New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East: The Chaotic Imagination [Paperback]

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.Images of Chaos: An Introduction * Tactic I: Desertion (chaotic movement) * First Annihilation: Fall of Being, Burial of the Real * Tactic II: Contagion (chaotic transmission) * Second Annihilation: Betrayal, Fracture, and the Poetic Edge * Tactic III: Shadow-Becoming (chaotic appearance) * ?Chaos-Consciousness: Towards Blindness * Tactic IV: The Inhuman (chaotic incantation) * Epilogue: Corollaries of Emergence

A timely and original intervention into current discussions concerning the status of a putatively unified 'West' and the ruin it continues to inflict upon the lands and regions outside of Euro-America. Mohaghegh has taken a productive detour from post-colonial discourse, and its endless effort to establish equivalence with the West through 'negotiation,' even as it recuperates precisely the hierarchical relationship it is dedicated to overcoming. Instead, he has rather turned to those (forgotten) writers and thinkers who have sought to express their resistance to both imported hegemonic literary and philosophic forms and those derived from their 'received' traditions by starting from a 'zero-ground' fraught with torment and ambivalence in order to find a voice that belonged to neither the canonical narrative of the 'West' nor the cultural conventions of a failed and negative 'tradition.' Readers will find in Mohagegh's account not simply the rescuing of a lost moment but also its continued embodiment in his own writing. - Harry Harootunian, Professor of Literature, Duke University

In this brilliant, wholly original work, Mohaghegh traces the emergent cultural critique in postcolonial fiction. He finds acts of provocation in the voices anló