Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

Description

The insurgent, the poet, the mystic, the sectarian: these are four modes of subjectivity that have emerged amid Middle Eastern thought's attempt to reverse, dethrone, or supersede modernity. Providing a theoretical overview of each of these existential stances, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh engages the views of thinkers and artists of the last several decades, primarily from Iran, but also from Arab, Turkish, North African, Armenian, Afghani, Chechen, and Kurdish backgrounds. He explores various dimensions of the Middle Eastern experience at the threshold of the postmodern moment, including revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, and radical-extremist thought. The profound reinvention of concepts characteristic of such work—fatalism, insurrection, disappearance, siege—provide unique interpretations and confrontations with the modern period and its relationship to those who presumably fall outside its boundaries of self-consciousness. Expanding the conversation, Mohaghegh contrasts the impressions of the Middle Eastern figures considered with those of the most incisive Western thinkers of modernity, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Baudrillard, to offer an original global vision that crosses the East-West divide.
Introduction: Modernity—Age of Extremity

Part I. Insurgent

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

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

Part II. Poet

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

4. Will to Chaos: Iranian Avant-Garde Literature and Western Thought

Part III. Mystic

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

Part IV. Sectarian

6. Sectarianism I: And They Shall Dream of the Enemy

7. Sectarianism II: Final Delineations of the Sect

Notes
Index

Sujets

• History of the Middle East
• Middle East
• Islam

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 13 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438456126
• Langue: English

Extrait

INSURGENT, POET, MYSTIC, SECTARIAN
SUNY series in Global Modernity

Arif Dirlik, editor
INSURGENT, POET, MYSTIC, SECTARIAN
The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism
JASON BAHBAK MOHAGHEGH
Cover art: The Sectarian , photographic collage by RLS, used with permission.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mohaghegh, Jason Bahbak, [date].
Insurgent, poet, mystic, sectarian : the four masks of an eastern postmodernism / Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in global modernity)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5611-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5612-6 (ebook)
1. Postmodernism (Literature) 2. Persian literature—Western influences. I. Title. PN98.P67M64 2015 808'.9113—dc23 2014020304
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my father, Hamid Mohaghegh …
Contents
Introduction: Modernity—Age of Extremity
Part I. Insurgent
Chapter 1 Theorizing the Insurgent: Otherless Subjectivity, Radical Coldness, and the East-West Matrix
Chapter 2 Images of Resistance: Media, Modernity, and the Machine Within Iranian Revolutionary Ideology
Part II. Poet
Chapter 3 The Poetics of Urban Violence: The Night Raid, the Martyred Body, and the Execution Spectacle
Chapter 4 Will to Chaos: Iranian Avant-Garde Literature and Western Thought
Part III. Mystic
Chapter 5 Vision, Disappearance, and the Soundscape: New-Wave Iranian Cinema and the Postmodern Pack
Part IV. Sectarian
Chapter 6 Sectarianism I: And They Shall Dream of the Enemy
Chapter 7 Sectarianism II: Final Delineations of the Sect
Notes
Index
Introduction
Modernity—Age of Extremity

