Narration of Violence or Violence of Narration: Bahram Beyzaie's The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad and The One Thousand and First Night

Bahram Beyzaie is one of the most distinguished Iranian playwrights. Beginning his career in the early 1960s and still working, he is considered as a playwright who has always been looking for discovering and inventing non-classic and non-western narrative templates. To fulfill this purpose, he has made considerable use of classic Iranian literary sources, among which the One Thousand and One Nights and Ta'ziyeh texts are special cases. By analyzing Beyzaie's two plays, Hashtomin Safar-e Sandbad (The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad, 1964) and Shab-e Hezar-o Yekom (The One Thousand and First Night, 2003), which were produced within a forty-year period, this article attempts to highlight some of Beyzaie's methods of narration, particularly in relation to violence.     

A Report on the British Premiere of Death of Yazdgerd: A Cross-cultural Adaptation?

In the spring semester of 2010, the students of the module “Non Western Performances” at Loughborough University were directed by Sudipto Chatterjee to stage the UK premiere of Bahram Beyzaie's canonical play, Death of Yazdgerd (1979). The play, which was initially supposed to be a student-led workshop as part of the module's practice, took a life of its own and turned into a full-blown production. The production consisted of all the registered students of the module who formed the cast and the crew, the main tutor and director Sudipto Chatterjee, the co-tutor and dramaturge Proshot Kalam) and the two technical tutors (Dave Hill and Mark Simpson). The present essay is an attempt to analyze the cross-cultural aspects and the practical approaches undertaken by the crew for the production of the play.     

Collective Identity and Despotism: Lessons in Two Plays by Bahram Beyzaie

With an overview of identity as a dominant theme in Bahram Beyzaie's artistic creations, this article examines two of his, arguably, most political plays: Chahar Sanduq (Four Boxes, 1967) and Khaterat-e Honarpisheh-ye Naqsh-e Dovvom (Memoirs of the Actor in a Supporting Role, 1981) to examine his reflections on the nature, function, and vulnerability of collective social, political, and cultural identity in authoritarian societies. Both plays illustrate that the tyrannical rulers of such societies perpetuate their dominance over their subjects through exploiting the individual's self-interests, thereby isolating him and stripping him of collective and, inevitably, individual identity. Beyzaie's allegorical and rather abstract approach in these plays contributes to conveying a less topical, culture-specific, and more universal message.     

From the Land of the Pure,in Search of the Lost Origin: An Interview with Bahram Beyzaie on Siyavush-Khani (Siyavush Recitation) and its Mythological and Literary Roots

The interview was conducted in 1997 after the publication of Beyzaie's extraordinary engagement with the legend of Siyavush in Siyavush-Khani (Siyavush Recitation). Beyzaie's experiments with Shahnameh legends are not adaptations in the strict sense of the term. This is primarily because their stories are often different from what appears in the Shahnameh, mix the narratives with other mythical sources and place them in contemporary templates with an inter-paradigmatic gaze that reflects on the meaning and the history of the present. The interview is significant in that, as it has been conducted by a leading playwright and scholar of Iranian performing arts, it enables the reader to have firsthand experience of working in Iran as a playwright and reveals some of the methods Beyzaie uses to handle his subjects.     

The Mongol Invasion in Iranian Drama: The Case of Bahram Beyzaie

New Historicists view history as a text through whose discontinuities and breaks the repressed and suppressed voices find ways of articulation. Likewise, a literary text, in its underlying layers, alludes to the historical conditions at the time of its production. In some cases, as in Bahram Beyzaie's works, however, the author intentionally uses the past to reread the present. He recreates history as a text in which the voices repressed in the classified history are heard. As the Mongols played an important role in the history of Iran, some of Beyzaie's works pay particular attention to them. This paper analyzes some of Beyzaie's plays and screenplays to investigate the presentation of the Mongols in his fictional worlds.     

