Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian

The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781438456126
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

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.

Part I

INSURGENT

Chapter 1

Theorizing the Insurgent

Otherless Subjectivity, Radical Coldness, and the East-West Matrix

He erases his face	he discovers his face
Rapture advances	A temptation wears you in her first dawn
Time advances	Where do you chronicle life and how?
	—Adonis, “Singular in a Plural Form”

An overarching view of the Middle East in the twentieth century and beyond, if even just selecting certain illuminating pockets of ideas and movements, provides one with an unexpected prototype for returning to the debate over the postcolonial or the third world. With that said, one wonders whether the myriad strategies of the postmodern and the postcolonial could be combined to forge an incredible category of some kind, a conceptual corrugation amid standing notions of the revolutionary, the radical, and the subversive that leads beyond the political (as we know it). We might call this endangering subjectivity the next insurgent.¹

Whereas the traditional revolutionary is very much the product of modernity itself, another version of insurgent action that we are perhaps already witnessing in the contemporary Middle East would mark the slipping away of an age that (for the postcolonial world) never even cemented itself in the first place. Since this work will in part endeavor to discern the intricacies of insurgent, poetic, mystical, and sectarian ideas and their ensuing philosophical-aesthetic implications for the life span of modernity, we can begin by exploring the varying dimensions of an insurgent mode of consciousness as it operates within multiple terrains of the human and inhuman experience of the Middle East, charting its trajectory in the exodus from arenas of political resistance to a broader form of aesthetic imagination and then even beyond the realm of the artwork and into a more radicalized form of subjective anarchy. Furthermore, the argument toward which the narrative thus far has oriented itself is quite simply that the experience of a certain third world existence, again defined here not as a geographical fixity but as an ulterior ontological possibility, has opened the floodgates for a subject position that not only observes and endures the segmentation of the world around it but deliberately wills itself toward a perpetually insurrectional mode of becoming. It is a reversal of Hegel in that it posits that the true is anything but the whole, though some have suggested that the dialectic is more open-ended than we may think (we will see otherwise). Putting this debate aside, the prognosis here is that the insurgent holds part of the key to resistance in modernity, leading one to ponder what might happen were insurgent divisiveness to become the overriding trend of an antiepoch. With such a paradox in mind, the underlying goal of this section marks an attempt to articulate the possibility of an insurgent profile that is not beholden to ideology, modernity, or the political itself.

The intent is always to formulate a conception of revolutionary agency independent of any call to an ordered world, one that subverts the machinations of power without the drive to supplant them by an alternative system. This prospect has been entertained before, of course, but here and now it appears with a theoretical modulation: namely that it reconfigures revolutionary action away from all visions of collectivity by recasting it into the parameters of an exclusively subjective phenomenon. An insurgent politics, by this definition, is therefore commensurable with a politics of the self, but a reconstituted self that partakes of an ethos somewhere beyond dialectics, beyond the absolutism of all truths, and beyond the most basic need to camouflage the obscurity of the world behind narratives of explanation. Consequently, the project of an insurgent consciousness derails all claims to a discourse of the real while once again making salient a space to revive the idea of subjectivity subsequent to the creative paralysis engendered in the wake of a poststructuralist death of the subject. It reinstates the will by investing subjectivity with an existential intimation free from many of the totalitarian trappings of the past, stripped of the desire to subordinate the continuum of time and space to any one monolithic vision; rather, it leaves things to thrash, to grow reckless, to supplant the meaninglessness of certain boundaries with the free reign of an experiential charge and imperishable restlessness. The insurgent thereby clears the path for a reimagining of political struggle precisely by waging its measures outside of the political unconscious. For it is in this way that subjectivity can pose a different insolence to centers of power, the endowment of an instinctive challenge through which a lone self might forego even the structural anchors of transgression and become something more of a rotational avatar.

And so, this chapter devotes itself to a theoretical exposition of the relationship between a becoming-insurgent and the exhaustive disintegration of belief-structures in modernity. To do so, it engages with a vast diversity of philosophical articulations so as to render more acute commentaries on the potential dissolution of essence, temporality, intentionality, causality, hierarchy, identity, objectivity, truth, and the paradigmatic issue of Being. In their place, we will speak of chaotic departure, outsider mood, otherless individuation, radical coldness, eternal war, unresponsive reversal, killer’s freedom, and affective overreaction. Moreover, several lines and excerpts from the contemporary Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) will be interspersed throughout the chapter, left hanging as crucial signposts that introduce each conceptual nuance. These will be our first visionary indications of a Middle Eastern postmodernity.

