A self-portrait may begin where recognition becomes uncertain. In Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1979), Francis Bacon places three versions of his head against fields of unqualified black. Each remains recognisably his, though none provides a face in which recognition can rest. The panels suggest successive views of a sitter turning before a camera, yet no continuous movement securely joins them. Bacon occupies every position the work establishes: he is the painter who looks, the man exposed to view, and the first spectator required to call these altered faces his own.

The word “self-portrait” compresses this threefold relation into a single reflexive form. Painter, sitter, and depicted person appear grammatically continuous, as though identity were secure before painting began. The painting loosens this apparent continuity. Bacon’s remark to David Sylvester, “I loathe my own face,” does not by itself explain the painting; it records the strangeness his appearance could assume for him (Sylvester, 1981, p. 130). The painted man remains Bacon without coinciding with the “I” who paints him. Between “I” and “he,” a distance opens within selfhood, while both pronouns remain attached to one life.

Before it is interpreted, a work of visual art asks to be seen. Words about the visible may obscure what they seek to approach, especially in the presence of Bacon’s altered faces and exposed bodies. Self-portraiture introduces a particular difficulty: Bacon is both the present subject who looks and the embodied person placed before his own gaze. Patrick Stokes’s account of Kierkegaard’s “naked self” may help to clarify this relation. Stokes describes “a gap between the self experienced as a here-and-now subject, and the person or human being as a temporally extended whole” (2015, p. 182). The naked self names the first-personal standpoint from which one encounters a life extended through body, history, and character, and assumes it as one’s own. Used in this limited sense, the concept gives language to a distinction already visible in Bacon’s self-portrait without claiming to explain the work as a whole.

The gap distinguishes two dimensions of a single existence. The person extends through time, bearing a body, a history, a character, and relations with others. The self is lived from within as the subject of the present moment. Their difference is experiential rather than numerical. It does not divide one human being into two entities. Instead, it explains how a life may remain one across time even when it is no longer felt as intimate. The present subject may meet the person he has been, or is becoming, almost as another man.

Bacon’s three heads allow this division within one existence to become visible, without serving as its illustration. They offer no separate selves or stages of a recoverable narrative. Each presents the same person under an alteration that the others cannot correct. Their relation might be formulated in the painter’s imagined first person: I may no longer recognise myself in him; nevertheless, his life is my life. His pleasures, failures, and losses remain mine even when memory cannot restore their intimacy. The painted “he” recedes from the looking “I,” while their distance remains within one life.

For Stokes, the naked self is neither an inner substance nor a pure identity hidden beneath acquired qualities..It names the here-and-now subject for whom the extended person can become an object of estrangement and concern (pp. 182–83). A remembered action may belong to the same life although the subject recalling it experiences its agent as foreign. The distance is first lived, then conceptualised. Personal continuity persists, while felt identity may weaken or disappear. Nakedness designates this exposure of the subject to a person it cannot simply cease to be (pp. 189–91).

Stokes also connects nakedness with abstraction from the person’s given concretion. Roles, habits, attachments, and history can be held at a distance and judged, though the subject never literally escapes the life that has formed its judgments. This interval makes possible a position toward what the person has become. It also prepares a return to the “actual self with all its difficulties and advantages,” for which the individual becomes responsible (Stokes, 2015, p. 185). The naked self opens the distance in which responsibility becomes possible; it does not itself complete the return.

The black ground gives pictorial force to that abstraction. No room, garment, occupation, or relation explains who this man is. Even the body contracts into a head and a narrow margin of neck. Such bareness might promise an identity purified of circumstance, but the face supplies no pure remainder. It presents features never chosen, changes never mastered, and a history absorbed by flesh without becoming legible there. The painter confronts the contingent person more directly. What remains is not an essence, but someone he may find strange and must still encounter as himself.

The faces also refuse the stillness promised by portraiture. A cheek slips sideways, an eye sinks into shadow, and the mouth seems to have moved after the rest of the head was fixed. These alterations expose the instability present in every likeness. The sitter changes while being recorded; the painter changes while recording him. Recognition occurs across an interval in which neither remains where looking first placed him. Bacon does not preserve a face against time so much as preserve the difficulty of deciding where, within its changes, the face abides.

Deleuze describes sensation as passing between levels and becoming an agent of bodily deformation (Deleuze, 2003, pp. 34–36). This account helps to name the forces that traverse Bacon’s figures without reducing them to symbols of psychological damage. Within self-portraiture, deformation also unsettles the alliance between resemblance and identity. Likeness survives displacement, although it becomes uncertain where likeness resides. Perhaps it lies less in any isolated feature than in the insistence with which these incompatible appearances continue to belong to one man. Identity remains compelling precisely when resemblance can no longer serve as its untroubled proof.

In the 1979 painting, this uncertainty acquires a temporal rhythm. The lateral heads turn from the more frontal image, while the central face appears to endure their divergent pressures. Each view changes what the others allow the viewer to call the same. The “I” who looks cannot choose one face as definitive, since every panel makes a claim upon him. Recognition moves among them without arriving at a final image. The unity of the life is neither visually given nor lost. It persists as something looking must attempt, without assurance of completion.

Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1980) carries the problem into a paler atmosphere. Against blue, Bacon’s head acquires a longer neck, a collar, and the beginning of a clothed bust. Social appearance returns in fragments, bringing the image closer to conventions through which a person is situated in the world. Yet the three views still fail to converge. Clothing does not repair the divided act of self-portraiture. It makes the division more exact: even when the depicted man is socially dressed, he remains exposed to a present subject who cannot delegate acknowledgment.

The later painting clarifies that the naked self is not a visually naked body. Nakedness belongs to the relation between the subject who now looks and the person who appears before him under the signs of a life. A collar may identify a social figure, and a bust may restore the conventions of portraiture, but neither determines who the man is for himself. Narrative, familiarity, and resemblance can support acknowledgment without guaranteeing it. The painter must receive this situated person as his own from an exposed present that no social description can fully occupy.

The face is bodily from the outset, and recognition takes place in flesh. Kevin Hunt writes that “Bacon explores the animalistic as inherent within the (godless) human condition” (2024, p. 6). In these heads, animality appears in the displaced jaw, unstable mouth, compressed cheek, and flesh that seems to move before expression settles. The animal does not replace the human. What emerges is the creaturely life upon which social recognition has already been built. Vulnerability, appetite, sensation, and mortality are not remnants of a prehuman existence; they are the material from which personhood can never free itself.

Skin is consequently more than an outer covering. In Hunt’s reading, it mediates between bodily sensation and the world, carrying contact, movement, and accumulated experience. Bacon’s paint gives that mediation a material form. Flesh appears rubbed, folded, and redistributed, making painted skin both surface and event. Deformation may then be seen as embodiment persisting through change, not merely as the ruin of an original face. The person cannot be extracted from what movement, ageing, and lived duration have done to the surface by which he is known, even when that surface no longer secures recognition.

In Self-Portrait (1973), the head belongs again to an entire seated body. A black sweater contains the torso; the legs draw inward; the hands descend toward a raised foot. The posture may suggest fatigue, defence, or simply the body’s effort to sustain its own weight. The room offers little habitation, so the figure is returned to bodily arrangement and mortal duration. What the small heads concentrate in the face is enlarged here: the present “I” encounters himself as a body already positioned, burdened, and exposed to meanings that cannot be entirely chosen.

The wristwatch fixes measured time to the figure’s arm (Harrison, 2016, p. 1042). It is a lucid object beside a body whose contours refuse lucidity. Yet it does not merely introduce mortality as a theme. Clock time and lived duration meet without coinciding. The watch counts uniform intervals, while duration enters the body as posture, clothing, fatigue, and weight. This body is neither an abandoned object nor a complete account of the self. It is the temporally extended person toward whom the present subject must take a position without finding a neutral place outside him.

The painter stands before a person he may fail to recognise and may abandon. Estrangement guarantees no responsibility. Stokes’s Kierkegaardian movement makes a response possible: a return from the naked self to the person in his concretion. The painting permits a conjectural sentence in Bacon’s first person: I may no longer recognise myself in him; nevertheless, his life is my life. Acknowledgment may begin when recognition reaches its limit.Bacon gives this task a painterly formulation: “How can I make this image feel more immediately real to me? That is all.”

References

Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum.

Harrison, Martin, ed. 2016. Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné. 5 vols. London: The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing.

Hunt, Kevin. 2024. “Michel Serres’s Sensorial Philosophy and the Importance of Skin in Francis Bacon’s Nudes.” Body & Society 30 (2): 3–36.

Stokes, Patrick. 2015. The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sylvester, David. 1981. Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1962–1979. New and enlarged ed. New York: Thames and Hudson.

Beneath the shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz lies an inhabited sea whose waters are also charted, regulated, and watched. Green turtles feed in the shallows around Qeshm, hawksbill turtles nest on nearby shores, and rays move over the sandy bottom. Coral colonies cling to the rocky reefs around Hormuz. A naval mine, if laid there, would remain insensible among these forms of life. Yet it would carry a political sentence in material form, suspended until a hull completed it. Long before a tanker becomes a market statistic or a news image, sovereignty has entered the sea as metal, pressure, and delayed force. The question is how this material possibility enters language, acquires political meaning, and begins to shape the use of force.

At the surface, the suspended sentence enters public language. Energy agencies classify Hormuz as a “chokepoint.” In the first half of 2025, approximately 20.9 million barrels of petroleum liquids crossed the Strait each day, about one quarter of all oil traded by sea. More than one fifth of global trade in liquefied natural gas passed through the same waters. An extensive system of circulation therefore depends on a narrow passage. These figures describe a material disproportion. Political interpretation begins when that disproportion takes the form of injury, obstruction, vulnerability, and rescue.²

A strait becomes a political metaphor when its physical shape begins to organise realities beyond itself. Hormuz then signifies more than the maritime passage between Iran and Oman. It becomes a throat whose closure threatens life, a gate whose keeper controls passage, or a threshold at which several claims meet. Each figure arranges geography, vulnerability, and power differently. Metaphor does not cause war in any mechanical sense. It helps make certain forms of military action intelligible by shaping the conditions under which force can appear urgent, proportionate, and legitimate.

The physical Strait remains intact in this account. Hormuz is narrow, heavily travelled, and difficult to replace. The principal Saudi and Emirati pipelines capable of bypassing it provide about 4.7 million barrels per day of alternative capacity, only a fraction of the volume normally passing through the Strait. Metaphor gains its hold because it answers to a real constraint. Its political work begins when strategic concentration is recast as anatomical necessity: narrowness becomes a throat, interruption becomes suffocation, and reopening becomes rescue. Interpretation does not invent the danger; it gives the danger a body and anticipates its remedy.

At the level of what Paul Ricoeur calls the metaphorical statement, no single word contains the meaning of “Hormuz is the throat of the world economy.” The attribution brings maritime geography, bodily fragility, and commercial circulation together within one sentence. Their initial incompatibility produces a new semantic pertinence. The Strait is seen through the body, while the body is reimagined through the Strait. Meaning arises from the statement as a whole rather than from an ornamental word that could be removed without altering the thought (Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, p. 75).

Ricoeur calls the imaginative dimension of this operation “seeing as.” Metaphor does not merely uncover a resemblance that was already waiting to be noticed. It makes a relation visible across an initial distance. A throat and a strait both channel passage through a narrow opening, but only one belongs to a living body. The image remains productive while similarity and difference stay in tension. Once political discourse allows the difference to fade, a contingent arrangement of ports, contracts, pipelines, and patterns of consumption begins to resemble a natural organism exposed to injury (Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, pp. 251–52).

Lakoff and Johnson place this operation within ordinary thought. Metaphor, in their account, structures perception and action rather than remaining confined to literature. Once the economy is understood as a body and Hormuz as its throat, oil takes the place of blood, transit becomes circulation, closure becomes strangulation, and reopening becomes resuscitation. The mapping carries an argument before explicit argument begins. Political judgement enters a vocabulary that has already assigned injury, agency, urgency, and remedy (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p. 3).

Every mapping is selective. The throat metaphor reveals dependence on a narrow route while pushing into the background the policies, contracts, infrastructures, and unequal histories that produced this dependence. It also compresses uneven exposure into the phrase “world economy.” In the first half of 2025, 89 per cent of the crude oil and condensate passing through Hormuz went to Asian markets; China, India, Japan, and South Korea together received 74 per cent. Yet the image creates one patient with one endangered organ, absorbing different markets and vulnerabilities into a single global body (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, pp. 10–11).

“World economy” captures a genuine global vulnerability, but in compressed form. A serious interruption would affect prices, insurance, transportation, production, and political expectations far beyond the immediate destinations of the cargo. The phrase turns a differentiated system into a single subject capable of suffering one injury. Once the world economy is imagined as a patient, the difference between regions directly dependent on Hormuz and those affected more indirectly begins to fade. Unequal exposure assumes the form of universal peril, and universal peril can support a universal claim to intervention.

The word “chokepoint” shows how familiarity can hide metaphorical force without eliminating it. In routine analysis, the term takes on a technical air. It refers to concentrated traffic, restricted passage, and limited alternatives. In moments of crisis, its buried bodily violence returns: chokepoint begins to imply choking, interruption resembles strangulation, and risk management acquires the urgency of rescue. By the time the word reaches a headline or a strategic assessment, geography has already taken the form of a threatened body.

Conventional language can turn geography into anatomy before a speaker becomes aware of the movement. “Chokepoint” seems to arrive already attached to the place, as though the word merely repeated what the map displayed. Yet a map shows constriction, not choking. The gap between the two is interpretive, even when long usage has made that gap difficult to see. The apparent naturalness of the term forms part of its political power.

Concealment here does not imply secret intent. It names a consequence of selection. A formulation foregrounds some relations and pushes others into the background. Concealment occurs when what has been pushed aside remains indispensable to the scene being presented. The question is less what a speaker privately wishes to hide than what disappears once one description governs attention. A metaphor may reveal a genuine vulnerability while obscuring the distribution of agency that produced or intensified it. Revealing and concealing are two effects of the same interpretive act.

In December 2018, Hassan Rouhani cast the Strait as a figure of reciprocal exposure: “If one day they want to prevent the export of Iran’s oil, then no oil will be exported from the Persian Gulf.” The warning exposes the coercive asymmetry of sanctions by making passage indivisible. Exclusion directed at one exporter is recast as vulnerability shared by all. At the same time, Iran’s own agency in the threatened interruption recedes from view. A possible act of interdiction begins to resemble the necessary response of geography itself. The Strait is made to answer sanctions in the language of its own closure.

Donald Trump’s formulation in May 2026 performs the inverse operation: “Nobody’s going to control it, we are going to watch over it.” The sentence acknowledges that open passage depends on surveillance and enforceable rules. Yet American military predominance recedes behind the language of guardianship. The denial of control installs a privileged gaze, while “watching over” softens the capacities to monitor, intercept, and attack. Rouhani turns threatened closure into reciprocity; Trump turns superior force into custodianship. In both cases, strategic agency appears as fidelity to an order that the Strait itself seems to demand.

The two statements come from different positions of power, arise in different circumstances, and address different audiences. Even so, they perform parallel interpretive moves. Each begins with a material condition and turns it into a norm. For Rouhani, the indivisibility of passage supports the claim that exclusion cannot remain unilateral. For Trump, the international status of the water supports the claim that surveillance by a dominant military power does not amount to control. Geography becomes an authority capable of legitimating incompatible actions. Each speaker presents strategy as obedience to the meaning of the place.

The crisis of July 2019 makes this movement visible without reducing language to a direct cause of military action. On 4 July, British forces detained the Iranian-chartered tanker Grace 1 near Gibraltar on suspicion that it was carrying oil to Syria in violation of European sanctions. On 19 July, Iranian forces seized the British-flagged Stena Impero in the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian officials connected the two detentions through the language of reciprocity. The British government declared them legally distinct, described the second seizure as “state piracy,” and invoked freedom of navigation as a condition of global trade.

The phrase “state piracy” did more than condemn the seizure. Piracy places an actor outside the legitimate order of passage. “Freedom of navigation” named the endangered good, while “safe passage” anticipated the form of its restoration. Britain proposed a European-led maritime protection mission and soon authorised Royal Navy vessels to accompany British-flagged ships through the Strait. Reuters and the Associated Press carried this vocabulary into public circulation as the sequence moved from seizure to protection and from protection to naval presence.

What matters philosophically in this episode is not that a word dispatched a warship. The seizures, sanctions, jurisdictional claims, crews, cargo, insurance costs, and naval capacities were all materially real. Language gathered these heterogeneous elements into a public configuration. “Piracy” identified an offender. “Freedom of navigation” named the threatened good. “Protection” assigned the work of restoring order. Military accompaniment then gave material form to an interpretation that had already made it appear reasonable.

The same events could have been arranged around sanctions, reciprocal detention, disputed jurisdiction, or the escalation of maritime coercion. Those descriptions would have left the legal and physical dangers intact while shifting the position from which the episode became intelligible. The beginning would have moved backwards; the identity of the first injury would have changed. The naval escort might then have appeared as both protection and further militarisation. Interpretation enters politics partly by determining where a story begins.

News gives this interpretive circuit its temporal form. A dispersed field of coastlines, contracts, crews, insurers, sanctions, pipelines, and military forces must be composed as an event. First there is an established flow. Then an obstruction appears. Responsibility is assigned. A restoring power enters. The sequence determines where political time begins. A tanker seizure may be cast as the first violence while an earlier sanction or detention remains in the background. An escort may be presented as restoration even as it enlarges the military field.

News can also place rival descriptions beside one another: enforcement and piracy, retaliation and aggression, protection and militarisation. Yet reporting still requires temporal order. An event acquires a beginning, an agent, and an anticipated end. The political force of news lies partly in this compression. It turns simultaneous claims and dispersed histories into a sequence in which one action appears primary and another derivative, one violent and another remedial.

Across successive crises, the Strait returns as artery, lifeline, gate, or chokepoint. Repetition gives these images duration. A description survives the incident that activated it and remains available for the next. Each subsequent disruption then appears to confirm the vocabulary inherited from earlier disruptions. The place accumulates interpretations until its political name becomes difficult to separate from the scenarios of closure, surveillance, rescue, and war that have repeatedly passed through it.

Lakoff and Johnson describe how metaphors become socially effective by guiding action and receiving confirmation from the actions they guide. Their analysis of an energy crisis framed as war shows how a metaphorical structure can supply enemies, targets, sacrifice, command, and policy. Accepting the image becomes a licence for further inference. Around Hormuz, throat, guardian, gate, and obstruction perform comparable work. They dictate no single policy. They distribute the roles from which policies become plausible, allowing some responses to seem continuous with reality and others to seem like departures from it (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, pp. 158–59).

The language of clearing and restoration introduces a register that metaphor alone does not fully explain. Here the distinction between metaphor and symbol becomes necessary. A metaphor creates a new predication by bringing unlike terms into relation. A symbol carries meanings rooted in experience that interpretation can unfold without exhausting. In The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur examines defilement through the bodily and material figure of stain. Stain gives sensuous form to an ethical condition: impurity can be imagined as something that adheres, spreads, and calls for removal (Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, pp. 33–34).

Around Hormuz, a similar symbolic charge appears when a hostile presence is understood as contamination of a common medium and military removal as the restoration of clean passage. The verb clear can suggest technical access, restored order, and purification at once. Maritime security thereby acquires a surplus beyond its operational meaning. Removing a mine or another physical threat can take on a moral form in which danger appears as impurity and force as cleansing.

This symbolic surplus matters because purification follows a different logic from negotiation. A disputed claim may be examined, revised, or submitted to law. Contamination calls for removal. Once danger is imagined through stain, a hostile presence ceases to appear as one claimant within a conflict of claims. It becomes matter out of place within a medium imagined as naturally clean. The language of clearing can therefore narrow the range of political responses even when its immediate operational meaning is precise.

Ricoeur’s proposition that “the symbol gives rise to thought” means that reflection begins with a meaning already carried by image, experience, and narrative. Thought receives that meaning and subjects it to interpretation. The symbol remains productive because no single concept can exhaust it (Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, pp. 347–48). In the case of Hormuz, the task is to ask what the language of contamination adds to the operational meaning of clearance and what political consequences follow from that addition.

Considering the Strait of Hormuz as a political metaphor calls for distance rather than a neutral language beyond figures. It requires asking what each metaphor reveals, which forms of agency it obscures, and which actions it makes reasonable. Exposing metaphor does not deliver us into a non-metaphorical language. It allows metaphors to be compared, revised, and used with greater vigilance (Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, pp. 298–99).

Hormuz as threshold offers a counter-description already implicit in the geography of crossing. A threshold belongs fully to neither side. It holds separation and passage together. The figure directs attention towards reciprocal exposure, negotiated rules, and institutions of crossing rather than towards the medical rescue of a passive body. The question becomes not only how an injured circulation can be restored, but how several powers can cross a space that none can inhabit alone.

Threshold imagery is itself politically charged. A threshold can be guarded, closed, claimed, and crossed by unequal powers. Its value lies in the plurality it preserves. The throat gathers an extensive system into one vulnerable organism; the threshold keeps several parties within the scene. Where the throat calls for emergency treatment, the threshold raises questions of jurisdiction, reciprocity, permission, and shared exposure.

The gate shifts the emphasis from illness to authority. It can be opened, closed, guarded, or forced. The image brings the right to decide into the foreground. It can support Iran’s claim that proximity and coastline confer special authority, or the opposing claim that international passage must remain beyond the control of any coastal state. The metaphor settles neither position. It structures the dispute by distinguishing those who claim authority over passage from those who demand access to it.

Political interpretation therefore involves a conflict of metaphors rather than an escape from metaphor. Throat, gate, lifeline, guardian, and threshold compose different versions of the place and distribute agency differently within it. This does not make all descriptions equal. Some account more fully for material constraint, historical responsibility, unequal power, and the plurality of those exposed to a decision. Openness to interpretation is a discipline of judgement: it preserves the possibility of comparing descriptions before one of them acquires the authority of the place itself.

Literal truth cannot settle the comparison, since no metaphor is literally true. Arbitrary preference cannot settle it either, because each metaphor responds to features of the place while selecting particular relations among them. The throat registers concentrated dependence. The gate registers authority over passage. The threshold registers reciprocal crossing. Their adequacy must be judged by what they allow us to perceive and by the forms of conduct they make appear reasonable or necessary.

The Strait of Hormuz is therefore both a maritime passage and an institution of meaning. Its waters carry ships; its name carries interpretations of vulnerability and command. Leaders turn those interpretations into warnings and guarantees. News gives them sequence, recurrence, and urgency. Military systems return language to matter as surveillance, escorts, mines, and patrol routes. Force begins to acquire the appearance of necessity when one figure monopolises the place and its inferences harden into properties of the world. A strait remains open to navigation only insofar as it also remains open to interpretation.

Notes:

1. Theoretical sources: Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, translated by Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Routledge, 2003); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, translated by Emerson Buchanan (Beacon Press, 1967). Page references follow these editions.

2. Documentary sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, “World Oil Transit Chokepoints” (updated 3 March 2026); Reuters, “U.S. Will Not Stop Iran Exporting Oil, Iranian President Says” (4 December 2018), “Britain to Seek European Maritime Mission to Counter Iran’s ‘Piracy’” (22 July 2019), and “Britain Tasks Navy with Accompanying British-Flagged Vessels Through the Strait of Hormuz” (25 July 2019); Associated Press, “UK Offers Ships Naval Escort After Iran Oil Tanker Seizure” (25 July 2019); Reuters Connect, “Trump Dismisses Easing Sanctions on Iran, Says Hormuz ‘Open to Everyone’” (27 May 2026); and Jeremy Hunt, “Situation in the Gulf,” House of Commons, Hansard (22 July 2019).

What first held me in section 58 of Göran Sonnevi’s The Unfinished Language (1972) was the quiet unease of its pronoun. “We” appears before any individual voice can secure its borders. I approached the poem as an observer and found myself already included in its structure. Human beings emerge as “a series of unfinished, composite signs,” moving through conditions they cannot fully survey. Every interpretation carries the history that made it possible, together with the limits, inheritances, and unfinished relations of the person who speaks.

The central statement has the compressed form of a theorem: “A code can never decipher itself.” Self-knowledge remains inside the system that produces it. The interpreter has no clear platform beyond language, consciousness, or history from which the whole can be surveyed. Meaning emerges from the conditions it seeks to describe, and each clarification reveals another layer of dependence. The poem places limitation inside the act of reading, where understanding advances by moving further into the structure that gives it shape, direction, and the terms through which it asks its questions.

The unfinished belongs to movement. Words follow bodies, memories, political events, and natural forms as they enter new relations. Meaning changes with those relations and remains open to their consequences. Completion would require a completed history: every action concluded, every wound given its final name, every inheritance made fully visible. Sonnevi’s forms remain provisional, exact for a moment and exposed to what follows. Section 58 gathers this condition into eleven spare lines, moving from the divided self towards the larger and more intricate sign of history.

The poem’s brevity first gives it the appearance of a self-contained logical object whose terms can be held at once. Slower reading opens that object from within. Each statement leads into another scale: human beings appear as composite signs, the signs form a code, the code enters a logical class, and the class returns us to history. Its economy concentrates the problem, allowing each term to exert greater philosophical pressure. The pauses and divisions make that concentration visible before commentary begins and prepare the reader for the poem itself:

We are a series
of unfinished, composite signs on our way

The remainder of our innermost meaning
can never be deciphered

For a code can never decipher
itself

The class of all classes also includes
itself

We are part of
the composite sign
history.

—Göran Sonnevi, section 58 of The Unfinished Language.

The form carries the thought forward. “We are a series” waits for the next line, while “we are part of” remains suspended until “history” arrives. Syntax crosses the line break before the statement can settle. Each unit acquires meaning through what follows, then changes slightly as the sequence continues. Reading becomes an act of adjustment. Incompletion enters the rhythm of attention itself, where understanding develops through delay, correction, and return, and where each line passes its unfinished movement into the next, carrying the reader with it.

Mona Sandqvist finds an ethical motive in Sonnevi’s effort to interpret people within history: one must understand as far as possible in order to live, choose, and accept responsibility. Her reading identifies the poem’s ethical pressure, and the poem extends it. Responsibility moves through our decisions, through the words that make them recognisable as moral, and through the historical pressures still active whenever those words are spoken. Ethical judgement therefore begins inside an inherited vocabulary whose assumptions must be examined while it is being used in practice.

