of Arabic words, with distinctive sounds particularly “wa” (and) and “ana” (I) powerfully breaks English. You understand the poem and appreciate the soundscape even if you don’t know Arabic. But if you know Arabic you can access another layer. Her language is broken, “all ways,” the word itself broken and split between lines. When read aloud, however, all ways is always and not broken, as is the phrase using “ana.” But the break allows the poem to say that her language is not always only broken but also lost. Or is she lost? Both meanings are possible in reading and speaking. The last line stands out, “i miss my people.” A short sentence at the end of the poem alludes to losing people when you lose language, people being broken as language is broken. “break (me)” comes near the end of breaking poems. So this line also invokes the people who she misses who are dead or missing throughout the poems in the collection. A- anti- anti-colonialisme, a- anti-anticolonialisme, a- anti-anticolonialisme, a- anti-anticolonialisme . . .

BREAK IT DOWN Moving from poetry to pedagogy, how might breaks work in the classroom? How could a way of teaching make use of breaks in resisting the narratives and scripts we teach and are taught? Breaking as pedagogy might work if thought of as declassification, breaking it down. We might think of breaking down roles—the roles we inhabit, the roles those we study inhabit, the categories that help us make sense of the world. To explore them and use them is part of any critical project and critical thinking skills are partly what we seek to develop in the university classroom.



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A university classroom filled with students, assigned a series of books to read about Islam and gender politics amongst other things. Two teachers, co-teachers, colleagues, and co-designers of the course. The students are assigned a work—Amina Wadud’s Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam.20 They are asked to “break it down”: what is the argument, how does she build it, what is the methodology, how does she weave the diverse parts of it together, how does the form of autobiography and who the author is tell us about her analysis and critique, especially of Qur’anic hermeneutics? In the book, Wadud does indeed break it down, in a number of ways. She not only talks explicitly about how this work breaks with her previous analysis and interpretations of the Qur’an, but also skillfully weaves a tafsir together with writing on activism and social justice, as well as her own life story and how this informs her journey as a scholar, an activist, and a Muslim. Her work breaks silences and brings diverse pieces of life and scholarship together as a larger hermeneutic project, mirroring the Qur’anic one. Thus a Black, Muslim woman scholar, a convert to Islam, writing a feminist tafsir brings all of her life story, experiences as an activist and academic, her studies and her readings, her own critical evaluations of her previous scholarship together in one long narration which is the book Inside the Gender Jihad. There is much to learn through studying Wadud’s project, especially the elements of breaking in it: pieces and particulars of lived experience are drawn together in a narration that then works in a much larger way to illuminate the study of the Qur’an. Her work is thus intimate and specific, but also has much larger implications for a feminist tafsir, as well as the Qur’an and Islam more generally. Just as Baldwin and Jordan argue Black English deserves value, so Wadud claims a value for her story. The classroom experience is always gendered. Not only did male students not appreciate two women co-teaching a course involving material on the Qur’an in the classroom, this became particularly true when that work shook their ideas. They refused, over and over again, to break out, break with or break free of their ideas about women, race, and scholarship. This perspective is interesting “because it is unique,” because there are so few Black Muslim women in academia, “her work is a one-off,” and the implication, her work can’t or doesn’t speak to me or teach me because it is “specific not universal.” A moment for teaching, pushing the male students who all agreed to try to define what universal might mean, why their experiences are universal and Wadud’s could not be led to discussion and frustration, “I just felt like her life story was noise . . . it’s noise that distracted from her academic project.” And therefore the whole project was misunderstood. Hours of discussion later, some minds remained closed. But the gendered classroom division led to more interesting breaks as well. While not all female students agreed with the book or the arguments, or felt it “spoke to them” either, none were

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willing to find it impossible, dismiss it, or call it “noise.” The work that the male students refused to engage, in many cases enabled the female students to advance their intellectual projects substantially. This was true even of those students who did not particularly agree with Wadud’s arguments about Qur’anic hermeneutics. But as the teachers attempted to break it down, look into and explore the breaks, some students were able to engage this project, but others simply refused. All of the female students showed that they could understand how Wadud was inscribing resistance in her text, the power of her own break with her past analysis of the Qur’an in particular. The male students, altogether, refused. In silent and less silent protest against being assigned this book, some male students tried to break their teachers. No one left broken, but the breaks were powerfully exposed. RECLAIMING THE POWER OF OUR LANGUAGE/S Indigenous peoples’ reclamation of their languages, the choices of all people to create and speak and write in our vernacular languages and languages of resistance, is to name ourselves and our individual and collective realities. It is to assert our word-sound-power of meaning making and being in relation with one another. We communicate through language/s, not only words and what is spoken but also what is between the words, the spaces where words don’t go. Language can be used to dominate, but it can also be used toward liberation. As South African educator Neville Alexander has argued, people must use “the power of languages against the language of power.”21 Alexander promoted the emancipatory potential of multilingualism in the context of resisting apartheid and defining post-apartheid South Africa. The creation and use of languages of resistance such as Black English in North America and Rastafari “dread talk” throughout the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora represents this same impulse toward multilingualism. The impulse, need, demand for more languages is the demand for more views, philosophies, perspectives, understandings of the world. It is a refusal of dominance. There is no “proper” language. Language is always breaking. Never a seamless cohesive whole; full of cracks and fissures and fault lines. Tap, tap, tap . . . This breaking manifesto, was begun at a manif, as a manifestation of the liberating potential we see in the breaks. Improvising in the breaks, playing in the breaks, saying and staying in the breaks. Thinking about breaks helps us see the breaks; seeing the breaks disproves the myth of a cohesive whole settled proper language and order of things.



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What’s in the breaks? Who’s in the breaks? What’s to be gained in obscuring the breaks Wherein lies the potential for seeing, hearing the breaks or their matter (they matter) at all for that matter. Languages produced through histories of dominating “know” domination. Teach them something different, seen?

Break. Who’s the black sheep? What’s the black sheep? Know not who I am, and when I’m coming, so you sleep . . .22

Speak resistance: improvised, guttural, noisy, multilingual sounds of hope and struggle. Collective, creative power. Break. NOTES 1. Collectif dix novembre, editor, “Glossary,” in This is Fucking Class War, Montreal (2014), http://thisisclasswar.info/glossary.html (accessed November 12, 2016). 2. Alia Al-Saji, “Creating Possibility: The Time of the Quebec Student Movement,” Theory & Event 15, no. 3 (2012). 3. June Jordan, “Black English/ White English: The Politics of Translation (1972),” in Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 66. 4. Margaret Fraser, “Section Introduction: Casseurs,” in This Is Fucking Class War, edited by Collectif dix novembre, Montreal (2014), http://thisisclasswar.info/ casseurs.html (accessed November 12, 2016). 5. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 99. 6. Moten, In the Break. See also Charles Henry Rowell and Fred Moten, “Words Don’t Go There: An Interview with Fred Moten,” Callaloo 27, no. 4 (2004): 954–66. 7. Moten, In the Break, 41–42. 8. James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” New York Times, July 29, 1979. 9. Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language.” 10. June Jordan, “Black English/ White English: The Politics of Translation (1972),” in Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 72. 11. M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), 26. 12. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, 27.

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13. Velma Pollard, Dread Talk: The Language of the Rastafári (McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2000). 14. Rex M. Nettleford, Caribbean Cultural Identity: The Case of Jamaica: An Essay in Cultural Dynamics (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1978), 18. 15. Suheir Hammad, “first writing since,” in September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter (Melbourne: Spinifex, 2002), 4. 16. Suheir Hammad, “first writing since,” 89. 17. Suheir Hammad, breaking poems (New York: Cypher, 2008). 18. Hammad, breaking poems, 16. 19. Hammad, breaking poems, 51. 20. Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (London: Oneworld, 2006). 21. Brigitta Busch, Lucijan Busch and Karen Press, eds., Interviews with Neville Alexander: The Power of Languages against the Language of Power (Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Busch, 2014). 22. Black Sheep, “The Choice Is Yours (Revisited),” A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (Mercury Records 1991).

Part III

TEXT AND AESTHETICS: LITERATURE, POETRY, AND ART

Chapter 9

The 10-Point Nahdah Manifesto Stephen Sheehi

Over the past decade, there has been a return to the Arab nineteenth century in cultural studies of the Middle East. Theoretically informed and critical readers of the nineteenth-century Arab world have appeared, producing critical works that move beyond the Houranian paradigm, which sees al-nahdah al’arabiyah, or Arab Renaissance, as the century of importing “enlightenment” and liberal ideals.1 This chapter is not an amendment of these recent works. It is a manifesto. It refuses to debate. This manifesto speaks of al-nahdah demonstratively, yet critically, theoretically, yet empirically, without losing the topic (al-nahdah and its afterlives) in the self-indulgence and self-important onanism that accompanies “theory” and that threatens to deterritorialize “nahdah studies” within a mode of analysis that is useless if divorced from the politics of Arab history, cultural economy, and contemporary reality. Radical psychoanalytic theory, post-structuralism, Marxism, semiotics, queer theory, radical gender theory, and postcolonial theory are all essential to critically analyze al-nahdah, however, not at the threat of making the nahdah itself irrelevant. This manifesto, then, is a series of ten demonstrative assertions that define the “deep space” of al-nahdah, approaching it through multiple dimensions that interact with one another at any given point. The manifesto is not linear. Within the deep space of the nahdah, the points are rhizomatic, interrelated, and interconnected, defined in relation to each other. They are dialectical inasmuch as they act on each other within various degrees of intensity, within asymmetries of power, and scale at any given moment. The points are as follows:

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I. Al-nahdah less as an actual moment of originality and spontaneity than as an event (évênement).2 The “colonial encounter” and introduction of “liberal ideals” constitute much of this moment, empirically and epistemologically. But, this is not to say that ideals and concepts were “imported.” The nahdah-as-event is a moment of “suture,” a multivalent era suturing emergent subjectivities to material conditions that birthed them. It is an era where subjectivities come into being, into visibility, in the “event” of capitalist regularization of political economies, social hierarchies, and their concomitant individualist, parochial, and national subjectivities. We must re-center our thinking of al-nahdah as this suture of historical materialism and epistemology where subjects then enact their own being and identity as natural. In this regard, we must see all articulations within the nahdah (by intellectuals, craftsmen, politicians, clergy, etc.) as ideological enunciations and that these enunciations are material and discursive facts in the sense of Vico’s verum factum, where facts are true because they are made (i.e., constructed through articulation, practice, and thought). The relationship between political economy, social practice, emergent subjectivities, and ideology must remain the focus point of our approach to the nineteenth-century Arab world because they structure the subsequent century of thinking, acting, and reacting in the Arab world. The nahdah is an event, an era, a concept, and a historical fact. Collectively, intellectuals, compradors, entrepreneurs, workers and peasants, craftsmen and artisans, educators and students, clergies, bureaucrats, the “new men and women” of Ottoman Arab provinces, and all of those who opposed them, conceptualized the historical moment and their respective societies in terms of past, present, and future in relation to other eras that are, often, conterminously defined or recoded (i.e., the “Abbasid era,” “the classical era,” etc.).3 As an era, however, its beginnings and ends are unclear and should remain as such. The history of al-nahdah was already being written by the beginning of the twentieth century. Jurji Zaydan praised the “first nahdah” under Muhammad Ali and his project of building state institutions and for the production and reproduction of modern and classical knowledge. Philip Al-Tarrazi was writing the history of the Arab “press” by the 1910s.4 Articles about the history of schools and presses as well as the biographies of “nahdah pioneers” filled journals. Two decades after World War One, George Antonious would write the Arab Awakening, which punctuated a series of nahdah “afterlives” that continued from Mahmud Mukhtar’s statue in Cairo in 1928 to Jaridat al-Nahdah, Antun Saadah’s Syrian National Socialist Party’s official organ to the Tunisian “Islamist” political party.



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II. The nahdah is about modernity. It is modernity. This modernity is hegemonic. It is the beginning of Arab modernity. It is autogenetic and self-motivated. Even colonial mimesis is self-motivated. It cannot be separated from Ottoman modernity or its Ottoman context just as it cannot be divorced from the colonial designs of the West, the introduction of capitalism and emersion into the world capitalist system, the rearrangement of indigenous political economies, the creation of new social and political hierarchies, the destruction of others, and the recoding of others. There is no alternate modernity in the Arab world. Should we provincialize modernity? Absolutely. However, in the case of the Arab world, the intersection of modernities between Europe and the Middle East is not coincidental nor should it be seen as overdetermined and blind mimicry. The repetition within modernity speaks to its force and its ability to exact violence through consent and self-mutilation as much as coercion. Modernity is modernities. This is not a wordplay or some radical, Chakrabartian reassessment of modernity. It is the nature of modernity. Modernity is universal and universalizing not because it is, but because it wipes out and feeds on difference. As modernity identifies itself as a universal, within universal time, teleology, and history, it is constituted by (and, therefore, all modernities partake in) some particular form of shared characteristics: radical shifts in definitions of self, subjectivity, and the appearance of a particular sort of psyche (as mapped by psychoanalysis); capitalist restructuring of political economies; shifts of value and commodity production and the nature of land ownership and private property; the relation between the governed and their government, subjects and rulers, and the appearance of a particular notion of political rights and citizenship; the restructuring communitarianism based on the rise of an individualist subjectivity that is folded into new collectives, most prominent of which is parochial, sectarian and/or nationalist identities; and the mediation of new social relations between individuals, communities, elites, social structures, and governmental infrastructure that are mediated by new forms of power and market relations. But also, modernity is constituted, in Europe and North America as readily as Southwest Asia, by the imminence of its own failures, lack, and difference as well as its need to carry these failures and its own backward otherness along with it. (This is not to mention Bruno Latour’s critique of modernity’s impossible distinction and separation between nature and society.5) Just as all subjects are constituted by a lack and constituted by, on a social and/or psychic level, an Other, all modernity is about lack and failure. Al-nahdah is constitutive of its own lack (manqué), always bound to define itself through the

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ever-presence of its society’s perennial “backwardness” and social and cultural decay (al-takhalluf and al-inhitat) in relation to its own proleptic ideals of “progress and civilization” (al-taqaddum wal-tamaddun). This is not to say that the meanings of these words meant the same to all people but they certainly resonated between men and women in the Arab world and in Europe, who shared a particular nomenclature of modernity. That said, the nahdah is modernity and, within that modernity, new social groups adopted particular positions that were contrary to one another (e.g., the role of religion, both Christianity and Islam, in society, the prominence of consumer production and consumption in defining the self, the role of women, etc.) thereby making modernity not consistent within communities that championed it. III. The nahdah is a matter of political economy. It is about the reorganization of economic means of production, about the transformation of capital, the radical possibilities of capital surplus, and the reorganization of society to accommodate and naturalize a capitalist mode of production. We know the degree to which the political economy of Greater Syria and Egypt was transformed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. We acknowledge the important positivist work on land tenure, political economy, and feudal elites done in the past.6 Many fine histories have been written over the past two decades noting the materiality of changing modes of power in relation to the transformation of political economy.7 In this regard, the focus on disciplinary techniques and new regimes of power along with their concomitant social discourses must be understood within their materialist histories, within relation to the appearance, disappearance, and restructuring of various social groups as emerging from a reorganizing of economic production. IV. The nahdah is about epistemology. It is constituted by epistemological ruptures and shifts. All nahdah thought, from al-Tahtawi and Khayr al-din al-Tunisi to Butrus al-Bustani, Ali Mubarak, and Jurji Zaydan, to Shibli Shummayil and Farah Antun, to Muhammad ‘Abduh, Rashid Rida, and ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Qabbani, was rooted in a positivist, rationalist view of the world and Arab society. Nahdah intellectuals inhabited a number of intellectual and political positions.8 These positions may even have changed throughout their lives. However, crudely put, all nahdah activity was articulated through an epistemology that disenchanted and rationalized society, self, culture, history,



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and the world. This is not to exclude experience, which itself was folded into ways of interpreting the transformations under way. Nor is this an assertion that somehow understands that “secularism” is a fait accompli and all thought was “secular.” However, the epistemology underlying the transformations in political economy expressed itself in the naturalness of “reform discourse” that gave clear vision to the means by which the Ottoman Arab world had to “progress.”9 These epistemological shifts were violent. They worked to eviscerate competing lived experiences and thought processes. Nahdah epistemology was hegemonic and uncontested. The backwardness of the Ottoman Arab provinces was not disputed and the nahdah as an era of cultural “regeneration” and “awakening” still remains the dominant mode of understanding the period in the Arab world. As such, progress and civilization, its priorities and the criteria for modernity, remain unchallenged as fundamentally natural and timeless. This is not to say that the violence of this universalizing epistemological reorganization of self and society did not displace other modes of thought and practice. V. Al-nahdah is constituted by economic transformations that necessitated epistemological shifts to make these transformations natural, if not desired. From these shifts, we have the nahdah itself, which, inevitably, came to us through intellectual production. While Arab-Ottoman modernity was autogenetic, it was not created by nahdah intellectuals. Arab intellectuals did not “imagine” a nation and subjectivity that would then become inhabited. They did not “invent” a nation to be populated by Arabs, Syrians, or Egyptians. They were producers but only in terms of their labor. Arab intellectuals, women and men, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, were interlocutors for the material and social changes. Arab intellectuals defined formulas for social, cultural, political, and religious renewal and “reform.” These formulae were predicated on a system of signification that cuts across all nahdah writing and social-political positions, moving the subject from backward to modern via a number of critical steps and movements that are social, intellectual, cultural, and political in nature. The system of signification, accompanied by multiple forms of visual and discursive representation, naturalized and made logical a particular sociopolitical and subjective process: the ideal native subject’s personal effort and love of knowledge will lead to unity and concord (al-ittihad wal-ulfah), which, in turn, brings about progress and civilization. It is not coincidental that, despite their drastic geographic, cultural, and religious differences, Khayr al-din al-Tunisi, Butrus

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al-Bustani, and al-Tahtawi all articulated an incredibly similar formula for cultural renewal and this formula remains remarkably unchanged for decades. The formula posits the redress for cultural and social decay, ignorance, and fanaticism through the need for generating a desire for knowledge among their compatriots by expanding the means for the production, reproduction, and dissemination of, fundamentally, secular forms of knowledge (schools, presses, newspapers, and journals), which, in turn, creates new, native subjects, who work for national unity, concord, and welfare. Whether through a literate readership or oral transmission in public and private spaces, print media immersed new readers into a world of politics, current events, humanist knowledge, scientific developments, and social commentary, and, eventually, new visual culture. Journals, for example, familiarized readers with the most technical aspects of photography, the history of Egypt, the rigors and necessity of women’s education, great historical figures, phenology, and innumerable other topics that defined the natural and social world in which these readers qua subjects lived. Intellectuals did not produce nahdah modernity. They standardized it. They gave it a language (and particular nomenclature). They made it legible, recognizable, logical, and natural. Therefore, intellectual production did not provide or create an “imagined” community or nation. The narrative “exists only as a system for constructing possible statements,” or énoncé, within epistemologies awaiting articulation in performative, illocutionary acts.10 Intellectuals did not bring subjectivities into the world but brought them into comprehensible visibility and into a narrative, while, conversely, coding that which was antithetical to nahdah priorities and ideals as “backward.” In this regard, we remember that the nahdah was an epistemological rupture concomitant with tectonic shifts in political economy that reverberated through the social. Understanding this, we understand the era as one of violence: epistemological, social, psychological, and economic. Every illocutionary act of an intellectual, whether Islamist, salafi, secular, Ottomanist, Arabist, or sectarian, made sense of these changes. Nahdah writing never shied away from identifying the contradictions and challenges in achieving the formula of “civilization and progress”: keeping consumerism at bay, the destruction of indigenous industries, the loss of “authenticity” (be it cultural or religious), and the degradation and/or displacement of Arabic. They couched these challenges always within their civilizing mission. In the event of suturing fragments of new material realities to new subjectivity sensibilities, nahdah intellectuals were mediators of violence (state violence, epistemological violence, social violence, class and economic violence, cultural violence, etc.). Nahdah intellectuals mediated the violent material, social, and epistemological effects of the social shifts undergirding economy transformation. Their civilizational and subjective formulas for “success” (najah) and



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reform (islah) and their social and cultural discourses named transformations and, in doing so, naturalized them. The repetition and volume of themes, language, paradigms, and values found in the massive number of journals, newspapers, and other nahdah writing and production (including photography and visual culture) serve as a constant redress to the violence at the heart of these social, economic, and subjective shifts. VI. Al-nahdah is about ideology.11 Nahdah intellectuals mediated the social transformations of the day. They were interlocutors for the epistemology of modernity and the political economy, for the new subjectivities (individualist, communal, national, gender, etc.) that were emerging from these processes and the new social groups (classes), which these subjects formed. As such, nahdah intellectuals were ideological actors. They were class agents.12 These classes might not have been fully formed. The debate to which such classes took shape is under way. The answer is, of course, they did. But those “social groups,” as Gramsci called them, might not always align with the fantasy of unified classes in the West. That said, nahdah intellectuals were organic intellectuals not of subaltern classes (not to say that such intellectuals did not exist) but of newly emergent groups, often grouped together, if not misleading and homogenizing, as the effendiyah. These new groups of teachers, bureaucrats, petit fonctionnaires, clerks, secretaries, nurses, medical doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs and compradors, cultivated relationships and, if at times jostled with, old political elites and new economic elites, the Ottoman state, the Khedives, al-’ulema, and local churches. Just because they might have been organic intellectuals and class agents, does not mean that all nahdah intellectuals worked for the same class and ideological ends. Sarruf, Nimr, and Zaydan’s shared belief in the free-market and anti-communism stands in contrast to Shibli Shumayyil, Farah Antun, and even Salim al-Bustani. Abduh and Rida’s relationship to the state, even British rule, was not always consistent. On the other end, certain Khedives and ruling elites often patronized oppositional intellectuals (e.g., Y’qub Sannu’) while other intellectuals squarely aligned with Ottoman reformers, if not receiving funding from them (e.g., Butrus al-Bustani). More often than not, state intellectuals were left out in the cold or had to negotiate the changing political forces exerted by these old and new elites and social groups. Ali Mubarak is a keen example. Nahdah writing and activism were essential ideological statements that helped negotiate Syro-Lebanese and Egyptian societies’ immersion into capitalism, assuage the violence of deterritorialization, define codes of conduct, naturalize social and economic processes, provide instruction for new social

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relations, and define the relationship between the new individualist subject (who identified him/herself as a national subject) with the “natural” world and universal history. This ideology, in its many afterlives and paradigms, enframes modernity and postmodernity today in the Middle East. VII. The nahdah is about interpellation. It is about ideology. This ideology is hegemonic. As ideological enunciations, therefore, al-nahdah writing served to interpellate the subject into modernity and its concomitant social relations (between certain classes, between genders, between individuals, between citizen and government, as homo economicus, etc.). Nahdah ideology “hailed” (in Althusser’s words) its subjects, calling them into visibility and performance.13 It named them as Syrian, Arab, Egyptian, Ottoman, civilized, learned, moral, and/or modern. Nahdah writing served to hail and insert the new subject into the social spaces that were being created by economic and epistemological changes. Of course, first and foremost, the figure of the intellectual and the abna’ al-watan (compatriots or “sons of the nation”) best represents this hailing, where virtually all nahdah writing directly names or is directed to this “subject.” In hailing the subject, the nahdah intellectual made this subject “true,” “real,” and natural. Nahdah reform of Arabic “liberated” the language and writing as a site of power that it had not been. Language became the site for subjective formation, regularized by an aesthetic that was transparent and vacated of ontologies beyond its field of representation, performativity, and communicative reach. The signification system of the nahdah that they invoked unfolded a language that was immediately understandable. Indeed, language itself remained a contentious topic and one central to al-nahdah, but the signification system remained largely accepted.14 That is, the best means to communicate this signification with clarity and force (e.g., the language debates of the time) remained a topic of debate, but never the system of signification itself. As such, nahdah writing was a verum factum; it created a priori facts that were fundamentally “true” by merit of hailing those subject into being as natural. VIII. The nahdah is about subjectivity. Much has been made of the nation, nationalism, and modern national subjectivity. Perhaps too much, as Prasenjit Duara contends.15 The fact remains that the language of the nahdah is one



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that repetitively references national subjectivity; Ottoman-Syrian, Egyptian, and, yes, Arab. Sectarian identities won out in many states, notably Lebanon. This has yet to be acknowledged at the level of material reality because the national identity, which Syro-Lebanese nahdah intellectuals imagined, to put it bluntly, largely lost in Lebanon. While Arab identity undergirds much of Lebanese identity, it remains, across the board, largely exclusionist and parochial. That said, the nahdah speaks of Arab identity. Many have debated and discussed the existence of the concept “Arab.” Arab identity (and representation) emerged in the nineteenth century as the master narrative by which micro- and macro-subjectivities could be articulated. Of course, it comes to be fully formed by World War I. It is undeniable that Arab intellectuals in Arab capitals (including Cairo and Alexandria, Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut, and Jerusalem) are speaking of themselves ethnically as Arab, as Arabic speakers, and as sharing a common history that reaches back to and beyond the rise of Islam. Arab intellectuals talk of “al-ummah al-’arabiyah.”16 Perhaps this is a case of the après-coup, the afterward that is imprinted on history. It goes back to the relationship between signification, representation, and ideology. Still, the Arab is resurrected, hailed, and called into being as an intricate part of modernity that cannot be denied but is, perhaps rightfully, by those who take issue with Arab nationalism’s subsequent failings and those who have and continue to invoke it in order to maintain oppressive regimes and repress non-Arab native populations (notably, Berbers, Kurds, Turkoman, etc.). Arab meant Arab. It is and was a political stance and identity. However, it relied on the rise of a particular kind of individual, monadic psycho-sensibility, which is folded over into a collective identity that is asked to identify with a particular history, language, geography, and cultural or religious practice. Some may call this antecedent subject formation bourgeois individualism. Perhaps, more importantly, it is the rise of an ‘aql (esprit/mind) and nafas (psyche) that constitute the individual, which precedes and anticipates communal identities—a subjectivity that is particular to the modern moment, one that is imbibed with rights that are endowed by his or her very existence, not by God or Sultan. If we speak of subjectivities in the nahdah, we speak of national identities but also of the rise of class identities, sectarian identities, and gendered subjectivities. In this regard, subjectivities must be understood within the realm of ideology along with the process of identification, where new subjects identify with communal identities by linking and then sublimating their individuality to larger social configurations (ordered, named, and made natural by the nahdah intellectual). Gender, indeed, further complicates the individualist subjectivity. Gender remains at the center of all national, sectarian, and class identities because the “modern” nahdah woman is individuated in such a way that returns her to a fundamental unit of social