“UNABLE TO RESIST”: ON THE “POSSIBILITY” OF “IMPOSSIBILITY” AND CHRISTOPHE BOUTON'S TIME AND FREEDOM

This essay reflects critically on Martin Heidegger's remarks about authenticity and death with the aid of Christophe Bouton's Temps et liberté (2002), translated by Christopher Macann as Time and Freedom (2014). It first raises general questions concerning the possible thematic relationship between human endeavoring (action) and the experiences of finitude and freedom. Heidegger's Being and Time is particularly useful for exploring this relationship, but certain problems emerge when using this text for accessing the essay's themes. To wit: there are good reasons for mistrusting readings of Being and Time as a “practical” guide for grounding action. Against the practical reading, the essay wishes to reclaim the ontological‐existential significance of Heidegger's text. Although Bouton's treatment of Being and Time excludes its ontological dimensions and is entirely practical, even to the point of disregarding certain theoretical risks inherent in this approach, Bouton's study is indispensable for situating Being and Time in a historical‐intellectual context, whereby the experiences of freedom and time are understood within certain metaphysical presuppositions rendering them difficult to establish together on reliable grounds. Following Bouton's lead, the essay shows that the hermeneutic differences between practical and ontological readings of Being and Time can be explored through reflections on what Heidegger might have meant by the term “Möglichkeit” (“possibility”), from which Bouton infers “freedom.” It is alleged that Bouton does not fully consider all of Heidegger's assertions regarding Möglichkeit, most problematically the claim that the human being's most essential “possibility” is its “impossibility,” that is to say, its death.     

Exploring the City in the Cinema of Bahram Beyzaie

This article explores five of Bahram Beyzaie's urban films over the last four decades to study their critique of the process of modernization and social changes that have taken place in Iran. These include The Journey (Safar, 1972), The Crow (Kalagh, 1977), Maybe Some Other Time (Shayad Vaqti Digar, 1987), Killing Mad Dogs (Sag Koshi, 2001) and When We Are All Asleep (Vaqti Hame Khabim, 2009). It examines the impact of modernization on the architecture and landscape of the city and consequently on the local community. It then studies the increasing complexity of ascertaining the real and unreal within the city. Finally, it looks at the changing values, the fears and threats within the city and the impact these have on its inhabitants, particularly women and their movement within the city.     

Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure,Modernity and Anglo-American Expansionism

This essay focuses on two updated, Americanized versions of the Robinson Crusoe story published in the final quarter of the nineteenth-century: Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island and Douglas Frazar's Perseverance Island: or the Nineteenth-Century Robinson Crusoe. The first half of the essay considers how these Robinsonades reworked Defoe's novel as a fantasy of applied technology in an industrialized agrarian context. The second half of the essay engages with recent historical work on nineteenth-century British expansion in order to consider how Verne's and Frazar's adventures might be understood in relation to the flow of migrants and money from Britain to America around the period the novels were written. As a result, the essay proposes The Mysterious Island and Perseverance Island as literary vehicles that inspired visions of agro-industrialization at a time when Victorian subjects were increasingly drawn to the American West as a site in which to sink their labour and finance. Thus linking the circulation of the adventure form with overseas capitalist enterprise, the essay concludes by reflecting upon how such expansionism might be understood with regard to the discriminatory processes of primitive accumulation and uneven development that have characterized the growth of the modern capitalist world system.     

‘The Island Blazed’: A Blinding Light and Tiepolo's Hound

This essay is primarily a study of Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound as an affirmation of Caribbean, tropical, blinding light through an engagement with the life and work of Camille Pissarro. Conceived as such, the poem, I argue, proposes an “adamic” vision and imagination attuned with “Time” rather than “History” (the concepts are Walcott's), as well as an intensification of sensory-perception beyond vision. In order to better appreciate the historical and contextual relevance of Tiepolo's Hound, the essay provides first a general introduction to: (1) a nuanced understanding of light and its “otherness” emerging from modern physics; (2) some of the ways in which western capitalism and Cartesian perspectivism, as a hegemonic aesthetic and philosophical tradition in the West, have attempted to capture and control light and its “otherness;” and (3) the blinding quality of light in the tropical context, which repositions light as a force against any and all exploitative capitalist desires.     

Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government and the Modern Congress: The "Universal Principle" of Change

In Congressional Government Woodrow Wilson analyzes change in Congress during its first century of development. This essay argues that Wilson's analysis of the 19th century Congress, which explains congressional behavior as an outgrowth of both institutional and societal forces, provides a more useful interpretation of change than the institutionalist perspective dominant in the specialized studies of the modern Congress. The essay illustrates the value of Wilson's analysis to contemporary scholars by tracing its impact on the evolution of the author's interpretation of the congressional reforms and changes of the 1970s. The essay attributes the continuing value of Congressional Government to its broad and unified portrait of Congress as a whole.     