That ethical uncertainty becomes relational in “Whose life? you asked,” from Poems with No Order (1983). Language begins in an exchange between an intimate “you” and an answering “I.” Rika Lesser notes that the Swedish pronoun is the singular, familiar du, preserving the concreteness of the encounter. The poem reaches the claim, “Only then is there language / only then are we human.” Meaning arises between speakers, altered by question and response. Each voice enters the shared life of another and discovers its own incompletion there.

“Words Have No Limits,” from Unfinished Poems (1987), tests how far that relation can remain open. Limitless words cease to be words; sea and love lose their settled names; the speakers become “strange mirrors.” Meaning expands towards a point where distinction begins to dissolve. The poem then returns to bodily balance, the growing sea, and a voice rising from the throat. Openness needs form if speech is to remain possible. Language crosses boundaries while preserving enough difference for one person to address another and for an answer to be heard.

Sonnevi’s echo of Hölderlin enlarges the historical resonance of the sign. “A sign we are, without interpretation,” Hölderlin writes in “Mnemosyne” (c. 1803). Sandqvist reads the line as evidence of a forgotten higher vocation, a meaning modern humanity might once have embodied. Sonnevi carries the image into a historical landscape where the composite sign gathers many origins, pressures, and losses. Opacity belongs to the structure of the sign and to the past inside it. Interpretation continues through layers of history, each reading entering relations already in motion.

The poem beginning “Die Zeit ist buchstabengenau und allbarmherzig,” included in The Impossible (1975), brings this problem to the limit of address. Sonnevi describes Hölderlin’s brief, compulsively interrupted letters to his mother as attempts “to preserve the thread of life.” Writing becomes a narrow line between one consciousness and another while the self contracts under illness. At the poem’s end stands “silence, literal, exact.” Silence enters the written record through interrupted relation, withdrawal, and the pressures surrounding a voice approaching its limit within language itself.

As speech contracts towards silence, matter takes over part of the poem’s thinking. Light, crystal, water, and the body begin to carry distinctions that discursive argument can no longer sustain alone. A flash reveals “a sign of struggle” and a liquid-crystalline architecture in violent transformation. Crystal offers structure; liquid crystal changes configuration under pressure. Language behaves in a related way, giving temporary form to unstable relations and registering movement in the surrounding field. Precision survives as responsiveness, giving change a momentary and perceptible form in time.

The sea passages of The Impossible carry this movement through the body. “We are all born from the sea, the inner, floating sea,” the speaker says, where stages change in “rhythms of millions of years.” The womb holds evolutionary time within intimate experience. A body carries a past that consciousness cannot remember and words cannot wholly retrieve. Sonnevi places geological duration beside the softness of an abdomen. Their proximity allows personal life to appear inside a history older than memory and already active in flesh.

The sequence continues with the sea’s “invisible depth” carried inside another body. Visible water outside answers unseen water within, the two joined by the child taking shape between them. Grief enters as “foreign water” injected into “the inner sea,” spreading among mountains, stones, sand, wind, and waves. The passage gives suffering a material presence that can be shared with others while leaving its cause unresolved. Pain moves through landscape and body as a pressure that language gradually learns to hold.

The water carried inside the body also carries history. Once sorrow enters that inner sea, private feeling begins to shape the language of collective life. Political speech grows from the same material ground, seeking names for justice, violence, liberation, and necessity. Such names organise attention and action, then enter the structures they hope to transform. Each returns with a past. An emancipatory word may carry the record of coercion committed in its name, requiring renewed examination whenever it is spoken and whenever a collective future is imagined through it.

This crisis becomes explicit in Language; Tools; Fire (1979). Sandqvist argues that political disillusionment in Southeast Asia threatened Sonnevi with a loss of language comparable to the collapse he associated with Hölderlin. The long poem revisits revolutionary hopes after the emergence of the Khmer Rouge regime and renewed war in the region. It returns to a vocabulary whose terms have been altered by catastrophe. Words reappear carrying evidence of their historical uses, and poetry tests whether they can still sustain judgement, relation, and responsibility under the pressure of those meanings.

Lesser asks, “Where is the unfinished language finished?” and answers, “In infinity.” The answer offers the clarity of a formula, while Sonnevi’s poems keep that clarity in motion. Infinity suggests continuation without terminus. It keeps completion receding as language enters each new relation. I return to the smaller motions of the poems: a question addressed, an answer revised, a word heard differently after history enters it. Whether such continuation is enough remains within language itself. The next sentence begins, and its demands become visible only as we enter it.

Source Note

Section 58 from Det oavslutade språket (The Unfinished Language) and the quoted passages from Det omöjliga (The Impossible) were translated from the Swedish by Uncertain Coordinates. The English translations of “Whose life? you asked” and “Words Have No Limits,” together with the quotations from Rika Lesser’s introduction, are taken from A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, translated and edited by Lesser (Princeton University Press, 1993). The discussion of Hölderlin, linguistic loss, and Språk; Verktyg; Eld (Language; Tools; Fire) draws on Mona Sandqvist’s “Tecknet Hölderlin i Göran Sonnevis poesi,” Samlaren 109 (1988), 43–71.

Before the mountain becomes landscape, it becomes breath. Before the father becomes a character, he is a dark movement across white ground. The land enters the novel as sound, and from that sound emerges the logic of Sámi joik: mountain, river, animal, and reindeer trail carried into presence through voice. They return as memory, belonging, and knowledge held in the body. Ella-Maria Nutti’s Till träden (2024) begins with breath, sound, and snow. Snow erases the horizon. The sky lowers. A daughter riding behind her father imagines disappearing. Nutti lets silence move.

Till träden is Nutti’s second novel. A Sámi father and his adult daughter travel into the northern mountains by snowmobile. The machine fails. The weather gathers around them. They walk toward shelter, spend days in a cabin, ration food, tend an injury, and prepare to descend toward the trees. On the surface, the novel follows a struggle for survival. Its inward pressure comes from inheritance. The father knows the land. The daughter lacks part of its language. Both carry a history that has entered them as reserve, uncertainty, bodily memory, and unfinished speech.

For readers beyond Sweden, the Sámi are the Indigenous people of Sápmi, a homeland extending across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula. Their population is commonly estimated at 80,000 to 100,000, though no exact figure exists because the four states use different definitions and keep no unified ethnic census. Sámi identity includes several languages, regional histories, livelihoods, and religious traditions. Reindeer husbandry remains culturally important, while Sámi life has always exceeded any single occupation, social image, inherited custom, or national border.

The modern Scandinavian states did not merely neglect the Sámi. They reorganized Sámi life through land seizure, forced relocation, segregated schooling, racial classification, and the deliberate weakening of Sámi languages. In Sweden, children were removed from family environments and placed in nomad schools designed to control what kind of people they were permitted to become. Their bodies were measured by racial biologists, their lands were mapped for others, and their languages were treated as obstacles to progress. This history survives in broken transmission, inherited shame, anger, and silence between generations.

Nutti keeps that violence behind the immediate story, then allows it to flare inside memory. As a child, the daughter sees a man claim the ground as “my land,” curse the reindeer, and drive her family away while they gather lichen for the herd (p. 59). The scene compresses an entire colonial order into a few shouted words. The land is claimed, the family is driven away, and fear enters the child’s body before political language can name what has happened.

The novel’s central wound opens when the daughter asks what a particular kind of snow is called. Her father searches for the Sámi word and offers distinctions learned from weather, movement, danger, and use. She thinks, “So many words to learn. So many he has not said” (p. 63). The sentence carries two absences. It names the vocabulary that never reached her. It also gathers every unspoken question between them. The language of snow and the emotional language of the family become one field of missing names.

These words are forms of attention. A precise term for snow can register hardness, depth, crust, drift, thaw, risk, or the trace of an animal. Such knowledge has practical value in a northern environment. Nutti never turns vocabulary into ethnographic display. The daughter feels the loss through her body. She walks inside a world that belongs to her family, while part of its verbal map remains closed. She has reached the landscape before receiving the full language by which it can be read. To lack these words is to inherit the world in partial outline.

The father’s love arrives through action. He melts snow, prepares food, stacks supplies, repairs shelter, studies the weather, watches her exhaustion, and measures each remaining risk. His hands speak with greater ease than his mouth. Nutti keeps him complex. He carries knowledge, tenderness, fear, pride, and a learned reserve. He can lead his daughter through the mountains. He cannot easily explain why so much of their shared language failed to pass from him to her. His care sustains the body while leaving part of her inheritance unnamed.

A grammar of silence gradually takes shape between them. “We are fine” replaces a full account of danger. “Did you sleep?” carries worry without confession. “One more game” means stay near me. Porridge, firewood, a repaired window, and a bottle of melted snow perform meanings that speech cannot hold. Silence steadies them during the storm and preserves a lasting distance. The same quiet that prevents panic can leave another person unsure of love, history, language, and belonging. Nutti gives that quiet rhythm, weight, temperature, and duration.

The daughter’s memories of Adam repeat this uncertainty. She asked whether he loved her, then asked why, then waited for the answer to become solid. His reassurance never acquired enough weight. She imagined departure until departure arrived. The relationship belongs inside the novel’s larger structure of interrupted trust. Her father’s care has always been present in deeds. Adam’s affection also feels too light to guarantee permanence. She seeks language that cannot vanish. Each answer returns her to the place where words remain insufficient and silence feels like approaching loss.

The mountain strips away control. Early in the journey, the daughter thinks about people who vanished in mist and were never found. She admits that she dislikes being without control (p. 5). Soon the machine fails, the route dissolves, and weather erases the distinction between sky and ground. Even the father’s experience cannot secure them. After wondering whether prayer, moonlight, or the landscape might offer a sign, she concludes, “Nature just does” (p. 66). The sentence leaves them inside a world without promise, answer, or intention.

The land is close to them and indifferent to their wishes. It carries memory, livelihood, danger, and knowledge. The father can read snow and still become injured. The daughter can belong to Sápmi and still feel linguistically outside part of it. The mountain reveals how fragile identity becomes when names fail to travel across generations. Belonging becomes attention. Endurance. Responsibility. Comfort is never promised. Justice does not arrive with the landscape. Return remains uncertain.

The cabin gathers another order around them. Inside are a stove, tools, cards, bottles, a guestbook, and wood stacked by someone unknown. The daughter silently thanks the person who prepared it. She senses that the cabin is on their side (p. 77). Survival depends on care left for an absent stranger. Someone cut wood for a future body. Their card game extends this fragile order. They rebuild forgotten rules together. Each turn, pause, and correction creates a form that allows father and daughter to remain near.

Nutti’s first novel, Kaffe med mjölk (2022), also follows a daughter through family intimacy, illness, care, and speech that arrives late. Till träden carries this restrained emotional method into a wider and harsher landscape, where private reticence acquires the historical weight of interrupted Sámi transmission. In this sense, Nutti writes within a broader Sámi literary field in which land, oral presence, memory, and linguistic loss enter the structure of narrative. Her voice remains distinctly her own: quiet, domestic, bodily, and resistant to declaration.

The title reaches its deepest meaning near the end. The father tells his daughter that, during her hardest years, he spoke to the tree several times a week. One does not demand help from trees, he says. One asks, and the trees do what they can. He had placed his hand against the trunk and spoken there, perhaps speaking to her through it. The tree becomes listener, witness, and vessel. What could not pass directly between father and daughter remained alive in bark, memory, and repeated address.

The first mountain birches rise low and crooked from the snow. Farther down, the trees stand taller and gather into forest. “Where there are trees, there is life,” the daughter thinks (p. 185). Near the cabin, one tree has nearly split and remains standing (pp. 189–190). The father remembers how the children claimed trees as their own, how this one gave the place its reason. The family resembles it. The trunk is wounded, the crown divided, the roots still holding. Survival continues through the damaged form.

Till träden gives silence weather, muscle, breath, and duration. Political violence enters the smallest units of intimacy: a word not taught, a question postponed, a child frightened on disputed land, inherited knowledge held too tightly, love performed without a sentence. The journey toward the trees becomes a movement toward life and toward language. No complete restoration waits there. A beginning does. The daughter hears what has been missing. The father remains beside her. The unsaid becomes breath. Breath becomes sound. The sound moves through snow, body, and tree, then returns to silence.

What becomes of matter when it is no longer treated merely as the recipient of form? This is the question Ernst Bloch brings to Avicenna, and it marks the point at which their philosophical worlds begin to diverge. Bloch approaches matter through history, labour, and unrealised possibility. Avicenna situates it within an order governed by causality, necessity, and the Necessary Existent. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left does not retrace the internal movement of Avicenna’s system. The Necessary Existent, the hierarchy of causes, the Active Intellect, and the modal discipline of possibility and necessity remain at its edge. Bloch isolates instead a question within that system: whether matter can be understood not only as the recipient of form but also as a participant in its emergence.

Bloch’s response is neither a neutral account of Avicenna nor the recovery of a hidden medieval materialism. He places Avicenna inside a later argument about matter, history, and the unfinished character of reality. What matters to Bloch is not the full architecture of Avicenna’s metaphysics, but a pressure within it: the possibility that matter may contain more than a passive readiness for form. His reading takes its force from this displacement. It brings two philosophical worlds into contact without allowing either of them to remain unchanged. The result is not an agreement between Avicenna and Bloch, but a philosophical tension that the rest of this essay follows.

The distance is fundamental. In Avicenna’s metaphysics, matter belongs to an order of dependence. A possible being is possible in itself and necessary through another. Its existence is intelligible through causes whose ultimate ground is the Necessary Existent. Corporeal being is a composite actuality in which matter is never found apart from formative determination. Matter receives actuality through form, while form is prior to matter in the order of actuality. Neither term can be detached from the other without altering Avicenna’s account of corporeal being (Avicenna 2005, 38, 63, 70, 195, 327–28; Avicenna 2009, 15).

Avicenna consequently offers no preliminary version of modern materialism. God does not dissolve into nature. The future does not open as a field in which matter produces itself through struggle. Form belongs to the intelligibility of the sensible world. It is neither an incidental coating nor an alien force laid upon a self-moving substance. The most serious objection to Bloch therefore comes from Avicenna himself. Bloch detaches matter, possibility, and form from a metaphysics of dependence, then asks what they disclose once history becomes the horizon of their meaning.

Such a procedure calls for criticism, but not dismissal. Its selectivity is its philosophical method. Bloch is not composing a neutral history of medieval thought. He is making a lineage. His purpose is neither to prove that Avicenna anticipated Marx nor to discover a completed materialism concealed within Islamic philosophy. He asks whether the later inheritance of Aristotle granted too much authority to intellect, finished form, and transcendence, while matter remained a lower term: necessary, rich in capacities, yet unable to account for the forms through which those capacities entered the world.

Bloch calls the alternative current the “Aristotelian Left.” The term is retrospective and deliberately polemical. It recalls the division between Left and Right Hegelians after Hegel’s death. Bloch finds a resemblance between the naturalistic ways in which Aristotelian nous and Hegelian Spirit were “brought down to earth” (Bloch 2019, 14). The phrase does not designate a medieval party. It names two tendencies in the inheritance of Aristotle. One protects the precedence of intellect, completed form, and transcendence. The other draws formative power nearer to nature, matter, and temporal change.

For Bloch, Aquinas gives the Aristotelian Right its most systematic expression. Form grants matter identity, purpose, and actuality. Matter receives determination without generating it. The more actual a being is, the higher it stands. Matter may be full of possibilities, yet this abundance appears primarily as a deficit, since actuality does not belong to it in its own right. Bloch opposes this arrangement to a line that seeks “the sublation of divine potency itself in the active potentiality of matter.” The Right, he writes, “relegated matter to mere potentiality” (Bloch 2019, 16).

“Mere potentiality” forms the hinge of the argument. Potentiality may name a lack: a thing has not yet become what its proper form will make it. Bloch gives the word another weight. A potential is neither a finished object hidden behind the present nor a private desire imposed upon the world. It is a tendency within a real situation. It has conditions, limits, resistance, and direction. It may remain blocked, or it may fail altogether. Yet it belongs to the present before it assumes the visible shape of an accomplished fact.

Aristotle supplies Bloch with the first vocabulary for this problem and with its limit. Matter is dynamei on, what may become. Yet Aristotle’s account remains, in Bloch’s view, too close to passivity. Matter is “indeterminate in itself” and receives form “like wax” (Bloch 2019, 15). The image is exact. Wax receives an impression, but it cannot account for the image impressed upon it. The principle of formation lies elsewhere. Matter is indispensable to becoming, though it appears to have no share in the act that brings becoming to completion.

Bloch places Avicenna at the point where this relation begins to move. He does not claim that Avicenna abolishes the distinction between matter and form. His claim is narrower, and more consequential for that reason. Avicenna preserves the distinction while making matter “ever more important” (Bloch 2019, 21). In Bloch’s reconstruction, active form no longer stands wholly above matter. It enters the process through which material forms emerge. Form ceases to be intelligible only as an order imposed upon what lacks order. It becomes bound to a movement already under way within matter.

This is a deliberate displacement of emphasis, not a faithful restatement of Avicenna’s doctrine. Bloch reads Avicenna against the settled image of a philosophy in which matter remains ordered by form, while contingent existence is intelligible only through dependence upon the Necessary Existent. Menozzi describes Bloch’s Avicenna as attributing “active, collaborative agency” to matter (Menozzi 2022, 1469). The formulation is useful because it avoids a crude reversal. Matter does not become a person, a will, or a second God. It does not legislate its own future. It becomes a participant in formation.

Form remains necessary in this account. Its necessity, however, takes another character. Form no longer appears as a principle imposed from a realm untouched by material life. It gives articulation to capacities and tendencies already present, though not yet clear or distinct. The distinction between form and matter survives, but the old hierarchy weakens. Form continues to make something intelligible and determinate. It can no longer claim to be the sole source of determination.

Bloch’s own language is more forceful. Aristotle, he says, never fully escaped the identification of matter with passivity. Avicenna, by contrast, gives matter the characteristics of “ferment and pregnancy,” of self-creation, and of an incompleteness belonging to possibility itself (Bloch 2019, 21). These figures are not decorative. Ferment suggests movement beginning within a thing. Pregnancy suggests a present that contains more than it can yet disclose. Incompleteness means that actuality does not exhaust reality. What exists is real, though reality exceeds what has already taken form.

At this point, the question of God changes its place. Bloch does not merely reject God. He relocates a power traditionally assigned to God. What the Aristotelian Right reserves for divine actuality and transcendent form, namely the power to bring possibility into fulfilment, the Aristotelian Left seeks within matter. Bloch calls this “the sublation of divine potency itself in the active potentiality of matter” (Bloch 2019, 16). The phrase does not describe Avicenna’s theology. It names Bloch’s intervention in it. A capacity once placed above the world is sought within the world’s unfinished processes.

History changes with this relocation. It no longer appears as the temporal execution of an order complete in principle. It becomes the record of forms that arise, settle, harden, fail, and sometimes disappear. This does not make history arbitrary. Material possibility is not fantasy. It depends on knowledge, labour, technical means, institutions, time, and collective effort. Possibility belongs to the world in which it appears. Still, the existence of a form does not establish that it is the only form the world can take.

Bloch’s distance from mechanical materialism follows from this account. Mechanical materialism treats matter as a collection of fixed things moved by external causes. Its world is closed in another way. Every movement can, at least in principle, be traced back to forces that have already acted. Bloch seeks a matter that is real without being closed. Its possibilities are not supplied by consciousness from outside. They belong to the world, even where they remain blocked, undeveloped, or forgotten. Menozzi describes this view of matter as “a womb of possibilities” realised through human agency and labour (Menozzi 2022, 1472). The phrase matters because it names a world not exhausted by what has already been actualised.

The line Bloch constructs extends through Avicebron, Averroës, and Bruno. He does not suggest that these thinkers teach a single doctrine. They mark moments in a recurrent refusal to let form stand wholly apart from what it shapes. In Averroës, Bloch finds matter “eternally in flux” and alive as natura naturans, “in no need of a God-nous from above or beyond” (Bloch 2019, 15–16). Bruno later gives this tendency a sharper naturalist language. The genealogy is not a chain of simple influences. It is a history of alternatives that return whenever form becomes too distant from the life it claims to order.

The political consequence is modest, but serious. Once matter is understood as carrying possibilities that existing forms have not completed, endurance no longer resolves the question of necessity. Law, property, work, and political authority may persist for long periods. Their persistence does not prove that they must persist. Such arrangements emerged under particular conditions, and altered conditions may transform them. Bloch does not derive a programme of revolution from Avicenna. He makes it more difficult to treat the present as the final shape of the real.

Art matters because it renders the relation between matter and form visible. The artist is neither a clerk who copies the world nor a sovereign who creates without constraint. Artistic work begins with material that resists. It also works with what Bloch calls what-may-become-possible. The artist brings out a form prepared within the material, though not yet clear or complete. Art is neither imitation nor arbitrary invention. It is a practice in which form answers a possibility that has not yet found a stable appearance.

Bloch writes that present existence is neither “slavishly depicted” nor “violated by imprinted form.” What is predisposed in matter, perhaps “not yet matured to full clarity,” is “artistically driven to completion” (Bloch 2019, 43). Form is not abolished. It loses the right to govern from outside. A good form does not silence material life. It gives provisional expression to something already pressing for expression within it. Art offers no final reconciliation of matter and form. It shows their difficult cooperation. The work remains a form, but it retains the resistance and unrealised reserve from which it emerged.

Bloch’s Avicenna remains useful because neither thinker survives the encounter intact. Avicenna resists Bloch. His philosophy remains ordered by necessity, causality, and the Necessary Existent. Bloch resists Avicenna. He asks what possibility means once it enters history and becomes tied to labour, institutions, and collective action. Their meeting is productive precisely because it does not end in agreement. Each thinker reveals the limit of the other.

Unfinished matter names the distance between them. Matter is neither a vacant surface awaiting form nor a substitute deity. It names what reality has not yet used up. Form remains necessary for thought, art, law, and common life. Its authority ends when it presents its own success as final. Bloch’s point is not that form should disappear. It is that no form has the right to declare the world complete.

در نقاشیِ «راهب کنارِ دریا(۱۸۰۸–۱۸۱۰)» اثرِ کاسپار داوید فریدریش، مردی کوچک بر نوارِ باریکی، در ساحل ایستاده است. پیکرش در برابرِ دریا چنان کوچک است که در نگاهِ نخست به لکه‌ای تیره می‌ماند. دریا از پیشِ روی او تا لبه‌ی آسمان کشیده شده است. آسمان نیز بر آب افتاده و رنگِ هر دو را به هم نزدیک کرده است. ساحل، باریک و بی‌پناه، میانِ خشکی و آب مانده است. پشتِ مرد، نشانی از خانه و شهر و راه دیده نمی‌شود. او با همه‌ی قامتِ کوچک خود، در آن پهنه باقی می‌ماند.

دریا خالی است. سطحِ آب تا ساحل کشیده شده و در دوردست با آسمان درآمیخته است. کشتی‌ای دیده نمی‌شود. پرنده‌ای بر بالای سرِ مرد پر نمی‌زند. موجی به سوی او نمی‌آید. جامه‌ی تیره‌اش بر تنش مانده و دست‌هایش کنارِ بدنش آرام گرفته‌اند. نگاه، بر پیکرِ او مکث می‌کند و از آن‌جا به آب می‌رود. سپس به آسمان برمی‌گردد. این حرکت بارها تکرار می‌شود و تابلو را در سکوتِ خود نگه می‌دارد.

مرد بر ساحل ایستاده و دریا از حضورِ او عبور می‌کند. آب شکلِ خود را حفظ کرده است. آسمان بر جای خود مانده است. ساحل نیز در میانِ آن دو، باریک و روشن، دیده می‌شود. پیکرِ کوچکِ مرد در این منظره چیزی را کامل نمی‌کند. حضورش، فاصله را مرئی می‌سازد. از آن لحظه، مرد به راهب تبدیل می‌شود. او کنارِ دریا ایستاده است و دریا، با سکوتِ وسیعِ خود، در برابرِ او ادامه دارد.

شاید تا این‌جا لحظه‌ای چنین پنداشته‌اید که کنارِ دریا ایستاده‌اید. این تصویر از قابِ نقاشی آغاز شده است. من کنارِ دریا نبودم. راهبی که برای شما معرفی کردم، بر دیوارِ خانه آویخته بود و دریا پشتِ شیشه‌ی قاب مانده بود. چراغِ کوچکِ اتاق بر سطحِ شیشه می‌افتاد و گوشه‌ای از آسمانِ تابلو را روشن می‌کرد. بیرونِ پنجره نیز پهنه‌ای خاکستری دیده می‌شد، ولی آن‌جا آب نبود. بام‌های آجری بود. خیابانی کم‌رفت‌وآمد بود. پنجره‌هایی بود که تا ساعت‌های دیر روشن می‌ماندند.

نگاره روبه‌روی میز آویخته بود. ساعت از نیمه‌شب گذشته بود و کتابی باز کنارِ چراغ مانده بود. شبِ تابستانیِ شمال تا ساعت‌های دیر در روشناییِ خاکستریِ خود ادامه داشت. بام‌ها، دیوارهای آجری و پنجره‌های روبه‌رو در آن نورِ بی‌رنگ دیده می‌شدند. اتوبوسی از خیابان گذشت و صدایش میانِ ساختمان‌ها پخش شد. صدا در کوچه پایین رفت و پس از مدتی از میان رفت. شهر در همان روشنی باقی ماند.

مدتی به نقاشی نگاه کردم. بعد چشمم به شیشه‌ی پنجره افتاد. در شیشه، چراغ و لبه‌ی میز دیده می‌شد. کتابِ باز، پرده و گلدانی که سایه‌اش بر دیوار افتاده بود نیز در بازتاب مانده بودند. کنارِ پرده، پیکری تیره ایستاده بود. شانه‌هایش در نورِ اتاق شکل می‌گرفتند و در شیشه امتداد می‌یافتند. نگاهم به تابلو برگشت. راهب همچنان بر ساحل ایستاده بود. دوباره به شیشه نگاه کردم. پیکرِ تیره کنارِ پرده مانده بود.