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reproduction (educated women create educated children, orderly houses reflect and create orderliness of society’s most fundamental social unit, the family).17 IX. When we discuss the nahdah, modernity, its imperious epistemology and vision of society, and its individualist subject that lays ready to join and sublimate its energies to the nation, we speak of the manifest content of nahdah ideology and its writing. There are no alternate modernities in the Arab world. There is only Arab modernity that expresses itself through a given language grafted onto the hegemony of nahdah ideology. However, this is not to say that there is no alterity to Ottoman Arab modernity. The nahdah has its latent content. The suture between subjectivities, social configurations, and economic formations displaces previous formations, practices, and subjectivities. The latent is all that was demonized by the nahdah formula, criteria, ideals, and priorities. It is that which was made abject by “civilization and progress.” Subjectivities, histories, narratives, and dominant visions of al-nahdah have alterities and have alternative histories.18 The history of workers, of ideologies (e.g., anarchism), or of communal visions (Ottoman constitutionalism) are alternative histories but not necessarily alterity. Alterity is that which is displaced, haunting, arcane, and uncanny. It reemerges and is ever present but not easily metabolized by local modernities. It is not coincidental that so much early fiction, such as that of Salim al-Bustani, narrates the struggle of “native sons and daughters” with pirates, lawless Bedouins, criminal elements, wicked uncles and aunts, debased lascivious aristocrats, and corrupt officials.19 The Islamic State (ISIS) may be seen as the return of alterity in the nahdah’s afterlife. X. The nahdah naturalized a particular form of aesthetic. This took form in language, literature and writing, social space, art, architecture, and visual culture. The aesthetic made visible that which should be denigrated and elevated. It introduced rules of order, beauty, and clarity and identified chaos as vile. It allowed language to be a means of communication that could clearly depict what was natural without being blurred by Arabic’s self-consciousness and self-awareness. It is through this new aesthetic that nahdah ideology could “hail” or interpellate modern subjectivities, while simultaneously locating the nahdah subject in aestheticized literary, cultural, social, ontological,



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and temporal spaces of the modern. Arab intellectuals did speak of al-jamal (beauty) or fann al-jamal (aesthetics), but aesthetics was more prevalently discussed in terms of dhawq (taste).20 Civilization, Khalil Khuri reminded his readership, is founded on the dissemination of knowledge (al-’ilm) that creates the sound judgment/taste (al-dhawq al-salim) within individuals and the masses in order to elevate them to a level of human dignity not previously enjoyed.21 DECOLONIZING NAHDAH In 1974, Mahdi ‘Amil notes that the post-1967 “crisis” of Arab culture was not a civilizational crisis originating in intellectual malaise, historical failures of modernizing thought and Arab “development,” and/or a loss of “authenticity.” The latter theories were propagated by a number of liberal and left-wing intellectuals in the decade following the crushing defeat of the June War, exemplified in the 1974 “Kuwait Conference” on the “Crisis in the Development and Civilization of the Arab Nation.”22 The divergent theories expressed at this conference all share an interest in finding failure within the intellectual and cultural trajectory of the Arab world since al-nahdah al-’arabiyah through the Nasserist era. Specifically critiquing the paradigms emerging from the Kuwait conference, ‘Amil states that the contemporary “crisis” is not one of “Arab civilization” but it is a “crisis” of the bourgeoisie and their hold on Arab societies and politics.23 He notes the “crisis” in civilization, and what we would call today “modernity,” is one that is inbuilt as a crisis of the bourgeoisie, brought on by the contradictions of capitalism and its bourgeois model of the nation and its class structure. He observes that past is not only present in the current moment but the present is found always also in the past. Equally importantly, he locates this crisis not exclusively as one of the Arab world or “Arab civilization” but within a Hegelian dialectic found fundamental to the logic and system of capitalism itself. Arab intellectuals have been commenting and responding to this “crisis” since the nahdah; it was generative of the nahdah. Is then Arab nahdah a product of a wound? Was it birthed by a wound—a wound of colonial modernity, capitalist deterritorialization, and epistemological rupture? To understand the nahdah calls for more than a historical or intellectual study, a study of a social practice, a gender, a singular class, or a genre. It calls for a method of decolonization. Such a method aims not to recover a phantasmic socius, a desperately desired, lost, or displaced selfhood. It is a search for methods that probe, if not only through association and representational reconstruction, the latent histories of the manifest present and its surfaces. These methods acknowledge lost selfhoods are only knowable through their

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fragments, which themselves come to us through the filter of an alienated selfhood that is our own but also double, as Abdelkebir Khatibi has shown us. The first step in developing a decolonizing method is an understanding that our Arab selves are birthed and rebirthed by crisis, a crisis that is both by our own hand and one foisted upon us through decades of the violence, exploitation, dispossession, dehumanization, and self-cannibalization imposed and enforced by colonialists, imperialists, native oligarchies, dictators and tyrants, and their colluding elites and subalterns. Decolonization is the fleshing out, remembering, conjuring, indicting, tending to, accounting of, and, perhaps, even enjoying the wound; the wound that becomes the operative and generative mediating, but never sacrosanct, place and force for truly alternate subjectivities. Decolonization is not a project of healing nor can it aspire to something that can be completed. It is a constant act of righteous anger and love, a perpetual working through of a birthing that is as self-inflicted as it was imposed. Decolonization allows us to approach the nahdah as a wound that is indistinguishable from what we call identity. This wound is the beginning of an uninterrupted crisis, which we should not mourn, eulogize, venerate, fetishize, or celebrate. It is a social fact that allows us to see that wounds bind us to other wounded peoples, other nahdahs, other crises, other événement, other collusions, and other struggles. The wound poses us against the master-UR-self (i.e., “Western Self”), forcing us to realize it inside of us and constitutive of us. As such, it is also a fulcrum for us to productively wound the Ur-Self, to expose it as a construct, vulnerable, anxious, and always in crisis; to make it accountable for its asymmetries; to reveal how it itself has been organized by violence, and built itself on its own lack (the lack of the Master projected onto the lack of the slave, introjected into our ontology and making of our Self). In doing so, their wound and our wound (the colonizing self/Same and the colonized self/Other) would bring us together in a shared history and future to co-destroy, re-engineer, and create new forms of subjectivity. This possibility of the future is new as the perennial crisis that defines modernity. It is the future potentiality that the nahdah always proleptically and impossibly promised but never fully realized due to its avoidance of acknowledging its own alienation. In 1906, Farah Antun moved his struggling journal, al-Jami’ah, to New York City. Disaffected, politically and socially alienated from his intellectual and class community in Egypt and Beirut, his reason for moving the journal to New York was crisis. In his inaugural edition from the United States, he writes of his depression, disappointment, and his hope. While “enchanted by the East, in Syria and Egypt and elsewhere, we are in a small, weak country, where civics (madiniyah) has not yet been realized. . . . For that reason, we are forced, for the time



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being, to confront the Europeans and to look at their scientific, cultural, and social accomplishments (atharihim) with the eye of a student who looks at the accomplishments of his professor. Al-Jami’ah is managing to go into the heart of refined civility (madiniyah) so as to become acquainted with the headwaters of the great river there rather than wait for its waters to flow downstream and arrive here.”24 Socialist Farah, dejected, alienated, yet always righteous, saw the cracks, asymmetries, and promises of “progress and civilization” and the nahdah project. The journal failed too in New York as it had in Alexandria. Antun returned to Egypt, ekeing a life out, largely, as translator and failed playwright, ostracized by his Syrian and Egyptian cohort, only to die at forty-eight years old. Yet, this pioneer Arab socialist understood that decolonizing was a logical implication of an indigenous madaniyah (civics, civility). Decolonizing the nahdah is not a new project. It is inbuilt into the very modernity of al-nahdah, into its hegemony, and contained within its ideology. If capitalism creates its own gravediggers, as Marx suggests, modernity, coloniality, and the nahdah itself contain their own liberatory promises of decolonization. But actualization of this decolonization does not come suddenly or cheaply. It cannot be achieved through projections of fantasies, externalities to capitalist epistemologies, delusions of recoverable identities, denials of identifications, and permissiveness to indigenous forms of fascism (that accompany all modernities). Nor does decolonization come without self-indictment, self-incrimination, or self-love. NOTES 1. See Stephen Sheehi, The Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Kamran Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe (London: Routledge, 2007); Elliot Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Shaden Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seduction of Translation in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Tarek El-Ariss, Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Effects and the New Political (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Jeff Sacks, Iterations of Loss (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); and Samah Salim, The Novel and Rural Imaginary 1880–1985 (New York: Routledge/Curzon, 2004). 2. For the concept of event, see See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltman (London: Continuum, 2006). 3. For the idea of “new men and women,” see Stephen Sheehi, Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography 1860–1910 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), which develops Peter Gran’s idea of “new men” in Rise of the Rich: A New View of Modern History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 60–61.

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4. See Viscount Philippe de Tarrazi, Tarikh al-sahafah al-‘arabiyah (Beirut: alMatba’ah al-adabiyah, 1913). 5. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 6. Many important studies on land tenure and economic transformations in the Middle East during the nineteenth century have been written; for example, see Kenneth Cuno’s study that ends the year of the Khedival land reform, The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); or Dina Rizk Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 1540–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For an interesting micro-examination in the contexts of Jordan, see Eugene Rogan’s Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan 1850–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 75–94. Likewise, for a critical reevaluation of property relations during the nineteenth century, see New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, ed. Roger Owen (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). The classic works, mostly compilations, still remain valuable, including Land Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East, ed. Tarif Khalidi (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1984); The Economic History of the Middle East, 1800–1914, ed. Charles Issawi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Ehud Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy 1800–1914 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002); and Resat Kesaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy: The Nineteenth Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). 7. For some examples, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California, 1991) and Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005). 8. For one collection of studies on these various positions, see The Making of the Arab Intellectual: Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood, ed. Diyala Hamzah (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). 9. For some studies, see Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University, 2007) and Maria Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 10. Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2013), 96. 11. See Stephen Sheehi, “Toward a Critical Theory of al-Nahdah: Epistemology, Ideology, Capital,” Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 43, no. 2–3 (2012), 269–98. 12. For a microstudy of how nahdah intellectuals served as class agents, see Stephen Sheehi, “Butrus al-Bustani: Syria’s Ideologue of the Age,” in Origins of Syrian Nationhood, ed. Adel Beshara (London: Routledge, 2011), 57–78. 13. For one example, see Stephen Sheehi, “Hailing the Modern Arab Muslim: alKawakibi and Stabilizing al-Nahdah,” Alif, vol. 37, special issue on “Literature and Journalism of al-Nahdah,” ed. Hala Halim (forthcoming). 14. See, for an example, Sacks, Iterations of Loss; Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe; and Abdulrazzak Patel, “Language Reform



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and Controversy in the Nahdah: al-Shartuni’s Position as a Grammarian in Sahm,” Journal of Semitic Studies, vol. LV, no. 2 (Autumn 2010), 508–38. 15. Prasenjit Duara, “Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When,” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny, eds., Becoming National (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 16. See, as an example, “al-ummah al-‘arabiyah” in al-Jinan 1:22 (1870), 686–87. 17. See Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation (Berkeley: University of California, 2005) and Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied (Berkeley: University of California, 2001). 18. For some studies about alternative histories, John Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds of Egypt 1863–1914 (Albany: SUNY, 2004); Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California, 1995); Akram and Antoine Khater, “Assaf: A Peasant of Mount Lebanon,” and Sherry Vatter, “Journeymen Textile Weavers in Nineteenth-Century Damascus: A Collective Biography,” in Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East, eds. Edmund Burke and Nejde Yaghoubian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Cairo: American University of Cairo, 1998); Michael Gaspar, The Power of Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 19. See the figure of the Bedouin in Salim al-Bustani’s Huyam fil-Sham (1870) and Budur (1872). 20. For one excellent article on “taste,” see Toufoul Abou-Hodeib, “Taste and Class in Late Ottoman Beirut,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 43 (2011): 475–92. 21. Khalil Khuri, “al-Tamaddun,” Hadiqat al-akhbar 28, 5-F17 (July 1858); reproduced in Sharbil Daghir (Charbel Dagher), al-‘Arabiyah wal-tamaddun fi ishtibah al`alaqat bayn al-nahdah wa al-muthakafah wa al-hadathah [Arabism and Civilization in the Suspicious Relationship between the Nahdah, Intellectuals, and Modernity] (Beirut: Dar al-nahar, 2008), 13. 22. Issa Boullata wrote about this conference in Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990). 23. Mahdi ‘Amil, Azmeh al-hadarah al-‘arabiyah am azmeh al-burjwaziyah al‘arabiyah (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1974 [8th edition, 2013]). 24. Farah Antun, “Tadhkar initial al-Jami’ah: Manshur al-intiqal min Misr, kitab wada’ wa kitab shukr,” Qasiditan vol. 6, no. 1 (July 1), 1906 (10 Jumad 1324), 24.

Chapter 10

The Aesthetic Imperative History Poeticized Huda Fakhreddine

The modern in Arabic poetry was not born under the Western gaze. As in any literary tradition, the history of Arabic poetry (and literature) is punctuated with moments of revolting against the poetic past, of molding it into the unexpected, from the seven pre-Islamic poems, to the Quran, to the unprecedented rhetorical inventions of the Abbasid poets. It is under the Western gaze, however, that “Modernism” in Arabic poetry came to see itself, capitalized and bracketed, not as a linguistic poetic phenomenon but as a cultural aspiration. Modernism in the Arabic poetry of the twentieth century became a lens, an outsider’s lens, which could expose flaws not only in the poetic tradition of the Arabs but in their very culture, their very identity.1 To become modern no longer meant to be renewed, revitalized, revised, revolutionized; it has come to mean becoming different, different from oneself, becoming an “other.” Through the lens of Western critical theory, modernism in Arabic poetry, as it is in other “peripheral”2 poetic traditions, is seen as a literary tradition’s, if not a whole culture’s, desire to be saved from itself. There are many distortions/illusions that dictate this perspective on Arabic poetry in the world today including the all-too-exhausted binaries of Old and New, Self and Other, East and West. These same distortions play a role in creating the image or self-image of all poetic traditions that are considered “nascent” or “emergent.” Regardless of how far back a poetic tradition’s roots extend, “nascent” or “emergent” in this context means visible or becoming visible from the perspective of the more dominant participants in the paradigm of world literature. In this context, we cannot ignore the history of colonialism and the role it plays in assigning power and prestige to literary traditions in a postcolonial world. Much of the available scholarship, in Arabic and in other languages, has us under the impression that modern Arabic poetry is haunted, plagued even, 147

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by a pressing need to achieve “contemporaneity with world literature.”3 This need to become of the present and not an antique of times past is one of the main challenges criticism and academic scholarship have set for modern Arabic poetry. Even when we detect poets escaping this view in their poetic projects, we still find it central to the approaches adopted in studying the Arabic modernist project, both in the Arab world and outside of it. Striving to envision a path for Arabic poetry toward the present, aspiring to help it catch up with “World Literature,” a caravan that seems to have set out without it, critics and scholars scrambled to invent a fitting history for this poetry; a trajectory that reflects English, French, and other traditions that succeeded in achieving “modernism.” This envisioned journey toward modernism is not only scripted, following the cues of Western experiences, but is also imagined under duress. So much appears to be at stake beyond the poetic and literary. The development is portrayed as a whole culture’s quest for relevance; as a struggle to avert a crisis of culture, a crisis of identity. The first half of the twentieth century is portrayed as a compact NeoClassical period preceding cramped pre-Romantic and Romantic periods, with a rushed Symbolism on the side, followed by a hurried, albeit deliberate and effortful theoretical phase that led to the first “modern” Arabic poems, the first Free Verse poems in 1947.4 All poetic events that occurred before this time line of progression toward “modernism” are relegated to the “classical.” This is not the same category of timeless “classics,” which every poetic present is compelled to reclaim,5 but the old and the outdated “classical,” which must be overcome. In the light of this imposed periodization of Arabic literature, the study of the modern is therefore veered in one of two seemingly opposite directions: one that looks forward (a code word meaning westward) for influences and models, and another that looks backward for points of variance or departure. As a result of this, the modern poetic forms (the freeverse poem and the prose poem) are often viewed in opposition to the Arabic literary tradition: as rebellions or reactions, or even as means of escape. We can describe the modern Arabic poem (or poems) and we can juxtapose it and compare it, but rarely do we engage it on a rhetorical or aesthetic or even poetic level. Beyond the declared break from the Arabic poetic tradition, whose most obvious manifestation is abandoning the classical meters, criticism on modern Arabic poetry still hasn’t answered the basic question about the “new” or “free” poems: why is this poetry modern and how? It hasn’t answered this question beyond the claim that this is poetry written with the intention and the strong desire to be modern. This willingness to submit to an outsider’s imperative seems to intercede on behalf of the collective Arabic poetic effort to become modern. “Modernism” as a borrowed lens, and not as a tradition’s “private exaltations and self-absorbed refinements,”6 has created the myth of a monolithic



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faceless tradition, trapped in our restrictive understanding of the Arabic poetic forms We often overlook the fact that there are multiple varied stains of Arabic poetic modernism, and that the poetic forms they produced have existed in conversation and in contrast with each other from the very beginning. More pressing than responding to outside influences or announcing a break with the tradition, the proliferations of the Arabic modernist project were primarily motivated by distinguishing themselves from each other. One can point to several positions and directions within this large experiment, each presenting an agenda and imagined trajectory for the modern Arabic poem. The two most visible manifestations of the modern poem in Arabic are the free-verse poem (qasidat al-tafʿila) and the prose poem (qasidat al nathr), and even within these two categories one can trace many schools or trends. Nevertheless, the landscape of this ongoing Arabic poetic project is flattened and ironed out to uphold two imagined categories, the “modern” and the “classical.” These categories and the narrative they propagate require a poetic tradition that is perpetually ancient and with no present—and, needless to say, no future. Ironically, once modern Arab poets turn their backs on their tradition, once they jump the fence of classical meters, whether through variation, distortion, or complete abandonment, their poetic tradition becomes completely irrelevant in the new world that has taken them in. Under the imperatives of constructed and highly ideological paradigms such as “World Literature,” scholars see Arab poets as modern without a tradition behind them but rather a tradition ahead of them, more contemporary and modern than they are; a borrowed tradition they have to catch up with. Even when gestures are made toward the tradition in our study of the modern, they are only made from an outsider’s vantage point, which is capable of realizing that Abū Tammām could have been a Mallarmé and Abū Nawwās a Baudelaire.7 Our first misstep, as students and scholars of modern Arabic poetry is that we have been trained to understand Arab modernism as the beginning of an era but not the end of one.8 Every age rewrites its poetic tradition for its own purposes. Rarely is a whole tradition dismissed as hindering or irrelevant as in the case of non-Western traditions such as Arabic at the turn of the twentieth century. These non-Western modernisms are perceived in their early stages not as revolts against or discontinuities with their traditions but rather as attempts at voiding these traditions and the relationship with them. And, a void, unlike a discontinuity that may later be reconnected, is inert absence.9 An absented tradition cannot be influenced, it can only be replaced. The void this imposed perspective creates will continue to haunt our views of poetry in “area studies” today. We have been conditioned, by curricula, syllabi, titles of academic positions, and imagined poetic histories to see these poetic traditions as perpetually of the past or as effortful struggles to escape that past.

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We have not yet reconciled with the fact that these traditions have pasts and presents and futures that will not necessarily squarely fit into our rubrics and our time lines. The study of modernism as an American or European brand imported by the “emergent” and “developing” traditions is to be transformed into a study of “modernisms” that do not all necessarily sound, feel, or direct themselves in the same way. This is a study of modernism that has to begin by liberating itself from the myths of evolution perpetuated by histories of literature. We should resist the historical approach to these “nascent” poetic traditions, for history has its obvious biases toward them. Instead, I would say that every great poem is in itself the end of an era, the culmination of a poetic experience and a transformation of a whole tradition. Didn’t ʽAntara, the historically early poet, see himself at the end of time wondering at what he could possibly say since poets hadn’t left a patch of poetry un-mended?10 Didn’t al-Mutanabbī and after him al-Ma’arrī, feel that they were living the old age of time and its senility?11 How else can a poet bring about a new era in a language’s imagination, if he or she did not see themselves and their poems as a collapse of past and present and signaling of what is to come? This is the moment Eliot described as the “present moment of the past,”12 a moment that is no longer one of consecutive stations in a line of progression but rather a moment from which time radiates in all directions. This is the very moment in which a poet stands at the intersection of beginnings and ends, and all of time radiates out of the poem. This is a view of history as history in the wake of the poem, best described by the following line by the Abbasid poet Abū Tammām: Of a beauty for which tomorrow yearns and for which yesterday avidly longs.13

This line changes the directionality of time. There is no time before or after the poem; both future and past yearn for that moment in the present that brings them together, collapsing them into each other. In the verse above, both “tomorrow” (al-ghad) and “yesterday” (al-ams) are stimulated and moved to action by beauty. The poetic event is what dictates the direction of time in this context. Unlike the historical imperative, the aesthetic imperative, as Abū Tammām shows us, can reconfigure poetry’s relationship to history, poeticizing history, if I may say, in resistance of the overwhelming historicization of poetry. It is worth noting in this regard that Arab poets writing today are heirs to a generation that has undergone many phases of introspection and selfexamination. Many of the naïve reductive assumptions or adoptions of the binaries such as East and West, Old and New, and even the meaning of what



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the modern is in relation to historical precedence or antecedence have been revisited. In fact one of the most prevalent characteristics of the modernist movement in Arabic poetry today is an exaggerated consciousness of the failings or shortcoming that afflicted its early phases.14 What remains in need of reconfiguring and self-examining is our view as scholars of Arab modernism, especially scholars looking in from the outside. Understanding why or how Arabic poetry is modern is a course of study that must not only engage the Arabic literary tradition as we are beginning to see in recent works. It must also be motivated by a genuine interest in it and sincere subscription to its relevance. This probably applies to all literary traditions but in the case of Arabic poetry it is more pronounced. While it may be possible for the scholar and translator of modern Arabic narrative forms, such as the novel and the short story, to be happy with the imagined division of “modern” and “classical,” seeing it as a relief from having to concern him or herself with “the classical,” the scholar and translator of Arabic poetry would be most deluded to think that possible. Of course I would never want to be understood as saying that Arabic poetry is in some fundamental way bound to its past or that it cannot be appreciated without knowledge or expertise in its ancient distant roots. If imagining modern Arabic poetry as merely the imported outsider’s imperative is reductive, it is equally reductive to insist on viewing all Arabic poetic practices in the shadow of the qaṣīda (the metrical and mono-rhyme master-Arabic poetic structure that dominated Arabic poetry since pre-Islamic times). This relativizes the achievements of any poetic movement and those of its individual poets and thereby undermines them. However, the necessary first step is resisting the essentializing view of the qaṣīda. This is a view that flattens the Arabic qaṣīda and with it all of the Arabic poetic tradition and portrays it as overly monotonous and single-minded. It is not the qaṣīda boasting its opaqueness, its untranslatability, and its italics that concerns us here, but the qaṣīda, the Arabic poem, that perpetually resonant and ever-changing poetic voice, that rings through the shells of rhymes, meters, stanzas, hemistiches, and feet. It is the qaṣīda, the Arabic poem that surprises and baffles; the Arabic poem, which, can pick up its skirts of meters and rhymes and dance to the rhythm of the times, as Ibn al-Mu’tazz reminds us: Do not be suspicious if I don’t make sense to you, for it is to the rhythms of time that I dance.15

The qaṣīda, which should concern us as readers, poets, and critics of modern Arabic poetry, is not the old Arabic poem of the past, but the forever new Arabic poem of the past that transforms the past into a necessary dimension

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of the present. It is not a matter of a diachronic or synchronic view of the life of Arabic poetry. The life of poetry is a single thickened textured moment, forever present and forever expanding in all directions. Attempting to study pre-Islamic poetry, for example, without arriving at it from our vantage point of the present of Arabic poetry today is like somebody holding on to a pot of gold at the bottom of a well with no means of making it relevant to the outside world at all. Similarly claiming to specialize in the modern without an intimate knowledge, if not love for the Arabic literary tradition is as impossible as standing in the mouth of the well suspended in midair. The old and the new in the study of poetry do not merely speak to and depend on each other across time or in opposition to it; they in fact only exist in the present poetic moment; they only exist in each other’s wake. Understanding why and how Arabic poetry can be modern begins by recreating the thickened present moment of Arabic poetry in our work as critics and scholars. This is a moment in which the modern Arabic poem cannot have meaning as difference or change but rather as transformation; transformation of something before it, something which is now just as present, urgent, and meaningful as it is. Some have claimed that to be considered modern, an Arab poet, as is the case for poets of other “nascent literatures,” has to prove himself or herself an active participant in Western literatures and thought.16 If that were true why do we only imagine the modern Arab poet entering this arena to participate unequipped, stripped of the context that gives meaning to his or her modernism beyond adaptation or emulation? Thinking of the participation of Arabic poetry in Western literatures brings up the issue of translation and translatability. In Arabic, the poem can speak for itself and it is the reader’s responsibility to listen to the entirety of its voice, but in translation the voice of the poem is not all carried across. Our translations of modern Arabic poetry should aim at that distant meaning, the meaning the poem acquires from its context and the poetic landscape it grows into and out of. Even if we decide to explore the original and creative turns that translation/interpretation can take when one decides to de-contextualize or de-territorialize a text or poem, shouldn’t we first acquaint ourselves with the context before we abandon it? A translator can only tap into the creative potentials a poem can have in translation when she sees herself as a student of a whole tradition and not as the creator of figures or works of choice. Just as the modern poem is a transformation of the whole of its native tradition, we must imagine the translated poem as a transformation of the whole of its target tradition. The effort to imagine roots for the translated poem in its target language will result in layered, textured translations that make meaningful connections and pave the way for a vibrant conversation between languages and cultural in their wake. Even if the end results are



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always going to be lacking, the effort to make them complete is enough to transform what we do from translation of poetry into translation as poetry, where translation becomes one of the many disclosures of poetry. The translators of “peripheral” modernisms can no longer inhabit liminal positions in the two poetic traditions they engage but rather should strive to occupy a larger space of intersection that harkens to the core of both traditions. We are in need of translations of Arabic poetry that provoke the target literature they are translated into, creating a “happy fruitful commerce”17 in which a modern poem and its translation are allowed to be consequential transformations of our sense of meaning, form, language, and even time. NOTES 1. Adūnīs, Al-Shiʽriyyah al-ʽArabiyyah, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1989), 81. 2. Itamar Evan-Zohar uses the adjectives “young,” “weak,” and “peripheral” to describe literatures in which translated literature occupies a central position. A literary tradition finds itself in such a position when it is witnessing crises, transitions, vacuums, and when it has an imbalanced view of itself. The image of these literatures is more easily rewritten in translation in a manner compatible with the imperatives of the “stronger” literatures that receive them. This refers to an imbalance in these literary poly-systems between the indigenous and the alien. This is a situation congruent with the manner in which Arabic literature (and particularly Arabic poetry) in the twentieth century is often portrayed. See Evan-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Poly-System,” in Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 200–1. 3. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Preface to Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), xxiv. 4. For example, see the trajectories toward modernism delineated in the following works: M. M. Badawi, A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 1975); and Paul Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006). 5. J. Stetkevych, “Arabism and Arabic Literature” in Arabic Poetry and Orientalism, ed. Walid Khazendar (Oxford: St. John’s College Research Center, 2002), 21. 6. J. Stetkevych, The Hunt in Arabic Poetry: From Heroic to Lyric to Metapoetic (South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 2015), 14. 7. Adūnīs, Al-Shiʽriyyah al-ʽArabiyyah, 87. 8. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), 22. 9. Edward Said, “The Palestinian Experience,” in The Edward Said Reader, eds. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (New York: Vantage Books, 2000), 22. 10. Husayn b. Aḥmad Al-Zawzanī, Sharḥ al-Mu‛allaqāt al-Sab‛ (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, n.d), 191.