WITH SPLINTERS (OR STARS) IN OUR EYES: ON READING THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL WITH MARTIN JAY

This mostly admiring review article focuses on Martin Jay's 2020 essay collection entitled Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations. Though it highlights details and insights from nearly every essay in the collection, the review devotes significant attention to chapter 4, which focuses on the relationship of the Frankfurt School's first-generation scholars with Sigmund Freud. The departure point for my engagement with Jay's fourth chapter is the translation of the German word Trieb (drive) as “instinct” throughout The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Although Jay's treatment of Max Horkheimer's, Theodor W. Adorno's, and Herbert Marcuse's recourses to Freudian psychoanalysis emphasizes their abiding commitment to Freud's theory of instinctual forces (over and against objections to his biologism), the question of whether a drive differs from an instinct does not arise. This question therefore offers an occasion to speculate on how distinguishing more firmly between instinct and drive might matter for the Frankfurt School's opposition between first and second nature. Though I praise Jay's decision to include a chapter on Miriam Hansen's Benjaminian revision of the public sphere, I also criticize his practice, in this volume at least, of consigning most scholarship authored by women to the endnotes rather than engaging with it in the main text.     

Ophthalmoscopy in Charlotte Brontë's Villette

This essay re-examines the representation of scopic conflict and discipline in Charlotte Brontë's novel, Villette (1853), within the context of the reconfiguration of the eye during the 1850s. Villette is pioneering in its representation of an ophthalmoscopic conception of the eye, as an organ which could be looked into by medical practitioners as well as looked at. This notion of the eye was only possible after Hermann von Helmholtz's invention of the ophthalmoscope in 1850. Villette is thus one of the first literary responses to the newly visible living retina. This essay argues that in light of the novel's emphasis on a penetrable, legible eye, the critical emphasis that scholars have placed on surveillance as a disciplinary model in Villette is overstated. Visual exchanges are described not in the disembodied abstractions of panopticism, but with references to a violent lexicon derived, in part, from the novel terminology of ophthalmoscopy. The prominence of opthalmoscopy points towards a remedial narrative in which diagnosis is succeeded by surgical intervention, and ultimately the restoration of sight. M. Paul Emanuel is the principal emblem of this visual practice: a merciless autocratic ophthalmologist who brings pain but also palliation. Villette's remedial narrative is organized around three devices designed to respectively look into, perforate, and enhance the human eye: the ophthalmoscope, the stylet (an instrument used in eye-surgery), and spectacles. This analysis adopts a historicist approach to re-contextualize Brontë's imaginative depiction of optical technology and perception within the mid-century emergence of ophthalmology.     

Democracy and political economy: Tocqueville's thoughts on J.-B. Say and T.R. Malthus

This essay examines the intellectual origins of Tocqueville's thoughts on political economy. It argues that Tocqueville believed political economy was crucial to what he called the ‘new science of politics’, and it explores his first forays into the discipline by examining his studies of J.-B. Say and T.R. Malthus. The essay shows how Tocqueville was initially attracted to Say's approach as it provided him with a rigorous analytical framework with which to examine American democracy. Though he incorporated important aspects of Say's work in Democracy in America (1835), he was troubled by elements of it. He was unable to articulate clearly these doubts until he began studying Malthus. What he learned from Malthus caused him to move away from the more formalised approach to political economy advocated by Say and his disciples and move towards an approach advocated by Christian political economists, such as Alban Villeneuve-Bargemont. This shift would have important consequences for the composition of Democracy in America (1840).     

The Société Européenne de Culture's Dialogue Est-Ouest 1956: Confronting the ‘European Problem’

This essay, which is part of an ongoing monographic study of the Société Européenne de Culture, looks at the SEC's relationship with Europe's communist intelligentsia during the first phase of the Cold War. European intellectual life during this period is generally associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Yet the SEC, the membership of which included some of Europe's most eminent figures, ranging from Camus and Jaspers, to Adorno and Merleau-Ponty, to Lukács and Sartre, can be seen as having provided a reference point particularly for the European left, not least because of its unique openness to communist participation. Giving special attention to the Dialogue Est-Ouest (Venice, March 1956), one of the earliest encounters between Europe's eastern and western intellectuals since before the war, this essay considers how the SEC's engagement with contemporary Marxist theory there not only embedded the dialectic as the SEC's operational method. It also provided an early indication of that institution's imminent shift from a preoccupation with universal values to an awareness of cultural difference and diversity, as a result of the critique of current western liberal ideology and its cultures, undertaken by the SEC in light of the Thaw.     

FROM NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY TO KANT'S—AND BACK

Reflecting on Anthony Jensen's Nietzsche's Philosophy of History, this essay describes Jensen's account of the three‐stage development of Nietzsche's historiographical practices and metahistorical positions: from his early philological writings, through The Birth of Tragedy, and into the mature philosophy of history that Jensen uncovers in Toward the Genealogy of Morality and Ecce Homo, which, so Jensen argues, consists in ontological realism combined with representational anti‐realism. While Jensen notes the importance of a like‐minded readership for the success of Nietzsche's historiographical projects, the essay asks whether Nietzsche did in fact have such a readership and further emphasizes that the Genealogy and Ecce Homo are structured in such a way that they seek to create one. A similar structure is identified in Kant's “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective.” The essay concludes by reflecting on the significance of this similarity in light of the doctrines of eternal recurrence that are expressed in both Nietzsche's late writings and Kant's youthful cosmology.     