چراغِ چند پنجره‌ی روبه‌رو هنوز روشن بود. زنی از برابرِ یکی از آن‌ها گذشت. در پنجره‌ی دیگر، مردی پشتِ شیشه نشسته بود. نورِ زردِ اتاق بر صورتش افتاده بود و سرش کمی به سوی پایین خم شده بود. صدای خنده‌ایِ هم‌سایه‌گان را می‌شنیدم، شاید هم صدای بحث و دعوا. درِ ساختمان شماره ۲۰ بسته شد. آسانسور در یکی از بلوک‌ها بالا رفت و صدایش در دیوارها پخش شد. وقتی سر برگرداندم، پرده خالی بود. سایه‌ی گلدان بر دیوار مانده بود و خطِ باریکی از نور بر کفِ اتاق امتداد داشت.

خانه در سکوتِ کامل نبود. صدای یک نواخت یخچال از پشتِ درِ آشپزخانه اعصابم را به بازی می‌گرفت. لوله‌ای در دیوار گاه صدا می‌داد و دوباره خاموش می‌شد. کابلِ شارژر از لبه‌ی میز آویخته بود. تلفن رو به پایین کنارِ کتاب مانده بود. کلیدی بر سطحِ چوبیِ میز برق می‌زد. تکه‌ای نان روی بشقاب مانده بود و کاغذِ نازکش در کنارِ سینک افتاده بود. حوله‌ای نیمه‌خشک از دسته‌ی کابینت آویزان بود. اشیا در جای خود قرار داشتند و هر یک در روشناییِ کم‌رنگِ شب، شکلِ جداگانه‌ی خود را حفظ می‌کردند.

قفسه‌ی کتاب در راهرو قرار داشت. درِ بالکن چند قدم آن‌سوتر بود. راهرو باریک بود و نورِ اتاق تا نیمه‌ی آن می‌رسید. بخشِ دیگر در روشناییِ خاکستریِ شب قرار داشت. کتاب‌ها در طبقه‌ها کنارِ هم ایستاده بودند. بعضی جلدها صاف و تازه بودند. بعضی خمیده و فرسوده به نظر می‌رسیدند. چند کتاب اندکی از ردیف بیرون زده بودند، چنان‌که دستی آن‌ها را پس از جست‌وجویی کوتاه رها کرده باشد. پشتِ شیشه‌ی بالکن، نرده‌ی تیره دیده می‌شد و فراتر از آن، بام‌های دور در امتدادِ آسمان قرار داشتند.

روی طبقه‌ی پایین، یادداشت‌های روزانه‌ی کیرکه‌گارد بود. میانِ صفحه‌ها برگه‌ای تا خورده بود. در آن قطعه، چهره‌ی زنی در جنگل‌زار ظاهر می‌شد. چهره از میانِ شاخه‌ها می‌گذشت و کنارِ تنه‌های باریک دیده می‌شد. سپس در بخشِ دیگری از جنگل بازمی‌گشت. هر بار همان صورت در برابرِ نگاه قرار می‌گرفت و با بازگشتِ خود، فاصله‌ی تازه‌ای می‌ساخت. کتاب بسته بود، ولی حضورِ آن قطعه در راهرو مانده بود. در شیشه‌ی درِ بالکن نیز تیرگیِ باریکی میانِ نرده و بازتابِ اتاق دیده می‌شد.

کتابِ «جنگ و صلح» روی میز بود. با گشودنِ آن، اتاق به چشم‌اندازی از جنگ‌های تاریخی بدل شد. به میدان جنک. خانه‌ها و شهرها از صفحه محو می‌شدند و میدان‌ها جنگ هر دم وسعت پیدا می‌کرد. اسب‌ها سُم بر گل می‌کوبیدند. ارابه‌های زخمی‌ها از راه می‌رسیدند. مردانی با صورت‌های خاک‌آلود از کنارِ هم می‌گذشتند. پرچمی بر زمین افتاده بود و اسبی بی‌سوار در میانِ صداها می‌دوید. آندری بر خاک افتاده بود. هرچند گلوله‌ی توپ منفجر نشد ولی ضربه‌‌ای کاری بر او وارد کرد. جهان، دیگر معنای پیشینِ خود را نداشت. اسب‌ها از گل می‌گذشتند. فرمان‌ها از جایی دور می‌آمدند و در باد گم می‌شدند. کسی خم شد، چیزی گفت و رفت.

بالای سرش آسمان باز بود. خاکستری و سرد بود. رنگش همان رنگی بود که بر دریای نقاشی افتاده بود. آسمان، روشنیِ خود را بر گل، بر چرخ‌های ارابه و بر بدن‌های افتاده می‌ریخت. صدای فرمان‌ها در دوردست می‌آمد. رفت‌وآمدِ اسب‌ها از میانِ غبار می‌گذشت. دستی از لبه‌ی ارابه آویزان بود. سربازی خم شده بود و چیزی را از میانِ گل برمی‌داشت. نامی در میدان فریاد زده می‌شد و در میانِ رفت‌وآمدِ آدم‌ها گم می‌شد. جنگ از راهِ جزئیات خود دیده می‌شد. هر چیز، در میانِ آن صداها، جایِ کوچکی داشت و با همان جایِ کوچک، تصویری از ویرانی را کامل می‌کرد.

در صفحه‌های بعدی، راهی نمایان شد که مرا به روستاها می‌برد. بلوطی پیر کنارِ جاده ایستاده بود. تنه‌اش تیره و گره‌خورده بود. شاخه‌های خشکِ آن در هوای سرد امتداد داشتند. جاده در میانِ زمین‌های باز می‌گذشت و از کنارِ خانه‌هایی دور ادامه پیدا می‌کرد. فصل از راه رسید. برگ‌ها بر همان شاخه‌ها نشستند و سبزی از میانِ گره‌ها بالا رفت. راه در صفحه ادامه پیدا می‌کرد و مرا با خود می‌برد.

درخت بر کنارِ جاده مانده بود و جهان در پیرامونِ آن حرکت می‌کرد. خاک رنگ عوض می‌کرد. نور بر علف‌ها می‌نشست. پنجره‌های روستا در دوردست روشن می‌شدند. صدای ارابه‌ای از جاده می‌آمد و در پیچِ راه محو می‌شد. بلوط با تنه‌ی سنگینِ خود در همان‌جا ایستاده بود و فصل‌ها از شاخه‌هایش عبور می‌کردند. نگاه بر آن درخت می‌ماند و از آن‌جا به راه می‌رفت. راه به روستا می‌رسید و روستا در دلِ صفحه گشوده می‌شد.

بعد تالاری روشن پیدا شد. آینه‌ها نور را در خود نگه داشته بودند. پارچه‌ی لباس‌ها با حرکتِ آدم‌ها تغییر می‌کرد. دست‌هایی بر لبه‌ی صندلی‌ها آرام گرفته بود. ناتاشا وارد شد. موسیقی آغاز شد. جمعیت در جای خود ماند. دستی بالا رفت. شانه‌ای چرخید. پایی از جای خود جدا شد. حرکتِ نخست در تالار پخش شد و به حرکت‌های دیگر پیوست. چند نت در فضا ماندند و در چهره‌ها، در نگاه‌ها و در حالتِ ایستادنِ آدم‌ها امتداد یافتند.

رقص آرام‌آرام تمامِ تالار را گرفت. نور بر کفِ براقِ سالن افتاده بود و از زیرِ پاها بازمی‌گشت. موسیقی از میانِ آینه‌ها می‌گذشت. صورت‌ها در آن روشنی نزدیک می‌شدند و از هم فاصله می‌گرفتند. در گوشه‌ای، زنی دست‌کشِ خود را مرتب می‌کرد. مردی کنارِ دیوار ایستاده بود و به جمع نگاه می‌کرد. ناتاشا در میانِ حرکت‌ها پیش می‌رفت و تالار با او شکلِ دیگری پیدا می‌کرد. صفحه زیرِ نورِ چراغ مانده بود و اتاق، برای مدتی، بوی پارچه، موم و چوبِ کهنه می‌داد.

وقتی چشم از نقاشی برداشتم و حواسم را جمع کردم، در راهرو کسی حضور نداشت. قفسه‌ی کتاب ساکت و درِ بالکن بسته بود. نرده‌ی تیره در شیشه دیده می‌شد. بیرون، آسمان هنوز روشناییِ اندکِ خود را نگه داشته بود. در اتاق، صفحه‌ای ورق نمی‌خورد. کتاب جنگ و صلح، روی میز دیده نمی‌شد. صدایی از کنارِ پرده نمی‌آمد. با این حال، خانه از حضورِ شبحی پُر شده بود که در میانِ کتاب‌ها، نورِ اتاق و شیشه‌ی درِ بالکن حرکت می‌کرد.

تیرگی در شیشه جان گرفت و از میانِ بازتابِ اتاق، آهسته به سوی درِ بالکن خزید. کنار درِ بالکن ایستاد. نخست به بازتابِ خودم می‌ماند. سپس جامه‌ی تیره‌اش به جامه‌ی راهب دریا دگردیسی پیدا کرد. نورِ اتاق بر شانه‌هایش ماند و در شیشه پخش شد. چراغ‌های راه‌پله رنگ باختند. آسانسور از پایینِ ساختمان بالا آمد، پشتِ دیوارها گذشت و خاموش شد. خانه برای چند لحظه ساکت ماند. نرده‌ی بالکن در شیشه بازتاب یافت. زیرِ پای آن موجود شبح‌گون، خط ساحل، به صورت نوار باریکی از زمین پدیدار گشت.

روبه‌روی او، دریا تا دوردست کشیده می‌شد. روشناییِ خاکستریِ آسمان بر زمین سایه افگنده بود و بام‌های شهر را در خود فرو می‌برد. جاده‌ی روستا از میان صفحه می‌گذشت. تالارِ روشن در سکوتِ خود فرو می‌رفت. میدانِ جنگ در گل و غبار باقی ماند. پیکرِ تیره کوچک‌تر شد و در امتدادِ ساحل دور رفت. هنوز نمی‌دانم در آب غرق شد، در جنگ کشته شد، یا هرگز از قاب بیرون نیامده بود.

A sky breaks open above a city that has forgotten why it fears thunder. Invisible bodies cross the dark like dust in a sealed room. A fevered child turns in sleep. A lover reaches for a face already becoming an image. Far away, a ship moves through black water while the gods, serene and remote, take no part in the storm. Then Venus appears: a bright disturbance moving through grass, flesh, birds, and salt water. This is the world Henri Bergson finds in Lucretius: matter made vivid, frightening, and luminous through poetry.

In The Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of Lucretius, Bergson treats De Rerum Natura as a philosophical vision realised in verse. He is concerned with a poet able to think nature as transformation: bodies gather, endure briefly, dissolve, and enter new combinations. The argument supplies an order, yet the poem prevents that order from hardening into abstraction. It keeps matter in movement, exposed to contact, separation, pressure, and change. Bergson’s central insight is that Lucretius’ philosophy already possesses a poetic mode of apprehension.

The therapeutic purpose of the poem is central to Bergson’s account. Lucretius seeks to release the mind from superstition by showing that thunder, eclipse, illness, birth, and death belong to nature rather than divine intervention. Fear begins when phenomena are read as messages from invisible powers. Epicurean physics returns them to material causes: nothing comes from nothing; nothing disappears into nothing; events arise from prior conditions and pass into other forms. Nature remains dangerous, yet it no longer appears as a field of arbitrary commands. Bergson identifies this liberation from terror as the governing purpose of the poem (Bergson 1959, pp. 13–16).

The hymn to Venus gives this project its first visible form. Venus moves among fertile fields, spring winds, birds, animals, waters, and bodies drawn toward generation (De Rerum Natura I.1–43). Bergson reads the hymn within a poem that removes the gods from the government of the world. Venus therefore gathers the active appearances of nature into one image: growth, recurrence, warmth, desire, and the renewal of living forms. The opening establishes the sensuous character of Lucretian materialism. Matter has weight and motion, but it also has brightness, breath, colour, and seasonal force.

Bergson admires this union of order and animation while judging Lucretius’ particular scientific explanations more severely. The Roman poet could not provide an adequate account of light, sound, storms, or lightning, because his method lacked systematic observation and experiment. Bergson argues that Lucretius often moved too quickly from broad hypotheses to detailed explanations of particular phenomena (Bergson 1959, pp. 61–64). Yet this limitation leaves the larger philosophical achievement intact. Nature must be explained through processes internal to itself, rather than through supernatural interruption.

Bergson presents the dominant theme of the poem as a strict natural order: the same laws recur, causes yield determined effects, and the foedus naturae binds the universe permanently (Bergson 1959, p. 50). This is essential to Lucretius’ struggle against superstition. Yet the poem complicates the image of strict repetition. The clinamen introduces deviation into atomic motion. It does not abolish law, but it prevents law from becoming a picture of inert uniformity. Nature remains ordered while allowing encounter, collision, and the emergence of temporary forms.

The critique of religio develops this tension in human terms. In the episode of Iphigenia, fear turns violence into obedience. Ritual cruelty acquires authority when suffering is interpreted as divine necessity (De Rerum Natura I.80–101). Lucretius attacks a world-picture in which terror becomes useful to power. Bergson rightly links this intellectual liberation to the poem’s wider longing for peace. Yet Lucretius offers no vision of historical redemption. He removes sacred sanction from violence and leaves human beings responsible for the institutions, habits, and fears that they continue to produce.

“Then the vivid force of his mind prevailed,
and he advanced far beyond the flaming walls of the world,
travelling through the immeasurable whole in thought and spirit;
from there he returned victorious, telling us
what can come into being, what cannot,
and where the boundary of each power stands.”

— Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I.72–77,Trans. W.E. Leonard

This scene forms the intellectual summit of the opening movement. Epicurus crosses the limits of the visible world and returns with knowledge of limits. Bergson sees in this movement the freedom gained through natural explanation. Philosophy discovers what can happen, what cannot happen, and where the power of each thing ends. Storms, illness, and death remain real, but they lose their status as omens and punishments. The poem turns epistemic clarity into visionary travel. Its authority depends upon the fact that thought must cross an image before it can return as knowledge.

The comparison between poetry and honeyed medicine explains how Lucretius’ doctrine enters the reader’s mind. Difficult teaching must be offered in sweet verse, as bitter medicine is given to a child in a cup touched with honey (De Rerum Natura I.921–950). The image does not reduce poetry to ornament. Verse turns invisible process into sensory evidence. Water, honey, poppy seeds, stones, and corn ears allow the reader to imagine differences of density, speed, smoothness, and resistance within the mind’s material composition (Brown 1997, pp. 116–17).

The poem then carries this evidence beyond image into sound. Its hexameter does not simply accompany atomic motion; it enacts it. Alliteration, assonance, repetition, and metrical weight give philosophical exposition a bodily pressure. Swift rhythms suggest fluidity; slower and heavier sequences make viscosity or resistance audible. Lucretius asks the reader to hear matter before fully mastering its concept. Form is therefore part of the argument’s method, not a vessel added after thought has already been completed.

Book II gives this poetic materialism its clearest expression. Atoms fall, swerve, collide, and form temporary compounds. The clinamen allows motion to become encounter and combination (De Rerum Natura II.216–293). Bergson retains its Epicurean setting, where the problem concerns the formation of worlds and the possibility of freedom within material law. Its poetic consequence is striking. Form appears inside movement. Bodies emerge through contact, pressure, interruption, and attachment. Nature remains ordered, but its visible forms are provisional and exposed to dissolution.

The poem’s treatment of natural explanation is subtler than a simple opposition between ancient error and modern science suggests. In meteorological and physical speculation, Epicurean writers often proposed more than one natural possibility rather than claiming a final mechanism. The point was to establish that such events could arise without divine intervention. This method does not turn every hypothesis into truth, but it clarifies the philosophical task: superstition is weakened once the field of natural causality has been opened. Bergson’s criticism of Lucretian physics remains valid, while the anti-superstitious method becomes more precise.

Book III deepens the material vision through its account of mind. Lucretius argues that mind and soul are bodily because they suffer with the body, move the body, and respond to injury. Illness, ageing, terror, and intoxication reveal the vulnerability of consciousness. Thought is swift because its elements are minute, smooth, and mobile; water and honey become material analogies for differing atomic motions (De Rerum Natura III.161–207). The argument makes the mind continuous with nature while preserving its fragility.

Here Matter and Memory offers a limited supplementary perspective. Bergson’s later account of memory clarifies why mortality remains emotionally resistant to proof: consciousness is thick with attachment, expectation, relation, and unfinished form. Yet this vocabulary should not govern the reading. Lucretius does not offer a philosophy of duration or virtual memory. His question is harsher. What remains when the bodily composition that sustains the mind breaks apart? The poem answers with dissolution, while its images show the difficulty of that answer for the living.

Book IV turns this difficulty into a theory of images. Through simulacra, Lucretius explains vision, dreams, fantasy, and erotic fixation as the movement of subtle material films from bodies into perception (De Rerum Natura IV.26–109; 722–817). The theory has lost scientific authority, though its poetic insight endures. Human beings inhabit images that return, repeat, and shape desire. The lover becomes attached to an internal figure rather than to a changing person. Images become material forces in the life of the mind. This is one of the poem’s sharpest accounts of obsession.

Book V extends the material vision into history. The earth was not made for humanity, and civilisation emerges from need, danger, imitation, labour, and invention (De Rerum Natura V.195–234; 925–1457). Bergson admires the vividness of Lucretius’ account of humanity’s difficult beginnings, though he criticises the poet for failing to recognise an ethical superiority in human development (Bergson 1959, pp. 55–56). Lucretius offers no such guarantee. Tools, law, music, and shelter create capacities, but also luxury, rivalry, war, and fear. Civilisation remains a fragile arrangement of bodies, habits, needs, and collective inventions.

The plague at Athens concludes the poem with its harshest image. Bodies are abandoned, funeral rites fail, and civic bonds weaken under the pressure of contagion (De Rerum Natura VI.1138–1286). The plague tests the poem’s entire discipline of explanation. Catastrophe remains real and collective, but it cannot become divine vengeance or an alibi for sacrificial violence. Bergson’s account of poetic intelligence helps preserve the force of this ending without false consolation. The poem does not triumph over mortality. It makes mortality visible without allowing terror to govern its meaning.

Lucretius emerges as a poet of material order without reducing nature to inert mechanism, and of motion without providential promise. Bergson makes this vision legible, even where his own philosophy tends to soften its severity. In Lucretius, atoms collide, bodies perish, cities fall ill, and no voice descends from the storm to explain the damage. Verse makes this atomism audible: particles, void, collision, loss, and renewal enter language as rhythm, recurrence, and force. The poem does not discover meaning hidden in matter. It teaches the mind to face matter without terror in a world where forms remain temporary and no order is spared change. Stars exhaust their fuel, bodies perish, cities fracture, and Earth itself falls silent after the gods, where each power ends.

What happens when a work possesses a rigorous internal form, yet does not appear in the institutional form through which rigor is recognised? Walter Benjamin’s failed habilitation is not only an episode in the biography of a writer. It is a scene in which the authority of form becomes visible. It shows how institutions decide whether thought has arrived in a shape fit for judgment, certification, and academic existence.

In 1925 Benjamin submitted Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels to Frankfurt (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) as a habilitation thesis, the qualification required for independent university teaching. The thesis entered a procedure governed by disciplines, committees, professional authority, and authorised routes to certification. In his introduction to The Origin of German Tragic Drama, George Steiner writes that Franz Schultz considered the work “inappropriate to Germanistik,” directed it towards aesthetics or philosophy of art, and later advised Benjamin to withdraw rather than proceed towards public refusal (Steiner, “Introduction,” 11). The event was not merely an argument over baroque drama. It was a conflict over jurisdiction: who could read the work, under which criteria, and within which institutional language.

Benjamin’s thesis was not formless. Its “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” addresses truth, ideas, origin, baroque drama, sovereignty, melancholy, allegory, emblems, and ruin. Its visible object is the German Trauerspiel, or mourning play. Literary history, however, is only the surface of the work. Benjamin uses baroque drama to think historical truth, political authority, theological inheritance, and the presentation of philosophical ideas. The architecture of the book does not surround an argument from the outside. It belongs to the method through which the argument becomes possible.

Trauerspiel is not classical tragedy. Benjamin’s world is populated by princes, courtiers, martyrs, corpses, intrigues, emblems, and ruins. Sovereignty appears theatrical, unstable, and exposed to decay. Meaning does not move towards reconciliation. It survives as fragment, image, and residue. Benjamin writes that ideas such as “the baroque” “do not make the similar identical, but they effect a synthesis between extremes” (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 35). Origin is therefore not a pure point behind history. It appears in transformation, tension, and destruction.

The difficulty of the thesis lay in this unity of method and object. Literary history, theology, philosophy, philology, and aesthetics enter the work together. Its philosophical claims cannot be detached from its prose, and its reading of drama cannot be separated from its theory of knowledge. Several disciplines could read the manuscript, but none could easily claim it as its own. Benjamin’s failure did not arise from an absence of intellectual order. It arose at the point where an internal order met the divided procedures through which academic order recognises itself.

There is no formless access to reality. Even the critique of form must take a determinate form. Concepts, documents, archives, methods, measurements, narratives, and rules of inference make claims answerable to others. They allow evidence to be inspected, language to be contested, and experience to enter a public world rather than remain private intensity. A critical text must itself be organised, precise, and open to dispute. Form is not an obstacle between thought and reality. It is one condition under which reality becomes common.

The problem begins when this necessary condition becomes a social test of belonging. A method may be required because it renders claims inspectable. A citation may be required because it permits verification. A distinction may be required because it makes disagreement possible. These forms become formalism when they cease to serve public criticism and begin to certify institutional resemblance. Then a preferred accent, inherited vocabulary, familiar style, professional confidence, or authorised manner of distance becomes evidence of intellectual merit.

Academic formalism does not mean that institutions possess standards. It means that historically acquired standards present themselves as the natural form of reason. It appears when unfamiliar difficulty is dismissed as obscurity while familiar difficulty is praised as depth. It appears when a writer must reproduce an authorised idiom before a claim can count as knowledge. The decisive question is not whether form is present, but whether form serves criticism or merely confirms that the speaker resembles those already authorised to judge.

Pierre Bourdieu provides a language for this distinction. His work emerged from French academic and cultural fields, while Benjamin’s case belongs to Weimar Germany. The institutions are not identical. Their mechanisms nonetheless converge at a crucial point: historically inherited codes can appear as neutral criteria of judgment. In The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Bourdieu rejects both a purely internal reading of philosophy and a crude reduction of philosophical discourse to external interests. Form has an internal logic. That logic is also shaped by the field in which it acquires authority.

Bourdieu’s double refusal matters because form is neither socially innocent nor reducible to social origin. A work has a conceptual movement, a syntax, a rhetoric, and a relation between its parts. These are real. Yet they can carry historical investments whose conditions of production have become difficult to see. Philosophical language transforms social and political dispositions into a discourse that appears purified of its origins. The transformation produces philosophy. It also protects authority when form is treated as too refined for social explanation.

Benjamin’s work presents a different configuration. Its problem was not that it lacked method, but that its method did not align easily with the forms through which competence was institutionally displayed. The thesis demanded a reading able to move between baroque drama, theology, philosophy, literary history, and theory of knowledge without dividing them into separate professional compartments. It reached a university organised through precisely such divisions. Its internal rigor became difficult to recognise because it did not resemble the established idiom of academic rigor.

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus clarifies the force of this recognition. Habitus is “history turned into nature” (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 78). Historically produced dispositions become practical, durable, and self-evident. They orient judgment before rules are consciously invoked. A reader does not first calculate whether a mode of argument belongs to a familiar intellectual world. Familiarity often arrives as the immediate sense that a text is serious, clear, disciplined, or properly formed.

The academic subject stands at the centre of this process. Academics do not judge form from outside the institution. Their competence is acquired through dissertations, footnotes, seminars, committee reports, peer-reviewed articles, disciplinary distinctions, and habits of citation. Training teaches what seriousness sounds like. It establishes where claims begin and end, how evidence should be ordered, and how intellectual distance should be performed. Citation and method gradually appear less as conventions than as signs of competence. The academic often recognises as rigorous the speech that resembles the forms through which academic authority was acquired and rewarded.

The authority of form therefore works through ordinary acts. A proposal is sent to the wrong department. A committee lacks the competence to read an object that crosses disciplines. A reader treats unfamiliar citation as evidence of weak scholarship, while the dense allusion of a recognised tradition appears as learning. A method is judged insufficient because it does not follow a familiar sequence of problem, evidence, analysis, and conclusion. None of these acts requires deliberate hostility. Together, they turn institutional preference into a limit on what can appear as serious work.

Official language gives this process its public force. Bourdieu writes that its authority lies not in language alone but in “the group which authorizes it and invests it with authority.” Official language “sanctions and imposes what it states,” while “tacitly laying down the dividing line between the thinkable and the unthinkable” (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 21). A university does not need openly to prohibit ideas. It organises the genres, procedures, tones, and evidentiary forms through which ideas become intelligible. A claim that cannot enter through authorised forms may be heard as confession, polemic, impression, or disorder rather than knowledge.

Benjamin possessed considerable cultural capital. He commanded philosophical and literary languages, had access to learned traditions, and produced a work of extraordinary erudition. His failure becomes revealing precisely because it occurred so late, at the threshold of institutional certification. The more ordinary form of exclusion occurs earlier. It begins in unequal access to the languages, habits, genres, and practices through which work becomes recognisable before it is ever formally evaluated.

Bourdieu and Alain Darbel’s The Love of Art gives this problem an empirical dimension. Their study did not treat cultural reception as an abstract matter of taste. It drew on surveys of museum publics, interviews, and observational research. Its central question concerned the social distribution of the competence required to receive a work as meaningful. Reception depends on whether viewers or readers possess the codes a work requires. Where those codes are absent, difficulty may appear not as difficulty but as arbitrariness or meaninglessness (The Love of Art, 43).

Educational institutions deepen this inequality when they fail to provide “the instruments necessary for an adequate reception of the academic message” (The Love of Art, 70). The result is not simply unequal knowledge. It is unequal access to the very forms through which knowledge becomes visible. Cultural ease appears natural because the apprenticeship that produced it has become invisible. The person who has inherited the institution’s codes appears talented. The person who has not inherited them appears unprepared, unclear, or intellectually weak.