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11. ʽAbd al-Raḥmān al-Barqūqī, Sharḥ Dīwān al-Mutannabī (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-‛Arabī, 1986), 4:296 and Abū al-ʽAlā’ al-Maʽarrī, Dīwān lūzūm mā lā yalzam, ed. Kamāl al-Yāzijī (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1992), 1:338. 12. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the individual talent,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1932), 11. 13. Abū Tammām, Diwān Abī Tammām, ed. Muḥyī al-Dīn Ṣubhʽī, (Beirut: Dār Sādīr, 1997), 1:362. This line comes from a praise poem dedicated to al-Ḥasan b. Wahab. I argue that regardless of his subject matter, which in this case is the patron, the subtext of much of Abu Tammām’s poetry is meditation on poetry itself. 14. For example, see Adūnīs et al., al-Bayānāt (Bahrain: Usrat al-Udabā’ wa al-Kitāb, 1993); Adūnīs, “al-Irtidād,” Al-Ḥayāt Newspaper, April 7, 1994; and Mohammad Bannīs, Al-Hadāthah al-Maʽṭubah (Tunis: Dār Tūbqāl, 2012). 15. Ibn al-Muʽtazz, Dīwān Ibn al-Muʽtazz (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, n.d.), 444. 16. Adnan Haydar, “What Is Modern about Modern Arabic Poetry,” Al-’Arabiyya 14 (1981), 52. 17. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translations of the “Thousand and One Nights,” in Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 94–108.

Chapter 11

A Vocabulary for the Impersonal A Notebook from Shiraz Setrag Manoukian

While doing research in Shiraz in the summer of 2014, an acquaintance told me he had found a blue notebook on the steps of the mausoleum of the poet Sa‘di on the northwestern outskirts of the city. He could not decipher the handwriting in Latin script covering the pages of the lined notebook, and showed it to me in the hope that I could read the script, or at least tell him in what language it was written. The notebook contains a mélange of annotations in alphabetical order, written mostly in Italian, with passages in English, French, and Persian. Between one entry and the next there are several white pages, as if the writer expected to add more lines, or include additional entries. The title of the entries does not always match the theme of the lines that follow. All this demonstrates the provisional character of the notes. Most likely, the writer lost or left the notebook while visiting Sa‘di’s mausoleum the day my acquaintance picked it up. In an age of overproduction, one might speculate about the relevance of making this Shiraz notebook public, especially in print. Moreover, if this edited collection has to engage outsider imperatives, how outsider is a notebook written in Latin script—the script of the insiders of this world—and how imperative is a notebook that contains no real call for action but a set of introvert notes? These objections notwithstanding, the notes are worthy of discussion because they seem to imperfectly capture something about the edited collection’s mandate to envision alternative methodologies in the current study of the non-West. The notebook’s vocabulary aims to displace what Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito—one of the points of reference of these notes—termed the paradigm of the person.1 In Esposito’s view, personhood is the dominant premise of contemporary conceptual debates, the globally shared and unquestioned value that permeates discussions about politics, law, and 155

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ethics. At stake are the failures of the language of human rights, and the sacralization of life as the last bio-political frontier, but also the effects of a bifurcation between, on one side, a volitional dimension of humans and, on the other side, an immediately biological body. Reworking many themes familiar to readers of Giorgio Agamben,2 Esposito provides a critique of this separation between the cultural and the biological, drawing on a trajectory of French thought particularly interested in the impersonal.3 As the term impersonal implies, these approaches do not deny the relevance of the person, but work to dislodge its sovereignty by opening up some venues for alternative trajectories. In a similar move, the notebook envisages an impersonal approach in which the split between an autonomous volitional core and a set of bodily and material circumstances is neutralized through a series of encounters (poetry, carpets, but also people and places) leading to new kinds of knowledge and experiences. These encounters, what the notebook calls anecdotes, are also inevitably reflections on writing and language, in a vein not altogether different from Barthes’s lectures on the neutral.4 A central theme of the notebook is an effort to go beyond representation, both in the political sense and in the compositional one, but also beyond recognition as the principal modality of restoring dignity. There is no gain, not even a therapeutic one, in being recognized, or in recognizing oneself. Shiraz, and Iran more generally, are the immediate contexts for the elaboration of this argument, but the notebook is oriented toward a broader reach. What follows is a transcript of the notebook. All non-English passages have been translated, except in a few cases where it was deemed relevant to leave the original word or sentence. All parentheses and italics are as in the notebook. The title and the endnotes are editorial. The endnotes cite the works that the notebook makes reference to. The press’s Manuscript Preparation Guidelines made it difficult to reproduce the actual layout of the notebook, but all efforts have been made to convey the provisional character of these pages. I thank the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for making this research and the editing of the notebook possible. Amateurs (It. Amanti) Professionals never make mistakes. They start from the beginning and proceed systematically, following the rules of their discipline. They know their field of operation, and are interested in cultivating a portion of said field that has not yet been studied in detail. Professionals do not look outside: they can only work within what is already known. Knowledge of a field is what defines them as professionals. Professionals are about self-cultivation: they



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care about themselves as bounded and cultivated persons circumscribed by their field (and their CVs). Amateurs make mistakes. They know some of the things they are interested in, but ignore others, because they keep moving out of a field: they understand the rules of operation of a specific field, but are not concerned with attending to them. They are not too serious, and not “engaged” at all. They do not do it on purpose. Simply, they start in the middle and keep changing concerns as they move along. Amateurs get in touch with the unknown. They do not aim to cultivate a plot of knowledge; instead they try to develop a relationship with what cannot be known. They often forget about themselves: they do not matter. Their efforts are rarely published in accredited journals, and they never receive research grants, because their propositions cannot fit the criteria of valuation and certification needed in those circles. For these reasons, amateurs are easily dismissed, and it is difficult to listen to what they have to say. They rarely write, and when they do, their statements might sound naïve, factually wrong, or conceptually weak. And yet, only amateurs are able to see what professionals will never see. Of course we live in a world of professionals, and it is impossible not to deal with them [who can claim not to ever be professional in relation to knowledge? Only a few, and they are unknown, unnamable—those that can be named are named because of their professionalism]. We are all professionals, so this is no easy binary, no alternative between good and evil. I will have to make clear that this contrast between professionals and amateurs is strictly figural. The distinction does not refer to individuals who would be either one or the other. These are two modalities of relating to knowledge. Another way of saying it: professionals are about morality. Amateurs are about ethics. What I am trying to say is that an amateur (conceived not as a person, but as a relationship to knowledge) is what I mean by the impersonal: a relationship with non-knowledge. Anthropology gets close to this notion of amateurism. Apart from the most narrow-minded, anthropologists are never going to be able to claim mastery over what they study (especially in relation to the supreme professionals, the readers of texts). Insofar as it is possible for them to even identify an object of research, this object escapes in all directions in such a way that only a mobile approach can make sense of it, and mobility is by default amateurish. You never know exactly where you are going, and how you are moving. This is the only viable definition of ethnography, the so-called method of the so-called discipline of anthropology: let’s call it anthropo-graphy as Val Daniel suggested. (Because of its fraught past, present, and total absence of any foreseeable future, anthropology cannot be redeemed: so there is no risk that anthropology could be celebrated or posited as a safe ground, as a politically and epistemologically sound point of the departure—anthropology is

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viable precisely because it is intrinsically problematic: there is no possible illusion. But is this not the case for any theory or methodology? Who would dare claim a safe ground?) Amateurs usually get intellectual genealogies wrong: they do not know who said what; they do not know if what they say has been said before (most likely it has—who can claim to say something that has not been said?). Is this mysticism? Maybe, but a mysticism of the here and now. A mysticism of micrological epiphanies. (I remember a conversation with Armando Salvatore about this.)5 How else would you establish a relationship with this otherwise foreign monument, so alien to the poetry of Sa‘di that it is supposed to represent, and yet inhabited by people (young and old) and nature (trees, water, birds) in a way that enables the force of the poet and the poetry to pierce through the institutional, commemorative, and soon to be commodified character of the place, and weave a meaningful texture into it?6 Is this not what everyone/nobody (personne Fr.) is looking for? A way to connect with what one is surrounded with that disarms institutional professionalism and capitalist accumulation? [Capitalism is also amateurish, and this is where things get challenging: it appropriates objects as it goes along, and changes its rules of operation on the way. Capitalism has become so akin to life itself that it is almost impossible to conceptualize something outside of it.] The usual attitude of those who produce knowledge about non-Western locales for Western audiences has been to push for maximizing professionalism, possibly for defensive reasons. In order to be taken seriously by their Western-minded colleagues, they strive to demonstrate the value of whatever they are presenting by abiding to the utmost requirements of the field: obey the rules of operation (transliteration first of all!), follow the latest trends, be theoretically au pair. They assume that this is the only viable approach to fight against Islamophobia, Iranophobia, and any other form of unequal distribution of recognition. However, the rejection of amateurism, and its penchant for unrepressed desire, has fenced off any relationship with the non-knowledge that these encounters might trigger. In this way, the non-West becomes just like the rest: a field of knowledge as any other. All leveled: erase desire, erase non-knowledge, cultivate a plot—whether it’s 1789 or 1979, Paris or Shiraz, it does not matter. Place and time are just coordinates that indicate the location of research. But is this the solution? Would the disappearance of desire and the chastising of amateurism grant the recognition professionals of the south aspire to? Answer: No—there is no need for recognition. No need to understand and explain everything. Amateurs look for a different kind of existence. The impersonal favors Pier Paolo Pasolini (Scritti Corsari) over Edward Said (Representations of the Intellectuals, chapter on professionals and amateurs).7



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Anecdotes The old Shirazi poet Houshang Hekmati came to the door with a book in his hands.8 He said: this is for you, for you the foreigner, so that you will translate it. He sat and stared at the courtyard with faraway eyes and told his story while reading poems. How poetry had saved him from his disquieting visions, which eventually were diagnosed as caused by a schizophrenic personality. Poetry had given him an impersonal language to inhabit. Sitting on a bench, the poet read his verses, almost paraphrases of his model Hafez. His poems have no sign of self (-expression): they are just poems; similar to other poems that have been written for centuries, and yet they are poems that allowed Hekmati to enter into a certain relationship with (non) knowledge: Joyous the moment (dam) they made me drink two sips from the cup of knowledge, rewarding my wakeful nights of weeping, and my sleepy dawns of sighing.

The foreigner wrote down the poet’s words, but also wanted to inscribe the light in the courtyard, the birds, the refraction of the poet’s voice, and his laughing grin accompanying the gesture of drinking from a cup. It was impossible to separate the experience of one of these things from the others: without the rest, the lines of poetry on the notebook’s pages seemed orphaned and meaningless. Discarded as amateurish and nonrepresentative, anecdotes—tales of practical action—are one of the few written forms that can articulate the force of the impersonal, at once asserting and denying the power of language to effect situations. Anyone who read Sa‘di’s Golestan admits that there is no moral to its short stories, no general norm that can be deduced from them: no stable meaning attributed to their language.9 On the contrary, anecdotes are a concatenation of statements that have the potential to be activated only in relation to specific circumstances. Not applied to the circumstances, nor productive of the circumstances either. Instead, anecdotes enter in a certain relation with the circumstances in which they are activated. Dam, is the breath, and therefore short, little; a short time, and thus the moment, the fleeting moment. An event is like a single breath, and it is already the assemblage of several things at once (voice of the poet, colors in the courtyard, trees, birds, gestures). This is what I would like the impersonal to mean. The impersonal is a protracted amateurish anecdote. No worries if anecdotes have been dismissed as oriental for at least three hundred years: Jean Lévi is right about their microworld—they make up a self-contained assemblage that speaks via conceptual characters and opens up questions more than provides answers.10 One could also say that anecdote is just another term for myth. Reactivate Giambattista

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Vico’s ideas about impersonal creativity: visions and metaphors as founding acts of imaginative reasoning.11 Vico thought that poetic language was the necessary form of reasoning before humans invented concepts. Poetry was the imperfect but potent means through which humans started making sense of their surroundings. Is this not also the position of the anthropographer? But when translation starts, all the poetry fades away into a process of recognition, a move into knowledge, and its familiar signposts, and nothing seems to count more than recognizing others as persons. Carpets A red milieu, crossed by blue triangular waves: they mark a pattern on the inside, and an opposite pattern on the outside. A yellowish-brown line, on one end turning itself in a spiral, and on the other end extending into a white square partitioned in four smaller blue squares. A fish swimming with its tail interlaced with another fish swimming with its tail interlaced with another fish swimming with its tail interlaced. Many imagine orientalism to be nothing but a Persian carpet in a European middle-class living room, squeezed between the sofa and the fireplace, with a coffee table in its midst. The task of the amateur is to rescue this thing called the carpet from its double abjection: as an emblem of class distinction, and as an emblem of orientalism. The rescue does not imply a return to the supposed original meaning of a carpet, nor does it entail a rejection of its signifier and the desires it triggers. Instead the idea is to provide a different vocabulary to acknowledge desire rather than chastise it (desire is another term for the unknown, no? What captures you without a known cause?). Abstraction is the domain of the impersonal. In a carpet you see how abstraction is an impersonal form of life. A repetitive/non-repetitive pattern unsettles the expectations of perfect order while defying disorder. (Avoid giving the impression that order and disorder stand in opposition to each other: this is the problem of using the terms desire/codification). Carpets are forms of life insofar as they are plateaus of interconnections that come to terms with a set of repeated patterns in variation. Morton Feldman played this.12 Marks’s path-breaking book analyzed this logic of enfoldment that undergirds what she calls “Islamic art”: carpets are the emblems of these forms.13 Thinking about the impersonal via carpets also helps discussing the question of attribution. Describing carpets as impersonal has nothing to do with the argument that the anonymity of the weavers obscures their exploitation. If weavers were to be named and turned into artists, their destiny would not be different. Certainly it is crucial to reclaim their identity. Certainly it is important to realize that women weaved these carpets; women put to work



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by their fathers, brothers and husbands; women underpaid and exploited. I have seen their tears when they recognize a carpet they wove years earlier. But one would have to understand the conditions of such reclaiming. Don’t we live in a world where unnamed victims are named only in order to be recaptured in someone else’s name? The exploitation of exploited bodies. The celebration of their authenticity is used to elicit affective reactions that are just other forms of domination. Even with the best intention, recognizing identities is not going to necessarily restore dignity. When Esposito questions the paradigm of the person, via Simone Weil and others, he shows how the mechanism of the person has become an operation of power, not redemption. Sitting in this walled garden in the early morning, suddenly all the stereotypes make sense, they are not faded pictures on a trade magazine forgotten on a street corner, its pages crippled by the rain and the sun. Stereotypes become bright images through which carpets and a lot more begin to make sense. You see the branches of the trees interweaving, the leaves, the occasional flowers, the rectangular pond and the vases around it, the walls framing the whole set on the side, the sky sealing it above. You see this and you see carpets. So is this what it is? It Comes When It Comes The other day I went to visit the great poet Mansur Ouji.14 He said, “[poetry] comes when it comes.” He said that poetry had not come to him in a while, and he had thought that it was finished. “But no, instead”—he said—“the dam broke, and poetry came flowing out.” Take this statement at its word. Poetry is an impersonal force that pushes its way through the dam of the person. Hâl ist mâ râ: literally “a state (of being) is to me”; “a mood/situation comes to me.” Translating it as “I am in the mood for” does not capture the impersonal construction. Something that is neither passive nor active. Agamben discussed these forms in relation to the middle voice of verbs in ancient Greek.15 Eye No other organ and sense exemplifies better the force of the impersonal in Shiraz (Iran? Elsewhere?). Eyes dart arrows, provoke transformations and induce behaviors. The actions of an eye are one step removed from the intentionality of the people who accomplish the action of looking. An eye (çashm) and its action (nazar) are detached from the body/mind (eye = organ without a body). A superficial ethnography would attribute the importance of the eye to a mechanism of dislocation, whereby one’s own inclinations, actions and

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reactions are attributed to a fictional external driving force: the eye would be an external agency of self-recognition. The interpretation that suggests that the eye constitutes a figuration of an unbridled sensuous drive (nature) does not account for its logic. Nor does the opposite view that suggests that the eye is a sort of controlling surveillance agency overseeing all social transactions (where would desire be?). None of these analyses capture the ways in which the eye/gaze is beyond the person. The impersonal element gives the eye its force. Whether described as an effect on people and things, or as an act of surveillance, the impersonal stare defies any process of subjectification as usually understood. The impersonal force of the gaze is at once public and private, coincides with the social, but in such a way that it cannot be reduced to a codified “social norm.” At times, the stare is actually detrimental— bazarzadeh: a commodity, most notably a carpet, that has been seen around the bazaar too much, and hence has lost value; zadeh: the effect of the stare. So it is neither evil nor good. Gender Persian language is ahead of the game. Gender neutral language par excellence. Erase all connotations: the pronoun u can refer to it, she, he, but also It. If you really want to express gender, you have to make an effort, and add qualifiers. However, contrary to the dominant European philosophies of the twentieth century, language is not what defines humans. So the whole notion of language needs to be put in perspective. Language is a game. So one should not mistake forms of address for what a relationship amounts to, but at the same time recognize the productive, creationist nature of language. Taking this productivity of language at its face value, without acknowledging its continuous fluctuations, means to impute purposeful design to a conscience, what in today’s parlance is described as a person. So is silence better? Silence is pure potentiality, is it not? But would not this silence be the most treacherous of all personal imbrications, the separation between language and silence, representation and the real? So u can be it, she, he, and It. The serious play of gender is enacted in these events of possibility: naming pure neutrality would be as misguided as fixing the gender of the pronoun. Do not tell me that gestures are just another linguistic code. They do not work as a language. Nor do images. The question of communication is overrated in that it will always put semantics before all else. Poetry and dance show rather than say, and by this very act question the suitability of language, showing its inadequacy. Do poetry and dance show a person? No, they show concatenations of colors, organs, trees, walls.



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Impersonal I just wish I could make clear that the impersonal has been there all along, but that it is not a question of metaphysics. Chinese Daoists figured this out long ago. The fact that it is impossible to reconstruct what the Daoists actually said, and who among them said what, makes the point even clearer.16 And all that I am saying has already been said. Why say it again? It’s a bit like Cage (via Beckett): there is nothing to say, and I am saying it.17 But Cage’s impersonal is a very American impersonal—an impersonal made possible by the conditions of life in mid-twentieth-century United States. There are other forms of the impersonal, and these forms have little to do with America. The impersonal stands at the threshold between what is and what is not. Rather than a concept, it is a modality of practical action. One establishes connections between words, one names things, bodies, and situations. But these names are fleeting ones. They are temporary nominations that can be refluxed, now you say it, now you do not. In this play, the impersonal is the threshold of a bifurcation. The impersonal occupies the line between what is attributed to something else, and what is attributed to a self (either one’s own self, or that of others). In between, there is a point where desire and codification collide into a practice that is not oriented at forming a self (or an other). Practical and triggered in relation to specific circumstances, the impersonal is not a metaphysical domain beyond all other domains: it is just a shadow that accompanies the day. By itself, it is nothing (non-knowledge). This Shiraz courtyard is my observation point, the line of partition of existence. I sit here in the early morning when the sun begins to touch the bricks in that corner, and works its way up to illuminate the whole wall and a portion of the courtyard pavement, moving into the still water of the shallow pool, and into the trees. Birds singing. Traffic heard but not seen. Cannot emphasize enough the staged qualities of this scene, of this enacted exotic anecdote. Mechanism No English word translates the French term dispositif. (How many untranslatable words are out there? When is the hegemony of English going to be overturned? The only hope is to consider that language is not thought. There is a difference between the two. Untranslatability makes it evident.) The legal and technological references of the term get easily lost. But mechanism is the closest English equivalent. The notion refers to a set of enabling devices, a set of relationships that produce an effect. A theory of mechanism is weaved into any discussion of

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the impersonal. The idea of a mechanism displaces self-formation as linear growth, and replaces it with the notion of a machine.18 The challenge is to both acknowledge the productivity of mechanisms, while also stating that not everything can be reduced to them. Without this “rest” everything would be biopolitics. However, the “rest” cannot be captured by itself (it would amount to nothing more than an act of fetishism. See what they have done to the category of life especially in anthropology, or, to shift contexts completely, to mysticism as a doctrine, or to silence as a signifier of ineffable experience). The dispositif has no outside (language included), but stands in a certain relationship to non-knowledge. Micrologist Small scale. Small questions. Tiny, scattered reasoning. Anthropography. Nietzsche In the current predicament of things, any emancipatory act that seeks recognition has to disavow the force upon which it is predicated. Nietzsche had seen this.19 N is more and more relevant, and more and more untimely. Reading N with younger intellectuals, one just gets the sense that they are unable to feel his provocations. They have been so immunized by what surrounds them that any effort to pierce the screen is bound to fail. They dismiss him for his racism and misogynism, and do not realize—well, some do, but they are few—that he is really writing about us, about the claim to victimhood, the false consciousness, the desire to overcome. They turn Nietzsche into a person. The impersonal however tries to avoid recognition, even Nietzsche’s. Organs without Bodies Reverse Artaud-Deleuze-Guattari via Persian classical poetry. Hand, foot, heart, eye and liver—they are moving, acting, enjoying, or suffering organs without a body, without a whole of which they constitute a part. And not just human organs, but animals, plants, planets and planes. From time immemorial (Goethe20), Europeans have interpreted the organs in Persian poetry as “personifications,” or as pantheism (Hegel21)—there is a parallel with reading Africans as fetishists. Colonial imaginations. But it’s exactly the contrary. Avoid the construction of any form of subjectivity, replace it with the “theater”—relational encounters—of organs sweating their way through the world. Love and Pain, Joy and Suffering the great theater of emotions (these



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days it is catchier to call them affects—and for good reasons. But the word has been colonized by a whole set of people who do not know what they are saying). Surrealism, Situationists, and Deleuze and Guattari went far ahead in this, but continued to somehow posit the body as the signifier. Making dismembered organs speak, act, love, and hate, Persian poetry mobilizes impersonal trajectories. Originality Despite structuralism and a lot of depersonalizing art, there is the widespread sensation that one has to be an original (and authentic) self. Art has become the mark of the creative, self-determining subject. Sometimes academics aspire to this condition as well, and they see themselves as original creators. But it should be pointed out that such activity is at best the exception, the very recent product of contemporary conditions (undoubtedly sustained by capitalism). To the proliferation of a “desire for originality” one should juxtapose a strict aesthetic of the impersonal (incidentally this has a much longer history in Iran, for example, that of poetry, but also of the visual arts, Marks explains it22). Technology/forms enacting the impersonal. (Emilio Spadola is right: the impersonal is a product of mass mediation.23 But this potentiality should be turned from an alienating trajectory into a desire for difference. In a sarcastic twist, mass mediation has now become the most personalizing mechanism of all, thus the impersonal use of such technologies should be the strategic counterpoint to the domination of the mediated personality.) All the current efforts to attribute personhood to each and every one are legitimate, and do help a lot in tracing the genealogy of the domination of the self and paradigm of personhood. But one could also sketch an opposite line of inquiry, and trace the trajectories and events of the impersonal. If this were not the case, for example, Persian poetry could not be understood. Thousands and thousands of verses repeat more or less the same situations and moods. “Oh”— the selfhood partisans reply—“but you are missing the creativity of variation, the play on words, the engagement with the tradition, this is where a distinct form of creativity, different from European models of originality was molded.” Fair enough, of course, but my dear friends, I read your comments backward. It seems to me that these infinite variations, this constant unfolding, these tireless efforts to erase any form of personal investment signify the incredible attempt to precisely construct an impersonal plateau. A plateau that would unsettle not just the self, but dispense with subjectivity altogether. [Back to mysticism, but again, nothing is new here, except maybe that the mysticism in question is a fragmented set of events, here and now, absolutely not a discourse.]