Eastern Insurgency as Chaotic Departure

I work your secret trade = I witness the unknowns of my state

I pant like someone trying to make home of his exile

I scatter—am diffused—my surfaces spread and I own none of them

My insides reduced, no place in them for me to live²

The full importance of chaos will be evaluated later in this book as the main pedal of the Middle Eastern poetic imagination, and yet it also shows some vital traces in the insurgent mind-set under scrutiny here. In some respects, this rendition of the insurgent shares a vague precedent in Nietzsche’s work, whose attention to chaos is unequaled in continental thought, though Heidegger later perpetrates a philosophical injustice against his predecessor’s view in a somewhat reductionist and watered-down reading that robs it of a more incendiary projection. Briefly, Heidegger defines the chaotic through Nietzsche as “the world as a whole, the inexhaustible, urgent, and unmastered abundance of self-creation and self-destruction.”³ Nevertheless, the totalitarian stimulus underlying Heidegger’s own designation of knowing makes him unwilling to accept this as the source of any ontological liberation; and so, in a hermeneutic slight, he begins to impose a more hegemonic will to mastery on Nietzsche’s intentional slanting and tangents, particularly in his recasting of art as that which “ventures and wins chaos, the concealed, self-overflowing, unmastered superabundance of life.”⁴ Though he maintains the language of a venture, the rhetoric of eventual conquest also runs rampant in this meditation, for the Heideggerian lens can only perceive this chaotic event as some ill-peddled vitiation of Being (it outstretches and manhandles): “Every living being, and especially man, is surrounded, oppressed, and penetrated by chaos, the unmastered, overpowering element that tears everything away in its stream … [that] pulls and sucks the living itself into its own stream, there to exhaust its surge and flow. Life would then be sheer dissolution and annihilation.”⁵ The real problem, then, is that Heidegger still wants desperately to live, whereas the insurgent (especially in the Middle Eastern anticontext) has no such preservation reflex. Whereas Adonis invokes the scattering of himself across surfaces (as a kind of unknowing), Heidegger domesticates the chaotic emergence to serve a mode of authentic knowledge that “is not like a bridge that somehow subsequently connects two existent banks of a stream, but is itself a stream that in its flow first creates the banks and turns them toward each other in a more original way than a bridge ever could.”⁶ In this slithering metaphor, however, Heidegger has obviously undone both Adonis’s call to self-diffusion and the great Nietzschean tension that must never be reconciled by ascribing supremacy to the Apollinian, subjugating the Dionysian impulse beneath a representational and hyper-rational retreat from the void. Thus, the insurgent (as named here) is an attempt not to recuperate or restore what Heidegger has already stolen but rather to reimagine what Nietzsche had achieved as a point of chaotic departure on the colonial side of modernity. By far this example has come closest to the daring, self-disciplining realm of the Eastern revolutionary ethos, for it is in this station alone that subjectivity can deter the more grotesque manifestation of the will to power while simultaneously avoiding a hopeless concession to world-historical forces.⁷ Rather, something more complicated is at stake, a positionality whereby one holds no desire to tame the aforementioned stream of existence in all its confusion, rage, and resurgence, but at the same time forestalls any drowning within it. The balance here is admittedly a delicate one, a timeless push-and-pull always skirting that fine line between the poles of surrender and domination, but it can be negotiated if one maneuvers well enough, arriving at a province where the self-willed experience of the edge alone is allowed to guide forward.

The argument in this piece is that the Middle Eastern insurgent can become that very tightrope walker (not all of them, never the everyone, but a select few), for a realization of the chaotic has increasingly pervaded the experiential stratosphere of what has long been called the third world (and now waits to be harnessed toward something unprecedented). Accordingly, Nietzsche’s remarkable contribution has never been so relevant than when Zarathustra uttered the words that “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”⁸ For this chaotic temperament is not the end but the non-essentializing skill of a revolutionary imagination now made integral to the operation of certain segments of the Eastern front. The first world has perhaps abandoned this possibility, for whatever reasons of contentment. The third world now has no choice but to embrace it as a conduit of its great discontent. Chaos is all that the history of modernity, a ghastly history of order, has left it.

There have been further allusions to a principle of chaotic departure, and among these Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have come relatively close, though then falling rapidly away from the lever to an unseemly subjective turn in their celebration of “the multitude” and its rejuvenation of the “irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist” (one detects the slightly underhanded injection of Nietzschean tones into a school that would not tolerate the former, having never known lightness or joy).⁹ As their most eminent effort, Empire, vocalizes the necessary call for a return to the concept of immanence as the basis for an amorphous, transnational revolutionary clique that might counterbalance any tendencies toward transcendental solutions, a split-personality disorder emerges in the theorization of this counter-epochal model. On the one side, Hardt and Negri seek a demystifying antidote to Foucauldian ideas of biopolitics, governmentality, and the subordination of the body to technologies of regimentation by announcing the urgency for an “anarchic basis of philosophy.”¹⁰ Thus they dispense terminologies of “nomadism, desertion, and exodus”¹¹ and rightly advocate for a modified sense of revolutionary orientation: “Whereas in the disciplinary era sabotage was the fundamental notion of resistance, in the era of imperial control it may be desertion. Whereas being-against in modernity often meant a direct and/or dialectical opposition of forces, in postmodernity being-against might well be most effective in an oblique or diagonal stance. Battles against the Empire might be won through subtraction and defection.”¹² And still, despite some fantastic Deleuzian improvisations, these very seeds of a chaotic politics find themselves betrayed later by a text that cannot swallow its own medicine, still held fast within an evolutionary perception of historicity despite a momentary digression into the idea of cyclicality, still reconfirming the all-presence of totalities that never were (however broken, extra-statist, and volatile) despite resuscitating arguments for the “alternatives within” and the need to distinguish between an imperial device that works well in itself but not for itself, and still shooting glances toward redemptive futurities that might allow humanity to “recognize a rupture of the system, a paradigm shift, an event.”¹³ As a consequence, even if empire as a conceptual category must in fact be treated differently, bringing us toward an unprecedented phenomenological territory, then Hardt and Negri’s continued investment in old idioms of resistance make their prescriptions terribly archaic vis-à-vis their lethal diagnoses.