The relevance to academic form is direct. A thesis, article, or theoretical intervention never arrives as bare content. It appears through expectations concerning tone, citation, vocabulary, evidence, genre, and confidence. These expectations are sometimes indispensable. They can also become an unacknowledged second examination: not whether a claim is true, coherent, or contestable, but whether its author has already learned the manners through which the institution recognises itself. Standards shift from conditions of criticism to proofs of social belonging.

Benjamin’s later canonisation makes the problem more complex. It should not be narrated as delayed justice, as though the work waited in silence until posterity recognised an intrinsic greatness that had been visible all along. Bourdieu writes that a work becomes a “sacred and consecrated object” through an “immense enterprise of symbolic alchemy” involving authors, critics, publishers, interpreters, and other agents in the field (The Rules of Art, 170). Benjamin’s later importance required editors, translators, critics, teachers, presses, courses, and readers capable of building a second institutional life for the work.

Canonisation did not simply reverse Frankfurt’s failure. It created the conditions for another form of reading. Translation made Benjamin’s syntax portable. Commentary divided difficult arguments into teachable concepts. Courses transformed obscurity into curriculum. Citation turned singular passages into shared intellectual currency. As Bourdieu writes, “the discourse on the work is not a simple side-effect” but “a moment which is part of the production of the work, of its meaning and its value” (The Rules of Art, 170). The later field did not merely discover Benjamin. It produced Benjamin as a canonical object.

This second life demonstrates the historical mobility of rigor. What counts as a legitimate object, a plausible interpretation, an adequate method, or a properly formed argument is never determined outside institutions. New readers, new disciplines, translations, curricula, and interpretive communities alter the conditions under which a work can be recognised. The question is whether institutions keep their forms answerable to the public purposes they claim to serve, or whether those forms harden into signs through which authority recognises only its own reflection.

The deepest power of academic formalism does not appear only in a committee’s final decision. It appears earlier, before manuscripts are submitted. It appears when writers learn which sentence must be softened, which memory must become data, which anger must become a research question, and which experience must be translated into neutral vocabulary. Institutional form becomes most effective when it is no longer felt as pressure. It becomes the writer’s own sense of what counts as serious, credible, and publishable.

Form is not the enemy of thought. Thought becomes public only in determinate forms, and criticism itself must submit its claims to form, evidence, and dispute. The authority of form becomes formalism when standards necessary for public answerability are confused with inherited signs of institutional belonging. Benjamin’s habilitation reveals a lasting danger: institutions may mistake resemblance to their own historical idiom for rigor itself, and may hear as thought only what has already learned to resemble its judges.

INTRODUCTION

Sometimes history begins a man’s story exactly where his life has ended: with a body left for years upon the gallows; with a corpse drying in wind and sun; with a severed head no one can find; and with a mother who learns of her son’s death after everyone else. She does not cry out. She does not fall to the ground. She carries a grief so deep that those who witness it weep blood for her sorrow. The eleventh-century historian Bayhaqi writes:

‘Hasanak remained on the gallows for nearly seven years, until his feet were wholly worn away and dried, so that no trace of them remained. Then, by order, they took him down and buried him, though no one knew where his head was or where his body lay. Hasanak’s mother was a woman of great fortitude. I heard that they concealed the matter from her for two or three months; and when she heard of it, she did not lament… Rather, she wept in such pain that those present wept blood from the pain of her grief. Then she said: “What a great man he was, this son of mine: a king like Mahmud gave him this world, and a king like Mas‘ud gave him the next.” And she observed the mourning for her son most nobly.’

— Abu’l-Fazl Bayhaqi (ca 995–1077)

From this scene, seven paths begin to diverge. One leads toward the body and the gallows, toward the terrible moment when a human being and the instrument of his death begin to resemble one another. Another leads toward the mother, toward a grief that begins before news arrives, before language can name the loss. A third leads into the archive, where history preserves the name but loses the body, records the sentence but not the wound. A fourth enters language itself, where rope and wood merely carry out what words have already made possible. A fifth moves toward the half-light of myth, where the dead do not disappear but remain suspended between sky and earth. A sixth turns toward conscience, toward the demand made by a body without a grave. And the last descends into near-nothingness, where, after the body has vanished, a voice still returns.

Hasanak is therefore more than a historical figure. He is an ethical and political riddle: the riddle of a human being erased from the world, from memory, from narrative, and even from his own body. Was Bayhaqi the only narrator of his fate? Was there ever only one Hasanak? Or is Hasanak a name for the many Hasanaks of history: those left hanging in the darkness of memory, leaving behind only a name in a chronicle, a body severed from itself, and a dim, ghostly image in the minds of the living?

At first, we seem to be facing one man and one story: Hasanak the Vizier, denounced by conspirators, condemned through accusations of heresy, hanged by order of Sultan Mas‘ud of Ghazni, and preserved for us by Abu’l-Fazl Bayhaqi. Yet outside Bayhaqi’s account, Hasanak becomes the image of all those hanged in the confused darkness of history. He belongs to the past only because narration has made him possible: because a few surviving manuscripts have pulled him back from oblivion. The force of his image lies precisely in its uncertainty: in the wounds, scratches, and erasures that detach the body from any single fate, any single place, any single language. Perhaps Hasanak is an allegory for that death-stricken region of history which keeps returning, wearing different faces, speaking in different tongues, appearing in different centuries.

There are at least seven tellings of Hasanak. We do not know whether they speak of seven Hasanaks on seven gallows, or of one Hasanak with seven faces upon a single gallows. I recount them here without judgment; not to decide which one is truest, but to show that Hasanak, whether one man or many, has been executed again and again in our history. Perhaps yesterday. Perhaps now, as I rewrite his memory. Perhaps now, as you read these lines. Perhaps the many Hasanaks of history are still being executed in cities near and far, in places that, like Hasanak’s eroded body in its final years, can no longer be clearly seen. Hasanak comes from the past, yet the gallows on which he stands is never only past.

I.

Hasanak was left upon the gallows for nearly seven years. In this telling, the body does not simply hang from the instrument of death; it slowly becomes indistinguishable from it. His feet grew used to the wood, until the gallows became his dwelling and he took root in it. The boundary between man and apparatus began to fail. Hasanak became the gallows, and the gallows became Hasanak. When the order finally came to take him down, almost nothing remained that could still be called a body. Only an old garment twisted in the wind, like a banner once raised for conquest, now fallen across the faces of the conquerors themselves, blinding them to the world. They did not lower Hasanak so much as disturb the structure that had absorbed him. It was as though the gallows itself had to be torn out of the earth. No one knew where his head was, where his hands were, where his feet had gone. After seven years, he was no longer a body one could touch, nor a voice one could hear and answer. He had become a form of public matter: wood, rope, air, absence. A man whose death had not ended, an event transformed before everyone’s eyes into an enduring object.

II.

In another telling, the true measure of Hasanak’s death is not the gallows but the delay with which the news reaches his mother. Seven years passed over him as years pass over wood: upright, dry, endless. The sun beat down; wind and rain wore away his bones; long nights held the moon and stars above his body. Yet somewhere, before the news arrived, another form of time had already begun: the time of a mother who feels an absence before it is named. When they finally told her, she did not cry out. Perhaps sudden grief belongs only to those who have not already been living inside it. What remained was not triumph, not punishment, not even death, but the slow absence a mother had perhaps already learned to feel. Mourning does not always begin with the message. Sometimes it begins earlier, in the body, before language, when a mother senses that the world has made room for an unbearable emptiness. In this telling, Hasanak’s execution is measured not by the duration of punishment, but by the silence between death and knowledge.

III.

In the archive, Hasanak both exists and does not exist. The chronicle keeps his name, but not his body. It preserves the sentence, but not the wound. It tells us that he was hanged, but not how seven years passed through him. History records the event, yet the event remains opaque. Who took down what was left of him? Where was he buried? Where did his head go? The document answers and withholds at once. Its truth is not complete presence, but damaged survival. Hasanak becomes a blurred figure at the edge of historical knowledge: neither martyr nor criminal, neither fully visible nor entirely lost. The archive does not rescue him from disappearance; it gives form to the disappearance. It teaches us that historical memory is not the opposite of oblivion. Sometimes it is the shape oblivion takes when it is written down. The truth of Hasanak, then, may not lie in the record of his execution, but in the gaps the record cannot close.

IV.

In the fourth telling, Hasanak dies first in language. Before the rope closes upon the body, words have already prepared the place of death: fatwa, accusation, command, heresy, obedience. The gallows is not merely a wooden structure in a public square; it belongs to a language-game of sovereignty. Within that game, a body is not simply killed. It is named, classified, judged, and made available for killing. The rope is a sentence. The scaffold, a grammar. The verdict teaches the crowd how to see the man before them: not as Hasanak, but as the use to which the word ‘Hasanak’ has now been put. His meaning is no longer hidden somewhere behind the name; it is produced in its circulation — in the judge’s verdict, in the sultan’s order, in Bu Sahl Zawzani’s malice, in the people’s fear, in his mother’s silence and fortitude. To follow the rule is to know where to stand, when to bow, whom to accuse, when not to speak. Perhaps nothing was buried in the strict sense, because his death had not taken place only in the world; it had taken place in the grammar of the world. That is why he appears again whenever his name is spoken. To say ‘Hasanak’ is to enter a language in which a human being, erased from life, remains as a proposition no form of life has resolved.

V.

There is also a telling in which Hasanak no longer belongs to the square, the court, or the chronicle. He belongs to the half-light where history becomes dream. Seven years on the gallows no longer appear as duration, but as suspension itself: between being and non-being, memory and oblivion, history and myth. Hasanak is no longer a concrete man. He is a specter wandering through the corridors of narration, one of those figures who leave history without leaving it behind. His feet are gone, his body cannot be gathered, his grave cannot be found; yet he continues. Perhaps the closest truth is that Hasanak was never taken down at all. Somewhere among the ruins and capitals where old commands still echo, the wind may still be striking his body. Perhaps someone opens a forgotten book and sees him there, neither alive nor dead, suspended between sky and earth. Sometimes death does not finish a human being. It transforms him into a form of waiting.

VI.

Another telling begins from the body without a grave. Hasanak, no longer living and no longer quite a corpse, becomes a demand addressed to the living. Time wears away his lips; the wind passes through his empty teeth; the body disintegrates in public air. But disappearance does not absolve anyone. It imposes a harder question. What do the living owe to a body that cannot be restored, a body no one can properly bury, a body that has been made both visible and unfindable? He was buried not as an unclaimed dead man, but as a nameless truth — and for that very reason, as a truth that obliges. What remains is not a monument to mourning, but a wound in history: the burden of conscience before a human being who can no longer speak and yet is still heard. A body that disintegrates in the air violates the ordinary law of the dead. It refuses the grave. It becomes a question the living are no longer free not to hear.

VII.

In the final telling, Hasanak disappears almost completely. Once, men had known what to call his body. Then even naming failed. His feet dried and were worn away, until nothing remained but absence. Wind passed through his bones. The sun shone upon what was no longer quite a body, only a fading memory in the minds of passersby. A woman passed and shook her head. A child ran, small feet upon the dust that had once been part of him. On the day Hasanak had vanished completely, the order came: Take him down. The rope had rotted. The knot had come undone. Hasanak had become nothing. He had no weight. The earth was empty, the air was empty, the soil, soil, soil. No head. No body. And then, precisely from this nothing, a voice returns. Perhaps even now, in the dark alleys of old and wounded cities, a corpse that is no longer a corpse whispers into the ears of the living: Where did I go?

AFTERWORD

These seven tellings appear in historical works, but they have not remained confined to books. They have passed from mouth to mouth, traveled from city to city, and moved from one age into another. We know that when Hasanak was taken down from the gallows, he no longer belonged to the earth or the wind, neither to ground nor sky. He was suspended between history and legend, memory and forgetting.

And still we do not know which telling is truer. We do not even know whether they speak of one Hasanak or seven; of seven Hasanaks in one age, or of Hasanaks who, in different centuries, became victims of their own time. Perhaps, in this sense, Hasanak never existed at all. Perhaps he was only a name that slipped from a historian’s ink onto paper and from there entered language.

Perhaps every age executes its own Hasanak. Perhaps we ourselves are Hasanak, in another time, another language, another place. If, at midnight, in a dark passageway, a voice rises and asks, ‘Where have I gone?’, how can we know that Hasanak’s body is not still hanging somewhere in the long geography of our history, still being worn away by wind and rain? How can we know that the voice comes from outside us, and not from within? Perhaps we are Hasanak himself, hearing our own voice from the gallows

ABOUT HASANAK

Hasanak, known as Hasanak the Vizier, was a prominent official at the Ghaznavid court in the eleventh century. He served as vizier under Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni from 1024 to 1030 and was executed in 1032 under Mahmud’s son, Sultan Mas‘ud. His fate is known above all through the Persian historian Abu’l-Fazl Bayhaqi (c. 995–1077), whose chronicle is among the most important works of classical Persian prose. Hasanak was drawn into the power struggles of the court and accused of religious and political disloyalty. According to Bayhaqi’s account, his body was left on the gallows for nearly seven years.

But Hasanak does not belong only to the past. His figure has survived because it contains something that continually returns in history: the way power first names a human being, then judges him, erases his body, and tries to determine how he will be remembered. In this sense, Hasanak is not merely a figure from Persian history, but the image of a recurring political experience.

His relevance today does not lie in any outward resemblance between his time and ours, but in the fact that the questions surrounding him are still our own: What happens to a body that power turns into an example? What does the archive preserve, and what does it lose? Who bears responsibility for the dead who have no grave, no voice, and no place? Hasanak therefore remains suspended, not only in Bayhaqi’s chronicle, but in every age in which a human being is turned into a warning, a sign, a silence, or an absence. A body erased by power does not disappear; it becomes the question history cannot bury.

بدن، حامل روایت است. «سی و پنج سال از عمر لبانش می‌گذرد»؛ یعنی لب‌ها فقط جای بوسه نیست، که محل رسوب زمان‌اند. «چین‌های نازکی بر پیشانی» و «رد پاهایش / در مرزهای زیادی جا مانده است» بدن را به حافظه‌ای مجسم تبدیل می‌کنند. هویت زن از راه همین نشانه‌ها فهمیده می‌شود: سن، سفر، عبور از مرزها، و تجربه‌هایی که دیگر فقط در ذهن نیستند، بلکه در بدن نوشته شده‌اند. بوسه با چشمان باز، یعنی خواندن این نشانه‌ها و پذیرفتن دیگری در تمامیت روایی‌اش.

از این‌جا معنای «دل‌واپسی» روشن‌تر می‌شود. شاعر، می‌گوید «دلواپس هیچ چیز نیست / غیر از آغوش باز تو». دل‌واپسی او ترس از گذشته نیست. نگرانی از امکانِ آینده است. آغوش، اگر بسته بماند، روایت زن را در گذشته محبوس می‌کند. اگر باز باشد، به «پنجره‌ی کوچک دیگری» بدل می‌شود «به سمت سرزمین‌های ناشناخته‌ی پیش رو». بوسه در این معنا پایان سفر نیست. لحظه‌ای است که گذشته بازخوانی، اکنون تجربه و آینده قابل پیش‌بینی و دیدپذیر می‌‌شود.

Introduction: Karbala and Sacred Memory

Muharram rituals are often understood as practices of liberation. They preserve the memory of one who was destroyed by power, deny that military victory establishes moral legitimacy, and return the victor to the judgement of the dead. Karbala interrupts the serenity of domination because it refuses the victor’s claim to possess history merely by surviving it. It makes the defeated morally present and gives the victim a voice that outlives the battlefield. This force is real, and any serious reading of Muharram must begin by recognising it. Yet the ethical dignity of mourning does not settle its consequences. A wound can expose domination, but it can also become the ground of identity. Defeat can awaken judgement, but it can also teach a community to remain faithful to defeat itself.

Karbala was not born as a timeless allegory of oppression. It emerged within a political world shaped by succession, kinship, tribal rivalry, oath, military power, patronage, and contested legitimacy. Its later theological, literary, and ritual meanings were not fully present on the battlefield. They developed through penitence, vengeance, pilgrimage, narration, lamentation, performance, state patronage, and the gradual transformation of political catastrophe into sacred drama. The event became larger than its immediate history because later communities returned to it not merely to understand what had happened, but to discover within it an image of themselves.

This article calls one historically sedimented moral formation Mawalian morality. The term does not describe all mawālī, all Shi‘i communities, or all mourners. Nor does it claim a direct and uninterrupted line from early non-Arab clients to every later Shi‘i ritual. It names an ideal type: a reactive moral formation in which socially mediated dependence is transfigured into sacred obligation, and sacred loss becomes a durable source of value, loyalty, and political discipline. In this formation, mediated recognition becomes inward dependence; dependence becomes sacred debt; sacred debt becomes bad conscience; and bad conscience converts suffering into moral capital.

The decisive figure in this formation is the mawlā. In early Islamicate usage, mawlā had a wide semantic range: patron, client, protector, freed person, ally, tribal affiliate, or dependent. This article does not reduce these meanings to a single legal relation. It isolates a moral topology. The mawlā occupies the structural position of the superior figure through whom recognition, affiliation, and security are mediated. The mawālī occupy the position of those whose social standing can be received through attachment rather than secured independently. The question is not whether every historical mawlā possessed identical legal powers or whether every relation of walāʾ produced the same kind of dependence. It is what form of selfhood may emerge when social standing, protection, and recognition are experienced as mediated by a superior will.

A terminological distinction is necessary. Walāʾ refers here to social and legal relations of clientage, protection, affiliation, and mediated belonging. Wilāya, by contrast, denotes sacred authority, guardianship, proximity, and loyalty in later Shi‘i thought. The argument does not claim that walāʾ simply became wilāya. It traces a more difficult genealogy: how forms of social dependence may be transfigured into sacred attachment, and how the moral grammar of dependence may survive when its object becomes holy.

The article develops this genealogy through Nietzsche’s analyses of ressentiment, debt, bad conscience, active forgetfulness, and the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche is not introduced as an external authority imposed upon Shi‘i history. His concepts are used as diagnostic instruments for asking how dependence becomes inward obligation, how suffering becomes moral value, and how memory may become hostile to life. The argument proceeds in three movements. The first examines the social grammar of walāʾ and the moral formation of dependent life. The second turns to Kufa, the Tawwābūn, al-Mukhtār, and Muharram in order to trace the conversion of political failure into penitential loyalty. The third follows this formation into Persianate literature, Safavid institutions, and the religious necropolitics of the Islamic Republic.

1. The Mawlā, the Mawālī, and Dependence

1.1 Nietzsche and Reactive Morality

Genealogy does not search for innocence at the beginning of a tradition. It does not ask only who first narrated Karbala, where the earliest mourning assembly took place, or which ritual form is oldest. Such questions remain indispensable to historical scholarship. Genealogy asks something more difficult: what kind of life does a value produce? Nietzsche’s concern is not simply the origin of moral values, but their value: the forms of existence they cultivate, reward, and make imaginable (Nietzsche 2006, Preface §6).

Nietzsche’s first essay identifies a moral transformation in which injury becomes value. Ressentiment is not ordinary anger. Anger may move, judge, strike, and pass. Ressentiment cannot discharge itself. It preserves injury because injury has become the subject’s principal source of moral leverage. The subject who cannot affirm the self directly reverses the values of the world that excludes it. Strength becomes evil; weakness becomes goodness; submission becomes virtue; endurance becomes proof of superiority (Nietzsche 2006, I.10).

The point is not that all oppressed people are reactive or that every memory of injustice produces ressentiment. Nietzsche’s target is more specific. A reactive morality emerges when the subject cannot act affirmatively and instead derives moral distinction from negating what it cannot become. The enemy becomes indispensable because the enemy supplies the contrast through which the subject knows itself as good. Injury is retained because it has become the condition of moral authority.

Nietzsche’s second essay explains how obligation becomes inward punishment. He traces guilt, Schuld, to debt, Schulden. The debtor does not merely owe something; the debtor becomes marked by owing. An external obligation becomes an inner accusation. Bad conscience emerges when aggression can no longer find an outward object and turns against the self. The self becomes divided: debtor and judge, accused and self-punisher. Domination no longer requires a visible master because it has acquired an inner voice.

The idea of active forgetfulness provides the necessary counterpoint. Forgetfulness is not historical amnesia. It is the capacity to prevent consciousness from becoming a warehouse of injuries, commands, debts, and unfinished accounts. Memory is necessary for promise, responsibility, and accountability; yet memory becomes pathological when it makes the past sovereign over the present. A community may remember deeply and still create. It becomes reactive when it can only repeat, accuse, and inherit.

Nietzsche’s third essay clarifies the role of the ascetic ideal. The ascetic ideal does not abolish suffering; it gives suffering a meaning that makes endurance appear morally necessary. Pain becomes vocation, humiliation becomes purity, and self-denial becomes spiritual height. The point is not that all religious mourning is ascetic in Nietzsche’s sense. The question is narrower: under what conditions can suffering acquire such moral authority that the conditions producing suffering become harder to challenge?

These concepts establish the theoretical horizon of the article. They do not explain Shi‘i mourning in advance, nor do they reduce religious life to a Nietzschean schema. They permit a diagnostic question: how can injury become moral value, obligation become inward discipline, and memory become hostile to life? Mawalian morality names one possible configuration of these conditions. The following sections move from this conceptual vocabulary to the historical grammar of walāʾ.

1.2 Walāʾ and Dependent Life

The vocabulary of mawlā and mawālī belongs to a complex legal and social field. It cannot be reduced to one relation or one stable social group. Depending on context, mawlā could refer to a freed person, patron, client, tribal affiliate, ally, dependent, or protector. The plural mawālī therefore did not identify a homogeneous class. It named a range of persons and relations located within the broad field of walāʾ. Any account that treats all mawālī as identical risks replacing historical complexity with a simplified moral pattern.

Yet semantic diversity did not eliminate hierarchy. In Iraq and Khurasan, particularly under the Umayyads, the term often referred to non-Arab Muslims—freed persons, converts, tribal clients, and others incorporated into Arab social networks—whose legal standing, fiscal treatment, military position, and social prestige could remain lower than those of many Arab conquerors. They were neither uniformly poor nor uniformly excluded. In Kufa, for example, mawālī could include non-Arab Muslim soldiers, rural migrants and landholders, artisans and merchants, war captives who had been freed, and Iranian nobles who had entered Islam. The category covered different economic levels and different forms of social attachment. Yet its diversity existed within a wider hierarchy in which Arab tribal status continued to carry privileged weight.

The social problem was therefore not exclusion in a simple sense. It was incorporation without equality. To become Muslim did not necessarily mean to enter the Muslim polity as an equal. Conversion could grant access to religious community while leaving intact unequal relations of patronage, taxation, military participation, and tribal prestige. A convert might be included in the community of believers but still require attachment to an Arab tribe in order to obtain social legibility. The structure of walāʾ could provide protection and access, but it could also make belonging conditional upon another (Hylén 2025, 175–76).

This tension is visible in the moral education of dependence. Protection requires gratitude. Gratitude becomes obligation. Obligation becomes loyalty. Loyalty becomes an inward need. The dependent subject learns that visibility depends upon attachment and that unprotected independence is dangerous. The person does not merely possess a patron; the person begins to understand the self through the patron. Public identity is received before it is created. Under particular conditions, the mawālī could stand before the mawlā not merely as clients before a benefactor, but as dependent lives whose security, recognition, and social viability were mediated by another power.

This is the Nietzschean force of the relation, though the article does not claim an identity between historical categories and Nietzsche’s moral types. The mawlā occupies the structural position of the master because value, protection, and the right to appear descend from the mawlā. The mawālī are not necessarily slaves in every juridical sense; yet they can inhabit the moral position of those whose social existence is mediated by another will. Dependence becomes not simply an external condition but a form through which social viability is imagined and experienced.

The Umayyad order sharpened this tension. Conversion did not automatically dissolve the distinction between conqueror and provincial subject. Military privilege, access to stipends, fiscal differentiation, political influence, and aristocratic prestige preserved Arab-centred forms of dominance. The degree and form of discrimination differed by region and period, and later Abbasid narratives often sharpened the contrast between Umayyad Arabism and Abbasid universalism. Nevertheless, the basic contradiction remained. Many mawālī entered the Muslim community as unequal Muslims: inside the empire, yet not fully within its ruling order.

The social tensions surrounding al-Mukhtār’s movement illustrate this condition. Arab notables complained that mawālī were being allowed to ride horses, receive stipends, and share in the fayʾ. These complaints were not trivial details. They concerned the signs of political membership: who could bear arms, receive a share of revenue, move as a mounted combatant, and appear as a participant in the political order rather than as a dependent attached to it. The intensity of the complaint reveals that equality was not only a juridical question. It was embodied in movement, military status, payment, and public honour.

This tension helps explain the appeal of the Prophet’s family. Early Alid currents could offer a language of belonging less dependent on Arab pedigree. The ahl al-bayt stood above ordinary distinctions of Arab and non-Arab descent. Sacred lineage could weaken the prestige of inherited tribal superiority. The Prophet’s family became an alternative source of dignity for subjects whose place within the Umayyad order remained precarious. Attachment to the household could therefore function as a critique of Arab chauvinism and as a means through which excluded subjects found a more dignified relation to political and religious authority (Crone 2005).

Yet this alternative remained ambiguous. It could weaken one hierarchy while preserving another. The dependent subject could reject ordinary Arab patronage by entering the moral orbit of sacred authority. The relation of dependence was not necessarily abolished; it was transfigured. Protection became grace. Obligation became love. Attachment became devotion. The worldly mawlā was displaced by the sacred mawlā. The subject escaped one structure of subordination only by entering a more exalted and enduring form of dependence.

1.3 Debt and Bad Conscience

Mawalian morality begins when the external relation of walāʾ is internalised. The dependent subject no longer experiences dependence merely as a social fact. Dependence is carried into conscience. The subject learns to judge the self through the gaze of the superior figure. The central question is no longer whether the self has acted freely, creatively, or justly. It becomes whether the self has been loyal enough. Moral worth is measured by the intensity of attachment. The relation of protection becomes a relation of self-surveillance.

The moral economy of debt is central to this transformation. The dependent subject receives affiliation, dignity, and visibility through attachment. That attachment can gradually be remembered not as a contingent historical arrangement but as a moral obligation. The subject becomes indebted to the source of recognition. Repayment occurs through service, humility, emotional fidelity, sacrifice, and continual demonstrations of loyalty. The debt cannot be settled because the superior authority is sacred. The more sacred the authority becomes, the more permanent the subject’s indebtedness becomes.