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Power [Spending time in Iran] it becomes even clearer. Clear as transparent water: current critical discussions about power are still in their infancy. It is not a question of theory, but rather the completely naïve and persistent idea that power is a question of good and evil. As much as a whole cast of characters has been repeating for centuries that power is actually not a question of good and evil, still we tend to connect actions to these venerable categories, oh so venerable, and feel so good about goodness and feel such disgust for evil, as if they had a tangible essence. But how can we be so blind? All these naïve invocations of resistance and indignation: once again reactivating good feelings against evil ones. Foucault’s conception of subjectivation shows more and more its limits.24 (1) Foucault’s non-theory of power, has been made into a de facto theory, where the notion of power is attributed an almost metaphysical status. (2) The double bind that sits at the core of Foucault’s late rapprochement with the notion of subjectivity, namely that power is at the same time constitutive and repressive, has somehow (paradoxically) allowed for yet another foundational claim in relation to the subject. The vitalistic impetus that drives much of anthropological efforts nowadays seems to elude the question, and rather than develop a theory of desire (conatus) that would really unsettle the ideas that humans are an empire within an empire, seems instead to reinstate even more a voluntaristic notion of action.25 The impersonal might run into similar contradictions. Or be posited just on the side of Nature (or God). Naveeda Khan and myself understood the limitations of the impersonal when we reached this point.26 The idea of a force that cannot be named, but pierces through, risks being misunderstood for metaphysical. The power of non-knowledge turned into a dispositif of and for knowledge (knowledge of selves, people, and things). But maybe we were running too fast. Sacred Mystical Simone Weil wrote about personhood and the sacred. Attacking the notion of personhood, she claimed that only what is impersonal is sacred.27 There are echoes of Durkheim in her essay,28 even if her approach claims to be against society and convention, and moves toward a sublime outer space of mystical encounters. Weil’s argument is particularly important for her discussion of the law. She claims that personhood is precisely what produces exclusion and oppression in the name of a recognition that cannot be pretended from the suffering subject if not at the cost of more suffering (a conversation



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with Samira Esmeir clarified the question).29 But Weil remains trapped in her own politico-theological trap: only absolute transcendence can save us all. Well, we are definitely not going to be saved. Sex Think (not think) of sex as an impersonal practice. Three in the Morning When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said, “You get three in the morning and four at night.” This made all the monkeys furious. “Well, then,” he said, “you get four in the morning and three at night.” The monkeys were all delighted. There was no change in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeys responded with joy and anger. Let them, if they want to. So the sage harmonizes with both right and wrong and rests in Heaven the Equalizer. This is called walking two roads.30

How often one has been in the position of these monkeys? But to claim recognition for being cheated would be to simply restate the mechanism of three in the morning. Let’s impersonally harmonize with right and wrong. It’s the same. Traffic in Shiraz Epiphany of the impersonal. NOTES 1. Roberto Esposito, Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012). 2. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 3. See Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life . . . ,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e] 2007), 388–93. 4. Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège De France, 1977–1978, trans. Thomas Clerc and Éric Marty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 5. Armando Salvatore, The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power, and Civility (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

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6. The mausoleum of the poet Sa‘di in Shiraz was rebuilt in 1952 in a modernist style. 7. Out of the many writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the notebook highlights Scritti Corsari, published in 1975, no doubt because of the references to Iran, to the orientalist desire that permeates its pages, and its critique of consumerism. In 2015 there is still no published English translation of this collection of essays. See Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti Corsari (Milano: Garzanti, 1975). See also Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996). 8. Houshang Hekmati, Ganjnameh (Shiraz: Navid, 1982). 9. Sa‘di, The Gulistan, Rose Garden of Sa‘di, trans. W. M. Thackston (Bethesda, MD: Ibex Publishers, 2008). 10. Jean Lévi, Le Petit Monde Du Tchouang-Tseu (Arles: P. Picquier, 2010). 11. Giambattista Vico, Principles of New Science Concerning the Common Nature of the Nations, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968). 12. Morton Feldman, Patterns in a Chromatic Field, Perf. Charles Curtis and Aleck Karis (New York: Tzadik, 2004). 13. Laura U. Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 14. Mansur Ouji, Hâl Ist Mâ Râ –: Devist va Panjâh-o-do Rubâ`i dar `Eshq va Madh-e `Eshq (Shiraz: Navid, 1989). 15. Agamben, Homo Sacer. 16. A reference to the impossibility of establishing definitive interpretation of Daoist doctrines, given the textual difficulties, the fragmentation of information on them, and the filters of the interpretative traditions. 17. See John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 109–27 and Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1958). 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 19. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 20. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-East Divan: The Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues, trans. Martin Bidney and Peter Anton von Arnim (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010). 21. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). 22. Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity. 23. Emilio Spadola, The Call of Islam: Sufis, Islamists and Mass Mediation in Urban Marocco Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 24. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005).



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25. Reference to Spinoza’s concept of the conatus, see Ethics III, P6 (in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, trans. E. M. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 26. See Naveeda Khan, “The Death of Nature in the Era of Climate Change,” http://www.academia.edu/1973269/The_Death_of_Nature_in_the_Era_of_Climate_ Change, n.d. 27. Simone Weil, “Human Personality,” in Simone Weil: An Anthology, trans. Siân Miles (London: Penguin, 2005), 69–98. 28. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995). 29. Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press 2012). 30. The whole paragraph is a citation from Zhuangzi. The notebook quotes the French translation of this passage by Jean Lévi, Les Oeuvres De Maître Tchouang (Paris: Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances, 2010), 23–24; for convenience we used the English Translation by Watson, Zhuangzi, Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 36, though the two are quite different.

Chapter 12

Architextualism A Manifesto in and of the Margins Lucian Stone

PROLEGOMENON TO A CHAPTER THAT DOES NOT APPEAR IN THIS BOOK This manifesto calls for a renewed attentiveness to text as material body—a call to remember that the text is a material object with which the embodied reader has a relationship. There is, in other words, a physical encounter with text, an aesthetic experience—not merely an abstract, imaginative, or intellectual exercise. Therefore, there is—or ought to be—an interrelation between the text’s form and its content. We should begin by asking what kinds of experiences, sensibilities, and ideas are imprinted upon the pages in how they are consigned, edited, formatted, typeset, designed, and bound. Lest we forget, the printed text is not a neutral medium for the free conveyance of ideas, information, concepts, theories, memories, and so on. There is no absolute liberty or creativity for authors and readers alike. The text is an occupied space. It is a space governed by rules; there are borders, checkpoints, and barriers. All movements and appearances within the text are surveilled and tightly controlled. There are written (visible) rules, ones archived and indexed in exhaustive reference works and kept ever in mind by disciplined authors, copy editors, editors, and designers (e.g., grammar, syntax, logic, punctuation, conventions for proper citation, etc.). These standardized rules promise consistency and therefore communicability, a supposed lucid transmission between author and reader—a passageway secured by a highly sophisticated system of signs, formats, and oversight. And there are unwritten (invisible) rules: those of the marketplace, such as market competition and profitability, and those of disciplinary norms 171

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and trends, so-called academic standards. Of the latter, one is reminded of Nietzsche’s observation that “every generation of men of learning has an unconscious canon of permitted sagacity; whatever goes beyond it is called into question and all but employed to cast suspicion on the probity of its propounder.”1 To reach the point where one can be heard, or be seen in print, is to be complicit with and conform to a routine continuation along the path on to which the scholar has been pushed, a conception of truth determined by unthinking subjection to an acquired habit. Such natures are collectors, explainers, compilers of indices and herbariums; they study and prowl around a single domain simply because it never occurs to them that other domains exist. Their industriousness possesses something of the tremendous stupidity of the force of gravity: which is why they often achieve a great deal.2

Academic and publishing enterprises are thus conservative in form. These institutions do not challenge or unseat power, they produce on its behalf and profit from it. Rationality, as it has already been pointed out elsewhere, is chiefly conceived of as being instrumental. Consequently, as Nietzsche observes, “All the members of the guild keep a jealous watch on one another so that the truth upon which so much—bread, office, honours—depends shall be baptized with the name of its real discoverer.”3 “Method,” “standards,” and “rigor” are codes for power and self-preservation; that is, maintenance of the status quo. Knowing and internalizing these laws has become a science unto itself.4 This truth comes into relief when we attempt to conceptualize something that we might call “world thought.” The canon of admissible theorists, philosophers, poets, and scholars—those whose works must be cited as passwords in the crucible of peer refereed publications—has remained remarkably small and Western centric. These thinkers are granted automatic entry into these hallowed halls, no matter how narrow, prejudiced, or reductive their work. The result is a thriving economy for exegetes and gatekeepers who have gladly forgotten that a “scholar can never become a philosopher.”5 Thought suffocates within these tightly guarded precincts. This manifesto posits that genuine thinking—or at least the possibility thereof—exists on or even outside of the margins of this body of literature— where there is still room to breathe. But the texts themselves, as they have been formalized and regulated, provide us with little clues to this fact. As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish noted, “Exile edifies the body. The beauty of form enchants you, even when meaning is incomplete, for perfection is the awareness that something is missing.”6 Similar to how architectural techniques determine how a particular space is experienced, the physicality of the text coincides with how a written work is

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perceived, understood, and appreciated. Likewise, these techniques are most effective when the devices themselves remain imperceptible. For instance, typesetting has become homogenous, minus, perhaps, a slight variation in font—few even notice it. The margins are left blank (pristine), supposedly securing a neutralized zone wherein the author’s research—that is, the evidence and arguments proffered—take center stage. The text is divided and subdivided into discrete, well-organized sections, chapters, and subsections—each numbered, descriptively titled, and meticulously indexed. Take off their covers and books look nearly identical. Cumulatively, the appearance of the text gives cover for the network of governing conventions that shape what we write and read, and ultimately how we think. Author and reader alike are expected to treat the text as if its governing rules did not interfere in the so-called creative or intellectual process—in the formation of its content. The illusion is freedom of thought, when in fact all printed ideas conform to market forces and disciplinary practices. In short, the impress is one-directional; the text is molded by this system of power—the reverse appears impossible. The acts of writing and reading have, by and large, become false consciousness or even bad faith.7 The overcoming of this situation does not entail counterarguments or the articulation of more ideas within these restrictions. This is a losing gambit. Instead, we propose to recapture the materiality of the text. We take as our inspiration the tradition of Islamic illuminated manuscripts, whose glosses, parallel texts, and images occupy the margins and even encroach upon the main body of work—a form of graffiti that reimagines, restructures, and thereby liberates the space of the text. As Abdelkebir Khatibi and Mohammed Sijelmassi note, A margin may perhaps be defined as something totally outside the law and statutes of the text. Totally, because the margin breaks all the rules and all the limits of authority. In vain does the writer put a frame round his text, protecting it from harm with vigilant ceremonial: the margin breaks through the frame, goes through the looking-glass and creates a general scandal.8

To encounter an illuminated text is a singular aesthetic—that is, disruptive— experience. The margins are filled with notes, substantive interventions, filigree, inspirited outbursts, commentaries, doodles, tangents, digressions, calligraphy, and drawings; the supposed neutrality and governing structure of the text is exposed and transgressed by techniques of textual resistance. These breaks free space, or reorganize and reorient the reader within the space, so that new voices are heard or seen, and new ideas and practices can emerge. ***

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As if to prove the point, while working on this manifesto in preparation for the current volume, the publisher informed the editors that it was cost prohibitive to include the piece as originally envisioned by the author in the printed volume. Its inclusion would, furthermore, create intolerable delays in the production schedule. Thus, what you are reading is not the manifesto itself, but a prolegomenon to a manifesto that does not appear in this collection. It appears outside its margins on the Internet. Make no mistake, we recognize that this complicates the very content of this manifesto, not to mention its potential impact: “the marginal commentary may consist of a word or a phrase belonging to the body of the text, put in so that this commentary breaks the line of the script and gives it an unsuspected drift. The book then has to be turned around in all directions so as to follow the line of the script. Thus, too, the body turns with the book, joining in a little dance.”9 Its digitalized manifestation necessarily will not have the same overall affects and effects that its appearance in the printed volume would have had. (And the digital space has its own rules and constraints.) Given the choice to include something, as opposed to nothing, we elected for this compromise in the hope that this gesture and the digitized version might serve as an opening salvo in recapturing the “matter” of the text, even when consigned to virtual territory. Thus, in order to access the actual manifesto, the reader must visit the volume’s website and click on the button provided.10 NOTES 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Untimely Meditations, ed., Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 170. (Emphasis in original.) 2. Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 172. See also Nietzsche’s disapprobation of scholars in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “[T]hey sit cool in the cool shade: they want to be mere spectators in everything and they take care not to sit where the sun burns upon the steps” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [London: Penguin, 2003], 147). 3. Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 172. 4. Again, as Nietzsche said, “Science is related to wisdom as virtuousness is related to holiness; it is cold and dry, it has not love and knows nothing of a deep feeling of inadequacy and longing. It is as useful to itself as it is harmful to its servants, insofar as it transfers its own character to them and ossifies their humanity” (Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 169). 5. Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 181. These exegetes acknowledge and even praise the intellectual contributions made by a thinker like Nietzsche while

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simultaneously admonishing him for his writing style—as if the two can (should be) so readily be divorced. 6. Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2011), 82. 7. How routine has it become for scholars to recite the demands of adding a line on their curriculum vitae with a view to the job market, tenure, and promotions reviews (“publish or perish”), or publisher deadlines as their primary motivation to work? Yet the work itself supposedly remains uncompromised, original, a significant contribution to the field, and so forth. Frequently added to this line of rationalization is the knowing, cynical, and self-deprecating qualifier that the work, after all, will only be of interest and therefore read by a miniscule audience of other specialists. 8. Abdelkebir Khatibi and Mohammed Sijelmassi, The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), 148. 9. Khatibi and Sijelmassi, The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy, 148. (Emphasis added.) 10. http://www.rowmaninternational.com/book/manifestos_for_world_thought/ 3-156-7b1012f0-dc86-496f-b988-5067e7355c17.

Part IV

EMBODIMENT: ARCHITECTURE, OBJECTS, AND TIME

Chapter 13

Architecture of Modulation Resistance as Differential Vision Eyal Weizman

Note: This chapter is the product of a dialogue between Eyal Weizman and Jason Mohaghegh on June 15, 2015. The former’s spoken responses to certain questions have been arranged here along various thematic axes.1

1. SPEED Violence operates on multiple speeds, from the immediate, instantaneous kind of violence of an event, in a blast, through its repetition and patterns within an urban environment, to a kind of slow violence of environmental transformation, architectural development, and climate change.2 Architecture usually operates at the slow end of the spectrum; its violence of construction is about a slow way in which the environment is configured for territorial control, for depriving people of their lands and ability to use the space. There is also a very fast and instantaneous way in which violence operates architecturally through the destruction of buildings, infrastructure, and so on. Although we tend to think of construction/destruction as completely opposite aspects architecturally, perhaps the right way to think about it is that they are both acts of manipulating space to gain territorial control, and often it is not clear what it is that you are doing. Are you constructing or destructing? Every act of construction involves destruction, and the other way around. So, I think that we need to look at the variable speeds of violence, and how every speed that it has kind of lends itself to another form of analysis. Whereas human rights groups usually look at the instantaneous event, which lends itself very clearly to monitoring, it is the violence of slow transformation that often remains invisible. For example, everybody is counting the 179

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dead, and there are always controversies around the number of casualties. But I think that even the fiercest critics of Israeli domination in Palestine do not really count the slow mortality of Palestinians, those lives that could be lived and are simply not lived anymore because of environmental conditions, because of inability to access healthcare, because of basic infrastructure and institutions that are destroyed. It’s a kind of death that is much more difficult to quantify and to analyze, and more slow and painful to experience. The real question with respect to slow violence is this: What constitutes killing? This is so because slow violence blurs the distinction between killing and letting die. There are thousands of Palestinians who could have lived today who are not living anymore because of the quality of water in Gaza, because of non-access to appropriate healthcare and medicine, and so forth, because of the frequent electricity shortages and outages, and those in the West Bank because of checkpoints, and other such incremental interruptions. And the question is, Can we understand those deaths and understand them as acts of killing, rather than as excess mortality? I think that this is the challenge of working and understanding conflict across variable speeds. I think basically one has to devise one’s methods across an understanding that there is not one rhythm. One could say, à la Virilio or Marinetti, let’s accelerate, or one could slow things down, but the fact is that you would have variable speeds. You would have history running at variable speeds and violence running at variable speeds and each one is somehow convertible to another. So to a certain extent, the slow violence of desertification, say, along the threshold of the desert as it cuts from North Africa, from Algiers going through the entirety of North Africa to Syria, Iraq, areas of Iran, and the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier; the North-moving of the threshold of the desert is the kind of slow violence that could erupt and is convertible to a fast, instantaneous violence of a bomb blast or a sword on the neck, and the like. It’s various forms of processes that are converted to each other. As an architect, everyone understands it; you look at this crack in the wall, the crack can progress slowly, kind of cutting the building along a line of least resistance. It can linger there for years and then sometimes it just opens up and crushes, and when it does so it moves faster than the speed of sound. Cracks move faster than any matter, because they are non-matter. So you have various kinds of degrees of convertibility, and politics operates across this entire scale. I’ll give yet another example. There are various degrees of temporariness that are in operation in thinking about Palestine. Of course, we know that the Occupation is by itself—that is, even calling the form of domination in the West Bank and Gaza “Occupation,” Gaza perhaps not anymore—a way to create it as a temporary condition, as a temporary aberration of the normal, juridical order of the state. That’s why it’s called Occupation—“occupation” is by definition temporary. There is another form



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of temporariness, and this is the temporariness of refugee camps—a claim unfulfilled. They are temporary because there is another telos, of return, that renders the present a simple thing. But there are also other forms of temporariness even if we take as examples things that accelerate to the highest speed. We know, for instance, that the delayed fuse on bombs—that fifty milliseconds between impact and detonation—brings bombs into the middle of living rooms that would otherwise blast at impact with the roof. This allows them to enter into the core of a building, or dig themselves into the ground underneath it, to destroy it. Also, there is the time difference between a warning rocket and the evacuation of a building, like in Gaza when Israel shoots a warning rocket three minutes before blasting. There is a way to think of that temporary situation, of the house that is warned, the house that loses its protection, the house that is no longer effectively a shelter in which people can decide whether to stay in and be human shields—and consequently to be considered by Israeli legal authorities as voluntary human shields therefore forgoing any legal protection—or leave. Thus, there is no point in making a kind of theoretical commentary about temporariness and acceleration, but rather we should think about the convertibility between various speeds and various acts of temporariness. We know of the various forms of accelerationism also, in a kind of neoDeleuzian thinking, that call for one to out-capitalize Capitalism, and outsmart this and that. The local translation of these ideas is—in as much as the politics of the peer was a sort of Marxist-Leninist strategy to make things worse, that good will come only out of making things worse—putting a kind of ethical scale of good and evil on a temporal scale of slow and fast. But I think the theory—both the politics of the peer and accelerationism—is dangerous unless one is doing it on oneself. You cannot decide that the worse is the better to other people. You can say it to yourself. But the minute you make a calculation of good and evil and sacrifice the present for the future, sacrifice momentary gain for long-term gain, not on yourself, you get various forms of totalitarianism, and totalitarianism is based on the sort of politics of the peer. So I am very disturbed by a kind of accelerationist variation on that theory, unless, of course, it is something that you enact yourself. 2. MOVEMENT The ability to control space is not the presence in it; it is the ability to circulate through it, or the ability to control the circulation of your agent, and simultaneously of others, through deep space. And this is why I always say that walling and un-walling are complementary measures. You cannot understand the wall as introducing an act of static geography to a situation because the

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wall is a filter. It slows some people, for example, those people coming to seek work beyond it. It modulates who comes in, who comes out, and how fast they are moving through it. But, it in fact accelerates people going in the opposite direction. Also, part of the act of walling is the un-walling of the homes of Palestinians, that is, moving through the walls within Palestinian domestic space or urban space. So, you have an attempt to look at space as a kind of viscous medium that is continuously rearranged and morphing as a set of flow valves that control circulation in space utilizing all the available technologies—and these technologies are not only architectural, they are juridical, they are military, and so forth. Resistance will always be an attempt to circulate in an unscripted manner through space. So again, it is not only the circulation of people: if you release your sewage through the wall or through Gazan water, you spill sewage into the sea in a way that seeps through the international borders and reminds those coastal Israeli towns of the presence of a humanitarian catastrophe on the other side. You are breaking the logic of circulation that wants to contain and separate for hygienic reasons this Gaza area. Speaking about movement of people is kind of obvious I think in that context. But it is obviously part of it also. 3. SOLIDITY, AERIALITY Walking through walls, as the Israeli military exercise did in the beginning of the millennium, during the Second Intifada, is a tactic that is taken from guerrilla fighting. There are many sorts of co-evolutionary processes in warfare for which one cannot say “this is a property of one side or the other.” Take Israeli drones, for instance, these guided rockets that are in the skies. Hezbollah too has its drones; Hamas fired several drones into the air and some have entered Israeli airspace. Now because of Hamas’s inability to control the surface, they were continuously navigating under Israeli forces through the last war in a network of tunnels and emerging always in between them, in the camps or even hitting them at the back in logistical areas. The more Israel controlled the sky, the deeper into the earth the resistance were seeking to retreat. So you now have three layers or different types of warfare. You have the aerial war, you have the land war, and you have the subsoil, and each one is, again, moving at different speeds, the jet (the aerial) being the fastest. Although they would not go maximum speed during relatively simple air-to-ground operations where there is not much antiaircraft fire, it contrasts with the sort of five-meter-per-day speed of movement of cutting a new tunnel. So that is the slowest, though, as we have seen, not much less effective.



