Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College, USA. He is the author of The Chaotic Imagination: New literature and Philosophy of the Middle East (2010) and Inflictions: The Writing of Violence in the Middle East (2012).

• Part 1: Silence and the Outside 1. The Poetics of the Unspoken: Disaster, Exhaustion, and the Outside of Language (West) 2. Eternity’s Wager: The Wanderer, the Insurrectionary, and the Counter-Historical Moment (East) Part 2: Silence and the Dream 3. Scathing Imaginaries: Abandonment, Forgetting, and the Night-Dream (West) 4. The Aesthetics of the Unreal: Agitation, Sabotage, and the Fragment (East) Part 3: Silence and the Body 5. Disciplined and Innocent Bodies: Power, Masking, and the Visionary (West) 6. The Captive and the Exile: Vulnerability, Sensation, and Desire (East) Part 4: Silence and Experience 7. The Excessive and the Formless: Delirious Writing (West) 8. Paradox, Ecstasy, and the Catastrophic Mind: Apocalyptic Writing (East)

‘Displaying an enviable intimacy with French thought on the one hand (Deleuze, Foucault, Blanchot) and twentieth-century Iranian poetics on the other, the author manages to do something quite extraordinary: from a non-Western perspective, he radically calls into question the time and place of the ‘postmodern’. If ever there is a book to make names of modern Persian literature such as Akhavan, Nima, Shamlu and Hedayat as familiar as Bataille and Guattari, it will be this one.’Ian Almond, Georgia State University, USA‘To call this work a tour de force is accurate but also unfaithful to the very tone and flesh of Mohaghegh's arguments, which resist facile syntheses and idle submission to the idol of difference. He instead begins and remains with silence and productively dwells in its Continental and Middle-Eastern trenches...Rebuking univocity, each silence defies a border. Committed with these thinkers to resisting the bordered self and imperial lines of demarcation, through a careful, learned, and unique reading of these texts, Mohaghegh assembles a paradoxical poetic unison not across borders but to cross out the very notion of borders.’Farhang Erfani, American University, USA