The Prophet’s family could become the supreme object of this debt. Their suffering gave the dependent subject an image through which social diminishment became morally intelligible. Their defeat became not merely a political event but a claim upon the survivor. The subject did not simply prefer Husayn’s cause or admire his courage. The self could experience its own existence as answerable to a sacred loss whose demands exceeded ordinary reciprocity. The relation to the dead therefore became more than historical remembrance. It became an obligation to prove fidelity.

Bad conscience appears when failure is turned inward. Insufficient loyalty becomes guilt; guilt calls for self-discipline, abasement, or renewed demonstrations of fidelity. The subject becomes both servant and judge, subordinate to sacred authority while policing the self in its name. The hierarchy no longer requires constant external enforcement because it survives as an inward moral demand. This movement should be distinguished from the theological doctrine of wilāya. The argument is not that walāʾ mechanically became wilāya. It is that a moral grammar of mediated belonging could be transfigured into sacred attachment, so that dependence acquired spiritual depth and emotional permanence.

1.4 Sacred Mastery and Vicarious Rage

The internalisation of debt does not produce quiet obedience alone. It can also produce moralised hostility. The subject who cannot affirm the self directly may turn an injured will outward through hatred of the enemy. The enemy gathers into one figure the powers that excluded the subject: privilege, contempt, violence, and mastery. This anger can be historically justified. It becomes reactive when it cannot produce an independent position and instead requires the enemy’s continuing evil to sustain the subject’s moral identity.

Mawalian morality repeats this structure in a sacred register. The dependent subject identifies with the suffering of the Prophet’s family. Their defeat gives a higher image to the subject’s own humiliation. Their enemies become the visible form of everything that denied recognition. The subject does not overcome the world that wounded the self. The subject remains tied to it through the enemy whose evil gives sacred suffering its value.

The result is a divided moral posture. Before the sacred mawlā, the subject speaks the language of abasement, debt, service, and love. Before the enemy of the mawlā, the subject speaks the language of vengeance, purity, and punishment. The sacred authority cannot easily be criticised because it is the source of the subject’s value. Aggression must therefore be displaced. The enemy becomes the vessel into which fear, humiliation, weakness, and the desire to command are poured.

This is vicarious rage. The subject cannot fully act in the self’s own name, but can act in the name of the sacred wound. The subject cannot establish equality for the self, but can demand vengeance for the sacred victim. The subject cannot create a future independent of inherited authority, but can preserve a past that authorises anger. This rage is intense because it is not merely political; it defends the source of moral existence.

The preacher, reciter, or guardian of sacred memory is not identical with Nietzsche’s ascetic priest. The comparison is functional, not literal. The issue is whether ritual interpretation directs grief toward political judgement or gives grief a moral permanence that makes release appear disloyal. When suffering becomes proof of purity and the enemy becomes necessary for collective coherence, mourning can preserve the very structure of dependence that it condemns. Mawalian morality becomes anti-emancipatory when it does not merely remember injustice but requires injustice as the condition of moral distinction.

2. Kufa, Karbala, and Defeat

2.1 Kufa and the Failure of Allegiance

Kufa was a social laboratory in which the moral possibilities of Mawalian loyalty became visible. It was a garrison city, a market, a military settlement, and a field of continual political conflict. Arab tribal formations, non-Arab clients, freed persons, converts, merchants, administrators, soldiers, and migrants shared an unstable urban world. The city was not a simple opposition between Arabs and mawālī. Its divisions were numerous, and local alliances could cut across ethnic or genealogical lines. Yet Kufa made visible the contradiction at the heart of the early empire: religious belonging existed beside unequal prestige, while political allegiance existed beside coercion, fear, bribery, and fragile patronage.

Husayn’s relation to Kufa was structured by the collapse of allegiance. The city invited him through letters and pledges. It promised support against Umayyad authority. Yet the promise dissolved under pressure. Muslim b. Aqil was isolated, supporters withdrew, and the governor’s administration used intimidation, surveillance, and tribal manipulation to destroy the political basis of Husayn’s movement. Karbala was therefore not merely a military defeat. It was a catastrophe of bayʿa, trust, and public obligation.

In the early Islamic period, bayʿa was not simply a declaration of submission. It was a pledge that could express accession, recognition, military support, and political allegiance; its contractual form also implied reciprocal obligation. In Umayyad political practice, however, it increasingly became an instrument for binding subjects to dynastic rule. The same grammar could be used by those who challenged the ruling order: refusal of allegiance, or the pledge of followers to an alternative leader, could communicate dissent and establish a rival claim to authority. This broader political meaning of bayʿa clarifies why the breakdown of Kufan pledges mattered so deeply, even though the specific history of Husayn’s invitation and abandonment requires its own sources (Kontny-Wendt 2025).

This does not make Kufa innocent. It makes the failure intelligible. Tribal interests, social hierarchy, fear of punishment, economic dependency, and political fragmentation made public loyalty unstable. The people who sent invitations could become the people who remained silent. The city’s betrayal was not a simple moral defect in a unified population. It was the outcome of a fractured social field. The failure of allegiance emerged from a world in which dependence and unequal power made loyalty difficult to sustain.

Later mourning transforms this failure into another kind of relation. The broken oath no longer remains solely a political event with social causes. The question shifts from why the pledge failed to what the survivors owe the betrayed figure. Karbala thus becomes a point at which political catastrophe begins to acquire moral authority over those who survive it. A political failure can be remembered in order to change the structures that produced it. But it can also become the basis of an enduring obligation, in which the future is measured less by transformation than by fidelity to the dead. The Tawwābūn make this second possibility visible.

2.2 The Tawwābūn and Debt to the Dead

The Tawwābūn uprising, a Shi‘i penitential movement that took military form in Rabīʿ II 65 AH / November 684 CE, reveals the passage from political betrayal to moral indebtedness. Its members understood their failure to support Husayn not merely as an error of political judgement but as guilt. Their failure became a debt to the dead. They sought purification through vengeance and self-exposure to death.

The movement is central not because it proves that later Muharram existed in complete form, but because it reveals a moral structure from which later mourning could grow: betrayal becomes guilt; guilt becomes debt; debt becomes sacrifice. The Tawwābūn were aware that their campaign might lead to their deaths, but they regarded their action as martyrdom in the cause of loyalty to the Prophet and his family, hoping that it would cleanse them of guilt. In Rabīʿ II 65 AH / November 684 CE, they gathered at al-Nukhayla outside Kufa. Their numbers were lower than expected, and promised contingents from Basra and al-Madāʾin did not arrive. Nevertheless, they proceeded.

On their way to battle, the Tawwābūn stopped at Husayn’s tomb. There, prayer for Husayn, weeping over their own failure, and remorse for their betrayal were joined to the military undertaking. The grave was not merely a place of memory. It became the point at which a political campaign acquired a penitential form. The mourners approached the battlefield through a ritual relation to the dead. Their visit to the tomb connected grief, confession, loyalty, and war before the uprising moved toward its military defeat at ʿAyn al-Warda (Hylén 2025, 119–20).

The Tawwābūn did not merely remember Husayn. They became answerable to him. The dead ceased to be merely remembered and acquired a claim upon the living. The survivor’s task was no longer only to understand the failure, repair political institutions, or resist Umayyad power. It was to repay a debt that could not be settled through ordinary political action. Their relation to Karbala became penitential. The catastrophe demanded not explanation alone but expiation.

The movement makes visible the conversion of political defeat into collective bad conscience. Unable to repair the betrayal, the community turns punishment against itself and calls sacrifice redemption. The aggression that might have become institutional critique is directed inward. The subject becomes both accused and executioner. The movement seeks purification, but its grammar is not emancipation. It is debt, guilt, self-punishment, and the hope that death may cancel an obligation to the dead.

This reading should not erase the concrete political conditions of the uprising. The Tawwābūn fought an Umayyad force; they were not simply engaged in private penitence. Their campaign was military, and their language of guilt existed beside commitments to vengeance, leadership, and collective action. Yet the moral form of their action matters. The military campaign was framed as a response to an unredeemed failure, and the hope of death was inseparable from the hope of purification.

The Tawwābūn therefore mark an early transformation of defeat into moral obligation. Husayn’s death becomes more than evidence of Umayyad violence: it becomes the measure by which survivors judge their own worth. The dead acquire a claim upon the living, and sacrifice appears as a possible language of repayment. The past no longer lies behind the community as an event to be judged. It stands before the community as an unfinished demand. The future begins to appear not as a space of independent creation, but as a field in which inherited failure must be answered.

2.3 Al-Mukhtār and the Alid Alternative

Al-Mukhtār’s movement introduces another dimension of the genealogy. It emerged in a period in which the political order itself was divided. For roughly a decade, from 64–73 AH / 683–692 CE, two competing caliphal claims confronted one another: the Umayyads in Damascus and Ibn al-Zubayr in Mecca. Al-Mukhtār rose in Kufa against the governor of Ibn al-Zubayr and claimed to act on behalf of Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya, a son of ʿAlī. The revolt was therefore not simply directed against one ruler. It intervened in a fractured political field in which sovereignty itself was contested.

The coalition was mixed and should not be reduced to a simple class revolt, ethnic rebellion, or completed Shi‘i movement. Its political aims were complex, and its relation to messianism, vengeance, and later Imami thought remained unstable. Yet its social composition matters because it reveals how loyalty to the Prophet’s family could become a political language for subjects whose status within the Umayyad order was constrained by unequal incorporation.

The mawālī were particularly important to the movement because al-Mukhtār’s coalition disrupted established hierarchies of Arab prestige. Reports surrounding the uprising emphasise the military and social participation of mawālī, including their access to horses, stipends, and shares in the fayʾ. Such participation provoked resentment among certain Arab notables, for whom equality within the military and political order threatened an established social distinction. The dispute was not merely symbolic. It concerned who could ride, fight, receive payment, and be recognised as a participant in the political community rather than as a dependent attached to it.

The movement gave concrete form to an Alid alternative. The ahl al-bayt offered a sacred lineage whose prestige could counter the ideology of Arab birth. Vengeance for Husayn became a refusal of Umayyad hierarchy. Mawālī could appear not as marginal clients seeking admission, but as participants in a morally superior cause. Sacred lineage could weaken the prestige of ordinary genealogy. The moral priority of the Prophet’s family could drain Arab/non-Arab distinctions of part of their force. It could allow subjects denied recognition within the dominant order to find dignity elsewhere.

This was a genuine historical opening. Al-Mukhtār’s movement was not simply an emotional compensation for social humiliation. It mobilised people whom the conquest aristocracy had not fully integrated. It made claims about status, loyalty, leadership, and justice. It offered a political language through which socially inferior groups could become agents rather than passive recipients of inclusion. The revolt’s military and financial disputes show that the issue was not only symbolic recognition. It concerned access to the resources and visible signs of membership in the political order.

Yet the alternative remained ambiguous. It challenged one vertical hierarchy while preserving the need for a higher source of authority. The political question did not become whether subjects might stand as equals; it became which lineage should command loyalty. The mawālī could reject Arab aristocracy by entering a deeper relation of devotion to the sacred household. Their demand for dignity became inseparable from sacred attachment. The Alid alternative did not necessarily abolish the master-form; it displaced it. The worldly master is replaced by a sacred master, and social dependence is transfigured into a relation of devotion whose authority becomes more difficult to question precisely because it is sacred.

This does not make the movement politically empty or morally passive. It could mobilise rebellion, courage, and demands for recognition from groups treated as socially inferior. But its emancipatory horizon remained limited when dignity was secured principally through attachment to sacred authority rather than through the creation of more equal relations among the living. A struggle against domination can simultaneously preserve the moral conditions of domination. The dependent subject can refuse one master while remaining unable to imagine a life without mastery.

2.4 Muharram and Ritual Defeat

Muharram rituals do not merely preserve information about Karbala. They produce a relation to Karbala. They organise bodies, voices, gestures, tears, pauses, images, and collective responses into a moral discipline. The mourner walks, beats the chest, chants, listens, weeps, offers water, carries a standard, or enters a procession. None of these acts is merely private. Each occurs within a rhythm that preceded the participant and will remain after the participant. Feeling becomes public because the body is trained to perform feeling in recognisable forms.

This ritual power can create solidarity, care, and social recognition. It can make private suffering speakable. It can give language to those who experience poverty, bereavement, humiliation, abandonment, or fear. Yet ritual does not merely permit emotion to emerge. It shapes emotion. It teaches when to cry, what image to remember, whose pain carries authority, and what visible form loyalty should take. The mourner learns not only that Karbala matters, but how Karbala must matter.

The reciter speaks, the assembly responds, and the preacher intensifies the scene. Narrative is completed through collective affect. Tears become more than signs of sadness. They become evidence of belonging. The one who weeps demonstrates entry into the moral world of the sacred victim. Distance from this form of emotion may appear as coldness, estrangement, or betrayal. The pressure need not be stated openly. It works through expectation. The tear becomes a credential. The body becomes witness. Emotion becomes public proof of moral membership.

Here Husayn becomes not only the victim of power but the sacred mawlā of mourning. The mourner receives dignity by proving proximity to his suffering. This is an analytical claim, not a report about every mourner’s explicit belief. Participants may speak of love, justice, intercession, historical remembrance, or community. Yet ritual can organise these feelings through a vertical structure. The mourner receives value from nearness to sacred suffering. Sincerity is proved by submitting feeling to the established grammar of grief.

The ritualisation of loyalty converts political memory into sacred debt. The mourner no longer confronts only the question of injustice. The mourner confronts the question of whether enough mourning, remembrance, sacrifice, or defence of the sacred loss has occurred. Emotional insufficiency becomes moral failure. The sacred victim becomes an unreachable creditor. The ritual does not simply remember suffering; it can make continued indebtedness the measure of fidelity.

The sanctification of defeat begins when defeat becomes more than a historical fact. Loneliness becomes proof of truth; thirst becomes proof of innocence; abandonment becomes proof of superiority; death becomes victory. This inversion can deny the victor the right to define history. Yet it becomes dangerous when it hardens into identity. Defeat then ceases to be a catastrophe to be understood and overcome and becomes the emotional home of the subject.

The enemy consequently returns as a recurring moral figure. Political disagreement becomes vulnerable to translation into the drama of sacred victim and demonic oppressor, while criticism may appear as betrayal. Ritual then does not simply preserve memory. It can stabilise a world in which inherited suffering remains more authoritative than political transformation.

3. Memory, State Power, and Necropolitics

3.1 Rawżat al-shuhadāʾ and the Metaphysics of Mourning

The Persianate world did not merely transmit Karbala. It altered the temporal order through which Karbala could be understood. Through elegy, sermon, rawza recitation, pilgrimage, visual image, domestic memory, and public performance, Karbala moved beyond the distance of history. The thirsty child, the grieving mother, the severed head, the burning tent, the riderless horse, and the captive family became recurring images. These images did not primarily supply historical information. They produced presence. They brought the mourner into the scene and made sacred suffering available to sight, sound, imagination, and bodily response.

A Scene of Mourning and Battle at Karbala, Persian miniature from the manuscript of Rawḍat al-Shuhadāʾ by Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī, 16th century.

Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī’s Rawżat al-shuhadāʾ is decisive because it does not merely narrate a political event. It changes the time in which the event is received. Karbala is not confined to the historical horizon of 680. In the narrative tradition represented by the Rawżat, Husayn’s coming death reaches backward through the history of prophecy. Adam and the prophets encounter the catastrophe before it occurs and mourn it in advance. Martyrdom is not only remembered after the fact; it is anticipated before history reaches it.

Kāshifī does not place Karbala within prophetic history only in abstract terms. In the narrative of Adam and Eve’s separation, Adam experiences an inexplicable sorrow after the loss of Eve. Gabriel explains that this grief is connected to the coming calamity of Husayn, and Adam is called to mourn a death that has not yet occurred. The sorrow of the first human is thus reread as an anticipation of Karbala. Prophetic history becomes a sequence of prior laments for a future catastrophe (Kāshifī, Rawżat al-shuhadāʾ, Diez A fol. 5).

This is what may be called the metaphysics of mourning. The phrase does not mean that Kāshifī constructs a philosophical system in abstract language. It means that the narrative gives mourning an ontological reach. The history of salvation is reread through an event that has not yet occurred. Prophetic history becomes a sequence of anticipations, signs, prior laments, and foreshadowings. Husayn’s death becomes anterior to itself. It belongs to the origin of sacred time before it belongs to the chronology of political history.

The consequence is decisive. The past is no longer remembered simply because it happened; it appears to have happened because the universe had already mourned it. Every prophetic sorrow becomes a prefiguration of Karbala, while every later sorrow becomes its repetition. The narrative does not merely enlarge the community of mourners. It gives Husayn’s death a claim upon all sacred history. Humanity is imagined as entering a world in which grief for Karbala already precedes the mourner’s own arrival.

Once Adam and the prophets have already mourned Husayn, the mourner is not simply remembering a historical crime. The mourner enters an inherited cosmos of obligation. The event cannot be completed because it was never limited to a single historical moment. It becomes older than the community, older than ritual, and older than the subject who mourns it. In this form, Karbala no longer asks first to be analysed politically. It demands fidelity. The catastrophe becomes universal precisely because it becomes impossible to leave behind.

The narrative tends to displace political causality by embedding Karbala within prefigured sacred time. The question is no longer first how a specific order of power, coercion, betrayal, and dynastic rule produced Husayn’s death. The event appears as an anticipated catastrophe, a sorrow already distributed across prophecy, and a loss that cannot be completed because it was never confined to one moment. A political catastrophe is thus recast as a cosmic sorrow. The historical victim becomes the centre of a universal field of grief.

Rahimi describes the Rawżat as a bridge linking the historical and mythical worlds of Karbala, one that fuses the present with a memorialised sacred past in ritual time (Rahimi 2012, 314–15). This is precisely its power. The text does not merely preserve memory; it joins the present to a world in which nature, body, grief, death, desire, and sacred history continuously mirror one another. The martyr’s blood is no longer simply past. It appears in the earth, in flowers, in water, in scent, and in the tears of those who remember.

The metaphysics of mourning gives the sacred mawlā a new status. Husayn is no longer only the wounded authority of a community. Husayn becomes the sacred master of salvation history. Adam mourns him. The prophets anticipate him. The believer receives moral existence by entering the debt of his coming sorrow. The relation between devotee and sacred authority is no longer grounded only in social attachment, ritual debt, or collective guilt. It becomes cosmological. The mourner owes the dead because the world itself has been organised around their sorrow.

The aestheticisation of calamity intensifies this temporal order. Pain becomes beautiful; the wounded body becomes luminous; the desert becomes a theatre of truth. This transformation may preserve the dignity of the victim, but it can also make suffering emotionally indispensable. Defeat becomes an aesthetic possession, while consolation and release begin to appear morally shallow. The metaphysics of mourning therefore alters the relation between past and future. The event is no longer a historical catastrophe that demands explanation and prevention. It becomes a sacred horizon in which loss precedes the mourner and remains more authoritative than the future. Liberation risks appearing as forgetfulness; joy risks appearing as betrayal.

3.2 Safavid Ritual and Institutional Memory

The Safavid period did not invent Shi‘ism, devotion to the Prophet’s family, or mourning for Husayn. Shi‘i centres, Alid loyalties, shrine networks, learned traditions, and commemorative practices existed in Iran and across the Persianate world before 1501. Nor did Iran become uniformly Twelver overnight. Conversion, clerical migration, legal reorganisation, patronage, coercion, public ritual, and local negotiation proceeded unevenly across regions and social groups. Yet the Safavids transformed the scale, visibility, and institutional density of Twelver Shi‘ism. They made it a public grammar of sovereignty.

This transformation mattered because the Safavid state did not rely only on military conquest, dynastic lineage, administrative authority, or courtly display. It also sought to make political rule legible through sacred signs. Schools, courts, endowments, shrines, pulpits, processions, devotional gatherings, and religious specialists gave Twelver Shi‘ism a durable social body. The state governed territory, but it also sought to govern the signs through which political and religious belonging became visible. Subjects encountered the Safavid order not only in taxation, law, war, and administration, but in the names they heard, the calendar they inhabited, the processions they watched, the sermons they attended, and the sacred past they were taught to remember.

Coinage offers a particularly concrete example. Safavid coins did not merely circulate money; they circulated political theology. The transformation of religious mottos and visual signs on coinage helped make Twelver Shi‘i affiliation visible in ordinary transactions. Safavid monetary inscriptions promoted Shi‘i teachings and distinguished the state’s religious identity from earlier and competing political formations (Savagheb, Shahidani, and Amraʾee 2016). The coin entered markets, taxes, wages, gifts, and exchanges. In this sense, Shi‘i sovereignty was made visible not only in doctrine and law, but also in the ordinary material signs through which subjects encountered rule.

This material detail should not be exaggerated. A coin did not produce belief by itself. Nor did public ritual create a uniform Shi‘i subject. Yet together, such signs formed an environment in which political belonging was increasingly mediated through a visible language of sacred loyalty. The state did not simply demand obedience; it helped establish the symbolic conditions under which obedience, devotion, memory, and collective distinction could appear to belong together.

Muharram acquired new force within this formation. Mourning gave collective identity a body. It organised urban space through mosques, streets, markets, shrines, and processions. It organised time through the recurrence of the ritual calendar. It organised affect through grief, spectacle, self-display, and shared identification. The collective mourning body became an image of the polity: a body gathered around sacred injury, ordered through ritual repetition, and distinguished from an external enemy.

This was not merely private devotion enlarged in public. It was the production of a social order in which sacred memory, political belonging, and emotional discipline became increasingly entangled. The ritual participant was not asked only to remember Husayn. He or she was invited to inhabit a public world in which the memory of Husayn supplied a language for loyalty, sacrifice, danger, and collective truth. The political force of mourning did not rest only in the message of sermons. It rested in the repeated formation of bodies capable of feeling together.

Rahimi’s account is essential precisely because it prevents a crude interpretation of this process. Safavid Muharram was not merely a device imposed by the state upon passive subjects. It constituted a public field in which merchants, guilds, neighbourhoods, religious specialists, women, courtly actors, the poor, and urban crowds could enter visible relations with one another. Ritual could reinforce authority, but it could also produce solidarities and forms of expression that exceeded direct state control. The Muharram public was neither simply obedient nor automatically resistant. It was a contested social field in which power sought representation and society acquired collective presence.

This ambiguity must be retained. The Safavid state did not invent a completed ritual machine and then simply apply it to society. It appropriated, patronised, regulated, and made use of practices that already possessed their own histories, affects, and local meanings. Safavid Muharram involved a shifting relation between domination and transgression, official performance and carnivalesque disruption, public discipline and unstable social interaction. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, participation by guilds, futuvvat members, women, and poorer groups helped make the Muharram public more autonomous from the state. Ritual space intersected with bazaars, coffeehouses, caravanserais, baths, schools, squares, and zurkhānas, creating an informal civic sphere rather than a simple extension of royal power.

Yet this ambiguity does not remove the institutional effect. Once mourning entered the apparatus of sovereignty, sacred loss acquired durability. It was no longer carried only by families, poets, storytellers, preachers, and pilgrims. It was distributed through institutions, urban space, ritual time, and public signs. It became pedagogy. Society learned not merely to remember, but to remember in authorised forms. It learned which griefs defined belonging, which enemies organised moral perception, and which emotions certified loyalty.

This is the point at which Mawalian morality becomes politically decisive. The issue is not that people mourned Husayn, nor that the Safavid state honoured the Prophet’s family. The issue is the institutional conversion of sacred attachment into a public structure of recognition. Mourning could become a way of receiving political and moral visibility. The participant’s relation to the sacred past was no longer only devotional or literary; it became socially legible through public performance. To belong visibly was increasingly to participate in the authorised grammar of sacred memory.

The critical problem is therefore not ritual itself, but the vertical organisation of ritual meaning. A community may mourn in order to judge power, preserve the dignity of victims, and create solidarity among the living. But mourning can also become anti-emancipatory when it trains subjects to receive value principally through fidelity to sacred suffering. In that case, the past does not merely illuminate injustice; it becomes the source from which moral legitimacy descends.

The Safavid transformation of Muharram did not abolish the older grammar of dependence. It gave that grammar institutional depth. What had appeared in early forms as mediated belonging, loyalty, debt, and sacred attachment could now be reproduced through public ritual, political symbolism, and social memory. The Alid alternative was thus not necessarily secularised or translated into a language of equal citizenship. Rather, the worldly master is replaced by a sacred master, while the state presents itself as the authorised guardian, interpreter, and organiser of the public world in which sacred mastery is enacted.

Manuscript folio from Rawḍat al-Shuhadāʾ16th century.

This distinction matters. The Safavid state did not claim to be Husayn, the Imam, or the sacred household. Its political power depended rather on mediating access to the public meanings attached to them. It could sponsor shrines, regulate public ceremony, circulate religious signs, patronise clerics, and mark the calendar of collective mourning. Through these acts, the state acquired access to the emotional grammar of loyalty, sacrifice, and belonging without becoming identical with the sacred object of devotion.

The result was not simple ideological domination. Safavid Muharram remained unstable because the ritual memory of Karbala contained a judgement against tyranny that could not be entirely contained by authoritarian uses of power. The same symbolic world that legitimised authority could also make authority vulnerable to accusation. The image of Yazid could not be permanently secured against new political meanings. The ritual public could therefore sustain state formation while preserving a latent language of dissent.

Nevertheless, this instability should not obscure the critical point. The institutionalisation of mourning changed the relation between loss and political life. Sacred suffering became repeatable, visible, governable, and socially consequential. The wound was no longer only remembered; it was administered. Its repetition taught subjects how to feel, how to belong, and how to recognise moral authority. In this sense, the Safavid order did not merely preserve the memory of Karbala. It helped transform that memory into a durable political grammar.

Mawalian morality reaches a new stage here. Dependence is no longer sustained only through direct social attachment or inward guilt. It is supported by institutions that make fidelity visible and emotionally credible. The subject encounters sacred authority in the street, the sermon, the mourning assembly, the shrine, the coin, and the ritual calendar. The political order becomes more durable because it is not experienced only as command. It is experienced as a world of signs in which loyalty to sacred loss appears as the form of collective truth.