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4. MATERIALITY AND THE BORDER We can refer to a kind of weaponization of every element, every mundane element in the landscape, be it the planting of pines by Israelis in a way that makes the ground acidic and keeps our grazing stock away or whether it is the olive trees which keep the Palestinian claim over all the particular areas and grounds. Again, resistance is not ontologically different than occupation. You see, when one uses a tree, the other uses a counter-tree to contest it. When Israelis are using a red-roof suburban building, sometimes Palestinians adapt it—mimic it. We are in a shared space. Of course there is the power relation of colonizer and colonized, but I think it would be complete error to say, “One side uses technology, the other doesn’t.” The theories of spatial enactment and violence in space exist on both sides, in different ways and with different political and ethical implications. To this end, the border doesn’t really exist. A border is an instrument of a sovereign state power that is simply inapplicable in situations of colonial occupation. There are many walls; there are many forms of barriers. It doesn’t operate in the way that we imagine it—as a kind of clear, static demarcation. The wall is somehow dematerialized in different ways in relation to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In the West Bank, it physically is splintered. It exists as various controlling and stopping devices that are scattered throughout the land and is visual from deep space; these devices, therefore, operate above and below. In Hollow Land,3 I attempted to completely deconstruct the idea of the border from the way we normally imagine it. It is not this kind of Santiago/Tijuana, one side or the other. It is splintered across deep space. In the Gaza Strip, the wall is a kind of membrane that becomes the sovereign of Gaza because through it, it modulates the amount of electricity, the amount of humanitarian aid, the amount of food, the amount of medicine, the amount of petrol that goes into Gaza and sustains it. It is actually through the wall that it is controlled but again it is not an act of hermetic separation. It’s a kind of membrane that modulates those life-sustaining provisions to calculations that are keeping it at the minimum possible level. What is the minimum number of calories? What is the minimum number of megawatts? What is the minimum amount of medicine that would keep Gaza sustainable, yet on the brink of total collapse? As such, I think that resistance needs to be articulated across the entire spectrum of possible action—on the military level, on the level of civil disobedience, on the level of law, and, in cases in the international arena, on the level of boycott—any action. When the occupation and the domination of Palestinians within the 1948 borders are operating to the extent that they are, all mundane elements within Israel, every mundane law, have a kind of

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political agenda. Therefore, all of them need to become sites of resistance. Resistance needs to be across the entire spectrum. Nothing should be understood as a natural, banal state law—not the way parking is organized, not the way the queue is articulated in public institutions, not the way the law or education is operating. It needs to be broken along the entire spectrum because it is the entire spectrum of these actions through which the ideology of domination is somehow enacting itself. Therefore, resistance needs to operate across this spectrum as well. 5. VERTICAL-HORIZONTAL AXES I advocate for the horizontal over the explicitly vertical, only if by horizontality we mean equality, democracy, and the undoing of mechanisms of surveillance. But too often, illusions of resistance as daily life is counterproductive in our region because there is an assumption that the Israeli state has—of course it has—control of space and power and access to technology. We Palestinians need to also have access to technology, and if we have drones, we will fly the drones. It’s not that we need to remain on the surface and essentialize or Orientalize ourselves somehow. Resistance is on the same plane and repurposing and using and learning from the same technology, and subverting it. For this reason, I am bothered sometimes by the over-romanticizing of exile and of nomadism, especially, the kind of sedentary-nomadic archetype. Sometimes it is obscene how wrong it is. For example, in the south of Palestine, the state is trying desperately to designate the Bedouins as nomads, to tell them they are nomads. In response the Bedouins say, “No, look, we have been cultivating wheat in our villages for hundreds of years. We have not been nomads since the eighteenth century in these parts, especially not in the way that you would imagine nomads. Why do you want us to go? Like you, we’re moving up and down on the elevation from time to time.” Claiming sedentary existence is a way of protecting their land, and the Israeli state wants to tell them that they are nomadic. Various forms of special-forces operations understand themselves as nomadic, whereas other populaces understand themselves as sedentary and static. So those categories are fluid and changing on all sides. Thus, I think that it is not about the horizontal being an alternative to the vertical. That would be a kind of misunderstanding of the politics of verticality. There is a new conception of space that has been created through generations of colonial administration and military rule. In turn, they develop their own form of resistance that flows within these channels and occupies the same space and resists within the same dimensions. When power constructs



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something, in general, you unplug it from its source, you do not dismantle it. It’s something very different. It’s something very different to destroy or flatten something than it is to subvert it, to reuse it, to inhabit it in a different way, which is what I think needs to be done. I do not see a way that settlements will be evacuated, that roads and bridges will be dismantled and brought back into some kind of romantic horizontalism or whatever that might be. Rather, I see them being used in a much more imaginative dimension. I see the West Bank and Israel proper without even considering the border between them. When return happens or when various other forms of decolonization take place, everything within that structure might look the same but it will be used in a different way. Imagine an entire space in which, of all the normal, mundane elements of daily life, none is used for what it was designed for. Each one is performing a different task. My spatial imagination is not one of reversibility, but of a much more imaginative and equal democratic inhabiting of existing structures. 6. VISUAL DIFFERENTIALS One should think about the question of visibility and hiddenness differently: that is, to not see those things as opposites, in the same way that one must not see construction/destruction as opposites, slow and fast as opposites. Rather, to see modulations between, such that acting on a visual spectrum is always to be introducing a differential in vision. Seeing something—panopticism—is simultaneously about sharpening some aspect of vision and masking others. It is about creating a differential. Who can see what? Who can see what and when? Who can see what, when, and how fast? These are the kinds of questions that are asked, and resistance also operates not only as concealments; sometimes things need to be concealed, on both sides, and sometimes they need to be made hyper-visible. Sometimes within the same image elements of it need to be made visible and elements need to be taken radically into the background. So you intervene in a field of vision and the intervention is always differentiated and modulated. Of course, when you draw instruments of power—in order to shame them, in order to claim against them, in order to mobilize against them, in order to sue them, in order to write petitions against them—you need to make some violations visible. When you draw a map, you always have a choice. What do you not draw and what do you draw? Do you draw the informal routes that go around the checkpoints? No. Do you draw the checkpoints? Yes. Do you draw the checkpoints so that informal routes could happen? Yes. If you do not draw them, could they exist? And then, what’s the line thickness? In what color? What is the shade? All those things are decisions within a thick and extremely varied static field that has many,

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many options within itself. This is why the field of the sensorium, of vision, is so dense, interesting, and varied, because you can act upon it in multiple ways. Hence, the interesting aspect of creating radical cartographies is in operating within the image complex. We have a situation now in which the difference between mapping and photographing is becoming nonexistent. And that means, on a most simple level, satellite imagery. Satellite imagery is a photograph in a map. But, then, social media comes in—if you are syncing it and geo-syncing it and locating it in space—and produces a kind of fourdimensional map of space and events as they unfold within an environment. Mapping today is really knowing how to navigate between various media forms. Architecture now is an optical device; it is the only optical device from which you can see the relation between images. Both the resistance in Gaza, for example, and also of course, citizens, witnesses, and others are continuously recording in space. People risk their lives to say things into their smartphones, to leave them on, to record, to take images. They upload thousands—tens of thousands of images. We can see conflict in a way that we have never seen before, but this can be very confusing. So sometimes you basically need to use architecture as an optical mechanism that puts the relation between images in space and in time. In fact, there could be no other optical device to see images because the story—what matters—about a particular fight, or a particular violation, or a particular incident is never in one image alone. It’s always in relation between images and it’s a kind of crossreferencing of thousands of things. Imagine the idea of a montage that is captured very easily and neatly in things like before-and-after photographs. Really, it’s kind of a nineteenth-century trope, before-and-after photographs. The cameras were too slow to capture people in movement. They needed to be exposed for too long. You had to turn the human event into an archeology, an archeology of what it left in space: a street before/a street after, a building/a ruin, a forest/a deforested area, and so forth. This is a story told by two, but you need now to explode that idea of the simple montage of two and understand before-and-after imagery as a relation between an image complex that is composed out of thousands of images and temporal gaps and speeds between them. 7. HUMAN AND OBJECT While I acknowledge certain strong critiques of humanism, there are some very important achievements that humanism has introduced. So, I am very wary of radical epistemological breaks. I would say that the distance between people, things, buildings, and plans needs to shrink. We need to



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understand continuities between the world of matter, objects, and humans rather than throw humanism away toward a kind of new object or ontologies that are as radically fascist as anything that disregarded objects in the first place. Cutting the human out of the material world is negationist in the same way that the negationists of old genocides, Holocaust deniers, tried to completely discard human testimony—claiming it to be an irrelevant epistemology and, therefore, to only let matter speak. This is a kind of reduction that was incredibly problematic and used by people like David Irving and others. Simultaneously, from a human rights perspective it disavows the material world and simply relies on memory, trauma, testimony, the witness, and so on, and is somehow infantile in the same way. So we need to find various, innovative, creative ways to entangle humanism with the material world. When I analyze now a city in war in my forensic agency, what I do is look at the architecture; I look at the city as a varied sensor. The minute it is attacked it starts recording. Everything in a city starts recording. The trees record violence, the buildings record it in a way that they are pulverized, and people’s memory records and then they deliver testimony. Smart-phones are recording; the clouds are recording. To heighten this sensitivity of material formations, to understand them almost as surfaces that are completely sensitive to touch, to contact, to disturbance, we cannot look at them as a neutral medium that is simply there. They are both presence and representation. They record in a way that they organize. If you say that any material organization is sensored, then the act of sensing is transformation. This is why architecture is so important. How matter senses—matter senses through transforming its interior, internal properties in response to external force fields. Its shape changes. Shape is something that is continuously in transformation, and at any given moment in its process of transformation, it is a record, a sensor—but to sense is to transform. And to transform is a different architectural layer. So, the city transforms. Mud transforms, right? Any kind of material surface sensors through its transformation—here again, architectural imagination is absolutely central to understanding that we need to understand all material surface as viscous. We need to understand that we exist in a viscous, gelatin space, even though it appears hard to us in the time scale of our psychological subjective conception at this particular moment. And this viscous medium is a sensor of everything that happens in it. But it is not only a sensor, it is also an agent. It also induces and participates, influences, animates, and all sort of things. You interact with it, and it is a kind of political architectural imagination that I call “political plastic.” Space is a political plastic. The minute that you understand space as a political plastic, there is no difference between construction and destruction. It is simply the reorganization of space.

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8. MEMORY Moving beyond the binary categories of memory: memories and forgetting are interdependent and this is a kind of psychic operation that is modulating your self-conception in the world. They are interdependent of each other. There is no memory without forgetting; there is no forgetting without memory. You cannot remember if you did not forget some things and basically what matters is what you choose to foreground and what you put in the background. It is the same discussion as that of the visible field above. It is not a question of whether you are recommending erasure versus heightened visibility, but in what way do you modulate the visual field? In what way do you modulate your psychic conception of your past, or not the individual psychic but the national conception of the past? So, of course, some things, in order to harness political changes, need to be highlighted and some others need to be put into the background. This is politics. Whenever you foreground a period out of history, monumentalize it, teach it primarily, in a particular way, you create gaps and lacunas all around it. You basically turn the lights off all around it. It kind of sucks up the intellectual energy. A lot of that is happening in our region because the conflict is very much one of narratives. It is obvious that the two national projects, both competing for legitimacy in as much as they compete for military power, would try to highlight particular moments in their history to solidify claims. 9. ARCHITECTURE Architecture is philosophy in material form. Future forensics is the way of creating a future, of preempting a kind of bad event from materializing. It is the way of inverting the order of time and looking for traces at present of a future occurrence that has not yet taken place. Then again, there is the dilemma of co-option. The only way that a repurposing of tools could take place is when you get as close as possible to power. So the closer you get, the more agency for change you have, and the more dangerous it becomes. Everything that I do is highly dangerous. I’m trying to tread a very, very thin line. I need to be aware of this line. Everything that I do—it’s not that there is a remote possibility that it might one day become useful for others; at any given moment, at any given exchange, it could. And I know of various examples where it has. And one has to use theory and use critical theory in always gauging that distance from power, always gauging that distance from that proximity and ways of being co-opted. Not to build a kind of dialectical position that is very, very clear. On the contrary, trying to enter into the logic of violence. Trying to steer it away, to a certain extent,



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share the techniques. To enter the field of violence is to enter a much closer ecology between the resistance fighter and the soldier that they are fighting than anyone else around. Now, what we are trying to do is a form of confronting the war machine where it is most vulnerable. It is most vulnerable in its inability to enact violence in a free manner. There is no force—Hamas does not have the force—to resist the Israeli army. On the other hand, the Israeli military cannot fight Hamas. They can only fight the civilians. They cannot find them, they cannot target them, except for here and there, they have never been able—even in the small area where they have such domination—to stop rocket fire into Israel for more than fifty days. Not in Gaza, not in Lebanon; they are unable to confront militarily guerrilla organizations. What they are able to do and the way they conduct their warfare is by turning collateral into targets. They claim that they target military installations, but the political effects of the warfare are run through the collateral. When they left Gaza in August 2014, they said, “Now we have achieved a certain deterrence because Palestinians will come out and see the destruction that we have brought and the number of civilian casualties, and they will think not twice, but many times before starting again.” That is the only way they are able to fight: “If you fight us, we will kill your civilians.” And that has to be taken away. It has to be taken away as a technique, as a possibility. So justice is a big term and justice could certainly not be achieved in legal terms. But one can intervene within the possibility of warfare. Thus the refugees are the most modern figure within the Palestine conflict, because the politics of refugees is equivalent to the politics of change—it could only rely on change and demand change. The only way to decolonize Palestine is with the right of return. The right of return is not simply an idea of going back to the rural, rooted utopia of pre-1947 Palestine. But what it is, is a demand and a call for equality, and it needs to be articulated as a call for equality and transformation. Therefore, refugeeism is not a matter for the refugees themselves. As long as there are refugees, the possibility, the hope of decolonization, the hope of justice, the hope of equality exists. NOTES 1. The editors want to express their gratitude to Jaclyn Berg, Benjamin Davis, and Gary Suchor for their meticulous work transcribing this manuscript from the digital recording. 2. See, for example, Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 3. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).

Chapter 14

One Foot in Front of the Other A Physicality Manifesto Brian Seitz and Jens Veneman

A manifesto is an intrinsically offensive and frequently quixotic gesture, one that forces philosophy to be concise while simultaneously endeavoring to run slightly over the speed limit. This manifesto is in praise of the priority of physicality, the alternative to which is the living dead, which by this stage in the development of the subject-technology assemblage is virtually the same as the undead, eternal host to the digitality that preys on said subject. This is a reality check partial to things, which by extension implies a skepticism regarding screens (which in concealing nothing obscure so much). This manifesto stands for attentiveness, raw appreciation and vulnerability, rude grace and good manners, all understood in intimate connection with physicality. This manifesto is pitched in favor of seeing physical things, hearing physical things, smelling physical things, tasting physical things, touching physical things, feeling physical things, and talking about physical things. The fact that we now live in a zone of thoroughly saturated, Nietzschean gray—a blur effectuated most immediately by means of electronic stimulation—does not diminish, and in fact only accelerates, the ontological priority of things physical. The actual is apparently no longer confined to the realm of the physical, but the physical cannot be captured or contained by new forms of experience fueled and enframed by technology. The physical “knows no bounds.” Physicality will intervene. These things having been asserted, our starting point is to ask whether or not the subject as device-staring-being remains fundamentally conditioned or configured by something physical. It would seem to be the case that a device is physical and that staring into one is a physical “action.” With their lithium1 and nicad power sourced from the ground, the batteries that drive the devices 191

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are certainly physical, and so is the juice that feeds them, and these aspects of power are metonymic and material-symbolic of the system that is exhausting Earth (which seems headed toward the conflagration forecast by prescient Stoic philosophers back in the day). And yet in observing people staring— that is, observing device-staring-beings walking pathless in public spaces or just standing with a stupid grin—it would seem that staring sends people into a condition of oblivion regarding physicality, which is reduced to something ambient or to what the phenomenologists used to call horizonal. The screen itself is thus only quasi-physical, an apparent passageway out of physicality.2 In exiting into that passageway, conclude that the device-starer inhabits the impression that in its pairing with the screen, it, the device-starer, is in charge: the subject is the figure (lord of the earth, said Heidegger), and physicality is reduced to the status of a backdrop, the ground, although with the ascendance of the device the ground is more of a rabbit hole than a proper stage or setting. From a philosophical standpoint, this last observation—impression of a certain Gestalt—might at first seem to blur the difference between physicality and virtuality. Yet we insist that it only serves to intensify that difference, while emphasizing, too, that this difference or divide is not oppositional but an indication of doubled, problematically related realms of reality; and to paraphrase Kant and Dostoevsky, there are many such doubles, including the one associated with the forthcoming point regarding “social constructs.” There are passageways between the elements of a given double, but in exiting the physical, some of them lead nowhere, into a void. Conversely, a predator drone’s journey from a computer screen to its target is a transit from nowhere (cyberspace that just happens to be located near Las Vegas but is nowhere because it could be anywhere) to somewhere absolutely physical (termination, an entirely different species of nowhere). Meanwhile, those localities that remain off the grid and thus detached from those passageways are a reassurance that not all vanishes into a virtual void. One prominent characteristic of current existential conditions, then: Not present. Given deconstruction’s incisive and dynamic interrogation of presence, this eventuality is deeply disturbing. However unstable, conditional, oppositionally constituted and dependent it may be, “presence” seems preferable to the void or virtuality, or at least there is much more philosophy to be found there (here, a word that echoes a place). Taking advantage of some doubles and passageways and possibilities of disappearances, this manifesto celebrates and touches on some prominent points associated with physicality: • Social constructs are strata layered onto and at the same time emerging from the physical. Regarding both strata and emergences, picture here dancing, on one end of a spectrum, where the dance animates the body



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and the body animates the dance, and then, on the spectrum’s other end, torture, regarding which it is unnecessary and would be disrespectful to spell things out. Untimely Nietzsche—who invented or, to be more precise, demonstrated, modeled, and experimented with the notion of a social construct—knew this, as did his progeny, Foucault. The physical provides the armature on or through which discourse finds purchase. Discourse is mighty. Through all of its seemingly endless permutations it retains a constitutive, ontological power. But it requires something to motivate it, to move and by which to be moved. Discourse needs something to work off of and on which to work. That which is physical makes itself available for this. Without a tongue, language cannot be said. Or to use a different type of example, geology is a social construct, but the physicality of which it is an echo and thus extension is not. • “While forms are fluid, their ‘meaning’ is even more so” (Nietzsche). • The physical is multifarious, always openly and open-endedly specific, congealed, as it is, into bodies. The first thing moved by and that moves discourse is bodies. Bodies are the first instance of physicality. What is most insightful (and delightful) about Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of flesh, of bodies, and of the chiasm is his understanding that “my” body, which is not discrete, is immersed in a world of bodies, and that mine is mutually electrified by its contact with all of the others; animal, vegetable, mineral, stellar (i.e., heavenly bodies), the visible and the invisible. • To be clear, we are talking not about universalities but ubiquities, which can also be conceptualized in terms of ubiquity. • The iconographies and choreographies of embodied intersubjectivity are what is most threatened by the subject-technology assemblage, by, that is, the emergent processes of sedentarization (cf. Virilio, Open Sky) that are coextensive with so-called “social” media and the systems of which they are part. This is true insofar as physicality is abandoned at the entrance to the rabbit hole, with all of the attending ramifications for the evacuation of the soul, but also, more concretely, insofar as device-staring drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists, and parents pushing strollers pose a physical threat to themselves and others: although they would appear to be in motion, their “consciousness” is somewhere else, or possibly nowhere. Students who are observed texting in class now get marked absent, since they are. If there ever were a case for soul/body dualism, the time would have arrived, were there much in the way of soul remaining. Note: We take this opportunity to propose here an entirely new physicality-focused therapeutic regimen designed for people inclined to leave physicality so vulnerable by forsaking it: such a regimen might begin by simply shutting down the connection. However, we already anticipate that the first obvious obstacle to this eventuality is the likelihood that the new therapists will be stealing glances

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at, side-checking their devices—like their clients, they, too, will be mesmerized, somewhere else, somewhere other than present. • In a Socratic sense, let us hold our positions! Let us take a stand on or at least stroll over Heidegger’s bridge, which connects so many bodies. Physicality will prevail, because it must! • There are only bodies, and yet there is also only one body, the one registered in terms of Earth’s carrying capacity, overpopulation, and the carbon footprint bequeathed by industrial socioeconomy, by, that is, human and all adjacent bodies and the machines in relation to which we may have become mere extensions. There are only bodies, only specific formations of ice, and yet they are all one as they melt in uneven unison and unitary direction—into the sea—a late confirmation of the prophecies of Thales, who warned us of a universe comprised of water. Or we might remark on global processes of desertification coupled with rising seas: aesthetically, these processes would seem to be at some sort of odds with each other but are of course different sides of the same thermometer. • In the virtual world, nothing actually happens. In the physical world, massive quantities of juice are required to fuel devices. In the physical world, millions of barrels of petroleum are burned annually in order to ship millions of cargo containers of bottled water to the inhabitants of the world city. The juice, petroleum, and the water are physical, as are the ships and shipping lanes. The subject-technology assemblage sips bottled water while screen-staring at an altitude of 36,000 feet. • There are only bodies insinuated into natural cycles, rhythms, and processes. Yet the interruption and displacement of natural processes by the compromised, erratic processes that characterize the Anthropocene throw all bodies, including the bodies of the seasons themselves, off guard. All bodies are bodies within and beside other bodies, and they have naturally always been at the mercy of rich formations of physicality. Now, though, these bodies are at the mercy of themselves, that is, at the mercy of the culture of production and even of so-called sustainable development. If there is a way forward, it must entail remaining open to being at the mercy of forces other than ourselves (what now is “other”?). Or apparently those forces have already found us. We—the writers of this manifesto—personally experienced the flood dragged into Red Hook, Brooklyn, by Hurricane Sandy (the only benefit of which was that it knocked out power, and internet and cell service). “It” is already here. • Physical health is always tenuous, as physicality in its multifarious configurations always has been. The heart should not attack us, and systems of breathing—of the exchange of carbon dioxide for oxygen—should remain in balance. We acknowledge that an imperative has inserted itself here, but



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it is a reflection of what old Kant used to call “natural laws,” or simply an acknowledgment of the vulnerability of physicality. • When food systems begin to collapse, we in the privileged world—those of us who live in the world city (Virilio) and who read philosophy, and so forth—may be left staring at cookbooks (Ottolenghi) and scrambling to find clean drinking water. Are cookbooks physical? Only as a passage to the ingredients they urge us to assemble. • When we consider assembling the elements, the virtues of concrete—lime, aggregate, water—are self-evident. Dig a hole, make a mold, or set a form, for example, mix the mud and pour it in, encasing steel rebar to provide supple strength, take that strength vertical, steel goes anti-gravity. While concrete is a relatively simple admixture, steel is a complex amalgam and product of many extractions—coal and metals—so steel is always haunted by ghosts, by real, physical voids in the ground (conclude that ghosts are physical). The process of shaping wood or stone is a matter of removal, and removal of material is also synonymous with the creation of ghosts—insofar as it is discarded, removed material would seem to fade away, but as Derrida’s palimpsest teaches us, nothing does. • As should be evident by our reference to concrete, steel, wood, and stone— the stuff of sculpture—physicality is not a category, which is to say that it is no more “conceptual” than is pigmentation. Colors play themselves out in social constructs, but the palette must be there in order to execute the painting. Put differently, the palette may be a construct—it is certainly a labor—but the colors are not, and the colors are apparently endless: science may not tell us that, but art does, offering physicality in the sometime problematic form of the visible, the reverse of a rabbit hole. • The Ring of Gyges offers a tale about becoming invisible while retaining the advantages of physicality. But reading the tale in an alternate direction suggests that the lesson is about the reality that we are only and always visible, visible because we are physical, and do not vanish even when we are dead since we decompose and “return.” Unless we go down a rabbit hole that neither Plato nor any other ancients could have imagined. Still, physicality will prevail. • Yet in contemporary times much of the agora seems to have gone invisible, an instance of masks concealing masks concealing masks concealing numbers that are ultimately electronic and thus possessed of a peculiar ontological status, masses of value accruing to industries that produce nothing other than “value” (so maybe Gyges’s ring does exist). • What does money mean in an increasingly cashless economy? Cash has the capacity to become invisible while yet remaining physical. Chip cards may be plastic, but they embody a type of value dissociated from physicality. The black and gray markets do not take plastic. Bitcoin, maybe.

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Meanwhile, bank robberies used to be physical operations. Now, they are elaborate hacks. The “money” vanishes, and the thieves cover their tracks electronically. • Fool’s gold (pyrite) helps us retain clarity about value, or at least about gold, value emerging from difference. However, physicality does not help us fabricate a fiduciary standard, since the worth of gold, with its ambitions toward universal value, is precisely that with which we imbue it, no more and no less. • Regarding fool’s gold, this hyper-consumerist culture is all about the accumulation and disposal of products. The accumulation and disposal of products threatens physicality. • What is the value of physical labor in a “service economy”? Physical labor is still what drives things, but it seems only marginally visible to those who spend their waking hours staring at devices that have been built by a hybrid of assembly-line labor and robotics. In any event, physical things do not maintain themselves, design processes have not yet gone robotic, nor do the extractive processes in the backdrop of all other forms of production happen automatically. And machines do not go on strike. • The dominant game in the world city is all about the intensification of development, by which we mean real estate. On the one hand, what Snyder calls “the growth monster” devours every opportunity it can to build new luxury condos for the device-staring-being (who may live in an inverted world in which the squares are now the “creatives”—a.k.a. entrepreneurs— and the real creatives have been relegated and demoted to the status of “content providers”). On the other hand, and in the background, the suits are still there, and the banks hold the titles to our real estate, the most real aspect of which is that we must maintain the physical structure, that is, the “real” of real estate refers to the necessity of constant maintenance. The physical does not need to remind us to pay attention to it, since unless we do, things fall apart. • Some people might think that property is something physical, which is somewhat confusing yet harbors within it a sordid truth, which is that the origins of property claims and of the discourse of property are invariably illegitimate—they are expressions of physical power (even if, to follow Rousseau, this entails a mastery of psychological manipulation). Property. Real estate. • There is little room in a manifesto to talk about history, just to appreciate the past insofar as “artifacts”—from cave art to potsherds—overcome or endure in time. Not the “cemeteries” referenced by a haunted Marinetti in 1909, but the brute physical traces of our ancestors, as well as the flesh of Pleistocene-era mammals who, entombed in permafrost for tens of thousands of years have survived into the Anthropocene, revealed now by the



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melt, which is to say that, as the permafrost vanishes, traces of the past reappear, the reverse of a rabbit hole, indications of the future. • In a direction that is something like the contrary of the emergence of woolly mammoths and yet is coextensive with their emergence or reemergence, what Klein calls “sacrifice zones” are the physical cost of extraction, out of sight, out of mind. Physicality will intervene. The common good—the common thread—is grounded in physicality. The common thread is and will continue to be grounded in and on the ground, which remains contested. The contest for physicality is a political one as borders pretend to divide it, as processes of exploitation accelerate, and as the illusion of security guarantees its insecurity, as that which has always been riddled with organic faults disintegrates into a world characterized by crisp, catastrophic political polarities that never before existed. NOTES 1. It is worth noting here the use of lithium to treat forms of mental illness. 2. The only way out of this rut would seem to be Nietzsche’s “How the True World Became a Fable: History of an Error” in Twilight of the Idols, which remarks that with the overthrow of the real world goes the apparent.

