Abstract
In watching this emergent literature closely, one discovers that there are still other sides to venture, other tactics of navigation and infliction that might coalesce into a chaotic imaginary. Thus it reenters the domain of this textual perishing, once again to stage a night raid of being, with new weaponries at hand yet driven by the same recurring desire: to execute a stance beyond the forbidden—to give consciousness over to its own relentless abrasion—to a reckoning at the poetic edge. So now it devises another covert annihilation, one that lashes against the chaining, against the machinations—one that persists as a scar upon the pale body of the real (ever unhealing). Without a messianic stride toward the universal or the redemptive, without the far-reaching delusions of the martyr’s yielding to death, without even an echo of salvation afforded, this consciousness inhabits the spirit of concentrated warfare in its most bare form. Here is where it burns, surrender long since having become an impossibility, as a pulsation like no other—one that breathes the cadence, performs the experience of the end, and therein overturns the mythic walls of the real for the transparent phantasms of the unreal.
And these ones
having stared into the face of peril
are defenders of fire
the living, marching alongside death
ahead of death
forever living even after having crossed beyond death
and forever hearing the name
with which they existed …
They stand face-to-face with the thunder
illuminate the house
and perish.
—Ahmad Shamlu, “Requiem”
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Notes
Shamlu, “The First I Saw in the World,” trans. Jason Mohaghegh from the original Persian Majmu’eh-ye Asar-e Ahmad Shamlu (hereafter, MAAS) (1381; Tehran: Zamaneh Press, 2002).
Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 91.
Nima Yushij, “A Sigh,” trans. J. Mohaghegh from the original Persian Majmu’eh-ye Kamel-e Asha’ar-e Nima Yushij (hereafter, MKANY) (1375; Tehran: Mo’asaseh Entesharat Negah, 1996).
Nader Naderpour, “Distorted Mirror,” in False Dawn, trans. Michael C. Hillmann (Austin, TX: Literature East and West, 1986), 44.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1951), 39.
Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (St. Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1992), 86.
Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 102, 106.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 11.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 51.
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (New York: SUNY Press, 1988), 33.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1979), 73.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 87.
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” in Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 210.
Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? Trans, J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 49. This is also how Heidegger chose to read the impact of Nietzsche’s language, writing in his opening to “What Is Called Thinking?” that “Nietzsche endured the agony of having to scream. In a decade when the world at large still knew nothing of world wars, when faith in ‘progress’ was virtually the religion of the civilized peoples and nations, Nietzsche screamed out into the world: ‘The wasteland grows’ … But Nietzsche had to scream.” This is no longer an exclusive posture, though, for it can be said that all emergent authors now have to scream.
Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Vintage, 1992). This extends beyond Camus’s understanding of the rebel “who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation … [and] affirms the existence of a borderline” (13), for the outcry here is less about the borderline and more about chaotic territoriality.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1996), 185.
Martin Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics? quoted in Theodor Adorno, Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). The emergent figure, in its chaos alignment, must stand against and revoke the Hcideggcrian theory of sacrifice in What Is Metaphysics?: “Sacrifice is the expenditure of human nature for the purpose of preserving the truth of Being for the existent. It is free from necessity because it rises from the abyss of freedom. In sacrifice there arises the hidden thanks, which alone validates that grace—in the form of which Being has in thought turned itself over to the essence of man … that he might take over the guarding of Being” (49). There is no more interest here for such things: neither for human nature nor for the truth of being, no patience for validation or grace, no hidden or transparent thanks, and with it, no guardianship over the essence of man (annihilation must threaten all of these columns).
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987);
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956);
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). Annihilation shows no tolerance toward the future-as-distance, at once undermining Levinass statement that “death is ungraspable … [for] death is never now” (41) and Sartre’s idea that “finally sometimes the future is discovered as a nothingness in-itself, inasmuch as it is pure dispersion beyond being” (293). Here there are no such vague stratifications, no temporal lapse into the horizon, but rather an enigmatic seizure of the right time, as when Nietzsche demands “the free death which comes to me because I want it. And when shall I want it? He who has a goal and an heir will want death at the right time for his goal and heir” (1 84). What does it mean, then, that the emergent authors are their own heirs?
Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” in Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1978). Annihilation adjoins immanence and impermanence, nearing Benjamin’s destructive character who “sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always positions himself at a crossroads” (303). In this way, annihilation creates the clearance.
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© 2010 Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
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Mohaghegh, J.B. (2010). Second Annihilation. In: New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114418_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114418_3
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