3.3 The Islamic Republic and Sovereignty over the Afterlife

The Islamic Republic does not merely inherit the metaphysics of mourning. It adds to it a political claim to sovereignty over the afterlife. This phrase does not mean that the state governs the soul’s eschatological destiny. It names the state’s claim to authority over the public afterlife of the dead: over which deaths become martyrdom, which graves become sites of collective memory, which bodies remain publicly grievable, and which dead are excluded from the authorised archive of sacrifice. Kāshifī turns mourning into a metaphysical order; the Islamic Republic seeks to give that order bureaucratic durability, visual repetition, territorial presence, and institutional force.

This regime may be called religious necropolitics. In Mbembe’s sense, necropolitics concerns sovereignty exercised through the subjection of life to the power of death. In the Iranian case, the issue is not only the power to expose bodies to war, sacrifice, imprisonment, or death. It is also the power to govern death after death: to classify bodies, arrange hierarchies of sacrifice, distribute public honour, preserve authorised names, and determine which losses may enter the national imagination. The decisive political question is therefore not only who dies. It is who is permitted to remain publicly alive through death (Mbembe 2003, 11–40).

The martyr is not simply a dead person honoured by survivors. Martyrdom transforms death into an enduring political presence. The name, portrait, grave, funeral, family, and memory of the dead become capable of issuing claims upon the living. Those who have “given everything” can become the moral ground on which citizens are asked to remain grateful, patient, loyal, and prepared to sacrifice. The relation between the living and the dead is therefore not merely commemorative. It is disciplinary. The dead are made to speak, and the living are asked to answer.

The Iran–Iraq War gave this political grammar exceptional density. The conflict was not simply narrated as a national war of defence. It was repeatedly interpreted through the Karbala paradigm: a sacred struggle in which the faithful confront tyranny, sacrifice becomes proof of truth, and death may become victory rather than defeat. The historical distance between 680 and the 1980s was deliberately narrowed. Karbala did not function merely as an analogy. It became a living political script through which the war could be narrated, felt, and justified.

Olmo Gölz has shown that Islamist martyrdom discourse in wartime Iran drew explicitly upon Karbala, heroic self-sacrifice, and the moral obligation to resist injustice (Gölz 2019, 35–51). The soldier’s death was therefore represented not only as service to territory, state, or national survival. It could appear as participation in a sacred continuity of martyrdom. The war dead were inserted into the historical body of Karbala. Their blood did not simply belong to a contemporary battlefield; it entered a prior moral archive in which sacrifice was already meaningful before it occurred.

The state’s use of Karbala did not create martyrdom from nothing. Shi‘i traditions of sacrifice, mourning, justice, and resistance existed long before the Islamic Republic. Yet the war gave these traditions a new political concentration. It joined national defence, revolutionary legitimacy, religious obligation, masculinity, youth, and public sacrifice in one emotional economy. Death became an act through which the individual could be made morally legible to the nation. The martyr’s body became the point at which religious memory, state legitimacy, and collective belonging converged.

This political afterlife required a material form. Cemeteries, portraits, murals, memorial museums, funeral processions, commemorative calendars, street names, and graves transformed sacrifice into a visible public environment. These forms did not merely preserve private grief. They made selected deaths durable, exemplary, and politically legible. Khosronejad’s work on the material culture of the “Sacred Defense” shows how images, objects, graves, and memorial practices sustain the social presence of the martyr after death (Khosronejad 2013). The state does not simply commemorate the dead; it seeks to organise the meanings through which their sacrifice addresses the living.

The grave is especially important in this economy. It is not only a site of burial. It can become a point at which private grief is converted into public pedagogy. The name on the stone, the portrait, the epitaph, ritual visits, flags, flowers, and the spatial organisation of burial grounds turn death into a scene of instruction. The living encounter the dead not only as objects of sorrow, but as examples. The grave tells them what sacrifice means, who deserves public honour, and what kind of loyalty remains expected of those who survive.

Visual culture extends this operation beyond cemeteries and memorial sites. Portraits of martyrs, murals on city walls, posters, television images, documentaries, and commemorative publications distribute death across ordinary life. Roxanne Varzi’s work shows how post-revolutionary media, youth culture, images, and martyrdom intersect in the formation of political affect (Varzi 2006). The state does not govern only by issuing orders. It also governs by producing images through which sacrifice becomes emotionally available, publicly recognisable, and morally compelling. The martyr’s face does not merely represent a dead individual. It creates a relation between the dead and the living.

The category of martyr is therefore never neutral. State-recognised deaths are granted a public afterlife: they may educate, command, and bind. Other deaths may be rendered private, criminal, obscure, shameful, or politically unintelligible. Talebi’s distinction between state martyrs and dissident martyrs reveals that this is also a struggle over visibility, burial, public space, and memory (Talebi 2012, 120–47). The difference between the official martyr and the dissident dead is not simply one of commemoration. It is a difference in political existence.

Religious necropolitics governs by ranking deaths. It distinguishes between blood that generates moral obligation and blood that must disappear. It determines which mother may mourn publicly, which family may claim honour, which grave may become a national site, and which body must remain outside the authorised map of grief. The state’s power is not exhausted by its capacity to discipline the living. It also includes the power to regulate whether the dead can become politically present.

Yet this power can never be complete. Karbala contains a principle of reversal: the symbolic language that legitimises rule can also be turned against rulers. The image of Yazid can return against those who claim to speak in Husayn’s name, while a grave denied public honour, a forbidden funeral, or a photograph carried through a street can form a counter-archive that exceeds official control. Religious necropolitics is therefore the political administration of the metaphysics of mourning. The danger is not that mourning exists, nor that the dead retain moral force. It is that fidelity to the dead becomes indistinguishable from obedience to the institutions that claim authority over their memory.

3.4 Pathological Memory and Responsible Life

The final problem is temporal. A culture becomes pathological when it cannot release the past into the future. It repeats loss because loss has become necessary; it needs the enemy because the enemy sustains identity; it preserves defeat because defeat provides moral distinction. This is not a medical diagnosis. It is a genealogical one. The pathology concerns a relation to time in which the past no longer illuminates the present but commands it.

Active forgetfulness offers a different possibility. It does not erase Karbala or deny the reality of violence. It refuses to let inherited injury become the only form of historical time. A society may remember deeply and still create. It may mourn and still build. It may preserve the victim’s name while refusing victimhood as an identity. The issue is not whether the past should be remembered, but whether memory allows new forms of life to emerge.

Certain rationalist currents in Islamic thought offer a limited but important counter-horizon. Their emphasis on justice, responsibility, and human agency resists fatalist accounts of suffering. This does not make Mu‘tazilite theology a modern political programme, nor does it turn it into an Islamic analogue of Nietzsche. Yet its insistence that human beings are responsible for their acts places pressure on any moral order that treats suffering as sacred destiny. If human beings are responsible, suffering cannot simply be sanctified; its causes must be judged, and its repetition must be prevented.

The task is therefore not to abolish mourning but to break the metaphysics of mourning when it turns fidelity to the dead into permanent indebtedness to suffering. Mourning becomes responsible when it turns the memory of violence into judgement against the institutions that produce violence. It becomes life-affirming when it refuses to let death remain sovereign over the future.

Conclusion: Mourning and Responsible Memory

This article has not argued for a direct or mechanical line from the mawālī of the early Islamic empire to later Shi‘i mourning. The mawālī were diverse, early Shi‘i communities were diverse, and Karbala acquired its later meanings through centuries of narration, ritual, doctrine, literary production, and political transformation. The argument has instead traced a genealogy: the social grammar of mediated belonging could provide a moral form through which dignity was received from a superior authority rather than created through autonomous action.

The Prophet’s family offered an alternative to Arab aristocratic prestige, and that alternative could give excluded subjects a real language of dignity. Yet sacred authority could also preserve a vertical moral structure. The worldly patron was displaced by sacred authority; political belonging became devotional attachment; defeat became a source of moral capital. This did not necessarily produce submission, since such attachment could generate protest, courage, and rebellion. It remained anti-emancipatory, however, when dignity depended upon loyalty to a sacred loss rather than upon the creation of new relations of equality.

Mawalian morality names this danger. It describes the movement through which dependence becomes inward obligation, sacred loss becomes a claim upon the living, ritual gives that claim a body, and institutions preserve it as public memory. The metaphysics of mourning universalises loss; religious necropolitics administers its public afterlife. In each transformation, suffering may acquire meaning, but the future risks becoming secondary to the authority of the past.

The critique is not an invitation to forget Husayn or to deny what happened at Karbala: a struggle over power, succession, and allegiance that later memory recast as a Mawalian moral drama. It asks what kind of relation memory establishes with life. Does the victim call us to create a world with fewer victims, or does loss become the condition of identity itself? Responsible memory does not abandon the dead. It refuses to turn them into masters of the living, and it refuses to let fidelity to their suffering become a model for its endless repetition. The dead are honoured not when their suffering becomes a model for endless suffering, but when their defeat helps make defeat impossible.

References

al-Khayyūn, Rashīd. 1997. al-Muʿtazila: al-Baṣra wa-Baghdād. London: Dār al-Ḥikma.

Crone, Patricia. 2005. “Mawālī and the Prophet’s Family: An Early Shīʿite View.” In Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical Islam, edited by Monique Bernards and John Nawas, 167–194. Leiden: Brill.

Gölz, Olmo. 2019. “Martyrdom and Masculinity in Warring Iran: The Karbala Paradigm, the Heroic, and the Personal Dimensions of War.” Behemoth: A Journal on Civilisation 12 (1): 35–51.

Hylén, Torsten. 2025. The Karbala Story and Early Shiʿite Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Kāshifī, Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ. Rawżat al-shuhadāʾ. Sixteenth-century illustrated manuscript. Diez A fol. 5, PPN 729902196. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Orientalische Handschriften.

Khosronejad, Pedram, ed. 2013. Unburied Memories: The Politics of Bodies of Sacred Defense Martyrs in Iran. London: Routledge.

Kontny-Wendt, Natalie. 2025. “The Revolt of Yaḥyā b. Zayd b. ʿAlī (d. 125/743): Bayʿa, Disobedience and Rebellion in the Early Islamic Period.” In Between Rebels and Rulers in the Early Islamicate World: Power, Contention and Identity, edited by Hannah-Lena Hagemann and Alasdair C. Grant, 73–94. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Translated by Carol Diethe. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rahimi, Babak. 2012. Theater State and the Formation of the Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran: Studies on Safavid Muharram Rituals, 1590–1641 CE. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Savagheb, J., Sh. Shahidani, and S. Amraʾee. 2016. “The Process of Change in the Imprints: Images and Religious Mottos on the Coins Minted in the Safavid Period.” Iranian History after Islam 7 (12): 63–111.

Talebi, Shahla. 2012. “From the Light of the Eyes to the Eyes of the Power: State and Dissident Martyrs in Post-Revolutionary Iran.” Visual Anthropology 25 (1–2): 120–147.

Varzi, Roxanne. 2006. Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

A society can become tired before it becomes free. It can grow tired of prisons, funerals, official lies, empty promises, and the small humiliations that enter ordinary life. In such a condition, political hope changes its shape. People do not only ask what must be changed. They also ask who might carry the change for them. A name can seem more solid than a programme. A familiar face can seem more reliable than an institution that has not yet been built. This is one of the ways hope becomes dependence. The dead whale in Krasznahorkai’s novel offers a provisional image for this condition.

The figure of the dead whale in Krasznahorkai’s novel is taken up here as a political metaphor, not to describe Reza Pahlavi as a person, but to consider a political situation. The comparison is not one of essence, character, or moral equivalence. It concerns the meanings that can gather around a public name, and the hopes, fears, memories, and expectations projected onto it. In certain restorationist and centralist circles, Pahlavi’s name can carry such associations: order, national restoration, security, modernity, and release from clerical rule. He neither creates these desires nor fully controls the meanings attached to his name. The question, then, is whether the symbolic weight assigned to a public figure can postpone the harder work of representation, institutional limits, plurality, and equal citizenship.

These longings are neither foolish nor insincere. After repression, defeat, and uncertainty, the wish for a recognisable centre is understandable. People who have lived without trustworthy public institutions may look for a person who appears capable of giving direction. The difficulty begins when the hope invested in a figure is no longer accompanied by questions about limits, procedures, rights, and accountability. Then the figure becomes larger than the arrangements that should restrain him. Political expectation begins to replace political judgment.

Krasznahorkai’s town does not collapse in a single moment. It has already lost the habits that once gave ordinary life a shape. Trains no longer arrive as expected. Reports come late, or arrive distorted. Rumour travels more easily than explanation. “All normal expectations went by the board,” the narrator writes, and daily life is disturbed by an “ever-spreading all-consuming chaos” which makes the future unpredictable and the past difficult to recall (Krasznahorkai 2002, “An Emergency”). Disorder is not only material. It alters the relation between people and events.

Fear develops in this space. It is not merely fear of an external danger. It is fear of no longer knowing whom to trust, which account is reliable, or what should count as evidence. When uncertainty becomes habitual, certainty acquires a special value. A voice that speaks firmly may seem more useful than a voice that speaks cautiously. A command may seem less burdensome than an argument. The desire for order is understandable, but it can also make people ready to accept forms of authority they would otherwise resist.

The whale gives the town’s fear a visible body. The Prince gives it a political direction. He is not the source of the anxiety that has already spread through the town. He is the figure who understands how to use it. Fatigue, resentment, humiliation, boredom, and waiting had remained dispersed. They had no clear object and no common language. Under his influence, they begin to acquire the sound of certainty. The crowd is not given an explanation of its condition. It is not asked to distinguish what has happened from what is feared, or rumour from knowledge. It is given the feeling that its uncertainty has found an object and a purpose. Fear no longer appears as fear. It begins to resemble clarity, and the town becomes less able to distinguish conviction from understanding.

Valuska’s encounter with the whale does not produce knowledge. The creature “needed neither pointing out nor rational explanation,” but its visible form remains difficult to grasp. Valuska sees it “with a mixture of fear and wonder,” then discovers that its tail, skin, jaws, and dead eyes do not form a whole he can comprehend (Krasznahorkai 2002, “The Werckmeister Harmonies”). The spectators appear to look past the body itself, as though the advertised object could not be the real object of their attention. They expect another presence, another force, another explanation.

This is why the whale can be useful for thinking about Iran. The question is not why people support a political figure. They may have reasons to do so. The question is what happens when a society begins to treat one name as the place where its fears and hopes can be deposited. A society subjected to exclusion, corruption, economic insecurity, state violence, cultural humiliation, and long uncertainty may be drawn toward any sign of order. The danger lies not in hope itself, but in the weakening of the public forms through which hope can become common action.

The Islamic Republic is a theocratic despotism. Its authority is sustained not only by coercion but by a claim to sacred legitimacy. It governs through law, security institutions, religious instruction, public discipline, and the control of bodies. Clothing, language, mourning, public presence, and speech are treated as matters that may be supervised. Execution, imprisonment, torture, forced confession, disappearance, and unfair trial are not accidental failures of the order. They have repeatedly appeared as instruments through which the order protects itself and displays its power.

The mass executions of 1988 show the character of this power with particular force. Thousands of political prisoners were forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed, including people who had already been tried and were serving sentences. Families were often denied information about the circumstances of death and the location of burial. Graves were concealed, evidence was disturbed, and mourning was restricted. Amnesty International has described the killings and their continuing concealment as ongoing crimes against humanity, because the authorities have not disclosed the full truth, identified those responsible, or protected burial sites and evidence (Amnesty International 2018).

The violence did not end with the executions. It continued in the conditions under which the dead could be remembered. This is one meaning of necropolitics in the Iranian context. The state does not simply punish the living. It also seeks to regulate burial, naming, commemoration, and grief. A family may know that a relative has been killed but still not know where the body lies. A grave may become a place that cannot be visited freely. Memory becomes insecure because the state claims authority not only over a person’s death, but also over the public forms through which that death may be acknowledged.

The same logic appears in the state’s treatment of women’s bodies. Clothing, voice, movement, visibility, and public presence are treated as matters of command. The reported sentence of seventy-four lashes against Parastoo Ahmadi after she performed without compulsory hijab belongs in this setting. Reporting on the case also described travel restrictions and bans on artistic activity imposed on Ahmadi and members of her production team (The Guardian, 18 June 2026). The case concerns more than one singer or one concert. It shows how a woman’s voice can be made into an offence, and how law can be used not to protect a person but to discipline a body in public.

This history helps explain the intensity of the desire for liberation in Iran. Yet liberation and freedom are not identical. A society may reject a despotic order while remaining uncertain about how power should be limited after that order has gone. It may desire an end to clerical rule while postponing questions about courts, free media, regional authority, minority rights, financial transparency, and the removal of leaders. Such postponement is understandable in a moment of danger. But it is not harmless. Questions deferred during a transition often return later as the structure of the next order.

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement introduced another political language. It did not begin by asking who should occupy the summit of power. It began with the death in custody of Jina Mahsa Amini and with the refusal to allow that death to be absorbed into official silence. Then other experiences appeared beside it: women’s bodily autonomy, the right to speak and organise, the right to mourn, the demand for linguistic equality, and the demand to live without permanent religious and political supervision. Its force came from the fact that these claims entered the same public space without becoming identical.

This plurality was not a defect that required correction. It was one of the movement’s democratic possibilities. Women, students, workers, Kurds, Baloch, Arabs, Azerbaijanis, religious minorities, and families seeking justice did not bring the same history into the movement. They did not need to. What mattered was that they could appear together without first being reduced to one authorised identity. The movement’s promise lay in the possibility that solidarity might be built without demanding sameness, and that a national future might be imagined without requiring one person or one group to speak for everyone else.

Reza Pahlavi enters this field with the inheritance of royal despotism. He is not a representative of the Islamic Republic. His name belongs to another order of power: the Pahlavi monarchy, built around the crown, the court, the security apparatus, censorship, and a narrow field of permitted political participation. The monarchy was not theocratic. It did not govern through clerical guardianship or compulsory religious law. But it was authoritarian, and its authority stood above society rather than answerable to it. That difference matters. It does not settle the democratic question.

The restorationist horizon attached to Pahlavi’s name cannot be treated as politically innocent. It presents monarchy as relief from the disorder of the Islamic Republic before the conditions of a democratic future have been decided. It gathers memories of order, national dignity, modernisation, and escape from clerical rule. These memories are real. They are also selective. They do not answer how power will be divided, how dissent will be protected, how public money will be examined, or how citizens with different languages, histories, and political demands will be represented without being subordinated to a national centre.

Pahlavi’s prominence did not resolve the crisis of representation within the opposition. It often displaced it. As his name became a central political reference, questions about constitutional limits, minority rights, regional authority, free organisation, and the right to dissent were repeatedly treated as matters for later. They were asked to wait until after the transition. But a transition is already shaped by what is postponed in its name. When limits on power are deferred, the old habit of waiting for a centre returns before the old regime has gone.

The problem is not leadership. Political movements need people who speak, organise, negotiate, and take responsibility. The problem begins when leadership is treated as representation without the institutions that make representation answerable. A public figure is not a constitution. A family name is not a procedure. Representation requires decisions that can be challenged, leaders who can be removed, finances that can be examined, and minority positions that do not depend on the patience of a majority. Without these forms, politics becomes personal. Loyalty begins to replace judgment. Criticism is heard as betrayal.

This can be seen in the treatment of disagreement. A question about a future constitution is made to look like disunity. A demand for decentralisation becomes a threat to the country. A warning about concentrated power becomes evidence of bad faith. The argument does not disappear. It becomes harder to make. Access to the political centre begins to matter more than the content of a proposal, and recognition from a leader carries more weight than an institution that does not yet exist. The logic of guardianship has not disappeared here. It has changed its language.

The question of ethnic and linguistic equality makes the problem visible. Mother-tongue education, cultural recognition, equal participation, and decentralised administration are not signs of national disintegration. For Kurds, Baloch, Arabs, Azerbaijanis, Turkmen, and other communities, they may be conditions of equal citizenship. A country does not become common by requiring its citizens to forget the languages in which they first learned to speak. Territorial integrity cannot be secured by treating every request for local authority as an act of suspicion. That merely repeats the older relation between centre and periphery: obedience is called unity, and equality is called danger.

Within a vocal part of the Pahlavi constituency, such demands are frequently treated in precisely this way. Difference is not received as a political fact to be organised; it is received as a preliminary threat. Language becomes a test of loyalty. Culture becomes a question of national security. Local political claims are reduced to separatism before they can be discussed. This does not describe every supporter of Pahlavi. It describes a real tendency within the restorationist field: the tendency to imagine national unity only when one history, one language of power, and one centre are permitted to dominate the rest.

The atmosphere of denunciation is not confined to online argument. In Canada, Masood Masjoody, an Iranian-Canadian critic of both the Islamic Republic and the exiled monarchy, disappeared in February 2026. His remains were found the following month. Two people known to him were later charged with first-degree murder. The accused had publicly supported the restorationist movement in online posts, although police said that the motive remained under investigation and did not publicly identify a political cause or implicate Reza Pahlavi himself (IHIT, 17 March 2026; Associated Press, 16 April 2026). In Hamburg, Morteza Sadeghi, an Afghan restaurant owner, was killed after an altercation at his restaurant. Some diaspora reporting linked the dispute to Pahlavi symbols, though this has not been publicly confirmed by the police (Afghanistan International 2026). These cases raise a harder question: how does hostility within a restorationist political culture enter private relations and ordinary places?

Such cases do not explain a political movement by themselves. They show something narrower. Political identity becomes dangerous when it is treated as a test of loyalty rather than a matter of argument. Where symbols, flags, photographs, and names become compulsory signs of belonging, disagreement ceases to be a political relation. It becomes an offence. The demand for unanimity enters daily life through small things: a restaurant wall, a public meeting, a message sent at night, a name treated as an insult. Exile then ceases to provide safety. It reproduces, in another setting, the habits of fear.

Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment can be used here only with caution. It should not be used to dismiss the suffering of the oppressed or to make justified anger appear shameful. In the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche writes that slave morality “says ‘no’ on principle” to what is “outside,” “other,” and “non-self,” and that “its action is basically a reaction” (Nietzsche 2006, 20). The relevance of this passage is limited. It draws attention to the risk that a politics may become dependent upon the enemy it opposes and unable to imagine its own principles.

A movement may be clear about what it rejects and still remain uncertain about what it must protect. Anger does not establish courts. Memory does not guarantee the rights of future opponents. The removal of a ruler does not by itself alter the habits of rule. This is the danger of reactive authoritarianism: the removal of the jurist-ruler without dismantling the logic of guardianship. The phrase does not identify all opposition with the Islamic Republic. It names a risk that appears whenever power is concentrated before the institutions capable of limiting it have been secured.

The alternative is not a politics without conflict, leadership, or national solidarity. It is a politics in which none of these stands above law. It requires independent organisations, free media, transparent financing, courts that do not answer to power, protections for dissent, equal citizenship, language rights, and procedures through which leaders may be criticised and removed. These arrangements are not technical details to be postponed until after liberation. They determine whether liberation will leave behind a public capable of acting, rather than a population waiting for another authority to decide in its name.

The whale does not destroy Krasznahorkai’s town by itself. It reveals a process already underway: the loss of trust, judgment, shared language, and ordinary confidence. No political figure can explain Iran’s crisis by himself either. Yet a name can become dangerous when it begins to take the place of society. The question is whether political life can be organised without another guardian at its centre: whether people can remain present, able to speak, organise, remember, disagree, and resist the return of power in a familiar form.

“I am my world. (The microcosm.)” (TLP 5.63). Few sentences in the Tractatus are more vulnerable to misunderstanding. Read in isolation, it may sound like an assertion of private idealism: the world is “mine” because it lies within consciousness, or because nothing beyond my experience can finally count as real for me. Yet the surrounding propositions resist that conclusion. This essay argues that the “my” in “my world” neither denotes empirical possession nor establishes a hidden metaphysical owner. It identifies a pressure within philosophical reflection: the desire to find a final bearer of the world.

The first objection comes from Wittgenstein himself. “The world is independent of my will” (TLP 6.373). Even if everything I wished were to occur, that would still be a matter of fate rather than logical necessity (TLP 6.374). My body may weaken, suffer, or die; other people may act beyond my knowledge; historical events proceed without consent. The world cannot be “mine” in the ordinary sense in which a possession belongs to its owner. The phrase must therefore be read without granting sovereignty to the empirical individual.

This does not empty 5.63 of force. It shifts the question. Wittgenstein is not asking whether an individual consciousness successfully contains reality. He is asking what kind of thing the “I” would have to be if it were to stand behind the world as its final bearer. The immediately preceding proposition supplies the crucial formulation: “The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world” (TLP 5.632). The subject is not introduced as another object, nor as a hidden member of a larger inventory. It is introduced at the point where the demand for such an object begins to fail.

The early architecture of the Tractatus explains why this failure matters. “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (TLP 1.1). Facts determine what is and what is not the case (TLP 1.11–1.13), while propositions represent possible states of affairs that may agree or fail to agree with reality (TLP 2.1, 2.11, 4.01). This does not entail that every conceivable reality must be named in a proposition. It establishes a narrower claim: factual description concerns how things stand and how they might have stood otherwise. It works within the distinction between truth and falsity.

TLP 5.631 tests that form of description through an imagined book, The World as I Found It. The book could record the writer’s body, sensations, illnesses, memories, actions, and acts of will. It could distinguish what the will commands from what it fails to control. It might become exhaustive as an empirical account of a person. Yet the subject relevant to philosophical reflection would not be entered as one further fact in the book (TLP 5.631). The relevant “I” cannot be added as an additional item in the record.

The example does not deny the existence of persons. The imagined book already contains an empirical self: a body, biography, psychology, pattern of conduct, history of suffering, and field of relations. What cannot be extracted from this description is a second owner standing behind its contents, a witness who possesses the body and gathers experience into a private domain. This is not a failure that better psychology could repair. A fuller description would add further facts, but it would not yield a final proprietor without making that proprietor another constituent of the world it was supposed to stand behind.

The term “limit” names this failure of inclusion. It does not yet tell us that the subject inhabits a second region beyond reality. Nor does it imply that persons or psychological lives are unreal. It marks the point at which a certain procedure loses its grip: the attempt to make the world complete by adding an owner of the world to its factual contents. Bodies, thoughts, and actions are describable facts. The philosophical I does not emerge when the description becomes more comprehensive. The word “my” must therefore be detached from ordinary possession.

