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

340 Pages·2015·1.862 MB·English

by  Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

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
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
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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 1
Part I. Insurgent
Chapter 1
Theorizing the Insurgent: Otherless Subjectivity, Radical Coldness,
and the East-West Matrix 31
Chapter 2
Images of Resistance: Media, Modernity, and the Machine
Within Iranian Revolutionary Ideology 81
Part II. Poet
Chapter 3
The Poetics of Urban Violence: The Night Raid, the Martyred Body,
and the Execution Spectacle 117
Chapter 4
Will to Chaos: Iranian Avant-Garde Literature and
Western Thought 139
Part III. Mystic
Chapter 5
Vision, Disappearance, and the Soundscape: New-Wave
Iranian Cinema and the Postmodern Pack 213
viii Contents
Part IV. Sectarian
Chapter 6
Sectarianism I: And They Shall Dream of the Enemy 243
Chapter 7
Sectarianism II: Final Delineations of the Sect 275
Notes 303
Index 325
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 fix-
ture 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 primar-
ily 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 col-
lective 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
1