It is in this way, perhaps,
that I discovered from the beginning
the shadow of the devil
lay waiting in ambush for me.
—Ahmad Shamlu, “In the Struggle with Silence”
Beneath the heavy tides of a mythology titled “the modern age,” and with its hired executioner “Western civilization” always close at hand, the so-called peripheries have succeeded in constructing four faces (or perhaps four masks) to combat the otherwise smooth procession of a death wish. These four existential prototypes—the insurgent, the poet, the mystic, and the sectarian—have served such “Eastern” or “Middle Eastern” adversaries well in their attempt to sabotage and dispute the moment. In the same fashion that they have rotated throughout the past century from one fixture of this subjectivity-constellation to another, so will this text slide between such hostile and relaxed patterns, trying on its different uniforms and attires, before finding itself at the threshold of another epochal rift. 1
To decode the greater fictive duel between the East and the West in our time, this book explores the precise ways in which Middle Eastern thought has staged its own distinctive experiment to reverse, dethrone, or supersede the question of modernity. It therefore tracks some of the most compelling responses, engagements, and challenges offered primarily by Iranian (though alongside Arab, Turkish, North African, Armenian, Afghani, Chechen, and Kurdish) thinkers and artists of the last several decades, investigating their profound reinventions of individual and collective identity in the wake of these new transformative currents of the contemporary era. To this end, the book extends its focus across several volatile dimensions of the Middle Eastern experience, including voices from the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, and radical-extremist thought. Each section, in turn, discloses its own unique vantage of interpretation and confrontation with the ascent of the modern period and its relationship to the immediate realities of those who presumably fall outside its right of self-consciousness. The outcome is a fascinating coalition of cultural and intellectual figures contributing to a charged debate on issues of the post-historical instant, catastrophic resistance, and the creative imagination in states of siege.
In terms of methodology, the book manuscript is divided into the aforementioned four sections—the insurgent, the poet, the mystic, and the sectarian—with corresponding theoretical-scholarly expositions included therein. Accordingly, the text provides a general theoretical overview of these four subjective stances while also disentangling the particular views of various radical leaders, intellectual forerunners, literary icons, and artistic visionaries from the Middle Eastern front. First, the opening section (on the insurgent) undertakes the topic of revolutionary extremism, incorporating selections from the Syrian author Adonis and then examining the essential writings of major Iranian ideologues of the twentieth century—namely, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Ali Shari’ati, and Ayatollah Khomeini—surrounding issues of technology, representation, globalization, colonialism, and the conflict between so-called first world and third world political forces. These ideological authorities, above all else, exhibited an overwhelming suspicion toward the inflamed trends of the modern age, isolating an insidious connection between such historical shifts and increasing patterns of imperialist domination; they believed that such values were inseparable from corrosive systems of power and hegemony, and thus looked to devise their own resistance-based approach to the reigning models of machinism and cosmopolitanism. Second, as a vital counterpoint, the book then turns its critical gaze toward the Iranian literary vanguard and its renegotiation of “the poet” as located within an antimodernist movement of unmatched importance for the future (of writing and world). In this instance, the section first explores the prospect of “poetic violence” and its apocalyptic tendencies before then following the textual innovations of Sadeq Hedayat, Ahmad Shamlu, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, and Reza Baraheni toward their most grueling repercussions, wondering after the impact of modernity on both traditional and avant-garde forms of expression. The consensus of the poets would prove a double-edged one: namely, that the declared East had been plunged into a catastrophic epoch that nevertheless inadvertently freed its artistic frontline to reformulate itself as a “will to chaos.” More precisely, these authors would perceive not just society but also language, thought, and the body as continually under bombardment, thrown into a time of unrest and disaster; and yet somehow this travesty had yielded a reenergized atmosphere in which the literary voice could regain its unparalleled status. Third, the book channels its concentration toward the area of aesthetic mysticism, exemplified by the rise of Iranian new-wave cinema (Amir Naderi, Forugh Farrokhzad), upholding this cultural site’s intense practice of a countercurrent to modernity in its own right, one of ritualistic abandonment and enclosure that stands with the more overshadowed, unspoken, and outsider elements of the reality-grid. In essence, these mystic filmmakers have selected the more subtle strategy of withdrawal toward the untouched pockets of the historical spectrum, using mysterious combinations of chanting and image to articulate their circles’ aim of disappearance. They thereby situate themselves in the obscure elsewheres of the auditory and visual landscape. And last, this text speculates on the enigmatic genesis of a fourth persona—that of the sectarian—whose full ambitions remain half-shrouded to the uninitiated (still pending before a low-hanging future), and yet some of whose elaborate philosophies, rites, and methodologies can be partially extracted. This sectarian guise is perhaps the most ominous opponent yet to be considered, for it convenes the powers and tactics of the other three masks while adding its own fearless postmodern thrust.
These four thriving compartments of ideology, literature, mysticism/cinema, and sectarianism have aligned themselves across vastly different conceptual axes, as each proceeds to offer its own drastic reinterpretation of time, space, being, death, subversion, pain, transcendence, victory, and blood. When placed in captivating dialogue with one another, we see how the several dynamic strands of Middle Eastern society in the past centuries have provided a multilayered set of narratives in reaction to the pressures of this temporal cauldron. Neither is it an insular conversation that one develops here, for the book also looks to contrast the impressions of these so-called Eastern figures with the most incisive Western thinkers of modernity (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard) so as to instantiate a more global vision that crosses the East-West divide. 2 Furthermore, this far-reaching intellectual and cultural record of ideas has had an outstanding effect on the controversies and events of the Middle Eastern present, as new protests and movements in the region borrow from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their predecessors. Whether looking to political, poetic, spiritual, or aesthetic sources for inspiration, the curr