The eye analogy sharpens the point. Wittgenstein asks where in the world a metaphysical subject could be found, then compares the problem to the relation between the eye and the field of sight (TLP 5.633). The question follows from the imagined book. If the subject is real, where should one look? Wittgenstein does not redirect the search toward an inner realm, a brain, or a mysterious chamber of consciousness. He questions the logical form of the search itself.

The relevant eye is not the anatomical organ. A physical eye can be seen in a mirror or in another person’s face. What matters is the eye as a point of vision. Nothing in the visual field establishes that it is seen from an eye, and the eye should not be drawn within the field as one more visible content (TLP 5.633–5.6331). The error is not that the eye has been placed badly. The error lies in treating the point from which the field is seen as one of the objects visible within it.

This analogy yields an important but limited conclusion. The subject should not be sought as an object among facts. It does not by itself establish that no non-empirical subject exists. The field of sight does not contain its point of vision as another visible item, yet it is still seen from somewhere. This leaves open a serious alternative interpretation: perhaps the subject is neither empirical nor fictional, but a non-empirical limit through which the world is, in some sense, “my world.”

P. M. S. Hacker develops this possibility in his account of transcendental solipsism. He distinguishes the empirical self from the metaphysical self. The empirical self is the person described in The World as I Found It: a human being with a body, psychology, and history among facts. The metaphysical self is not a second person hidden behind the first. Hacker compares it to the geometrical eye: a limit of the visual field rather than one of its constituents (Hacker 1972, 63–64). On this reading, 5.631 eliminates the psychological subject while 5.632 retains a non-empirical one.

TLP 5.641 gives that interpretation substantial textual support. Wittgenstein distinguishes a non-psychological I from the human being, the human body, and the human soul studied by psychology. He calls this I the metaphysical subject: a limit rather than a part of the world (TLP 5.641). A merely eliminative reading is therefore insufficient. Wittgenstein plainly employs metaphysical language about the subject. The question is not whether this language occurs, but what philosophical status it retains.

The wartime notebooks demonstrate that this issue remained unsettled while the relevant propositions were taking shape. On 2 August 1916, Wittgenstein connects good and evil with the subject, calls the subject a limit of the world, and contrasts the world of imagination with the willing subject. He then acknowledges the unclarity of these reflections (Pilch 2023, Ms 103, 2 August 1916). The notebooks do not decide the interpretation of the published Tractatus. Their value is genetic and diagnostic: they show that the relation between subject, will, value, and world remained a live philosophical problem.

The notebook entries of 11 and 12 August 1916 make the internal sequence especially visible. On 11 August, Wittgenstein writes that he objectively confronts every object, but not the I, and adds that philosophy can speak of the I in a non-psychological sense. On the following day, he writes that the I enters philosophy because “the world is my world,” then places this thought beside reflections on the visual field and the contingency of everything seen or described (Pilch 2023, Ms 103, 11–12 August 1916). These entries illuminate the proximity of TLP 5.6331, 5.634, and 5.641.

The ethical propositions preserve the same tension. At 6.41, the sense of the world lies outside the world of contingent happenings. At 6.421, ethics is transcendental. TLP 6.423 distinguishes the will as a psychological phenomenon from the will as the subject of the ethical, of which one cannot speak. Finally, TLP 6.43 states that good or bad willing can alter only the limits of the world, not its facts. These passages explain why Hacker resists reducing “my world” to a private mental world. They connect world, value, and willing without granting the empirical person authority over reality.

Still, the Tractatus does not explicitly identify the ethical subject of 6.423 with the metaphysical subject of 5.641. Hacker’s connection is philosophically plausible, but the text does not formulate it as a theorem. The notebooks intensify rather than resolve this ambiguity. They show Wittgenstein trying to think subject, value, and willing together while recognizing the uncertainty of the attempt. This gives the metaphysical reading genuine pressure, but it does not establish a completed ontology of the subject.

A notebook entry of 2 September 1916 returns the question to solipsism. It recalls the project of writing The World I Found, then formulates the thought later found in TLP 5.64: solipsism, strictly carried through, coincides with pure realism; the I shrinks to an extensionless point while reality remains (Pilch 2023, Ms 103, 2 September 1916). The sequence matters. The factual book removes the empirical proprietor. Yet the ethical and existential pressure that generated the wish for such a proprietor does not simply vanish.

A therapeutic interpretation begins at this point. By such an interpretation, I mean a reading that treats the subject passages as exposing a philosophical temptation rather than as establishing a doctrine about an entity beyond the world. The question is not whether Wittgenstein may speak of limits. The question is what the reader is entitled to retain after such language has done its work. As Boongaling reports Diamond’s formulation, one may be tempted to preserve something “out there in reality” toward which metaphysical language was supposedly gesturing; Diamond calls this temptation “chickening out” (Boongaling 2020, 604).

The eye analogy does not authorize such a transition. It removes a demand for location, but the absence of a location is not evidence for an invisible source. Likewise, the distinction between psychological willing and ethical subject prevents value from being reduced to empirical facts, but it does not establish an object of metaphysical knowledge. A limit may guide clarification without becoming a thing discovered by reflection. This is the central difference between Hacker’s interpretation and a therapeutic one: not whether the self is empirical, but whether the non-empirical must be treated as metaphysically real.

TLP 6.54 gives the therapeutic interpretation its strongest support. Wittgenstein says that his propositions elucidate because whoever understands them eventually recognizes them as senseless and throws away the ladder after climbing through it. Only then does the reader see the world rightly (TLP 6.54). The passage does not prove that every sentence concerning the metaphysical subject is false. It does prevent such sentences from functioning as theoretical conclusions whose objects philosophy has established. The reader may be led to a limit, but is not licensed to populate the far side of it.

Boongaling complicates any automatic appeal to the ladder. Her criticism is directed at versions of resolute interpretation that identify throwing away the ladder with the end of philosophy; she develops a different account of Wittgensteinian naturalism instead (Boongaling 2020, 603–615). This matters because 6.54 does not interpret itself. Neither an ineffable metaphysics nor an effortless therapeutic closure follows from the metaphor without further argument. The ladder remains a pressure on the reader rather than a mechanical rule for choosing between interpretations.

The conclusion can therefore be both modest and firm. “I am my world” does not state that consciousness owns reality, since the world is independent of the empirical will. Nor does it establish a hidden metaphysical owner, since failure to locate the subject among facts does not entail the existence of a non-factual entity beyond them. The proposition exposes a demand for a final bearer of the world, then makes that demand difficult to satisfy. Its force lies in this difficulty rather than in a doctrine of possession.

The initial objection now returns in a transformed form. Other people, bodies, history, contingency, and suffering remain real; nothing in TLP 5.63 makes them private contents. The ethical and existential pressure behind the wish for an owner also remains. What the Tractatus does not secure is a theory capable of satisfying that wish. The “my” in “my world” names neither possession nor a discoverable subject; it marks the point at which the demand for a final owner of the world becomes philosophically unstable.

References

Boongaling, Pamela Ann J. “What Does It Mean to ‘Throw Away the Ladder’? A Reductio ad Absurdum Argument for Wittgenstein’s Naturalism in the TLP.” Principia 24, no. 3 (2020): 603–615.

Hacker, P. M. S. Insight and Illusion: Wittgenstein on Philosophy and the Metaphysics of Experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.

Pilch, Martin. “Ludwig Wittgenstein during the Brusilov Offensive in the Bukovina.” Digital presentation of Wittgenstein’s third war notebook, Ms 103, July 2023.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. With an introduction by Bertrand Russell. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1922.

Citation Note: All references to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are given by proposition number rather than page number. References to Wittgenstein’s wartime notebook Ms 103 are given by date of entry.

Today is the longest day of the year in northern Scandinavia. The night will not become fully dark. I sit at the kitchen table with the Tractatus because I have to write something. A cup of coffee sits beside the book. The red roses I bought a few days ago are beginning to bend in the vase. Across from me hangs a painting of the Buddha. The figure seems to be folding in on itself. Inside the book is a bookmark with Edvard Munch’s The Scream. When I open the book, I see Munch’s mouth before I see the page.

I read a few pages. Then I lose the thread. I heat the coffee again and return. Sometimes a sentence stays with me longer than I expect. Today, it is Wittgenstein’s: “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (1.1). I read it twice. A little later, another sentence stops me: “Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same” (1.21). By the time I move on, the coffee has gone cold.

Outside, people gather around the midsommarstång, flower crowns on their heads. They form circles and turn in the light that remains in the sky. The flowers, the music, the pole, and the moving bodies stand in a particular relation for a while. The circle holds, loosens, and forms again. This, too, is a fact in the world.

Philosophy feels like one of my closest companions. Books give me a kind of inward steadiness, and if I stay away from them for too long, I become restless. They do not put the world in order. They do not protect me from what is happening. Still, without them, some things become more difficult: to stay with a sentence, to see a connection, to return after losing the thread. On the table there is a book, coffee, roses, and Munch’s bookmark. On the wall, the Buddha continues to fold inward. For a while, this is enough to keep reading.

After a while, I put the Tractatus aside and take down an old Norstedts copy of Stig Dagerman’s Vårt behov av tröst. I open it near the middle and read: “And the silence, so full of the words that were never spoken.” I read the line once, then close the book. The coffee cup is still on the table. The roses have bent a little further.

On the other side of the kitchen, by the window, an old copy of Alfred Einstein’s Mozart lies beneath the orchid leaves. Beside the glass, a yellow flower is open. Above them hangs a small portrait of my mother, Leila, in green tones. Earlier in the book, Wittgenstein writes: “An atomic fact is a combination of objects” (2.01). On one side of the room, the Buddha’s eyes; on the other, Leila’s portrait. Between them are the books, the leaves, the pots, the table, and the late northern light.

The water moves, but the face does not answer.

At first, I thought the image was too calm. There was the blue face, the closed eyes, the mouth held in almost impossible balance. Around it, in the video, water moved slowly, while Eleni Karaindrou’s music from Eternity and a Day played in the background. Everything seemed arranged for stillness, tenderness, perhaps even surrender. And for that reason, I distrusted it. Images of serenity can be too easy. They can offer peace as a surface, a blue atmosphere in which the viewer is allowed to rest without being changed.

Add water to the face of the Buddha, and the danger becomes greater: the image may begin to feel profound before it has done anything. Perhaps I was not being addressed by the image at all. Perhaps the moving water was lending depth to a stillness that would otherwise remain decorative. Perhaps the whole arrangement was asking me to confuse mood with thought. This suspicion seemed necessary. Without it, the encounter would be too quick. I could have called the image serene, meditative, spiritual, beautiful, and moved on. But the longer I stayed with it, the less those words satisfied me. The calm did not simply receive me. It began to make me uneasy.

The first thing I could not move past was that the face did not look back. Its eyes were closed, but not in sleep, and not in indifference. They were closed in a way that removed the image from the ordinary exchange of looking. A face usually gives us something through the eyes. Even refusal has a gaze; even coldness recognizes the presence it refuses. Here, nothing was returned. I looked, but I was not met. At first this felt like distance. Then it began to feel more intimate than recognition, because the image did not reject me or turn away. It simply remained before me, untouched by my need to be seen.

Once I noticed that the blue face seemed indifferent to me, if it can be called indifference, my own need to be seen became impossible to ignore. It did not deny me, exactly; it simply did not turn toward me. I realized how much of looking is already a request: not only to see, but to be registered by what we see. The closed eyes refused this small economy of exchange. They gave me no answer, no comfort, no promise that I would be released from myself. And yet the refusal was not hostile. It did not close the image against me. It kept me there, in the discomfort of my own expectation.

The water complicated this discomfort. It moved while the face remained still. It gave duration to the image without disturbing its closedness. The surface of the water suggested passage, but the face did not pass with it. I had to ask whether I was responding to the face itself or to the atmosphere built around it. Was the image thinking through me, or was I merely submitting to a beautiful arrangement of color and motion? The question did not weaken the encounter. It made it more honest. Even if the water slowed my attention, the face itself still held something back.

It did not turn toward me. The blue around the figure gathered everything into a field of distance and attention. It did not merely decorate the face; it delayed my wish to possess it. The figure seemed near enough to affect me, but not near enough to be mastered. This distance is not emptiness. It is the space in which the image can remain other than my interpretation of it. If the face gave itself too easily, I could name it and be done with it. But it refuses that ease. It is clear enough to draw me in, but withheld enough to remain beyond my reach.

This is where the encounter becomes philosophical in the most intimate sense. I do not simply observe an object. Before I can explain it, I find myself already addressed by this blue face of the Buddha. It addresses me, but not by giving me a command. The image does not ask to be understood. It remains there quietly, without demand or persuasion. And yet its quietness is not neutral. It changes the position from which I look. What changes is not the image, but my relation to it. I become aware of myself as someone who seeks meaning, recognition, and perhaps a way beyond the narrowness of myself.

The image does not offer that way as an exit. It gives no method, no instruction, no path by which I might finally escape myself. Instead, it makes the narrowness perceptible. I stand before a face that appears free of restlessness, and my own restlessness becomes visible. Its calm does not calm me; it clarifies the movement in me that wants to be calmed. Shadow, surface, and water deepen this encounter without resolving it. They make the image feel shaped by time, but not explained by time. The face does not appear untouched. It seems to have passed through duration, through repetition, through being looked at and remembered.

Yet time here is not background information. It is felt in the stillness itself, in the contrast between the moving water and the unmoving face. The image is not outside time. It is a form in which time has grown quiet. For this reason, what stays with me is not a message, but a residue of attention. Something has been left there, not as a clue to be solved, but as a pressure that continues after looking. The image does not disappear when I turn away from it. It persists as a question whose force I cannot entirely locate.

Its silence, therefore, is not empty. It is not the absence of speech, but a form of contact with what remains. Meaning begins there, in the closed eyes, before it becomes an answer. The image says nothing, yet something in me begins to think. That thought does not begin as a concept. It begins as a disturbance, as the faint recognition that I have been touched before I have understood what touched me. In that first movement of thought, the image becomes more than something seen. It becomes a fragment of time, and also a mirror without reflection. It mirrors me not by giving me back my face, but by refusing to do so. It does not show me who I am. It shows me that I am asking to be shown.

There is something severe in this, but not cruel. The image does not abandon me. It keeps me company without resolving me. Its silence becomes shared, but the distance remains. The face stays closed, the eyes lowered, the blue deep. The water moves, but the face does not answer. And this brings me back to my first suspicion. Perhaps the image was too calm. But not because it offered an easy peace. It was too calm because it refused the drama by which I usually recognize myself. It would not mirror my unrest. It would not rescue me from it. It simply stayed there, still and blue, until the calm I distrusted became the very place where my unrest appeared. The image does not tell me who I am. It lets the question remain in me, alive. It is present before I know where it has touched me.

1. Sūrat al-Wāqi‘ah does not begin pleasantly. It begins in terror: an assault upon the earth. Before Paradise appears as a dreamlike realm, a promised land filled with wine, fruit, couches, houris, and ghilmān, God first takes the earth away from the human being. The surah opens with an event that admits no denial: “When that which is coming arrives, no one will be able to deny it has come” (al-Wāqi‘ah 56:1–2). The earth is shaken violently, the mountains are ground to powder, and they turn into scattered dust (56:4–6). The opening is neither a promise of peace nor an invitation to pure reflection. It is the first demolition of the dwelling-place. Before the flesh is rewarded or punished, it loses its shelter. The logic of the surah is founded on exposure: first the earth collapses; then the human being, stripped of world and ground, is relocated within a new economy of reward, torment, desire, and death. The Day of Resurrection is the story of a body dispossessed of its earthly home.

2. The language of Sūrat al-Wāqi‘ah is not explanatory. It produces dread. Before the body understands, it undergoes abandonment. The earth trembles, the mountain collapses, matter becomes dust, and the order of being is overturned. Meaning here is inseparable from terror. Fear is not first produced as an argument; it is produced as an experience. Before judgment, the body is torn away from its former world. Yet this does not mean that the new world is immaterial. In this surah, the afterlife is not detached from matter. Earth, stone, dust, water, food, fire, shade, thirst, hunger, enjoyment, pain, and torture all return. What comes after death is not outside the history of the body. It is the same fears, lacks, appetites, and dependencies, reorganized within another order. The body is not liberated from the world after death. Rather, the world itself assumes another form of judgment.

3. Naming turns unmapped terror in a dust-filled space into a topography of judgment. After the earthquake and the destructive chaos, naming re-establishes order: “then you will be sorted into three classes” (56:7). This triad is not merely an ethical classification. It is the reassigning of coordinates to bodies. Those on the Right, Those on the Left, and the Forerunners are three names for three locations. Language places terrified bodies on the stage of Resurrection: on one side, the blessed; on the other, the tormented; and before them, the Forerunners. Each position has its own nature and destiny, determined within the order of naming. To name is to turn chaos into a map, and a map makes the management of bodies possible. The text first destroys the earth, then erects upon its ruins a feast of enjoyment and a theater of punishment. After destruction, we encounter a new order.

4. I call this post-collapse order in Sūrat al-Wāqi‘ah “erotopia.” Erotopia is an order in which pleasure and pain are experienced in unrestrained form. The erotopic space cannot be reduced to a Paradise of sexual pleasure, though sexuality is one of its most explicit and charged elements. It is a world that frees the body from labor, thirst, hunger, aging, illness, decay, and death, while remaining intensely material, affective, and sensuous. It is not an abstract, disembodied, or numb space incapable of registering delight and pain. The desiring male body, the flawless female body, the serving body, the tormented body, and the dying body each receives a place within this arrangement. Sūrat al-Wāqi‘ah does not remove these bodies from history. It rearranges them within the fantasies, hierarchies, and bodily desires of its early Arabian world. Pleasure is purified of sin, but it is not placed outside judgment. Sacred desire does not stand beyond judgment; it is produced within it.

5. The ideal world of Sūrat al-Wāqi‘ah is not a city. It is the gathering of pleasure-seeking bodies in a sea of enjoyment, an erotopic space, and precisely for this reason it differs from utopia. In utopia, the problem is usually the organization of the city, law, property, justice, or collective liberation. In erotopia, the problem is the organization of appetite, access, service, and suffering: the admission of some bodies into inexhaustible enjoyment and the exposure of others to inexhaustible torment. Sūrat al-Wāqi‘ah does not build a political city, a city of justice, or a rational island. It would be mistaken to read this image of the afterlife as a negation of the earth. The boundary between this world and the next becomes thin and permeable, yet bodies do not vanish into abstraction. After the dust settles, they gather again in an order of earthly rewards: repose, abundance, service, ownership, and access to bodily blessings on an immeasurable scale.

6. Although the narrative is apocalyptic, it remains profoundly earthly. Paradise is not outside the world. It is the compensation of suppressed and denied pleasures, the projection of an earthly erotopic space. Those brought near recline on richly woven couches, face to face (56:15–16). The scene of enjoyment is familiar. The couches are earthly objects, but intensified and transfigured. Reclining securely upon them is the opposite of falling. Facing one another is the opposite of dispersion and exposure. The body that at the beginning of the surah had lost the earth now receives an erotopic dwelling in Paradise: a space in which the historical body, tired, thirsty, hungry, aged, deprived, and wounded by pain, attains rest, abundance, and lasting delight.

7. The first operation of this erotopic order is the organization of service. The Qur’anic Paradise is far more earthly than exegetes and theologians have usually allowed themselves, or believers, to admit. Its pleasures are not purely spiritual, intuitive, or disembodied. Around the reclining blessed move other bodies, and these bodies are not incidental. “Everlasting youths will go round among them with glasses, flagons, and cups” from a flowing spring (56:17–18). This is not simply an abundance of objects. It is an arrangement of labor, movement, beauty, and access. The ghilmān do not merely serve; they adorn the scene of enjoyment. They have no time, do not tire, do not age, and are not worn down by labor. In historical life, service belongs to work, exhaustion, and bodily decline. In Paradise, service is detached from fatigue and transformed into spectacle. Some bodies recline; others circulate. Some drink; others bring the cup. Heavenly enjoyment begins with an unequal distribution of position.

8. The second operation is the purification of appetite from consequence. Paradise is, in a double sense, more bodily than the present world. Eating and drinking remain, but they are freed from harm, scarcity, and fatigue. There is wine, but it is a transcendent wine, “a pure drink that causes no headache or intoxication” (56:18–19). There is fruit, meat, choice, and desire: “any fruit they choose” and “the meat of any bird they like” (56:20–21). The earthly consequences of pleasure have been removed. Wine remains, but the ruin of drunkenness disappears. Eating remains, but labor and scarcity are erased. Sexual desire remains, but anxiety, danger, illness, sin, and finitude no longer enter it. Paradise does not deny the body. It reconstructs it. It promises a body without consequence: a body that wants, drinks, eats, reclines, and enjoys without being trapped in the historical cost of wanting.

9. The third operation is the erotic transformation of objects. In Paradise, things are separated from ordinary use and inserted into a material culture of enjoyment. Water is no longer merely the relief of thirst; it becomes the flow of endless access. Fruit is no longer merely food; it becomes the abolition of prohibition. Shade is no longer merely shelter; it belongs to a body no longer exposed to exhaustion. The couch is no longer merely an object for sitting; it becomes the material form of repose. Wine is no longer merely a drink; it becomes pleasure purified of harm. In historical life, these objects are tied to scarcity, labor, the tired body, and finite time. In Paradise, they are detached from that history and reassembled as signs of sacred enjoyment. Paradise is not a list of blessings. It is an erotopic and dreamlike space in which pleasure flows out of earthly matter. Once objects become signs of enjoyment in this way, Paradise is no longer only a place of reward. It becomes the sacred experienced through language.

10. Despite its terrifying beginning, Sūrat al-Wāqi‘ah depicts a dazzlingly sumptuous world. It is a kind of theological Kāmasūtra, an erotopia. Eroticism appears in different parts of the Qur’an, but this surah gives one of the most compressed Qur’anic formulations of eroticism: the fantasy of endless pleasure on the part of an earthly and mortal being, translated into the language of judgment. Its formula is clear: the lifting of limits from pleasure and the experience of desire in unrestrained form. We are not dealing here with a lyrical work such as the Song of Songs, where the voices of lover and beloved, bodily longing, fidelity, absence, searching, and the name of the beloved remain present. Sūrat al-Wāqi‘ah moves beyond the boundaries of love, covenant, and fidelity, and enters the realm of limitless enjoyment: pleasure without name, without history, without memory, without pain, without waiting. The human being is not freed from desire. What is multiplied is not desire in the abstract, but the male subject’s appetite for pleasure. It becomes so boundless that the thirst to satisfy it cannot be quenched in the real world. It can be satisfied only in the sacred world, in the glittering court of God.

11. It would be a mistake to read the space depicted in this surah as a transhuman, ahistorical image detached from sexual imagination and from the experience of pain and pleasure. The erotopia of al-Wāqi‘ah must be read within the historical horizon of the Qur’anic sexual imagination of Muhammad’s prophetic discourse and the early Islamic world. This does not mean reducing the text to the private psychology of Muhammad. It means reading the surah as a prophetic discourse in which revelation, language, social hierarchy, bodily lack, and male desire are fused into a sacred image of the afterlife. In this image, the male body is bound to vulnerability, thirst, hunger, service, woman, youth, abundance, ownership, and the material conditions of desert and tent life. Together, these elements draw the erotopic space. The sexual images of Qur’anic Paradise cannot be reduced to purely spiritual symbols. Body, gender, desire, and power participate in the production of their meaning. What becomes eternal in Paradise, therefore, is not only pleasure. It is also a historical image of the body and of the ideal space imagined and desired within that early Arabian world.

12. The houris are the most concentrated embodiment of desire in the female body. Abdel Haleem renders the relevant phrase as “beautiful companions like hidden pearls” (56:22–23), while other translations make the gendered image more explicit as fair maidens with wide, lovely eyes. The critical point is not merely lexical. The historical and exegetical life of the image has overwhelmingly made the houri a female body prepared for male delight. Before the houris appear, the text has already built the erotopic space and prepared the instruments of enjoyment: couches, wine, cups, ghilmān, fruit, meat, water, and shade. Then the pleasure dispersed throughout the scene is condensed in the female body. In later verses, this body is made anew: “We have specially created” them, making them “virginal, loving, of matching age” (56:35–37). This is not a historical woman. It is a body separated from aging, childbirth, decay, memory, vulnerability, and time. It is untouched by weather, history, and social reciprocity. The female figure in this image is not simply beautiful. She is made accessible, renewed, pastless, passive, and deprived of independent desire. The houri is not a natural body. She is a body produced by religious erotopic language and then amplified by a long history of male interpretation. In this image, woman appears not as a subject of history, but as the object through which male enjoyment imagines its own eternity.

13. The beauty of Paradise does not solve the problem of social inequality. It intensifies it. The issue is not that women are absent from the heavenly scene; it is that their presence is organized through male access, male reward, and male fantasy. In the late antique and early Islamic worlds evoked by this imagery, women did not enter symbolic and legal life with equal claims, and the paradisal image does not suspend that inequality. It transfigures it. We face many unresolved questions within this erotopic world: Who desires, and who is desired? Who stands at the center of enjoyment, and who circulates around him? Who drinks, and who brings the cup? Who receives reward, and who is offered as reward? In Paradise, bodies do not enter the scene with equal claims. Some enjoy. Some are prepared. Some bring. Some are brought. Some demand. Some are displayed. This unequal distribution exposes the secret of promised pleasure: the transcendent appears not outside domination, but within its most precise arrangement. Paradise does not free the body from the history of hierarchy; it places the body as a sign within a table of reward, service, access, and male ownership.

14. The Paradise of Those on the Right is an exemplary erotopia. They dwell “amid thornless lote trees and clustered acacia,” with “spreading shade,” “constantly flowing water,” and “abundant fruits,” “unfailing, unforbidden” (56:28–33). If the Paradise of those brought near is the architecture of the reclining body, the Paradise of Those on the Right is the nature of abundance. This nature has no season, no scarcity, no prohibition, and no labor. There is water, but no thirst. There is fruit, but no toil. There is shade, but no exhausting heat. Nature here has no independent law of its own. It is an apparatus for supplying the enjoyment of Those on the Right. The earth has been purified of its historical suffering and transformed into erotopia. Abundance is the naturalized form of reward.