For one thing, there is a telling analytic insistence on the novelty of empire as trans-systemic reality, playing into the cult of newness endemic not coincidentally both to Western postmodernism and consumer capitalism, though in some unsuited way Hardt and Negri are also able to derive their creeds of revolutionary insurgency from writers who preceded the supposed upsurge of empire. In the end it seems inconsistent that proposals of resistance are afforded a comprehensive trans-historicality, jumping from Spinoza to Nietzsche to Foucault to even Saint Francis of Assisi for critical inspiration, all the while in the now we are presumably inhabiting a completely fresh space of power (note that this cross-centurial immanence of thought would be perfectly fine if only they believed in an outsider subjectivity capable of ahistorical imagination). From vending modernity as absolute rupture to vending empire as absolute rupture all the while fighting against absolutist logics, by tirelessly harnessing the past to justify the inception of a present that according to the analysis rests in complete disconnect with that same past, it seems the authors have quite deliberately commandeered the vaunting bravado of Enlightenment epistemology and all its self-contradictory tricks. Having said this, the narrative shows moments of brilliant assailment of a fictive age but then cannot help lending itself a gargantuan sweep that leaves nothing save its own theoretical vertigo—that is, it conveys a desperately epic tone; it is wracked by an extremist strain between pessimistic defeatism and unbridled utopianism; and its subheadings are riddled with gestures of infinite scope offset by supposed migratory deviations. One wonders, then, whether this pendulous swing between the inflated dispositions of robust triumphalism and alarmist nightmare, too invested in the now full-blown monstrosity of empire to think beyond it (or apparently to even allow it a beyond), is not susceptible to Nietzsche’s accusation of resentment in the Christian/anarchist: “The ‘fine indignation’ itself soothes him; it is a pleasure for all wretched devils to scold: it gives a slight but intoxicating sense of power … There is a fine dose of revenge in every complaint.”¹⁴ Where this becomes most blatant is in the fact that, for all their talk of plurality and sporadic affiliation, and despite a split-second revelation toward a race of “new barbarians” who would escape “the local and particular constraints of their human condition … to construct a new body and new life,”¹⁵ the authors do not follow this existential alloy into its proper outer reaches; rather, the text remains saturated with dialectical thinking of the most asphyxiating sort. This is why all renderings of a chaotic subject fail so poorly under their watch: for instance, their figure of the militant, who graces the final pages of the book, is at long last asked to stand in direct archetypal opposition with empire itself, thereby making it precisely non-isomorphic with Foucault’s specific intellectual; in fact, all specificities are badly engineered here, amid this lack of any craftsman-like attunement to the forging of an intricate subject-position, and therefore come stillborn into the theoretical world. A robotic army: without volition. More exactly, Hardt and Negri elide the most pressing component of a micropolitics of resistance, which for every other continental thinker of this outlook (Nietzsche, Kafka, Bataille, Foucault, Genet, Michaux, Cioran, Beckett, Artaud, Baudrillard, Serres, Deleuze, and Guattari) requires some nefarious architect in the laboratory (the overhuman, the supplicant, the deviant, the body-without-organs, the criminal, or the schizoid). Instead, Hardt and Negri convert each struggle into a hyper-attenuated collision with the obscenity of the world, such that when they go to actually visualize the attire and mannerisms of “militancy today,” they can do no better than to recycle tattered Marxist silhouettes of decades long-gone: “We are referring … to something more like the communist and liberatory combatants of the twentieth-century, the intellectuals who were persecuted and exiled in the course of anti-fascist struggles, the republicans of the Spanish civil war and the European resistance movements, and the freedom fighters of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist wars.”¹⁶ This nostalgic portrait of the contemporary militant is bizarrely retrograde and misguided, and remains the sole precise reason why such trends in Western postmodern theory cannot begin to fathom an Eastern insurgent voice that says things like “I am the fever of prophethood … My blood is fire.”¹⁷ No hyperbole; no longing for sedative mantras (some are just like this now). This is also why Hardt and Negri, who like so many other communist philosophers today have turned toward recent events in the Middle East, going as far as to award the insurrectionary masses there with a place at the vanguard’s table, broadcasting the news that “Arabs are democracy’s new pioneers” and that “these revolts have immediately performed a kind of ideological house-cleaning,”¹⁸ should just stay quiet, relax their ridiculous heralding, and defer to those who have listened more closely to what is happening: for the record, these movements are neither fledgling...