Chapter 15

Seventeen Theses on History Wael Hallaq

THESIS ONE Once the latest atom of present time lapses, it gains in our mind the highest assurance of knowledge ever possible. Yet, this is nothing but a fleeting moment of ostensible certainty, for the living present is only a little more certain than the unknowable future. As it increasingly lapses into the past, the atom gradually gains in uncertainty, increasingly fading in memory into an accelerated outburst of imaginative distension. To the exception of the rapidly fleeting present—that flash of current time—we live in and with history, epistemologically so defined. History constitutes a form of our knowledge. Feeble and ferocious, moral and immoral, history is our fate, a destiny and ingrained mental habit. It was born with us, not as a conjoined twin, but as integral to our mind. Indeed, it made the human mind, just as much as that mind has been and continues to be its maker, molding it in its own image. Shaping and defining the human condition, history is as much the mistake of our mind as that mind is the mistake of history. The defects and blessings of history—fluid and convertible, malleable and lacking any sense of irony—are the most accurate reflections of the human mind, exceeding in accuracy all that we call science. We are not merely historical beings, animals defined by history as much as by our so-called autonomous rational knowledge. We are not merely made by, and of, history; we are history itself, and it is us. THESIS TWO We love history and cannot live without it because it is the slave and master of both passions and minds. We tell it what to do and it tells us what we must 199

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and must not do. We make it love and hate, nourish and kill, and it reciprocally gestures toward us in good measure. We often regret history, and when we do, it invariably mocks us; but it does not seem to have ever regretted us. In the mirror of history, we covertly stand as the monumental fools. History is what we were, what we have never been, and what we think we are. It is a factual drama of a limitless imaginary. If the warp of it consists of factual drama, then the woof is made of poetics and fictive narrative. History is as confused as we are. THESIS THREE We are our history, for inasmuch as we make history through our evil and good deeds, history makes us in our ugliness and beauty. Confused modernists shun history: they regard its contents as savage, primitive, infantile, and culturally out of step; and as a discipline, it is perpetually doomed to inferiority. It could never aspire to join the ranks of science, but its advocates—those who concurrently study it and show its condescension—keep hoping against all hope. They realize little that their war was already lost not with the rise of science, for science has been the neighbor of history since time immemorial. Professional historians of modernity lost the war when both the historical and the scientific were severed from the moral, when Hume—and effectively Hobbes before him—eulogized the death of the Union between Fact and Value and celebrated the murder by the invention of the logical distinction between the Is and Ought. The murder, criminal and barbarous, was ennobled by the bestowal on it of a papal cloth of philosophy. Philosophical doublespeak had already outdone its political counterpart, long before the latter’s birth. THESIS FOUR “History of the present” is the highest manifestation of tautology. Clearly, there is no history that can exist outside the mind of the present, for various cultures in different epochs created their own, often unique, forms of historical narratives and invented distinct conceptions of historiography and historicism. One of the claims of the present, history is dressed in the garb of authorized knowledge. A nineteenth-century European production, modern history is little more than a political project of self-justification, the “self” ranging from the dominating nation-state to its complicit and loyal citizen, a self that subsists on colonialism and exploitation of nature, two complementary forms



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of destruction deriving their unitary identity from the mechanization of lifeworld. Modern history is the identitarian performative project of the modern Subject. THESIS FIVE The central domain of modern modes of historical writing is the Political, where nationalism and nationalistic narcissism saturate the historical mind. This follows from the premise that the modern age, in its divisions and architecture of the body-politic, is governed by the Political as well as by unprecedented forms of political power. The Political of the modern—and there is no other true Political—is a zero-sum game: the powers of politics and the Political leave no room for any other genuinely autonomous action, be it discursive, material or otherwise. Politics and the Political dominate, rule, transform: they are god equipped with immediate, effective, and unforgiving modes of sanctioned violence and destruction. As a form and expression of politics and the Political, the modern state is at once an abstract and extremely tangible god. It dominates, rules, and transforms history, crafting it in its own image. The historical profession, a structural sibling of other academic disciplines, unconsciously stands in collusion with the poles of political power, not only endorsing its imperium of repression and control, but also partaking in its architecture and construction. Professional historians are the platoon of palace guards who stand tall and proud in the service of the power-hungry headless emperor. The marvel in all this is the fantasy that if the charge is denied with vehemence and sufficient force, the stain of complacency would be removed. THESIS SIX Political sovereignty and the entire praxis of the state of exception are normal breaches required by the normative order of the Political. Deciding on the exception is neither stipulated in the law nor does it stand against or above the law. It simply is, and the Is rules as Law of the gods. The modern praxis of sovereignty replicates, reenacts, and displaces—in far more poignant and effective ways—God’s power on earth, it having wrenched divine power from the hands of God, only to throw it into the hands of the state’s lording subjects. Lording humans, believing themselves to be the new gods, thereby arose to the ranks of sovereign lawgivers—an unprecedented step in human history. “Power, power, and more power” became their motto, defining and shaping their life’s ethos and desiderata.

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This new human species shunned and loved history all at once. Shunned it because its inhabitants always appeared as human dwarfs, weak, and unable to claim their full potential and right to rule the earth. Loved it, because their historical imaginary made them feel good about themselves. The failures they alleged against the predecessors were supposedly instituted by some unknown power as preparatory lessons for their perceived successes. “We are superior to anyone before us” they prided themselves. “We are now even better than our own selves just yesterday,” they shamelessly proclaimed without a hint of embarrassment. Those who did not subscribe to the New Man’s ways were deemed failures in the trials and tribulations of history, lumped together with an “old order” to be overcome and redesigned in the ways and image of the New Man. The Savage, both primitive and noble, reminds us of our shame, of our origins, nakedness, and suppressed sin. He reminds us of our true nature that must be expunged, at times by oppressive law, but preferably by bellicose annihilation. Despite all denials, modernity’s project of history could never jettison this theology. THESIS SEVEN History is not the function of political power alone. Power is everywhere: it is the newly discovered law of nature, the modern natural law, the Universal Law that puts the Law of the Excluded Middle to shame. The Universal Law of modernity was made possible by the totalistic usurpation by the New Man of the power of God, an all-too-rushed usurpation that left out of the receptacle of booty the entire Tablet of the Ethical Code. The marriage of the New Man to maturity, to an entrenched realization of due evolutionary processes of mind, cosmology, and culture, was never consumed, for the Universal Law is the child of rape. The parents of the Universal Law screamed the distinction between and segregation of the moral from all other spheres of human endeavor: “Thou shall henceforth not confuse the Is and Ought or Fact and Value.” The Is and Fact thus reigned supreme, creating their own fragmented, uncertain, shortsightedly utilitarian morality, one governed in its entirety by the Universal Law. Because it is the brainchild of rape, our conception of history was raised and nurtured as much in violence as in perpetually unfulfilled yearning for love and care. It is a callous and depraved creature. THESIS EIGHT The modern state cannot be said to have arrived on the social stage, in its full weight, without having fully raised and controlled both schools and the



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modern academy. The Educational is both the logical and ontological necessary condition of the Political. The modern state is the happiest medium of a full-fledged dialectic between the Educational and the Political. Like the military and economic, the Educational has been dialectically productive of the state and its citizen. To conceive the citizen outside of the Educational is to conceive impossibility itself. Fragment: “God willing, each newly born child will be an aggressor,” thus spoke Schmitt’s Zarathustra!

Having commandeered the entire range of political power and military might, the modern state conquered the realm of legislation through which the arena of education was confiscated, reengineered, and regulated. The citizen’s genealogy lies precisely in this conquered and reengineered arena. If it is true that the citizen is at once the child and constitutive maker of the modern nation-state, then it is also true that the citizen-scholars’ concept of history and historiography is likewise constitutive of nationalism and the entire politics of the nation-state. The spectrum of academic disciplines, ranging from the so-called exact sciences to social sciences and the humanities, must thus account for their intellectual genealogy as specifically nationalist. Dominated by the nationstate’s cultural production, this genealogy is governed by Enlightenment conceptions of property, materialism, will, freedom, agency, and, most importantly, domination. The brainchild of the Universal Law, domination is a category of thought, a thoroughly encompassing field of intellectual activity, and one that—like science—affects and haunts all spheres of scholarship and thought. Domination indeed constitutes modern ontology and epistemology. However extensive and varied the academic field may be, and irrespective of the individual and collective claims to ethics, the collectivity that is modern academia is governed by—and can be amalgamated and redistributed with no qualitative difference under the spitting fire of—the leviathans of secular humanism and anthropocentricism. Modern history and historiography are footnotes to the main text of the Educational, just as the Educational is the extensively annotated Scriptures of secular humanism and anthropocentricism. THESIS NINE The Euro-American conception of history cannot be provincialized without due recognition of its exceptionality as a traumatized experience incurred under feudal, monarchical, and ecclesiastic molestation. Europe’s singular

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revolution against political and clerical domination and abuse led to radical solutions and a modern historical sequence of pendulum effect. Modernity’s unrelenting penchant toward inner and outer violence, and toward countless unique forms of destructiveness, is both effect and symptom of collective historical trauma and abuse. It is impossible to make sense of the driving forces of the European modern project, and as impossible to write true history, without adequately accounting for this collective trauma. Fragment: Victims of abuse tend to replicate the patterns of violence perpetrated upon them by their abusers. Non-Fragment: In all its central paradigms, including both its historical narrative and doctrine of progress, modernity emerged out of trauma and grew up in it.

THESIS TEN In their intellectual revolts since the Reformation, Europeans reacted through a complex process of restructuring their world, a process that replicated much of the performative structures that perpetrated physical and epistemological violence against them. Hence the irrefutability of the proposition that all important political concepts of modernity are, mutatis mutandis, secularized reincarnations of successively supplanted Christian political and theological concepts. Both political and secular theologies lie at the heart of the modern conception of history and historiography. THESIS ELEVEN Mass trauma in the European historical experience generated extreme resentment of religious traditions and crude forms of power and abusive authority, forms that were to evolve under modernity into subtle forms of coercion, violence, and oppressive governmentality. The outcome was a “civilizational” march away from history and toward an unforeseeable, yet more advanced and promising, destiny. Thus evolved a new secular metaphysic: today is always better than yesterday, and tomorrow will most assuredly be even better than anything that has gone by. The metaphysic is none other than the doctrine of progress whose initial steps marked a deep desire to escape from a painful past, to run to the present, and even from this to some unknown future. The doctrine of progress is a theology of escape. Bring what may, the unknown future can never be as painful as the torment of king, lord, or church.



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Reflecting origins replete with traumatic depredations and depravations, the doctrine culminated in a perpetually unfulfilled yearning for a better life—and in a robust irrationality. There is no present that can offer settled and settling contentment, except the present of the future. It is not doubted in the least that the rational consistency of this proposition will be demonstrated in some future time! THESIS TWELVE Soaked in blood and clothed with excessive pain, European history became the internal Other of the Euro-American present. Replicating that blood and pain, Euro-American colonialism created yet another Other, and still an Other’s Other. In viewing the colonized world as a generalized replica of Europe’s dark ages (primitive, despotic, superstitious), colonialism refabricated that world—through historiography and historical writing—in the image of its former self. At precisely that moment, Europe created, nay performed, an external Other who in turn manufactured an Other internal to itself. The colonized—initially Orientalized but later happily self-Orientalizing—would nearly suddenly cease to recognize themselves in their past, except as shadows and ghosts. Hence the rise of the Other’s Other of Europe, and with it the multiplication of hatred of the Self and of the Other. Like power, hatred is everywhere, here and there, in and out, for power is hatred of the Self as much as it is of the Other, and it permits no place in between. THESIS THIRTEEN As long as European history is monopolized by European historians and written in accord with the governing principles of the Enlightenment and modern historiography, Europe’s history remains unwritten at best and an immense lie at worst. And if the enterprise of those who decide the What and Wherefore of history remains a farce, then no history of non-Europeans has ever been written either; for all history that is the brainchild of modernity is, tautologically, a history of the political present, which is to say, of the domination–narrative of modern Europe or a transferred distillation thereof. THESIS FOURTEEN Because of the ontological impossibility of a history of facts, there remains the only other kind of history: moral instruction. Which is to say that the

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history of the Is, being nothing more than timeless mathematical truths, and despite all denials, situates itself entirely outside the modern historian’s gaze. This historian cannot write such a history, for no other reason than her utter inability to establish the cosmological and metaphysical rootedness of the Is; for the Is, by its very nature, is regarded as nothing but insentient matter. This is why insentient matter is explored as geology, zoology, physics, and astronomy, but has no place in modern history and historiography, commonly so conceived. If cosmology ends where history and historiography begin, then what is the latter’s mandate other than human life as disconnected from its ethical anchor and moral environment? Stripped of its ecological, insentient, metaphysical, and cosmological environment, human history is subjected to a form of rationality that is foreign to its own culture-specific nature and constitution, a rationality that strikingly claims false objectivity precisely because of its foreignness. It more often than not ignores truly performative elements, resorting instead to the marginal and trivial that makes for politically instructive narratives. This approach to human life of the past is another name for domination and callousness: it divides and fragments history as it likes and it whimsically rules it with its uncertain, flimsy, and always shifting modes of thought. Its arrogance is betrayed by the deliberate and unintentional disregard of indigenous rationalities that had given rise to that historical past and its forms of knowledge and of existence in the first place. THESIS FIFTEEN There is no respectable raison d’être for history other than moral instruction. Cicero celebrated it as magistra vitae, and Nietzsche lamented its extinction and desperately worked to re-create it for a valueless world. As a tool of knowledge, and like any tool, history is used for good and bad ends. Deprived of its moral thrust, history is murderous, not least because of its intimate association with nationalism, politics, and the modern state. If the facts of the past are the warp of history, then the architecture, interpretation, and meaning of these facts are its woof. History is the product that has inextricably been woven of actual facts and human interpretation of them, irrespective of what effect the amalgam of the two has on the former. The bloodier the woof is, the more murderous the product. The warp takes final color and shape entirely by virtue of the woof. The more ethical the reason of history is, the more honorable and monumental it is for life.



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THESIS SIXTEEN Modernity’s achievement has been to construct a displacement of all earlier systems of thought and of life and living. And because its genealogy is Christian, modernity replicated this latter’s important conceptions of knowledge and practice, casting them in secularized forms. In many important ways, the secular project that lies at the heart of modernity represents a change of players but not of the rules of the game. A significant secular replication of an earlier Christian phenomenon is a system of ethics and morality that has the semblance of virtuosity, but one that has sanctioned a group of beliefs and practices destructive of the ecological, insentient, animal, human, and social environments. Because this system arose within a larger global system of colonialism, where Afro-Asian premodern legacies challenged and continue to pressure Europe’s secular humanism, it was forced to continually defend itself against established and, until modernity, time-tested moralities. In this defense, modernity resorted to the concept of infinite improvement and relativism. In the former, modernity’s morality is vindicated through the falsely invincible proof of progress, which has nonetheless been unable to boast much beyond material improvement. And even this, the moderns have come to realize, has been achieved at an exorbitant cost. The slow but steady collapse of the doctrine of progress left a deficit in the defense of secular humanism in particular and in the project of modernity in general, a deficit that was made up for by a contorted doctrine of relativism that is, along with the doctrine of progress, the most ideologically charged conception humans have come to know in millennia. The unruly and confused and confusing doctrine of relativism is intended to prevent any coherent decision or stand on what is moral and ethical and what is not, betraying a pernicious multivalency, the means to entrench its chaotic but latent hypocrisy. The endlessly expanding force of relativism’s claims remains squarely lodged in the private sphere. Who would nowadays dare to claim relativism in the affairs of the state, its sovereignty, its law? Non-Fragment 1: True relativism was murdered precisely at the moment in which true freedom met its tragic end. Non-Fragment 2: The purpose and function of the doctrine of relativism is the defense of modernity’s new moralities, which are morally indefensible. Non-Fragment 3: Relativism is the subliminal method that reconstitutes vice as virtue.

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History and historiography operate not only within the doctrine of progress but also squarely within that of relativism. Any question we ask of history is as good as the next, so goes the standard practice, and no doubt the standard belief and conviction. Who is to say what is a legitimate or illegitimate, or valuable or useless historical topic of investigation? The doctrine succeeds capaciously in its relativism until, that is, it has met with the fundamental critique of the serious opponent. Modern history shows its absolutist color when the opponent avers that history is not an open-ended field of inquiry; that it cannot be allowed to serve political ends; that it cannot be allowed to partake in the construction of a Third-Reich, an apartheid regime, or any nationalist project whatever. THESIS SEVENTEEN Every thesis herein stands in a dialectical relationship with all the others, individually and collectively; without them there is no hope of it being properly understood.

Chapter 16

The Time of Critique Ruth Mas

It may be hard to believe given the ongoing political crisis in the United States, but the world is not “American”: It never was American, cannot be American. “American” is a metaphor for U.S. power and the post-Christian secularism that sustains it, and is simply a way of describing global empire.1 Empire likes nothing better than a crisis that affirms its indispensability. And so it is that the liberal segment of the white dominant class of the United States consumes crisis. It wasn’t too long ago that this constituency could hardly get enough of the “Syrian refugee crisis,” which was really the parade of somebody else’s misery reconfigured by the media as the Muslim march through Christian fences to liberal freedom.2 It was enthralling. It kept Daesh at bay. It anticipated the best in the face of a very sure idea of the worst. That assuredness, however, was a distraction, and here we are, U.S. citizen or not, dismayed to find ourselves within the reach of an orange-hued miasma of power.3 Until recently, U.S. liberals have been complacent and self-satisfied in their consumption of crisis. But now that crisis is domestic, their political indifference is suddenly difficult to sustain. One reason may be because the after-effects of the events of 2001 mean that experiencing crisis in the U.S. is not quite as much fun as observing it in others. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the current regime in the U.S. But, in whose name and for whom is everybody alarmed? The question needs to be asked especially now that the “reception” camps, the coiled, razor-wired fences, and the identification numbers marking Muslim bodies that cross into Christian Europe have mostly disappeared from the pages of the liberal media. Justice finds no refuge in crisis, and there is a politics to the way crisis clothes itself in the moral finery of hope that makes sure to leave untouched the boundaries of the nation it cloaks. 209

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Liberals located at the pinnacle of neo-liberal empire are invested in claiming the unprecedented extremes of the extant crisis in U.S. Doing so reassures them of the need for progressive liberalism to be rescued from the current regime, but at the same time it also reassures them of the U.S as the location for world power. While they may even own up to the fact that their centre of power is always seeking and has in fact achieved global reach, this only serves to render their crisis the crisis of all crises, and hence, the crisis of all. And yet, crisis is never “the biggest,” nor is it ever unique or new. It only feels new to those whom it affects, especially when they care about it only in so far as it affects them. Claiming the excesses of crisis is thus turned into a fillip for neo-liberal politics that incite time to arrange all of its laggards into a beeline of hope for a better future. And allegedly, there is no greater straggler in this world than a Muslim. This kind of thinking was rapidly reinforced after the events of the 11th of September, 2001 when the “medievalist regime” of Islam was weighed against the forward movement of the new millennium. At the time, a Guardian article, “Terror’s March Backwards,” summarised the dominant arguments for modernity’s turf war with Islam thus: “There’s a big stone at the back of the Stone Age and we’ll bomb them so hard back into that, they'll bounce all the way forward to 2002.”4 Throughout the last several decades, we have been primed to anticipate the apocalypticism that is Islam.5 At the same time, this anticipation of the end of times, rescripted as Islamic violence, is shored up for the political aims of liberal secularism and its regime of international politics. And the hegemonic quality to the teleological drive of politicized secular governance thrives on the expectation of an apocalyptic future. We are faced, therefore, with a feedback loop between the “crisis of Islam” and the one internal to U.S. politics that makes it difficult to ascertain where one starts and the other finishes. It is dismaying to observe the panic of liberal U.S. citizens as they realise that their nation’s sway and responsibility in the global push of power creates a politics that comes to a head at home. But it’s all a matter of time. Crisis is not in the habit of respecting boundaries, national, or otherwise, whether discursively or materially. It will be interesting to mark the moment, if there is one, when the neo-liberal capitalist penny drops for those now protesting the variations on white supremacy soldiering on at home. What does it mean to write critically within the borders of anticipation and crisis when that space is struck through with the type of pro-secular Islamophobia that secures the modern—and thus temporal—parameters that are reproduced by global politics? One would think that critique in this regard has to be a critique of the temporality put into place by modernity to create the “befores” and “afters” of its power. But, one knows the moral compass of temporal power has been skewed when the leader of the free world blusters his way into the hearts of his Christian evangelical supporters by declaring,



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“We must always remember that we all share one home and one glorious destiny, whether we are black, brown or white,” immediately after having urged his predominantly white Christian audience to be “outsiders,” because “It’s the outsiders who change the world and make a real and lasting difference.” And given that “Nothing is easier—or more pathetic—than being a critic,” what we have is a back-handed, if not outright confused, statement about the place and role of critique.6 Are we supposed to understand by this that meaningful change can only be effected by Christians, or white Christians, who position themselves as outsiders to a more inclusive community (or that a more inclusive community should be framed as Christian), and that in so positioning themselves they should be shielded from or not participate in critique? Is it not true, however, that what needs to be critiqued is how these “outsiders” are actually the dominant majority who commandeer the singular destiny to which those who are black, or brown, or non-Christian must conform? Critiquing the political exclusion of Muslims and others is difficult to do when our tools, the secular-hope-inducing ones, still adopt the exclusionary framework of secularism.7 This difficulty begins with the category of religion when it already takes for granted the secularisation of a tradition, and cannot accept that the tradition of Islam is very much an integral part of western historical ontology and the temporal politics of the systems of governance in which we are all now ensconced. The question of the political significance of critique in its relation to Islam thus has to do with the possibility of disembroiling the exercise of critique from the teleology of its Western post-Christian secular operation.8 It is a reminder that, in one way or another, Enlightenment thinking shapes us all due to the global dissemination—the enforcement, really—of the secularising structures of power and their temporal demands that it put into place by way of the modern nation state. Foucault’s reading of the public and political use of reason in Kant’s “Was ist Aufklärung?”9 is key to considering how to critique the inclusive exclusion of the frameworks of time’s modern-day politics. His refusal of what he terms the “blackmail” of the Enlightenment, the “for” and “against” positions that are increasingly impossible to uphold, is a necessary but very difficult thing to do when appeals to “the Enlightenment” are precisely what sustain claims about Muslims being out of time, anachronistic, discordant with the present, and having to catch up with the trajectory of secular history.10 Secularly schooling Muslims to reform, and to synchronize themselves, their traditions, their histories, and their sensibilities to the temporal structures of secularizing governance not only presupposes that they belong to an earlier time, it also assumes their irrelevance to the secularizing politics of our historical present.11 To ask Muslims to reform is, in this sense, incoherent, and as anachronistic as it is absurd. Yet so is claiming any present position of

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exteriority from which to oppose the Enlightenment or any system of power that sustains it.12 Modern secularising temporality’s dependence on the rhetoric of crisis and anticipation needs to be critiqued because it obfuscates the movement of power—and critique’s relationship to it. Foucault, in his reading of power famously developed in the first volume of the History of Sexuality and other essays, but also in his later lectures given at the Collège de France, has trained us to identify the everyday, inter-relational diffusion of power, its discursivity, and its productive non-coerciveness.13 We now know this by heart. The omnipresence of power makes its critical tracking an exercise in charting unpredictability. But does it do so completely? What, we might ask, has happened, for example, to Foucault’s treatment of power as outlined in Discipline and Punish?14 That treatment is a lesson in the institutionalisation of state power, one which has been harnessed by postcolonial studies, and which is crucial to our understanding of the location of Islam and Muslims in modernity. And the lesson is that we still need to contend with the durability of the violence of the state, which produces structural inequalities that are continuous and have endless stamina in perpetuating their material effects. Here, Ian Hacking’s reading of Foucault in his Historical Ontology is a necessary antidote to those who slip from “Power is everywhere” to “So, what can we do? Power is subjective!”15 Historical structures of power are sedimented into our present. They are resilient, they are material, and they stabilize into clear and identifiable patterns of continuity that are organized and sustained institutionally.16 Foucault, who eventually became annoyed with constant questions about where “structures” disappeared to in his “philosophy of discontinuity,” would agree. Power styles itself in many ways. But, because it endures structurally, even when it manifests itself sporadically, power is nevertheless stable enough to critique. The question is, how best to approach its creativity and its endurance? To admit to the continuity of power as the object of critique is not to establish the a-temporal uniformity or transcendence of institutionalized power.17 It is to know that at the very least, and with material certainty, power can be stalked. The challenge is getting a grip on power long enough to critique it with some degree of certainty about its direction before it slips through our hands again. This challenge is amplified when “what is happening” is nothing short of apocalyptic. In other words, while critique may then be all the more necessary, it is also all the more difficult. This is because when we actually do turn our gaze from the past or the present to the future—the future as the possibility of what could happen, or as the possibility of what we can do about what has happened—we are met with nothing short of a staggering magnitude of anticipation, whether fear or hope.18 Both are sides of the same coin, but here, I will stick to the question of fear. There is much to learn from fear when



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crisis comes knocking. The feeling of anticipation, Reinhart Koselleck tells us, is part and parcel of the modern experience of time in which the experience of present time is quickened into ever-shorter intervals.19 These are really just either moments of the hopeful anticipating of the future progress of modernity or of the fearful anticipating of that which can impede that progress. How history is used to ram a past into a horrifying future is a modern enterprise that functions in terms of what Foucault describes as “the discourse of power, the discourse of the obligations power uses to subjugate…the dazzling discourse that power uses to fascinate, terrorize, and immobilize.”20 This future is too often the projection of the incongruity of the religious difference of Islam where the Islam of our present or our future is actually an ominously (and conveniently) picked and pegged history of Islam.21 Manacling the apocalyptic dimensions of Islam to a secular present is supposed to ensure the perpetuation of that present as one of secularism’s assured calm.22 One only has to look at the effects of bombing secular peace onto the world to see how well that works. And those who will only train their eyes on their nation’s storm should at least take a long and hard look at how “Muslim bans”23 and “Muslim registers”24 are the corollary to publishing secular lists of “immigrant-criminals.”25 But Sikhs and Hindus are being shot too.26 The assaults on Jewish centres and cemeteries don’t stop.27 Attack dogs are unleashed on Indigenous protestors because pepper-spraying and bulldozing them somehow haven’t been sufficient to reinforce their colonisation.28 And yes, not all political violence is refracted quite as clearly through secularism when bodily difference is prejudicial. Black people are systematic fodder for institutionalised abuse, humiliation and murder, their lives “post-racially” resurrected as hash-tags.29 Women are reduced to grabbed parts.30 Transgendered people are outed from washrooms and military alike.31 On one side of a “big beautiful wall,” undocumented immigrants are hunted prey for deportation.32 The disabled are publicly mocked.33 And the poor are dying for lack of medical coverage thanks to the let-them-eat-nothing cruelty of the nation’s financiers. Scratch through the “post”(secularism) of current politics, and you quickly feel the Christian embrace of dominant heteronormative male whiteness chomping at the bit of secularism’s whitewashed tyranny.34 There is, in fact, very little calm, secular or otherwise, being assured right now. And indeed, it is quite understandable not to be able to foresee a reprieve from what Meryl Streep has called the “catastrophic instinct to retaliate [that] can lead to nuclear winter” presently characterising U.S. power.35 Writing for the Jacobin, Alec Gourevitch describes the discursivity of present-day power as “rapid fire barbarity.”36 The temporal disorientation produced by what has Streep has termed the “spasmodic regularity” and “easily provoked predictability” of the current regime of power has those in its grasp gasping for breath out of fear of the force and drive coming straight for them.37