Prophetic Perfectionism: The Afterlives of Nat Turner and John Brown

ABSTRACT

Recent fiction, film, art, and scholarship on nineteenth-century American abolitionists Nat Turner and John Brown shed light on the politics of their prophetic religion. Both men led violent rebellions against slavery for which they were executed. Prophetic perfectionism drove Turner and Brown but tended to fade in works about them. Exceptions to this pattern of reception include Jacob Lawrence's John Brown series (1941), Nate Parker's film The Birth of a Nation (2016), and Ted Smith's book Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (2014). This essay situates Turner's and Brown's prophetic perfectionism and their reception in the context of contemporary political theologies and aesthetics of religion and race.     

Montaigne: Founder of Modern Liberalism

In this essay David Lewis Schaefer summarizes and defends the argument set forth in his book The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (Cornell University Press, 1990; second edition 2019) that Michele de Montaigne's Essays (first edition, 1580) merits consideration as a founding text of modern political liberalism. After responding to the most extensive published critique of his interpretation (by James Supple) and citing other recent studies that harmonize with his argument, Schaefer compares his analysis of Montaigne's political aims and political-ethical teaching with those set forth in two other recent studies: Philippe Desan's Montaigne: A Life and Pierre Manent's Montaigne: La Vie sans loi.     

The romance of the Inland Isle: Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the landscape of Providence

Nearly two centuries after its publication, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1990a) remains among the most influential accounts of American political culture. This essay argues that the rhetorical foundation of the Democracy's enduring cultural power is its “imaginative geography” (Said 2000), about which I make two, interrelated claims. The first has to do with the Democracy's identification of the American land with divine Providence. I claim that the providential landscape is the chief means by which Tocqueville contains and organizes the account of the tension between achieved liberty and natural freedom that drives the Democracy. My second focus is on the romantic character of the providential landscape. Cosgrove (2005, p. 302) reflects upon the “tenacity of the island condition on the Western imagination” as frame and vessel of “imagination, desire, hopes and fears.” I argue that the Democracy's “Inland Isle,” as I call it, is a metaphorical island in this sense, and that its theoretical capacity and exhortative power derive from Tocqueville's use of an idiom expressive of a distinctively French tradition of landscape theorizing in which garden metaphor was used to construct meanings of equality and freedom, and voice and identity, in an emerging national, bourgeois order.     

The Inglorious

Abstract

The essay argues that Sheldon Wolin's case for decoupling democracy and liberalism, which he makes in both editions of Politics and Vision (1960 and 2004), significantly depends on the historical argument Henri Cardinal de Lubac made in his book Corpus Mysticum: L'Eucharistie et l'Eglise au moyen âge (1944 and 1949). Such a claim for the importance of this dependence deepens our understanding of the significance of both Wolin and Lubac for contemporary debates about religion and democracy. To this end, the essay has two proximate goals: (1) by displaying Wolin's use of Lubac's arguments concerning the shifting use of the term corpus mysticum, we will have a better theological understanding of Wolin's complex criticisms of liberal democracy; and (2) in the midst of claims to uncertainty about the political implications of Cardinal de Lubac's thought, we will see some of the conclusions that one political theorist came to after considering a theological argument. Finally, this particular instance of a mutually critical dialogue of faith and political reason raises crucial questions for thinking about the ends of democracy.     

Hobbes and Schmitt

Many commentators are unconvinced by Carl Schmitt's interpretation of Hobbes's political theory which, to their minds, remakes Hobbes in Schmitt's own authoritarian image. The argument advanced in this essay comprises three claims about Hobbes and Schmitt and the ways in which they are construed. The first claim is that certain commentators are bewitched by a picture of authority which biases their own claims about Hobbes, perhaps in ways that they may not fully appreciate. The second claim relates to Hobbes's individualism. On Schmitt's account, it was this individualism that opened the barely visible crack in the theoretical justification of the state through which it was worm-eaten by liberalism. This essay argues that Hobbes's individualism is not what Schmitt or his critics take it to be. The individualism that figures in Hobbes's discussions of covenant and conscience, pace Schmitt, is an illusion, albeit one that lies at the very heart of his conception of the state and animates his understanding of the relationship between protection and obedience that sustains it. The essay concludes with some remarks about the wider implications of the argument it advances.