Mashya and Mashyana UnearthedMyth, Metonymy and the Unknowing Subject
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About this book
Examines the continuity between a people’s ancient mythologies and their contemporary aesthetic tastes
- Offers a provocative retrieval of the ancient Iranian myth of creation to enable a fresh new way of looking at contemporary art and culture
- Critically reflects on how cultural continuities and civilizational endurance defy, overcome and correct the course of history and the logic of chronological periodisation
- Provides a detailed study of contemporary Iranian visual and performing arts with reference to their global context, exploring themes of gender and sexuality, self and society, home and exile, solitude and liberation, mysticism and philosophy
- Explores the world of Iranian film, fiction, poetry and drama as the wellspring of modern mythologies of selfhood and personhood rooted in hidden and unexplored subterranean visions of an alterity we have not yet assayed
- Examines the ways in which the ancient Iranian myth of creation resurfaces in contemporary film, fiction, and poetry, as metonymic allusions that accommodate to overcome a politics of despair
What if all we see, read, feel, fear, desire and repress in contemporary film, fiction and poetry are metonymic substitutes for much older and more ancient mythologies? What if our modern mythologies are not actually that modern?
Using Iran as an example of an ancient civilization with a sustained course of continuity all the way to the present time, this book moves towards a philosophical reflection on the relationship between what we see and feel today when engaging with art, literature and film and what we have otherwise deeply buried in the forgotten layers of our collective consciousness from time immemorial.
This is the story of Mashya and Mashyana Unearthed, an exploration of when and where ancient myths become metonymic in varied forms of contemporary cultural and aesthetic representations.
Table of contents
List of Figures
Introduction: The World of Pure Verisimilitude
From Truth to Verisimilitude
Under the Debris of the Fourth Wall
Ostranenie and the Arrested Mimesis of the Body
Framing the Performances, Spacing Performativity
The Liberating World of Pure Verisimilitudes
Mashya and Mashyana Unearthed
PART I MEN AND WOMEN
1 Men without Women
Lumpens, Intellectuals, Clerics
Searching for Deeper Roots
From Lumpenism to Fascism
Inorganic Intellectuals
Lumpenism in Cinema
The Mythic Gap of a Gender Imbalance
2 Women without Men
The Creative Constitution of a Public Persona
Knowledge of the Unknown
Seven Shades of Memory
Rethinking the Human in Literary Humanism
Gleichschaltung
Writing Women into Humanism
PART II MASCULINE AND FEMININE
3 Masculine/Feminine
Men of Honour and Fear of Castration
The Metaphoric Body
The Colonised Masculinity
Dash Akol: The Mythic Man Idolised
Contingency of the Body
In Search of ‘Authenticity’
The Dialectics of the Body’s Being-in-the-World
Sexual Thralldom
Mutilating the Feminine Body
Where Men are Men …
… And Women are Not Men
4 Feminine/Masculine
Daybreak
Women at Work
The Mythically Pregnant Reality
Re-Mythologising the Real
Mythologies
Ritual Birth
Urban Legend
Meanwhile, the Ma’arefi Family ...
Metonymic Mythologies of the Present
5 Liberation in Three Moves
The Realism of the Real
Fear of the Real
Towards a Neo-Realism
Reality under Erasure
The Taste of Cherry
The Bread and the Flower Pot
Baran and the Native
6 To Be at Home in the World
Dis-Engaging the Metaphysical
To De-Oedipalise the Oedipal
Re-Configuring the Body
Trusting the Camera
Subjectivity, Sexuality and the Imaginary
Towards a Counter-Symbolic
Visions of the Invisible
‘Semiotic Chora’
PART III HOME AND EXILE
7 The Cinema of Solitude
A Nocturnal Journey
Ice as a Floating Signifier
Simple, Solitary and Serene
The Site of the Solitary Unknowing Subject
8 The Ballad of Occidental Exile
The Exile as the Unknowing Subject
Exilic Cinema
Exile on Exile: Amir Naderi on Sohrab Shahid-Saless
Amir Naderi’s New York
Born Again in New York
A Migratory and Mobile State of Mind
On the Poetry of Concrete and Steel
Suspended of All Imported Meanings
The Troubadour of the Occidental Exile
PART IV MYSTICISM AND MYTHOLOGIES
9 The World of Verisimilitude
The Nature and Disposition of Creativity
Towards a Culture of Bodily Denials
Fabling the World
The Metaphysics of the Absolutes
Subjection and Re-Subjection
Against Dead Certainties
A Material Celebration of Life
The Sound of Gabriel’s Wing
Towards a Cinematic (Counter-)Culture
PART V VISIONS IMPERMISSIBLE
10 Visions of the Invisible
Art as Postcoloniality
Against the Jargon of Authenticity
The Publicity of the Spectacle
Counter-Imagining the Moral
Being Iranian
Self-Spectatorship
The Aesthetic as Liberating the Subject
The Colonial Modernity of Being Iranian
Looking Back
The Aesthetic and the Sacred
Conclusion: Mashya and Mashyana Unearthed
My Philosophical Mother is a Poet
Overcoming the European Sovereign Subject
The Prose and Poetics of a Longue Durée
The Battlefield of Pure Verisimilitude
From Mazdean Myth to Metonymic Subjectivity
Semblance and Subjectivity
Pivoting Towards a Liberated Subject and a Liberation Philosophy
Mythos as Inheritance
Notes
Index