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But, while accurate, Streep and Gourevitch risk becoming sources for the catastrophic claiming of the catastrophe, which, in terrorizing anticipation is slamming pasts right into futures. In a grotesque riff on Koselleck’s description of prognosis as “a conscious element (Moment) of political action” that “implies a diagnosis which introduces the past into the future,” the political interventions of our current prognosticators of apocalypticism are apocalyptic.38 The result is nothing short of disorienting, because the present from which we assess our politics in the world is lost between pasts we are running from and futures we are resisting. In this sense, the time of critique is not only the critique of time, but the sense of time in which and from which we are critiquing. It has its own momentum, and we have to ask ourselves how much we want to be parroting the temporality of power in our critique of it. Clearly, the time of critique is now. But crisis or no crisis, or whether it is somebody else’s crisis or our own, it always is the time and the now of critique. Therefore, our understanding of “now” must be as limpid as possible so that we can inhabit it fully self-possessed. To be clear, this self-possession is an act of subjectivization in the face of power. This is where our engagement with Foucault’s work on the genealogical critique of power, in which he initially hesitates to propose a political philosophy of ethics, must necessarily interpolate his later work on askesis, in which he treats the ethical practice of self-constitution. There is an obvious connection between Foucault’s critique of power and the importance that he places on ethics and the activity of writing in his spiritual exercises. Writing is one of the obligations of the exercise of the self and the reflexivity of thought, in which thoughts are kept “ready at hand night and day” so that they can be put into writing.39 Here, Foucault brings us directly to the question of activity, on which he implores us to focus and which must be evaluated. His discussion of writing implies that critique itself can be conceived as activity, even as political activity. But it is also something more. Critique can also be the definite orientation toward and accounting for what one will do, as modelled by programmed action that Foucault describes as set and reviewed at the beginning of the day when objectives and ends of actions are defined. The implications of thinking about critique in this way are rather important because they would suggest, by this reading, the necessary movement from critique as genealogy to critique as what Naomi Klein has called a “drafting of alternative codes of conduct.”40 One of the most fascinating things about this turn is what it does to Foucault’s concept of critique as genealogy, whereby the past is repeatedly excavated in a critical effort to untether our present from the normative grasp of modernity’s teleology, a teleology that guarantees its drive by appeals to crisis. The constant genealogical move assures the destabilization of the grasp of power on principles of governance, but it has received much criticism for not providing alternative principles by which to conduct ourselves. Well, as



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all good Foucauldians know, all proposed alternative principles are inevitably subjected to the force of power. So how do we come to terms with the tension between what Foucault has opened as a potential for thinking about action and the eventual necessity to critique the principles that this type of thinking would propose? One might suggest that the answer lies in the delay, the gap, the very short décalage between the time of action and the time of critique. The key to understanding this aperture is in how Foucault qualifies the idea of programming actions: by considering them for only a day. Thus, even this thinking, this examination, is directed at the “near and immediate future,” and expires at the end of the day,41 when a new posture is taken up whereby one evaluates onself through what Foucault describes as the “meditation on death and its future evils.” This stance depends on thinking of death as present and arriving at the end of the day as if it were the last one.42 This brings me to the importance of thinking through the connections between critique and askesis that have to do more directly with refusing the political configuration of time as anticipation. The night-time meditation has three important implications. The first involves warding off the future: Foucault describes the night-time meditation as structured by a “mistrust of the future, of thinking about the future, and of the orientation of life, reflection, and imagination towards the future”43 that nevertheless makes a “case [for] thinking about the future.”44 It is a “sealing off [of] the future,” which involves thought’s “systematically nullifying the specific dimensions of the future.”45 It is a “test of the worst,”46 where one trains “oneself in thought to assume” the worst of all possible worlds in all their probability and immediacy.47 This view of the future does not accept the uncertainty of the future since it takes on its different open possibilities. It also does away with the notion of the succession of time into the future by understanding time as “immediate time, gathered up into a point.”48 To quote Foucault directly, “We do not start from the present in order to simulate the future: we give ourselves the entire future in order to simulate it as present.”49 The second implication is that this exercise enables us to take a sort of “instantaneous view of the present from above.”50 It permits “thought to make a cross section of the duration of life, the flow of activities, i.e. the flux of time, and the stream of representations of the action” one is performing. It “immobilize[s] the present in a snapshot” of its reality and its value, which are revealed when you think of it as the last day.51 I would suggest that this is an excellent and necessary model for parsing out the ways in which histories are retrieved for the purposes of a present that is already caught up in the anticipation of the future. This is because it discloses the relationship of the past to the present by keeping the future at bay. But it also opens up the past in and of itself. What this means is that modernity’s secular separation

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from tradition becomes fundamentally unsure since the secular need not be grounded in Christianity. Furthermore, destabilising Christianity as the ground from which the secular, in modern fashion, separates, allows for the principles from any pasts, from any traditions, including Islamic ones, to ground our future presents (secular or not). We have the possibility here of enlarging the sphere both of political thinking and political action. Lastly, to paraphrase Foucault, the night-time meditation is a training of the self for the improvisation of thought,52 of speaking freely,53 of cultivating “true discourse” so that we are not caught off-guard, and can react critically in the moment of the surprise by having “ready at hand” the judgment of everything that we do.54 To speak of the improvisation of thought demands elaboration because of the opportunistic way in which being able to “capitalise on the unforeseen” has supported the ideologies of European colonisation.55 Why would Foucault, the foremost critic of power, align himself, in seemingly contradictory fashion, with its strategies by advocating improvisation as a tool of thought? An answer to this may lie in George Lewis’s and Benjamin Piekut’s introduction to their magisterial Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, where they link discussions of the “mobile, improvisatory sensibility” of modernity to Foucault’s thinking.56 Lewis and Piekut contend that Foucault employs “improvisational language” in his treatment of Kant’s essay when he takes up the question of the modern ethos as one in which the self is brought into awareness of its relationship to the present.57 This demands a historico-critical attitude for Foucault that “grasp[s] the point where change is possible and desirable and…determines the precise form this change should take.”58 Thus, for the critic to engage with improvisation in this way does not involve her in an act of violence on power’s behalf but instead allows her “to convert states of domination, in which power relations are frozen or blocked, into mobile sites for the conscious practice of freedom.”59 Critique is born of the actions of power. This means that the improvisation of thought required of critique should have the dexterity to deal with how power—its states and institutions—has mastered improvisation. The political implications of characterising critique as improvisation are configured by the different temporal registers that they each occupy. While most of the moment-to-moment actions that fill our lives involve improvisation and include our thinking, what renders improvisation different from critique is the quality of spontaneity.60 Spontaneity, however, occupies a different temporal register from improvisation proper and is certainly no replacement for the labour of thought, however quickly the latter needs to be produced—we have been admonished so many times for our failure to think through the ancillaries of disaster in the public arena of politics! It is for this reason that the spontaneity, extemporaneousness, change, or novelty of thought that pretends it can do without premeditation or pre-conceptualisation



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is minimised in the attitude of critique. Improvisation stands at the midpoint between, for example, the spontaneity of speech and dependence on the evanescence of time, and the deliberation inherent in critique, which rests on the systematisation of time, the constraints it presupposes, and the ways that it makes available elements of past time. Writing, the mainstay of critique, exists on the other end of the temporal spectrum, and is almost antithetical to the unscriptedness of spontaneity. The act of writing can take its time: time for inspiration; time for considering, nurturing, and judiciously deliberating ideas; time for writing and rewriting, for subtracting, adding and polishing.61 Writing and the thought that accompanies it, involves the deferral of time, the putting off of time, which spontaneity and, to a lesser degree, improvisation do not admit.62 And yet, how often do we seem to fall behind as critics when crisis necessitates an immediate response! And so it is that the improvisation of thought sees itself in productive tension with critique. Improvisation is a process of accessing and familiarising oneself with the past as the system given to it and within which it functions, a process that discloses and insists on keeping us very much in the present, and more attached to the constancy of the process of thought in the making. It is for this reason that musicians of jazz have become the subject of much critical thought. In his essay “Blue in Green: Black Interiority,” Nathaniel Mackey describes Miles Davis’s music thus, “It broods. It brings reflection to the fore.”63 “Miles’s less-is-more approach,” he continues further on, “appears to make deliberative thought audible, palpable—deliberative thought itself, not simply the decisions at which it has arrived.”64 Miles Davis, Mackey adds, “highlights analysis, dissection, the act of selection, discernment, choice…In so doing, he ma[kes] the music more palpably a vehicle for thinking out loud, the ‘out loud’ [is] in fact an effect of his use of silence—reticent sound, it seem[s], making cognition a manifest presence.”65 Improvisation aids critique in biding its time, in staying in the now of time so as not to fall into crisis’s trap of anticipation and the fear that it produces, which short-circuits our present. But, at the same time, and as in jazz, improvisation demands having thought ready at hand, that is, after its deliberation, having immediate access to it, delivering and performing thought at a moment’s notice. When time, thought, and forbearance are accumulated in our present, we are sharper, quicker, and more at the ready to quickly dispatch our critique. Moreover, if we consider Foucault’s treatment of both improvisational thought and critique, we see that improvisation incites critique to more easily access the future, much in the way Miles Davis “introduces us into what’s already underway, already there.”66 That already there reflects the subterraneous quality of crisis throughout history—the patterns or grounding of its emergence already established throughout a past that is waiting to emerge.

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The question at stake is what converging improvisation with the present moment of critique—one that is saturated with the knowledge of many possible pasts—adds to critique, and has to do with how critique uses its knowledge of the past to determine what will be, to critique this possibility, and to propose, however provisionally, how these possibilities should be decentred. The first answer is that it forces critique to be attentive to the present circumstances of power, especially when crisis rears its head. Our willingness and critical ability to subject ourselves to power’s immediacy whet our responses and create a very productive tension and engagement with its force so that we are able to dislocate and divert its trajectories. This involves redirecting our critical responses from the historical and structural grounding of the political event’s singularity (as if it were absolutely predictive of a future) to the singular moment when it becomes the object of critique. The second has to do with how forgoing an already determined future informs the success of critique. This is precisely where the tension in Foucault’s work arises. To resolve it involves thinking about critique both in terms of its capacity to identify the repetition of enduring structural patterns of power and taking on the different and open possibilities of the future in such a way that allows for the programming of multiple and continual actions that change over time to counter the singularity of these structures. Those who confront the conflict seemingly inherent in challenging continuing structures of power in temporary ways have thought deeply about the shape and form the performance of deliberative improvisation takes. We shall turn to two such figures representing very different cultural contexts but who have nevertheless produced complementary models for thinking about improvisational agency. The first is the jazz musician and composer Charles Mingus, and the second is the author and social activist Naomi Klein. In the last pages of his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, Charles Mingus describes how musical improvisation incorporates repetition as well as innovation. Responding to the restrictiveness and obvious pulse that marks the linearity of some forms of music, he states, But I use the term “rotary perception.” If you get a mental picture of the beat existing within a circle you’re more free to improvise. People used to think that notes had to fall on the centre of the beats in the bar at intervals like a metronome, with three or four men in the rhythm section accenting the same pulse. That’s like parade music or dance music. But imagine a circle surrounding each beat – each guy can play his notes anywhere in that circle and it gives him a feeling he has more space. The notes fall anywhere inside the circle but the original feeling for the beat isn’t changed… I’ve been using extended forms and prolonged chords for years and I wasn’t the first with that either. I got ideas from Spanish and Arab music. And much more can be done with pedal points – you



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know, notes sustained underneath changing harmonies but above these notes the keys can be varied so you get all kinds of effects.67

If we consider improvisation in terms of the rotary perception that Charles Mingus proposes, namely as a circle of time surrounding each beat within which notes can be played (that is, where notes don’t have to take place on the beat but are played behind the beat or in front of it), we can advance it as a model for formulating the critique of (and in the face of) the sedimentation of power’s continuity. Such a model of critique would be as well-honed and accumulated a discipline as Charles Mingus’s critique of linear conceptions of rhythm, one that would react to the repetitive singularity of the pulse of power by extending time in different directions. Expanding our critique over power’s temporality in this way would involve accessing different models of time than the ones propelled by its modern secularity, such as the ones that place tradition behind its beat in order to reroute or extend its future in a different direction. Capitalising on the pre-existing systems within which the continuing rhythm of power is set, or which power sets, would involve keeping up with their momentum against which it could then sustain its criticism. In doing so, it could succeed in redirecting or even changing the inflections of power. And yet a circle of possible notes, in major or minor keys for example, also surrounds each beat (and, it goes without saying, are played on the beat and before it or after it), and forms into changing harmonies, chords, assonances, dissonances, and so on. The beat of power never goes away, but our critical notes, the multiplicity of them, come at that beat from every possible temporal or spatial direction, or as Klein would have it (as we shall see below), “swarm” around it. The steadfastness of power is thus surrounded on all sides with the changing diversity of critique. That diversity could be formulated on the grounds of say, Spanish and Arab, or even Islamic thought. This model strays from the singular melody of power, and presupposes the multiplicity of the sound of criticism—individual solos but also the solos of others, their melodies, the reinforcement of sound in chords—and would reflect a collective quality in so far as it would also presuppose a multiplicity of critical players in the score of politics. Improvising and composing critique would not stop as long as power had a pulse; it would let go of the last critical note written and compose the next one only at, and as soon as, the moment arrived. That moment would always be now. Social theorist Jacques Attali maintains that music anticipates change and that there is a politics to sound that reveals how power works its way through the structural basis of society. “Any theory of power today,” Attali insists, “must include a theory of the localisation of noise and its endowment with form.”68 One of Naomi Klein’s earlier articles, “What’s Next? The Movement

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Against Global Corporatism Doesn’t Need to Sign a Ten-Point Plan to Be Effective,” takes up that posture, however inadvertently. It is a testament to the fact that the theoretical foundations of criticism and the improvisation of thought can be embodied in sound and thus grounded in something other than empty abstraction. Speaking of the demands made of activists criticised for being “scattered, nonlinear and unfocused” to present a unified vision and strategy against the continual assault of global corporatism, Klein asks “So how do you extract coherence from a movement filled with anarchists, whose greatest tactical strength so far has been its similarity to a swarm of mosquitoes?”69 The question’s importance lies in her realisation that “forced consensus” is such an inadequate response to the consolidations of power that “laboured manifestos are fading into the background, [and are being] replaced instead by a culture of constant, loosely structured and sometimes compulsive information swapping.”70 Klein’s answer, “Maybe...the best approach is to learn to surf the structures that are emerging organically,” is attentive to the materialisation of new political structures and their accompanying temporalities. She later adds, “Perhaps its true challenge is not finding a vision but rather resisting the urge to settle on one too quickly,”71 and one can see in both these suggestions that they are written in the true spirit of Foucault’s genealogy. That such an abstract thinker of power would find consonance with the experience of an activist reflects not only the strength of Klein’s materially grounded thought but reminds us all too of the impact that Foucault’s activism had on his theoretical work.72 Turning to Klein in this last stage of our elaboration of Foucault’s work offers us an up-to-date vocabulary—based on the experience of the concrete materialities and functioning of power—with which to respond to the intricacies that Foucault alerted us to, namely those that take the shape not only of concentrated and enduring structures but that are also inter-relational, fragmented, and decentralised. Most importantly, Klein’s elucidation of the principles of activism provides evidence that the view of critique in its inflection with improvisation developed here can be put into action and applied. For Klein, power, which she describes in terms of corporate concentration, globalisation, and power consolidation, needs to be met with fragmentation, localisation, or radical power dispersal.73 The pertinence of Klein’s discussion lies in how she outlines the shape that responses to power are obliged to take rather than in how she describes such power. Klein quotes her fellow activists, “‘We are up against a boulder. We can’t remove it, so we try to go underneath it, to go around it and over it,’” and, “‘transnationals ‘are like giant tankers, and we are like a school of fish. We can respond quickly; they can’t.’” Their imagery underscores how critical rapid improvisation and dexterity in the face of surprise are to activists who want to effectively counter a mass concentration of power.74 Like it is for Charles Mingus, such



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efficacy relies on the collectivity of action. Klein depicts this collectivity as “a war of the swarm”—a palpable bodily enactment of critique—made of converging “miniature movements” that are “intricately and tightly linked to one another.”75 In the following statement, Klein describes the organisational posture of activists, “Rather than present a coherent front, small units of activists surrounded their target from all directions. And rather than build elaborate national or international bureaucracies, they threw up temporary structures.”76 It could be rewritten for critics in the following way, “Rather than all agreeing on the same principles, individual as well as small units of writers approach their object of critique from all directions. And rather than waiting to develop elaborate arguments or focus on a coherent volume of theory, they fire off interim premises and hypotheses.” As critics, we may be better acquainted with historical models of power than the activists Klein discusses. But we have much to learn from the doggedness with which activists familiarise themselves with the intricacies of bureaucracy and political strategies and hunt down their next and newest manifestation. The collaboration amongst the activists described by Klein is effective because their partnership does not require uniformity, or consensus. The only consensus Klein speaks of is the drive to radically decentralise power. Could we as critics ever imagine the academic world in which we operate as working toward the common goal of decentralising power, of having no “central leadership or command structure,” and instead conceive of our alliances as “multi-headed”—a characteristic that would make our work “impossible to decapitate”?77 Klein uses the image of a boundlessly extensile “network of hubs and spokes,”—“activist hubs, made up of hundreds, possibly thousands, of autonomous spokes”—to describe the interlinked and decentralised masse confluence of well-primed activists protesting sometimes looming crisis, and their differently styled strategies and acuminated objectives. Klein states that within such a configuration, “The hubs are the centres of activity, the spokes the links to other centres, which are autonomous but interconnected.”78 Such an activist model, much in the same way as Charles Mingus’s conception of rhythm, is spherical and reflects a rotary grasp on the dynamics and decentralising impetus of (political) linearity. Mingus’s model is more attentive to the issue of temporality, reconfigured here for our purposes as the tempo of power. But what Klein adds to it is a clear conceptualisation of power as consolidated (found in the images of the boulder, the tanker, and the internationalised corporation), but also as a decentralised and ever-expanding web of hubs and spokes that are nevertheless still concentrated into “discrete units with the power to make their own strategic decisions.”79 Those familiar with the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality will recognise “the ingenious adaptation” of power “to pre-existing fragmentation” in the blue-print that Foucault designed.80

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These decentralised and fragmented models of coercive and productive power both suggest how crucial it is for the critic to rein in time. The challenge lies in the moment of crisis when predictive assurances that assuage the anticipation of crisis are all anybody wants. Time, for the critic, does not follow the temporality of progressive politics and its pre-synthesised teleology that unfolds itself throughout the progress or progression of time. And so it should not counter it with a preconceived teleology of power’s violence, however attentive it is to the continuation of its structures. The improvisational attitude toward time instead forces us to ward off the fear of an anticipated apocalyptic future in order to most effectively take on its potentialities in dispatching thought. There is, however, a redemptive as well as disciplining quality to crisis, and it should not be fully held at bay for the crucial reason that crisis forces us to come to terms with the value of our present. Thinking seriously about the possibility of the end of some of the facets of our present should be a finely honed practice of continual thinking in crisis indispensable to whatever thought we launch into the future. Such a practice finds resonance in the cultivation of a critical attitude characterized, in part, as the art of not being governed quite so much, and which is so central to Foucault’s project. We find strong echoes of this in his spiritual exercises where he calls for us to reflect “on the nature of the government one exercises on oneself and on others,” and “on our relations with the rest of the world.”81 For Foucault, this includes cultivating how to give “some advice, some urgent advice,” to others, so that the care of oneself is tantamount to the care of others.82 And here we necessarily have to confront the fact that the critique of temporality has, and has to, set a tone: in Foucault’s discussions of anger at the abuse of power, the question of anger is bounded by the ability to distinguish between the legitimate use of power and its abuse, but also the ability to “allow [for] the use of power,” a point he makes quite explicitly.83 And so Foucault insists on not arguing too intensely with ignorant people whom one cannot convince, and not giving too strong a reproof that offends instead of helps, and focusing instead on acting on others so that they come to build a relationship of sovereignty to themselves.84 This is what Foucault emphasized as the non-rhetorical showing of one’s thought, which is showing what one feels, rather than simply speaking out.85 But here Foucault also introduces the concept of parrhesia as a courageous and radical act of anti-socio-political flattery, levelled at the right moment, but which also preserves the other person’s autonomy.86 So, to restate Foucault but differently, Who will tell the Prince the truth? How? And when? Because there has always been a Prince no matter how or where we are located within the politico-theological trajectory of our liberalized secular governance. And that truth, the one that we are witnessing right now, as we speak, as we open our newspapers, and as we move in and out of airports, is that in the end, the art,



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that is, our art, of not being governed quite so much, is necessarily the art of ensuring that others are not being governed quite so much, or not even at all in the way that they are. ••• The mass migration of populations increasingly entails new forms of subjugation and renewed attempts to curtail the cultural, philosophical, and political promise that accompanies such movement. Because the power of exclusion is loyal to the nationalist borders that aim to reinforce it, secularism, in its hypocritical dependency on Christianity, is one of its most effective instruments. The necessity to be increasingly sensitive to power’s newness and to be wary of the momentum with which it consolidates into new orders will increase, both in terms of the innovation of the old-standing rules of secularising power, and the permutation of its settings. Our responses to this pretence of crisis will have to seriously consider the full dimensionality of “instantaneous views of the present from above,” and on the durations of intersectional life forms and traditions that they reveal. This is where the historical duration of traditions, of pre-modern secular or non-secular thought, are met with the improvisational demands of the modern. Yes, the continuity of tradition is and will continue to be disrupted by modernity’s alacrity. But, in so far as modern secularism has the full force of the framing capacity of power behind it, resorting to integrating these traditions wholesale (as a continuing whole) into a politically secularising environment, or using them to replace these principles of governance in different national frameworks (the nation being a political possibility, which from its formation was underpinned by the secularising principles of modern governance) will only be effective in secularising these traditions along the models set by post-Christian secularism. Appeals to think through and include these traditions should increase; how the pleas for sustaining their significance are satisfied will depend on the agility with which traditions are improvised in the face of modern power. Not content with separating itself from Christianity, the secular as a principle of modern governance, that is, as secularism, thrives in its global ambition by constantly availing itself of the traditions across the globe. What is left for us to do is to thoughtfully, deliberatively, compulsively, and consistently undercut the Christian grounds on which secularism claims to separate itself, a claim that legitimises its very existence and which cannot cease. (Once fully separated, of course, there would no longer be a need for secularism. We would all simply be secular, and secularism would lose its urgency, if not function, altogether.) What would it mean to calmly disclose the ways in which non-Christian histories and traditions are parsed for a politics whose continuance strives on the recalling of crisis? And what would it mean to unsettle the Christian underpinnings of secularism (in other words, give it other grounds) with, for example, the traditions and principles of a

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pre-modern Islamic past—a past also tied in its own way to the secular? Such a consideration will expand our sphere of political thinking and actions of solidarity to engage not only the increased diversity at home but also the diversity that reaches across national borders that secure a sense of tradition and community. After all, the world is not only American. This is a joint project of intrepid decentralising of power, which is carried out by “spontaneous composers,” to borrow a term from Charles Mingus, collectivised but only provisionally harmonised or synchronised—a sustained counterpoint against power for a better composed future that is especially incumbent on those writing from the institutions that sustain global empire. The exercise of improvisation is an infinite exercise of moral transformation, as Arnold Davidson has eloquently argued. As a project of non-coercive and heterogenic affiliation with others, it should know no bounds.87 Let my children hear music—for God’s sake—they have had enough noise. Charles Mingus NOTES 1. James Baldwin’s mark here is indelible. See: James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro (New York: Vintage Books, 2017), 107. A shorter version of this essay was written in Berlin throughout the months of February and March of 2017. It was presented at the Foucault and Religion Conference held at the University of Chicago, Divinity School on the 11th of March, 2017. My thanks go to Arnold Davidson, Maureen Kelly and Daniele Lorenzini for their engagement. I would especially like to thank Natalie Rose, an excellent interlocutor, for her invaluable comments on this essay. 2. Michael Birnbaum calls it a “parade of misery” in “Refugees Race into Hungary as Border Fence Nears Completion,” The Washington Post, 25 August 2015; Griff Witte and Michael Birnbaum, “Hungary Begins Busing Migrants to Austrian Border,” The Washington Post, 5 September 2015; and Rick Lyman, “Treatment of Migrants Evokes Memories of Europe’s Darkest Hour,” The New York Times, p. A9, 5 September 2015. 3. Stephanie Mencimer, “We May Have Unlocked the Mystery of Trump’s Orange Skin,” Mother Jones Magazine, 4 November 2016; and Marylinnne Robinson, “Trump: The Great Orange-Haired Unintended Consequence,” The Guardian, 10 March 2016. 4. Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris, “Terror’s March Backwards,” The Guardian, 17 March 2002. 5. See: Ruth Mas, “Crisis and the Secular Rhetoric of Islamic Paradise,” in Roads to Paradise: Concepts of Eschatology in the Hereafter in Islam, eds. Sebastian Günther and Todd Lawson (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017), 1290–1321; “Why Critique?” Journal of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Vol. 24,



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No. 4-5 (2012), 389–407; and “On the Apocalyptic Tones of Islam in Secular Time” in Secularism and Religion Making, eds. Arvind-Pal S. Mandair and Markus Dressler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 87–103. 6. Donald Trump, “Liberty University Commencement Speech,” in Time Magazine, 13 March 2017. 7. Mas, “Why Critique?” 391. 8. Ibid., 389–407. 9. Immanuel Kant, “Was ist Aufklärung?” in Politics of Truth (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1784, 2007), 29–37. 10. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Politics of Truth, trans. Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 97–119. 11. See: Mas, “On the Apocalyptic Tones of Islam in Secular Time.” 12. Mas, “Why Critique?” 406. One example is the call for the restoration of the Caliphate that pretends that an “authentic” Islamic state can exist independently and outside the sphere of westernization. For a nuanced discussion of the politics and terms under which a Muslim politics and return to the caliphate can be advanced see Salman Sayyid, Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonisation and World Order (London: Hurst Publishers, 2014). 13. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. I. An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978, 1990). 14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 15. Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 16. Mas, “On the Apocalyptic Tones of Islam in Secular Time,” 97. 17. Ibid., 96. 18. See: Mas, “Crisis and the Secular Rhetoric of Islamic Paradise.” 19. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. and with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 20. Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault: Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976, trans. David Macey, eds. Mauro Brentani and Alessandro Fontana, François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Arnold Davidson (New York: Picador, 2003), 68. 21. Mas, “Crisis and the Secular Rhetoric of Islamic Paradise,” 1291, 1314; and Mas, “On the Apocalyptic Tones of Islam in Secular Time,” 97. 22. Mas, “On the Apocalyptic Tones of Islam in Secular Time,” 87. 23. Amy B. Wang, “Trump Asked for a ‘Muslim Ban,’ Giuliani Says – and Ordered a Commission to do it ‘Legally,’” The Washington Post, January 29, 2107. 24. Matt Broomfield, “Donald Trump’s Proposed Muslim Database Resisted as Politicians, Celebrities and Activists Vow to Register,” The Independent, January 26, 2017. 25. Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Andrea Pitzer, “Nazis Once Published List of Jewish Crimes, Trump Now Pushing to Do the Same for Immigrant Crimes,” Democracy Now, 02 February 2017.

