Omnicide

Author: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0997567465
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 489

Book Description
A fragmentary catalogue of poetic derangements that reveals the ways in which mania communicates with an extreme will to annihilation What kind of circumstances provoke an obsessive focus on the most minute object or activity? And what causes such mania to blossom into the lethal conviction that everything must be annihilated? There is no turning away from the imperative to study this riddle in all its mystifying complexity and its disturbing contemporary resonance—to trace the obscure passage between a lone state of delirium and the will to world-erasure.. A fragmentary catalogue of the thousand-and-one varieties of manic disposition (augomania, dromomania, catoptromania, colossomania…), Omnicide enters the chaotic imaginations of the most significant poetic talents of the Middle East in order to instigate a new discourse on obsession, entrancement, excess, and delirium. Placing these voices into direct conversation, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh excavates an elaborate network of subterranean ideas and interpretive chambers, byways, and burrows by which mania communicates with fatality. Like secret passages leading from one of the multitudinous details of a bustling Persian miniature to the blank burning immanence of the desert, each is a contorted yet effective channel connecting some attractive universe (of adoration, worship, or astonishment) to the instinct for all-engulfing oblivion (through hatred, envy, indifference, rage, or forgetting). A captivating fractal of conceptual prisms in half-storytelling, half-theoretical prose, a rhythmic, poetic, insidious work that commands submission, Omnicide absorbs the reader into unfamiliar and estranging landscapes whose every subtle euphoric aspect threatens to become an irresistible invitation to the end of all things.

Omnicide II

Author: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1733628177
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
An infernal catalogue of manic visionaries, inspired by the poetry of the Middle East. In a new work in which conceptual elaboration, storytelling, and poetics are fused in the infernal heat of the desert, the cycle of Omnicide is closed with a philosophy of doom, deception, and the game, plunging headlong into the inevitable, the fatal, and the infinite. A series of controlled combustions fuelled by fragments drawn from the poetry and literature of the Middle-East, Omnicide II introduces us to a new cast of manic visionaries, from the Selemaniac to the Crystallomaniac, the Bibliomaniac to the Aeromaniac. In his relentless cataloguing of the myriad figures and portents of omnicidal doom, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh resumes the offensive of those writers, artists, and thinkers for whom the fiercest creative incandescence is only kindled in the shadow of certain doom. Amid war cries and lullabies, mages, wolves and pelicans, sabres and crystals, drones and soul-stealers, in settings ranging from the opium den to the Qatari luxury hotels, with his unique style and methodology, his dizzying breadth of references, and his implacable will to follow the most deranging lines of thought and evoke the most startling images, Mohaghegh draws the reader into territories disturbing and unfamiliar, atmospheres delicate and grotesque, moods morbid yet life-affirming, in a book that evokes fever and exudes dead calm. The utterly absorbing music of this writing both lulls and disquiets—a contemporary Necronomicon, an inexhaustible treasury of recipes for disaster, catastrophe, ruination and destruction, all in the name of the most intense creation.

Elemental Disappearances

Author: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 0998237558
Category : Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 86

Book Description
"Elemental Disappearances casts a wanderer's eye upon an ever-expanding configuration of sites of disturbance. The things sought after are apparitional: they appear and disappear at will; they perfect the art of materialization and vanishing. Such is the nature of living dangerously, and with it the short duration of enchantment. This collection tracks provocative ideas, artifacts, and phenomena rising and fading across different territories of the contemporary world. Through a constellation of powerful thought-images, the authors uncover spaces of an ephemeral and fugitive nature in order to generate a fractal vision of our time and beyond." (back cover)

New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East

Author: J. Mohaghegh
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349291038
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
Mohaghegh tracks the idea of 'chaos' into the contemporary philosophical and cultural imagination of the postcolonial world, exploring its vital role in the formation of an emergent avant-garde literature in the Middle East, concentrating on the writings of the twentieth-century Iranian new wave.

Revolutionary Bodies

Author: K. S. Batmanghelichi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350195383
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Breasts, Hands and Faces : Gazing at Iran's Mediascape -- Red-Lights in Parks : a Social History of Park-E Razi -- Post-Revolutionary 'Prostitution' and its Discontents -- Naked Modesty and the Reformation of Statues in Post-Revolutionary Iran -- HIV/AIDS and the Problem of 'Taboos' Talking.

