Chapter Six: Invisible Signs

Abstract

In the last chapter, I walked you through the labyrinth of the doctrines and history of Shi’ism by way of showing how a traumatic split occurred in the body politics of the faith and its aesthetic formalism parted ways from the captured imagination of the militant Islamism it flaunted to capture power from its monarchic rival. It was toward the end of that chapter that you saw how the aesthetic of intuition could indeed emerge from the current history of Shi’ism precisely at the moment when the nation it informs stands up to decouple itself from the state that falsely claims it. In my next move, I wish to show that neither Islam in general nor, in fact, Shi’ism in particular is any longer singularly in charge of how Iranians or Muslims read reality. To demonstrate this proposition I will dwell on a particularly traumatic moment of the murder of a young Iranian woman, Neda Aqa Soltan (1983–2009), in the course of the Green Movement in order to show how reading that death refuses to yield to any official metanarrative of revisionist historiography—that the simple sign of a murder persists through its militant appropriation by both the state and its discredited opposition. This chapter will begin to shift the focus of my attention from territorial politics to body politics, and see and suggest the metamorphic nature of both as they morph into each other. This shift between territory and body is necessary in order to see the manner in which the formation of the aesthetic reason overshadows and replaces the postcolonial reason, which is categorically predicated on the arrest and denial of the erotics of the body and the playful frivolity of emancipatory politics, its Dionysian proclivity to be even more precise. Here I will return to the domestic scene but now up the ante and look at the liberating aesthetics of representation surrounding the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, when the state failed to control the meaning of what her untimely death meant. In witnessing the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, we are back to the chaotic sign that signate and demand an explanation far beyond its forced reading by one faction or another. Here I will show how unruly signs behave once they are released from their habitual politics of complicity.