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26. Ellen Barry, “Officials in U.S. and India Condemn Shooting of Sikh Man in Washington State,” The New York Times, p. A9, 6 March 2017; John Eligon, Alan Blinder, Nida Najar, “Hate Crime is Feared as 2 Indian Engineers are Shot in Kansas,” The New York Times, p. A1, 24 February 2017. 27. Niraj Chokshi, “100 Headstones Toppled at a Jewish Cemetery in Philadelphia,” The New York Times, 26 February 2017. 28. Amy Goodman, “We Have to Keep Fighting: Water Protectors Vow Continued Resistance to #DAPL as Main Camp is Evicted,” Democracy Now, 23 February 2017. 29. Black Lives Matter, “We Affirm That All Black Lives Matter,” Black Lives Matter: http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/ (accessed 5th of February 2017). 30. Trump, Donald, “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women,” The New York Times, 8 October 2016. 31. Ruth Marcus, “Trump’s Preposterous Rationale for Revoking Transgender Bathroom Rights,” The Washington Post, 24 February 2017. 32. Nicholas Kulish, Caitlin Dickerson, Ron Nixon, “Immigration Agents Discover New Freedom to Deport Under Trump,” The New York Times, p. A1, 25 February 2017. 33. Callum Borchers, “Meryl Streep Was Right. Donald Trump Did Mock a Disabled Reporter,” The Washington Post, 9 January 2017. 34. Jeremy W. Peters, “For Religious Conservatives, Success and Access at the Trump White House,” New York Times, p. A12, 13 February 2017: 35. Meryl Streep, Speech at the Human Rights Campaign 2017 Greater New York Gala: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/meryl-streepdefends-goldenglobes-football-line-rips-trump-praises-trans-teacher-emotionalspe?utm_source= twitter&utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral (accessed 15th of February 2017). 36. Alec Gourevitch, “Beyond Resistance,” Jacobin, February 2017. 37. See Streep. 38. Koselleck, Futures Past, 19. 39. Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault: The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell, eds. Frédéric Gros, François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, Arnold Davidson (New York: Picador, 2005), 360. 40. Naomi Klein, “What’s Next? The Movement against Global Corporatism Doesn’t Need to Sign a Ten-Point Plan to be Effective,” in Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (New York, Picador, 2002), 19. 41. Foucault, Michel Foucault: The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 481. 42. Ibid., 501, 479. 43. Ibid., 463. 44. Ibid., 470. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 469. 47. Ibid., 469–470. 48. Ibid., 471. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 479.



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51. Ibid., 479–480. 52. Ibid., 454. 53. Ibid., 416. 54. Ibid., 469, 484. 55. See: Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Improvisation and Power,” in Literature and Society, ed. Edward Said (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980); George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, “Introduction: On Critical Improvisation Studies,” The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, eds. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 8. 56. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, “Introduction: On Critical Improvisation Studies,” 7–8. 57. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, “Introduction: On Critical Improvisation Studies,” 8. 58. Quoted in George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, “Introduction: On Critical Improvisation Studies,” 8. 59. Ibid. 60. For a brief discussion of the temporal folding in of spontaneity into the moment-to-monent rhythm of daily life see Vijay Iyer, “Improvisation, Action, Understanding, And Music Cognition With and Without Bodies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, 75. 61. I liken the act of writing here to Davide Sparti’s discussion of the composing process in music, “On the Edge: A frame of Analysis for Improvisation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, 186. 62. Sparti speaks of this deferral of time in terms of procrastination in, “On the Edge: A frame of Analysis for Improvisation,” 186. 63. See: J. Cameron Carter “Foucault Outside, Blackness Outdoors (Notes on the Fugitive Sacred),” talk presented at the Foucault and Religion Conference, University of Chicago, Divinity School, 11th of March, 2017; Nathaniel Mackey, “Blue in Green: Black Interiority,” in Paracritical Hinge: Essays Talks, Notes, Interviews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 201. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 201–202. 66. Ibid., 201. 67. Charles Mingus, Beneath the Underdog (Edinburgh: Canongate, [1971] 2005), 289–290. 68. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1977; 1985] 2009), 6. 69. Klein, 15, 26. 70. Ibid., 17. 71. Ibid., 26, 27. 72. See: Joan D. Hendrick, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 73. Klein, 21. 74. Ibid., 22. 75. Ibid., 18.

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76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 22. 78. Ibid., 17. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 20. 81. Foucault, Michel Foucault: The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 458, 459. 82. Ibid., 362, 354. 83. Ibid., 374–375. 84. Ibid., 482, 377. 85. Ibid., 404–405. 86. Ibid., 379, 388. 87. See: Arnold Davidson,“Introduction,” in Michel Foucault: The Hermeneutics of the Subject, xix–xxxx; “Spiritual Exercises, Improvisation, and Moral Perfectionism-With Special Reference to Sonny Rollins,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, 523–538.

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Index

Adonis, 51, 153 aesthetics, 8, 41, 42, 52, 138, 140–141, 148, 150, 165, 171, 173, 194 Agamben, Giorgio, 112, 156, 161 Adorno, Theodor, 41–43 aeriality, 54, 118, 182, 215 amateurism, 156–160 anecdote, 156, 159, 163–167 architecture, viii, 140, 173, 179–189, 201, 206 architextualism, 171–174 Arendt, Hannah, 85–87 Baldwin, James, 120, 125 Barthes, Roland, 156 Baudelaire, Charles, 18 Bergson, Henri, 15, 110 body, 15–18, 30, 55, 59, 60, 61, 71, 84, 109, 156, 161, 163–165, 171, 172, 174, 192–195 border, viii, 17, 26, 51, 58, 67, 70–72, 74, 76, 93, 103, 107, 110, 111, 171, 182, 183–184, 185, 197, 209 boundlessness, xi, 23 Benjamin, Walter, 28, 31, 73, 78 Blasim, Hassan, 61 breaking, 58, 115–127, 182 Buck-Morss, Susan, 75, 81

carpets, 160–162 colossus, 47–63 community, 13, 38, 83–93, 110, 111, 136 critique, critical theory, 36–40, 43, 147, 188, 209–216 Dabashi, Hamid, 30 Dadrian, Arsham, 91–92 Darwish, Mahmoud, 60, 172 Debord, Guy, 74–75, 76 decolonial, postcolonial, 7, 35, 67, 68, 141–143, 147, 185, 189, 210 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 16, 24–25, 31, 78, 109–110, 164–165 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 20, 95, 107, 110, 114, 195 diaspora, 83–94, 95 distance, vii–viii, 8, 57, 59, 105, 152, 186, 188 Dōgen, Eihei, 30, 31 epistemology, 5, 84, 89, 91, 119, 134– 137, 141, 156, 186, 199, 203, 204 Esposito, Roberto, 93, 155, 156, 161 estrangement, 83, 87–89, 91, 94, 107 exile, vii, 29, 81, 86–88, 93, 172, 184 eye, 48, 53, 56, 60, 61, 63, 159, 161– 162, 164 245

246 Index

Europe, 5–19, 20, 28, 30, 67, 70–77, 133, 134, 142, 150, 162, 164, 165, 200, 203–205, 207 event, x, xi, 25, 93, 104, 108, 115, 132, 143, 150, 159, 179 Fanon, Frantz, 29, 30, 67–79, 80 Farrokhzad, Forugh, 54 Foucault, Michel, 8, 73, 166, 193, 210–224 future, xi, 31, 39, 43, 58, 70, 83, 87, 89, 93, 94, 107, 116, 132, 142, 149, 150, 157, 181, 188, 197, 199, 204, 205, 211–215 gender, 125, 131, 137, 139, 141, 162 ghost, the phantasmatic, x, 7, 8, 54, 141, 195, 205 gift, 49, 79, 107, 114 global thought, 35, 36, 38, 44 globalization, 4, 13, 32, 74, 77 Gramsci, Antonio, 24, 26, 30, 137 gratitude, 104–107, 112 Guattari, Felix, 24, 25, 31, 78, 164, 165 Hammad, Suheir, 122–124 haraga, 67–79 Hedayat, Sadeq, 8 history, 12–14, 30, 35, 43, 44, 50, 78, 85, 132, 133, 134, 138–140, 142, 148, 150, 180, 188, 196, 199–208, 210, 211 horizontality, viii, 43, 54, 55, 83, 184– 185, 192 human, ix, x, 17, 31, 35–39, 41, 43, 47, 51, 53, 54, 57, 73, 75, 76, 79, 82, 85–89, 91–92, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 108, 122, 136, 141, 142, 156, 160, 162, 164, 166, 174, 179, 181, 182, 183, 186–187, 194, 199, 201, 202, 203, 206, 207 ideology, 24, 38, 58, 77, 84, 99, 118, 132, 137–140, 184, 207 immensity, 47–63

immigrant, migrant, vii, 67–79, 81, 82, 94, 123, 212 the impersonal, viii, x, 156–167 improvisation, 119, 126, 216–219, 224 Islam, 4, 5, 6, 8, 37, 38, 40, 43, 44, 100, 101, 117, 119, 125, 134, 136, 139, 140, 158, 160, 173, 209–211, 214 Jordan, June, 118, 120, 124, 125 Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 141, 173 Khayyam, Omar, 39–41, 43–44 al-Koni, Ibrahim, 55–56 language, 6, 24, 26–27, 29, 37, 50, 72, 85, 91, 100, 101, 108, 109, 115– 127, 136, 138, 140, 150, 152, 156, 159, 160–164, 193 Latour, Bruno, 133 machine, mechanism, 67, 73, 75, 79, 91, 161, 163–164, 165, 167, 184, 186, 189, 194, 196 manifesto, 7, 8, 9, 11, 23, 24, 70, 87, 89, 115, 116, 126, 131, 171–174, 191–192, 196 Mansour, Joyce, 52 Marcuse, Herbert, 26–27 marginality, 28, 68, 76, 84, 111, 117, 171–174, 196, 206 materiality, 16, 41, 43, 72, 74, 75, 101, 132, 134, 136, 139, 156, 171, 173, 174, 183–184, 187, 188, 192, 195, 201, 203, 211 Mauss, Marcel, 68, 79 memory, 10, 50, 61, 75, 84, 107, 187, 188, 199, 209 micrology, 27, 60, 139, 158, 159, 164 modernity, viii, 7, 10, 12, 13, 133–143, 200, 202, 204, 205–208, 210–214 modulation, 16, 179, 185 movement, xi, 12, 15, 47, 49, 71, 77, 78, 79, 116, 123, 151, 171, 181–182, 186

Index 247

Nahdah, 131–143 Nartuni, Shavarsh, 89–90 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15, 16, 24, 27, 41, 44, 69, 164, 191, 193, 197, 206 object, 25, 26, 30, 31, 35, 41, 48, 49, 50, 56, 75, 79, 158, 171, 186–187, 196, 206 Orient, Orientalism, 3–19, 30, 35, 37, 89, 160 originality, 28, 72, 80, 132, 152, 156, 165 the outside, outsider, vii–xi, 23–31 physicality, 37, 113, 118, 171, 173, 183, 191–197, 204 poetics, 18, 40, 43, 44, 60, 119, 122, 124, 147–153, 156, 158–165, 200 Plato, 26, 38, 195 power, viii, x, 7, 11, 12, 16–17, 18, 26, 28, 29, 31, 41, 42, 43, 48, 49, 50, 52, 63, 73, 75, 78, 79, 84, 86, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 131, 133, 134, 138, 147, 159, 161, 166, 172, 173, 183, 184, 185, 188, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 209–214, 222 present, x, xi, 17, 18, 39, 116, 122, 141, 148, 150, 152, 181, 200, 204, 205, 210, 211, 212, 214 resistance, 7, 24, 31, 41, 42, 91, 92, 115–127, 150, 166, 173, 179, 180, 182–186, 189 Ibn Rushd (Averroes), 35, 37, 38

Sa’di Shirazi, 155, 158, 159, 168 sacred, 52, 53, 56, 62, 100, 166–167 Said, Edward, 5–6, 20, 30, 70, 158 Sarafian, Nigoghos, 89, 90 Schmitt, Carl, 10–11 self-other, 41–44 Samman, Ghada, 59 Shamlu, Ahmad, 57 shipwreck, viii–ix Ibn Sina (Avicenna), 36–41, 43 solidarity, 77, 88, 117, 119, 122, 123 solidity, 53, 182 sovereignty, 53, 84–87, 110–111, 156, 201, 207, 215 speed, ix, 50, 59, 68, 81, 120, 179–18, 182, 186, 191 Spinoza, Baruch, 14–18 subjectivity, 7, 25, 48, 58, 79, 86, 88, 93, 100, 109, 110, 132–140, 142, 164, 165, 166, 187, 191, 193, 211, 212 synaesthesia, 18–19 Toptaş, Hasan Ali, 100–114 unreality, ix–xi verticality, 184–185, 195 Virilio, Paul, 180, 193, 195 visuality, vision, vii, 41, 48, 50, 59, 75, 116, 135, 136, 137, 140, 159, 165, 183, 185–186, 188 the West, 9–19 world literature, 147–149 world thought, vii–xi, 5, 9, 14, 17, 18, 47, 63, 94, 172

About the Contributors

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies at SOAS, University of London, and chair of the Centre for Iranian Studies at the London Middle East Institute. He is Senior Associate Fellow of the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Center for International Studies, Portugal. Educated at the Universities of Hamburg, American (Washington, DC), and Cambridge, where he received his MPhil and PhD as a multiple scholarship student, he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow in International Relations and Peace Studies at St. Edmund Hall and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. He is coeditor in chief, together with Prof. Ali Mirsepassi at New York University, of the Cambridge book series, the Global Middle East. His most recent books include On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution: Power and Resistance Today (2013) and A Critical Introduction to Khomeini (2014). Réda Bensmaïa is Professor Emeritus, formerly university professor of French and Francophone literature in the French Studies department and in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He has published extensively on French and Francophone literature of the twentieth century as well as on film theory and contemporary philosophy. He obtained his doctorate from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1980 and his master of philosophy at the Université des Sciences Humaines of Aix-Marseille in 1978. His most recent work is Gilles Deleuze, Postcolonial Theory, and the Philosophy of Limit (2017). Additionally, he has authored The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text (1987); The Year of Passages for the series Theory out of Bounds (1995); Alger ou la Maladie de la Mémoire (1997), and Experimental Nations, or The Invention of the Maghreb 249

250

About the Contributors

(2003). He is also the editor of Gilles Deleuze (1989) and Recommending Deleuze (1998). Huda Fakhreddine is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on modernist movements or trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition: From Modernists to Muhdathun (2015). She holds an MA in English literature from the American University of Beirut and a PhD in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from Indiana University, Bloomington. Wael Hallaq is a scholar of Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history. He is currently the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. His teaching and research deal with the problematic epistemic ruptures generated by the onset of modernity and the sociopolitico-historical forces subsumed by it; with the intellectual history of Orientalism and the repercussions of Orientalist paradigms in later scholarship and in Islamic legal studies as a whole; and with the synchronic and diachronic development of Islamic traditions of logic, legal theory, and substantive law and the interdependent systems within these traditions. Hallaq’s writings have explored the structural dynamics of legal change in premodern law, and have recently been examining the centrality of moral theory to understanding the history of Islamic law. His most recent book is The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (2013). His previous books include: A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunni Usul al-fiqh (1997); Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law (2001); An Introduction to Islamic Law (2009); and Shari’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (2009). Hallaq’s work has been widely read, and translated into Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Japanese, Indonesian, and Hebrew. rosalind hampton and Michelle Hartman met during a worker’s strike at McGill University where hampton was writing an institutional ethnography of the social relations of Black people and the university in Canada and Hartman was translating Arabic fiction into English while writing on the politics and ethics of the translation of Arab women writers. Since then they have protested, thought, and written together on a range of topics bringing together a critical anti-colonial analysis of race, language, and politics particularly within but not limited to Québec and Canada. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa, hampton is working with teacher candidates in urban high schools on how they develop racial and other critical literacies. Hartman is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the Institute of Islamic



About the Contributors

251

Studies at McGill. She is finishing the translation of Egyptian feminist, activist, novelist and intellectual Radwa Ashour’s 1970s memoir of her life in the United States and writing a book on literary expressions of transnational Black-Afro-Arab solidarities. Nanor Kebranian is postdoctoral research assistant in theory, history, and human rights in the School of Law at Queen Mary, University of London. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford with fellowships from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and Oxford’s Clarendon Fund. She joins Queen Mary after serving as Assistant Professor in Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. Setrag Manoukian is an Italian anthropologist and historian of modern Iran. He is the author of City of Knowledge in Twentieth-Century Iran: Shiraz, History and Poetry (2012). He teaches at the Institute of Islamic Studies and the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. Ruth Mas is Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. Mas’s research commitments emphasize the intellectual and political dimensions of contemporary Islam. She is specifically interested in the secularization of the Islamic discursive tradition. A second project investigates the relationship between secularity and criticism in current debates about the nature of temporality to critique and its relevance to the study of contemporary Islam. Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is an associate professor of comparative literature at Babson College. His focus is upon tracking emergent currents of experimental thought in the Middle East and the West, with particular attention to exploring the concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, sectarianism, and apocalyptic writing. He has published six books to date, including: The Chaotic Imagination: New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East (2010), Inflictions: The Writing of Violence in the Middle East (2012), The Radical Unspoken: Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought (2013), and Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism (2015). He is also the coeditor of a book series titled Suspensions: Contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate Thought, which is dedicated to showcasing cutting-edge movements in literature, philosophy, culture, and art across the region, and the cofounder of the 5th (Dis)Appearance Lab (www.5dal.com). Andrea Mura is a lecturer in comparative political theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published widely in the fields of political

252

About the Contributors

philosophy, psychoanalysis, and comparative political thought, with attention to areas of contemporary applied relevance such as citizenship, borders, and the role of religion and global capitalism in contemporary world politics. He is the author of The Symbolic Scenarios of Islamism: A Study in Islamic Political Thought (2016). Mahmut Mutman is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Social Research at the University of Tampere in Finland. He has received his PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Previously he taught critical theory, media, and cultural studies at U.S. and Turkish universities. He was a recipient of Fulbright grant. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at the Columbia University from 1999 to 2000 and 2008 to 2009 academic years. He is the author of The Politics of Writing Islam: Voicing Difference (2014), coeditor of a special issue of Inscriptions titled “Orientalism and Cultural Differences” and of a collection titled Orientalism, Hegemony and Cultural Difference (in Turkish). He widely published articles in peer reviewed journals such as Cultural Critique, Postmodern Culture, New Formations, Rethinking Marxism, Anthropological Theory, Radical Philosophy, Third Text, and Toplum ve Bilim on orientalism, nationalism, postmodernism, literature, film, media, and visual technologies. Brian Seitz is a philosopher based in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and London, England. He teaches at Babson College and is the author of Intersubjectivity and the Double: Troubled Matters (2016); The Trace of Political Representation (1995); and coauthor, with Thomas Thorp, of The Iroquois and the Athenians: A Political Ontology (2013). He is also coeditor, with Ron Scapp, of Living with Class: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture (2013); Fashion Statements: On Style, Appearance, and Reality (2010); Eating Culture (1998); and Etiquette: Reflections on Contemporary Comportment (2006). Stephen Sheehi is the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Chair of Middle East Studies at the College of William and Mary. He is a joint member of the faculty of the Asian and Middle East Studies Program (AMES) and the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. He is the co-director of AMES. Sheehi is the author of Foundations of Modern Identity (2004), Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (2011), and Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography (2015). His work on Arab culture, art, literature, and thought, Islamophobia and Palestine have appeared in Third Text, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, The British Journal of Middle East Studies, Discourse, The Journal of Arabic Literature, Jerusalem Quarterly, Ibraaz, Psychoanalysis and Society, Critique, Jouvert, The



About the Contributors

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Journal of Comparative South Asian, African, Middle Eastern Studies, Common Dreams, Mondoweiss, Jadaliyya, and al-Adab. Sheehi is also a board member at Kultrans’s “Synchronizing the Universal” program, an interdisciplinary research project at the University of Olso. Lucian Stone is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Dakota. His research focuses on questions of ethics and social justice drawing upon multiple sources of radical thought, especially those from Islamicate/Middle Eastern philosophy, critical theory, and contemporary Continental philosophy, and postcolonial/post-Orientalist writers, poets, and artists. Most recently he is coauthor of Simone Weil and Theology (2013). In addition, he has edited several volumes including Iranian Identity and Cosmopolitanism: Spheres of Belonging (2014); Dead Man’s Shadow: Collected Poems of Leonardo P. Alishan (2011); The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later (2010); and The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Library of Living Philosophers, Volume XXVIII (2001). He is the coeditor of the book series Suspensions: Contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate Thought and the editor of the journal SCTIW Review. Jens Veneman is a sculptor based in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Menden, Germany. He has exhibited in outdoor sculpture venues such as Socrates Sculpture Park, Fulton Ferry State Park, Prospect Park (New York) with solo shows at Stichting Catacombe (Amsterdam), Kentler International Drawing Space, Ridge Street Gallery (New York), and numerous group shows such as at L Gallery (Moscow). Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Visual Cultures, and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011 he also directs the European Research Council funded project, Forensic Architecture—on the place of architecture in international humanitarian law and he is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. Weizman has been a professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and has also taught at the Bartlett (UCL) in London, the Stadel School in Frankfurt, and is a Professeur invité at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He lectured, curated and organized conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include Mengele’s Skull (with Thomas Keenan, 2012), Forensic Architecture (2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (2009, 2011), Hollow Land (2007), A Civilian Occupation (2003), the series Territories (1, 2, and 3), Yellow Rhythms (2000), and many articles in journals, magazines, and edited books. Weizman is a regular contributor and an editorial board member for several journals and magazines including Humanity, Inflexions, and Cabinet, where

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About the Contributors

he has edited a special issue on forensics (issue 43, 2011). He has worked with a variety of NGOs worldwide and was member of B’Tselem board of directors. He is currently on the advisory boards of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, the Human Rights Project at Bard in New York, and of other academic and cultural institutions. Weizman is the recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006–2007, a co-recipient of the 2010 Prince Claus Prize for Architecture (for DAAR) and was invited to deliver the Rusty Bernstein, Paul Hirst, Nelson Mandela, Mansour Armaly, and the Edward Said memorial lectures among others. Jason M. Wirth is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and works and teaches in the areas of continental philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, aesthetics, environmental philosophy, and Africana philosophy. His recent books include Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (2017), a monograph on Milan Kundera (Commiserating with Devastated Things, 2015), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (2015), and the coedited volume (with Bret Davis and Brian Schroeder) Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (2011). His forthcoming book is entitled Nietzsche and Other Buddhas. He is the associate editor and book review editor of the journal Comparative and Continental Philosophy and is completing a manuscript study of the cinema of Terrence Malick.