Contemporary Iranian Philosophy

***This group's meetings will take place on the Blinding Cyclops Discord Community, under "Iranian Philosophy > Iranian phil meeting room": https://discord.gg/4uCVFs4vHw ***

ASSIGNMENT:
5/10/2021, 5:30-7:30 PST:
Omnicide: Part I: 1. Augomania, optionally forward and introduction

Goodreads link:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42600923-omnicide

DESCRIPTION:

This is a seminar unfolding from our curiosity about the deep philosophical history of Iran, and our desire to become acquainted with contemporary thinkers who find their lineage and influences rooted in this region of the world.

To gain some grounding in the weird side of Iran’s modern intellectual landscape, we began with Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals, a ethnographic and historical text that charts the proliferation of occult and spiritual figures, groups and practices over the course of its 20th century modernization. Doostdar describes a complex state of affairs, wherein the interactions of state power, conservative and mystical strains of Islam, scientific materialism, and Western spiritual movements, have generated ongoing tensions around the status of the unseen, the meaning of religious piety, appropriate deployment of rationality and the seat of metaphysical authority in Iranian society.

We turn now to a very different book, Jason Mohaghegh’s “Omnicide”. This highly synthetic work collages interpretations of the poetic and literary fragments of ten contemporary Iranian authors into an exploration of mania, its profligate objects, and its relationship to beatific and fatalistic states and desires. “Omnicide” is a book of extremes, where the limits of affect, place and language stretch and interact in wild, secretive and disorienting ways. We look forward to disentangling, and becoming entangled with, this strange text in the months to come, and hope that you’ll join us!

SYLLABUS:

The Iranian Metaphysicals - Alireza Doostdar [COMPLETE]
Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium - Jason Mohaghegh

PROSPECTIVE TEXTS:

Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials - Reza Negarestani