XYZT

Author: Kristen Alvanson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1916405231
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Book Description
Genre-defying fiction that accelerates "cross-cultural dialogue" into a kaleidoscopic rush of sensory estrangements, fairy tales, and alien encounters. "There's really no difference between us and them, so we're told…." Based on the author's experiences of living as an American in Iran, Kristen Alvanson's XYZT is a wildly imaginative dramatization of the idea of a "dialogue of civilizations" and its potentially outlandish ramifications. As part of an advanced technological test program, volunteers are shuttled back and forth between the US and Iran, hidden from the watchful eyes of immigration police and state bureaucracies. Each is given a single opportunity to be received by a local host and to have a brief authentic experience of what it means to live as “them” before being transported back home. But far from heralding the bliss of mutual recognition, the experiment unleashes a series of displacements so disorienting that the fabric of reality begins to fray. Ordinary people become entangled in extraordinary situations, and everyday life bleeds into mythological encounters, alternate universes and dark psychedelic journeys in alien lands where the real and the imaginary are indistinguishable. A treasury of tales told from multiple perspectives and in a multiplicity of styles, XYZT is an audacious cross-genre experiment, a firsthand memoir of what it means to see what "they" see, and a science-fictional, nonstandard engagement with anthropology in which cross-cultural encounters take on all the unpredictable features of a contemporary fairy tale.

The Writing of Violence in the Middle East

Author: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441150633
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Writing has come face-to-face with a most crucial juncture: to negotiate with the inescapable presence of violence. From the domains of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, this book stages a powerful conversation on questions of cruelty, evil, rage, vengeance, madness, and deception. Beyond the narrow judgment of violence as a purely tragic reality, these writers (in states of exile, prison, martyrdom, and war) come to wager with the more elusive, inspiring, and even ecstatic dimensions that rest at the heart of a visceral universe of imagination. Covering complex and controversial thematic discussions, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh forms an extreme record of voices, movements, and thought-experiments drawn from the inner circles of the Middle Eastern region. By exploring the most abrasive writings of this vast cultural front, the book reveals how such captivating outsider texts could potentially redefine our understanding of violence and its now-unstoppable relationship to a dangerous age.

Night

Author: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 178904278X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Book Description
This short book engages the myriad dimensions of Night, through ancient rituals, medieval storytelling, modern philosophy, and futuristic images, in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark. It thereby tracks Night through the prisms of its most fascinating practitioners: namely, those who keep strange hours and navigate the various potentialities of nocturnal experience (both of terror and enchantment). The Thief’s Night; The Runaway’s Night; The Drunkard’s Night; The Insomniac’s Night; The Revolutionary’s Night; The Lunatic’s Night; The Sorcerer’s Night. Undoubtedly, each of these conceptual figures provides a unique gateway into understanding the powerful sensorial effects of evening, as well as its vast connections to larger questions of time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, vision, secrecy, criminality, monstrosity, and the body.

New Media and the Artaud Effect

Author: Jay Murphy
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030834883
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
This book proposes, following Antonin Artaud, an investigation exploring the virtual body, neurology and the brain as fields of contestation, seeking a clearer understanding of Artaud's transformations that ultimately leads into examining the relevance Artaud may have for an adequate theory of the current media environment. New Media and the Artaud Effect is the only current full-length study of the relation of Artaud’s work to dilemmas of digital art, media and society today. It is also singular in that it combines a far-reaching discussion of the theoretical implications and ramifications of the ‘late’ or ‘final’ Artaud, with a treatment of individual media works, sometimes directly inspired from Artaud’s travails. Artaud has long been justly regarded as one of the seminal influences in mid- and late-20th century performance and theater: it is argued here that Artaud’s insights are if anything more applicable to digital/post-digital society and the plethora of works that are made possible by it.

Stratagem of the Corpse

Author: Gary J Shipley
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785272772
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
This book is unique in its dedicated tackling of the subject of death in the work of Jean Baudrillard. Through new readings of his work, the book makes so patently clear the importance of Baudrillard’s tendency to poeticize, his core indebtedness to Georges Bataille, Alfred Jarry, and others, and his reliance on paradox. Ultimately, Stratagem of the Corpse is less a making sense of death and more a transcript of what occurred when death made sense of us, a reverse thanatology in which death delineates the variant forms of our encroachment, not so much death as seen by Baudrillard but Baudrillard as seen by death.