15. Inequality also has a topographical form. Hell is anti-erotopia: the inverted image of the world promised by Paradise. The same materials that produce enjoyment in Paradise become instruments of torment in Hell. The experience of eternal eroticism is reversed into eternal torture. Water, food, shade, drinking, and the body are present in both realms. The difference is not in matter, but in the arrangement and function of matter. Paradise has constantly flowing water; Hell has scalding water. Paradise has spreading shade; Hell has “the shadow of black smoke, neither cool nor refreshing” (56:42–44). Paradise has fruit and meat; Hell has the bitter tree of Zaqqum. Its inhabitants fill their bellies with it and “drink scalding water,” lapping it “like thirsty camels” (56:52–55). In this surah, the afterlife does not create two immaterial worlds. It creates two opposed ways of deploying earthly materials: one for enjoyment, the other for erosion.

16. The tormented body is a body trapped in its own needs. In Hell, the body is not tortured only from the outside. It is tortured through the very needs that make life possible. It is hungry, and its food is Zaqqum. It is thirsty, and its drink is scalding water. It needs shade, and its shade is suffocating smoke. This body still has desire. It still wants. It is still driven toward the satisfaction of need. But every demand turns against it and deepens its failure. In Paradise, wanting becomes access. In Hell, wanting becomes compulsion. Hell does not destroy appetite. It keeps it unanswered, humiliated, and turned against the flesh. Perhaps this is because erotopia does not stand alone: by a single subtraction, it produces its own opposite. Anti-erotopia is precisely this: the body remains, but against itself.

17. The body, even when imagined as eternal, remains proof of human weakness and limitation. After depicting reward and torment, the surah turns from heavenly consumption back to the sources of production and survival: semen, cultivation, water, and fire (56:57–74). The text asks, again and again, who creates the emitted semen, who makes the crop grow, who brings water down from the clouds, and who brings forth the tree from which fire is kindled. These questions turn the body into a document of dependence. Human beings are present at the level of use and consumption, but absent and powerless at the level of origin. Here the text speaks of the foundations of historical life: reproduction, agriculture, water, and fire. After imagining abundance without labor, the surah returns to the realm of toil, production, and survival in order to show that from the beginning the body is founded upon what it does not own.

18. The “throat” in the verse “when the soul of the dying man reaches the throat” is not merely the name of an organ (56:83–84). It is the limit of life. It names the moment when the human being still has the body before his eyes, but no longer has possession of it. The throat is the last boundary of human ownership. It is the place where the lamp of life begins to go out. The body is still there, but it is drawing its final breaths. It is seen; relatives gather around it; eyes are fixed upon it, yet life has slipped beyond everyone’s reach. The surah asks why, when the soul reaches the throat and others look on, they cannot bring it back if they are truthful (56:84–87). The throat is a threshold, between breath and the cutting off of breath, voice and silence, presence and departure. In this moment, the body is neither enjoying nor being tormented. It is a body in the process of being lost. The human being stands before his own body, but is no longer its owner. In this surah, death takes up residence at a point in the body and reveals itself from there. The throat is the dwelling-place of death, the scene in which human beings witness the end of their ownership over the body.

19. The central subject of this surah is the body. The body is the site where sexual desire is converted into certainty. It is both the aim and the object of erotopia. The surah says: “This is the certain truth” (56:95). This sentence comes only after an entire world has been constructed: the shaking of the earth, the division of bodies, couches, wine, ghilmān, houris, flowing water, fruit, Zaqqum, scalding water, semen, cultivation, water, fire, and the throat. Certainty here is not merely a mental proposition. It is the result of the body’s passage through the scenes built by the text. The body experiences truth not as concept, but as fear, thirst, wanting, drinking, eating, reclining, burning, and dying. Sexual desire is the general name of the wanting body, not merely one particular act. Al-Wāqi‘ah is the most condensed form of the embodiment of promise: the thing that remains at the end of the world—the body. In erotopia, the body is both truth and certainty. It stabilizes the imaginary world upon which the surah impresses its most transcendent erotopic seal: “This is the certain truth.”

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, Qur’anic citations from Sūrat al-Wāqi‘ah follow M. A. S. Abdel Haleem’s translation, The Qur’an: A New Translation. Verse references without quotation marks indicate paraphrase or critical compression. “Richly woven couches” paraphrases 56:15–16, drawing on Abdel Haleem’s “couches of well-woven cloth” while foregrounding the scene’s material splendour. The terms houris, ghilmān, and Zaqqum are retained for their historical, exegetical, and gendered force where modern English renderings may soften the bodily and sexual imagery of the Qur’anic afterlife.

Before the Name Falls

If they ever ask what the saddest scene is, one should say: it is a name called after the one meant to answer it is gone. The name still travels toward him, but there is no one left on the far side of the voice. Grief begins there: in a call that still believes in return, in a world from which the answer has withdrawn.

A name first reaches us in another’s voice. Someone calls, and we come back from our darkness toward ourselves. While an answer is still possible, a name is more than sound. It is a path laid from one life to another.

But sometimes the name arrives too late. The voice rises, stays for a moment in the air, and finds no face. The one who should have awakened inside it is no longer there. Only his empty shape remains: a room without a lamp, a city without a lake, a station where every train leaves for somewhere else.

What follows is made of that late voice: fragments of a name left hanging in the air, unable to reach a face, an answer, or a return. The name remains, but the answer is gone. The world can still repeat it, in songs, in loudspeakers, in the air after departure. But each time the voice comes back, it brings nothing with it. It only falls, and goes on falling in the dark.

1. The Voice That Died: If they ever ask what the saddest sight is, I will say: it is a name called for the last time, when the one who bore it is already dead. The voice waits for an answer, but none comes. For a moment it remains in the air, as if the world itself might still reply. Then it falls, and dies there too.

That voice was mine.

2. The Self Without Her: The poem says: “Return to yourself.” I returned, and found myself to be the emptiest place in the world. A house and a city, at least, can keep their memories. But the self without her cannot keep even memory.

3. A City with a Bent Neck: The city, like a swan, had wound its neck around itself, so it would not forget that it once had a lake. But the lake had dried up, and the swan remained only in the curve of the city’s body. What remained was a city with a bent neck, calling to the vanished water with dry lips.

4. The Swan That Held Itself: If one says, “The swan has taken itself in its arms,” the sentence becomes beautiful, because the swan still has a lake. But a swan without a lake cannot embrace itself. It can only bend deeper into its own shape. The neck turns inward; the circle tightens. What looks like tenderness from afar becomes pressure at the center. Only a body closing around the place where water once was.

5. Inside the Empty Self: I returned to myself and found no door, no room, no lamp left burning. What I had called a self was only the shape her absence had left behind. I moved through it carefully, as one moves through a house after a death. Nothing answered. Nothing refused me. The emptiness was complete.

6. The Name That Did Not Return: I remained inside myself, like a room after the last lamp had gone out. Nothing had been taken, yet nothing remained. Even the silence seemed to belong to someone else. I called my own name once, softly, and waited. But it did not return.

7. At the Station: I stood on the platform and waited, though the waiting had outlived its reason. The loudspeaker named other places, other departures, but never mine. Trains arrived and left with a certainty I no longer had. When one finally stopped before me, I did not move. I was not waiting for a train. I was waiting for what no loudspeaker could name.

8. A Lake of Names: Her name was repeated in every song. A lake of names opened in the air, and each one sounded like a memory I could no longer keep. People sang without knowing whom they were calling. I listened and heard her everywhere, but never as an answer. The world could still carry her name. I could not.

9. After the Songs: After the songs ended, her name stayed in the air for a while, like dust in a room after someone has left. I listened until even that began to fade. The world had said her name many times, but none of its voices had reached me. When the last song was gone, I heard something beneath it. Not silence. Something falling.

10. The Body Without a Name: After the voice, the body remained. But it no longer belonged to the name. To call it was to hear only the failure of calling.

The body had no name.
The name had no body.

11. The Sound of Falling: When a voice falls, it does not break, because breaking has an end. It remains in the dark, like a stone falling so long that falling becomes its only home. Each day, I hear the sound of myself falling. It goes on where memory stops. It is the only sound that tells me I am still here. And because I hear it, I know I have not yet disappeared.

Only the falling remains

There are names the world can still say after the one who answered them is gone. They pass through songs, through loudspeakers, through the mouths of strangers. They rise for a moment, almost reaching a face, then remain in the air, as if the path back to the one they sought had closed behind them.

I thought memory might carry the name back. But memory was not a lake. It gave no water back to the swan, no reflection back to the city, no home to the station. It only brought the past close enough to hurt, and left it there, unable to answer.

I remained inside the empty self, beside the dried lake, on the platform, with the sound still moving after its answer had withdrawn. I listened until even listening seemed to fall with it. Nothing returned from the far side of the voice. Only the falling remains.

A body enters surgery in order to receive another form. This simple event belongs to a long medical history: plastic surgery as the art of restoring, reshaping, and reorganizing bodily form. The field cannot be reduced to cosmetic enhancement. Its history is tied to damaged faces, injured limbs, lost tissue, impaired function, and the attempt to return a person to recognizability and social presence (Santoni-Rugiu & Sykes, 2007). In this older horizon, surgery answers a practical and ethical need: the restoration of form, function, dignity, and participation in a shared world.

Plastic surgery is therefore not necessarily Plastopia. Nor should the human claim to transform one’s own body be too quickly demonized. Bodily alteration may be therapeutic, reconstructive, expressive, reparative, or ethically legitimate. Plastopia is used here as an analytic name, not as a medical diagnosis or a moral condemnation of aesthetic surgery as such. It begins only when the freedom to modify the body is captured by a circular regime of self-insufficiency. Plastopia is the condition in which the body becomes the unfinished proof of an insufficient self.

The term Plastopia has appeared earlier in design, artistic, and ecological contexts. In 2005, it was associated with Karim Rashid’s idea of a “plastic utopia.” In 2016, Elizabeth Babyn used Plastopia for an artistic project concerned with plastic, waste, mutation, and artificial landscapes. In 2023, the term appeared in ecological writing to describe a world saturated by plastic. These earlier uses matter because the word already carries a tension between utopian promise and material excess. In this essay, however, I use Plastopia differently: not as a utopia of plastic material, but as the circular utopia of plastic surgery, in which the promise of correction returns as renewed lack.

This distinction matters. In reconstructive surgery, alteration is often oriented toward restoration: function, recognizability, dignity, and social participation. In aesthetic surgery, the same surgical capacity enters another field. The ordinary body, no longer necessarily damaged, becomes available for improvement. The passage from reconstruction to aesthetic refinement is not a clean break, but a redirection of surgical knowledge: techniques once organized around repair become available for optimization (Akrawe et al., 2025). What changes is not only the medical object, but the philosophical status of appearance itself. Appearance becomes the site where possibility, lack, and identity meet.

This shift from restoration to refinement produces what may be called Plastopia. The techniques of repair become techniques of aspiration. A person may now enter surgery not because a form has been lost, but because an existing appearance is experienced as insufficient. The lack is no longer necessarily anatomical. It emerges in the relation between the self and its visible form. A nose, an eyelid, a jawline, a fold of skin, or the tiredness of a face begins to carry a question larger than itself. Appearance begins to absorb the question of identity.

Plastopia is a utopia displaced onto bodily form. Ernst Bloch’s language of the “not-yet” helps name the deeper structure at work here: human beings do not live only in what already exists; they live toward what has not yet arrived (Bloch, 1954–1959/1986). In Plastopia, however, this not-yet is narrowed. It no longer first names a world still to be transformed. It begins to name a face not yet right, skin not yet smooth enough, a body not yet acceptable, an image not yet complete. The future is brought close, but it is brought close as a possible correction of the self’s visible form.

The history of facial aesthetic surgery makes this displacement especially visible. Rhinoplasty, blepharoplasty, facelifts, facial contouring, injectables, and skin-tightening procedures do not merely alter isolated features; they reorganize the face as a technical field (Akrawe et al., 2025). The nose can be projected or reduced, eyelids lifted, skin tightened or filled, volume redistributed, proportions recalculated. In this technical imagination, the face is no longer only the site of identity. It becomes an editable surface, exposed to comparison, planning, and repetition.

Contemporary technologies intensify this logic. Photography, before-and-after imaging, simulation, three-dimensional planning, virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence make the possible face visible before it exists (Akrawe et al., 2025). These tools may improve consultation, planning, safety, and communication between surgeon and patient. Yet they also reshape desire. In the consultation room, a future appearance can appear before the operation has begun: rotated on a screen, measured, adjusted, compared, and projected. The image precedes the incision. The projected result becomes a standard against which the present is judged.

Here the possible is no longer an abstract fantasy. It appears as an image, a model, or a plan. Once visible, it silently evaluates actuality. The person has not yet undergone surgery, but the old face has already been placed beside its promised successor. This is one of Plastopia’s most subtle operations: it does not merely promise transformation after intervention; it reorganizes the present before intervention. The current body is made to appear late in relation to its own projected future.

This is why advertising and image culture matter. Dissatisfaction is not discovered alone before the mirror. The mirror has already been educated by clinic galleries, social media, filters, influencer images, before-and-after photographs, and commercial promises of transformation. Advertising does not need to say: you are ugly. Its operation is more delicate. It displays a possible version of the self and lets the existing self fall short. The “before” image becomes accusation; the “after” image becomes promise. Between them opens the gap in which dissatisfaction is organized.

The before-and-after image is therefore not a neutral medical document. It is a small narrative of conversion. It suggests that a deficient form can become a fulfilled form, that lack can become confidence, that dissatisfaction can become identity. Yet this narrative often works by making the “before” body retrospectively inadequate: the body one had becomes the body one should already have surpassed. Plastopia does not merely offer an image of improvement; it teaches the subject to read the present from the standpoint of its possible replacement.

Plastopia is not simply a medical phenomenon. It is a visual, technical, affective, and economic regime. It organizes perception before the scalpel touches the skin. The market does not merely answer dissatisfaction; it gives it a catalogue of solutions. A slight asymmetry becomes a consultation. A tired eyelid becomes a procedure. A line on the face becomes a treatment plan, a price, a recovery time, a photograph, and a promise. The clinic becomes a place where unease is translated into options. Insufficiency becomes commercially addressable.

The scale of this regime is not merely speculative; recent global surveys suggest the large-scale normalization of aesthetic modification, including non-surgical and minimally invasive procedures (ISAPS, 2025). Yet scale alone does not explain distribution. Because images circulate publicly, their pressures are not distributed equally. Plastopia is intensified by gender, age, class, racialized beauty standards, and the visual economies of social media. Some bodies are more aggressively exposed to correction; some faces are more quickly read as excessive, aging, deficient, or out of place. The mirror is never simply private. It is structured by norms, markets, technologies, and histories of visibility.

The present essay cannot fully develop these differences, but any account of Plastopia that ignores them risks treating an unequal regime as a universal experience. What appears as intimate dissatisfaction may already carry the weight of collective standards. The private feeling of inadequacy can be the interior form of a social demand. Plastopia should therefore not be reduced to vanity or psychological fragility. It is better understood as a field in which desire, technique, market, image, and social norm meet at the surface of the body.

Bloch’s philosophy of hope clarifies the depth of this field. For Bloch, hope is not decorative optimism or a private mood. It is an orientation toward possibility, a movement by which the present opens to what it has not yet become. His account of daydreams, anticipatory consciousness, and the “not-yet-conscious” gives philosophical dignity to the unfinished character of existence (Bloch, 1954–1959/1986). What he calls the “utopian function” discloses unrealized tendencies within life itself. Hope, in this sense, is a critical relation to the unfinished world.

In Plastopia, however, this utopian function is privatized and reduced. The subject no longer says: the world is not yet transformed. The subject says: my body is not yet adequate. The unfinished character of existence is transferred to the modifiable surface. Plastopia is the privatization of utopian hope through the body. What once belonged to the transformation of life is reduced to the correction of appearance. In Bloch, the not-yet opens the present toward a transformed world; in Plastopia, it encloses the subject within repeatable bodily correction.

This reduction also changes the question of identity. The subtitle asks: Who am I? In Plastopia, this question is displaced. It is no longer answered primarily through memory, action, relation, language, or world, but through the future form of the body. “Who am I?” becomes “What must my body still become in order for me to be enough?” This is the deepest philosophical displacement proposed here. The self no longer seeks expression through the body alone; it asks visible form to solve the problem of selfhood.

The word “plastic” is decisive here. Its etymological history belongs to the semantic field of forming and moulding: what is plastic is what can be shaped, formed, or given another configuration (Macionis, 2018). Plastic surgery therefore carries within its very name a broader imagination of formability. In reconstruction, formability serves repair. In Plastopia, however, formability becomes open-ended: because the body can be shaped, it becomes difficult to regard any given form as final. The body is held in suspense before its possible versions.

The corrected body may indeed bring relief. This must be acknowledged. A person may feel more confident, less exposed, more at home in the mirror, or less alienated from appearance. A serious critique cannot begin by denying the reality of such relief. But relief is not the same as reconciliation. Relief may quiet the symptom without resolving the structure that produced the wound. It belongs to a moment in which the body seems to coincide with the desired image. This coincidence remains fragile because the image itself is mobile. Once one image is reached, another becomes available. Plastopia does not destroy satisfaction immediately; it shortens its duration.

After correction, the gaze returns. But it does not return unchanged. It has learned angles, asymmetries, proportions, procedural names, recovery times, risks, prices, and possible futures. The subject returns to the mirror not only with a changed feature, but with a newly trained eye. The face is now examined from the side, under different light, through photographs, zoomed images, and comparisons with the promised result. The first dissatisfaction may have been vague; the later dissatisfaction becomes precise. The defect has a name, a measurement, a specialist, a procedure, and a cost.

The phenomenological distinction between Körper and Leib clarifies this instability. Aesthetic surgery acts upon the Körper: the anatomical body as object, visible, measurable, and technically available. But dissatisfaction may return through the Leib: the lived body, the body as felt from within, exposed to comparison, shame, desire, memory, and judgment (Di Stefano, 2017). This is why a technically successful operation may not become an existential reconciliation. The anatomical surface changes, but the lived relation may remain unsettled.

The same instability appears in the assumption that the body is a sum of parts. Critical discussions of aesthetic surgery have questioned the idea that beauty results from adding beautiful elements together (Di Stefano, 2017). Plastopia depends, at least in part, on this fragmented logic. A nose, eyelid, jawline, wrinkle, fold, or volume loss can become separable as a problem and attachable to a procedure. But the subject does not live the body as a list of parts. The subject lives it as a field of being-seen. Correcting a feature may therefore sharpen, rather than resolve, the whole relation to appearance.

This produces a specific form of disappointment. It is not the disappointment of receiving nothing. It is the disappointment that follows real but incomplete fulfilment. Davidson’s reading of Bloch is useful here: disappointment need not simply cancel hope; it can make hope more concrete, lucid, and critical (Davidson, 2021). In Plastopia, however, disappointment is rarely transformed into critique of the regime that produces insufficiency. It is recycled into another demand. Where Blochian disappointment may radicalize hope, Plastopian disappointment tends to commercialize it. The failed promise is not abandoned. It is renewed in the form of another purchasable correction.

Plastopia moves from dissatisfaction to correction, from correction to temporary relief, from relief to sharpened scrutiny, from scrutiny to new lack, and from new lack back to dissatisfaction. Each turn may appear as progress: a better body, a younger face, a more harmonious profile, a more acceptable surface. Yet the movement does not arrive. It circles. This is why Plastopia may be understood as a world-picture rather than a surgical procedure. It organizes the self around an image that remains always ahead. The body becomes the local territory where utopia is pursued after larger horizons of transformation have withdrawn.

The problem, then, is not bodily change itself. Human beings have always changed bodies through clothing, medicine, ritual, ornament, discipline, healing, surgery, and art. The problem begins when such change is asked to answer the question of selfhood without remainder. Plastopia takes the legitimate freedom to alter the body and submits it to a closed loop: if the self is not enough, the visible form must change; if the changed form is still not enough, another alteration is required. What should have remained one possibility among others becomes an obligation of the self. Existential unease is translated into technical adjustment, again and again.

Plastic surgery is not necessarily Plastopia. It becomes Plastopian only when formability turns into permanent incompletion, when the not-yet no longer opens the world but attaches itself to the face, the skin, the profile, the measurable surface. In that moment, the body is no longer simply changed; it is made responsible for redeeming the self. Relief may arrive, but it remains fragile, because the structure of lack has not disappeared. The promise has been fulfilled only enough to be renewed. The body is altered, yet the lived relation to the body remains exposed to the same question.

Plastopia begins when the possibility of form becomes the obligation of further form. Plastopia may initially appear as Pygmalion’s dream of perfect form, but it reveals itself as an Ouroboric movement in which each achieved form awakens the desire for another. What begins as a project of becoming enough returns as a deeper experience of not being enough. Thus, the question “Who am I?” returns as “What must still be corrected?”

Plastopia is the return of lack in the form of correction.

Note on Sources

Sources used in this essay: Paolo Santoni-Rugiu and Philip J. Sykes, A History of Plastic Surgery (2007); Silvy C. Akrawe, Swetha Reddy, Aamir Siddiqui, and Vigen B. Darian, “The Evolution of Facial Aesthetic Surgery: Historical Perspectives and Modern Innovations” (2025); Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (1954–1959; English translation 1986); Joe Davidson, “A Dash of Pessimism? Ernst Bloch, Radical Disappointment and the Militant Excavation of Hope” (2021); Valdas Macionis, “History of Plastic Surgery: Art, Philosophy, and Rhinoplasty” (2018); and Nicola Di Stefano, “The Idea of Beauty and Its Biases: Critical Notes on the Aesthetics of Plastic Surgery” (2017).

The statistical reference to the contemporary scale of aesthetic procedures is based on the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery’s 2024 global survey, released in 2025, which reports tens of millions of aesthetic procedures worldwide, including large numbers of surgical and non-surgical procedures. These statistics are used only to indicate the material scale of the contemporary aesthetic field, not to prove the concept of Plastopia.

Doubt never grows old because certainty has a short life. It ages quickly, loses its authority, and is finally absorbed into the archive of exhausted certainties. Doctrines lose their force; concepts become scholastic; gods become objects of historical explanation; certainties become institutions defending what they can no longer justify. What once appeared as necessity becomes custom. What once spoke as truth becomes tradition.

Doubt survives where certainty decays. It does not survive because it is pure, timeless, or untouched by history. It survives by undergoing transformation. It returns in different epochs with different targets, disciplines, risks, and limits. Its youth is therefore not innocence, but renewal: the capacity to appear wherever thought has become too obedient to its inheritance. For this reason, doubt is not one doctrine among doctrines. It is the recurrent pressure by which every claim to certainty is forced to disclose the conditions of its authority.

Doubt is a way of life that remains young. It does not merely react to the present; it stands a few steps ahead of consciousness, in the region of expectation and dream. It dwells in uncertainty, not as in a void, but as in a space where a wide window opens toward the future. Doubt is dreamlike not because it abandons reality, but because it refuses to let reality close upon itself as necessity. It keeps open the interval between what is given and what may yet be thought.

This is the sense in which doubt may be said to have an accent. The term is metaphorical. It does not mean pronunciation, identity, or biographical origin. It means that doubt is never a purely abstract act performed by a disembodied intellect. It occurs within a form of life. It has a position, a background, an address, and a practical force. A doubt is not exhausted by the proposition it questions; it also belongs to a scene in which questioning has consequences.

The history of philosophy need not be rehearsed as a chronology of doubt. Four forms are enough to show its internal transformations: Socratic ignorance, Pyrrhonian suspension, Cartesian method, and Wittgensteinian grammar. Each names not merely a philosophical position, but a different way in which certainty is interrupted, delayed, reconstructed, or made intelligible.

Socratic doubt has the accent of conscious ignorance. Its force lies not in knowing more than others, but in refusing to imitate knowledge where there is none. Socrates interrupts the reflex by which human beings answer too quickly when asked about justice, courage, piety, virtue, or the good. His “I do not know” is not mere absence. It is a discipline of judgment: restraint imposed on the desire to know too quickly.

Pyrrhonian doubt has the accent of suspension. It does not replace one certainty with another. It places opposing arguments in balance and withholds assent where no final ground is available. This form of doubt does not aim to found knowledge, but to loosen the compulsion toward final judgment. Its philosophical importance lies in showing that doubt may be a practice of restraint rather than a method of conquest.

Cartesian doubt has the accent of method. It doubts in order to found. Sense, body, memory, world, and inherited belief are exposed to suspicion so that one indubitable point may remain. It enters uncertainty in order to leave uncertainty behind. Its direction is constructive. It is not satisfied with doubt as a condition; it turns doubt into a passage toward foundation, using doubt in the service of certainty.

Wittgensteinian doubt has the accent of grammar. It asks what must already be in place for doubting to make sense. Can everything be doubted at once? Can one doubt the ground at every step and still understand what walking is? Doubt requires practices of trust, correction, memory, response, instruction, and continuation. It presupposes language-games and forms of life. A doubt that abolishes every background does not become more radical; it becomes unintelligible.

These examples show the central point: doubt does not possess a single philosophical identity. It may appear as conscious ignorance, suspension, method, or grammatical clarification. It may resist knowledge, delay judgment, prepare a foundation, or examine the conditions that make questioning possible. Its youth lies in this plurality of functions. Doubt returns wherever certainty has become too old to remember what sustains it.

What is true of doubt in philosophy is also true of doubt in ordinary life: its meaning depends on the form of life in which it acts. Doubt is not only a relation between a mind and a proposition. It is also a practical act within a world of bodies, institutions, wounds, memories, and power. The same sentence may perform different acts. “Are you sure?” may be a request for clarification, a gesture of care, an act of domination, a legal test, a medical dismissal, or a strategy of humiliation.

The judge’s doubt about the testimony of the wounded is not the same as the wounded person’s doubt about the justice of the court. The doctor’s doubt about the patient’s pain is not the same as the patient’s doubt about medical authority. The colonizer’s doubt about the memory of the colonized is not the same as the colonized person’s doubt about official history. These differences concern position, risk, credibility, power, and recognition.

Doubt must not be romanticized. It remains young, but youth is not innocence. Doubt may expose false certainty, but it may also protect evasion. It may open inquiry, but it may also delay responsibility. It may challenge power, but it may also serve power by rendering another’s suffering uncertain. Negation is not rigor by itself, and suspicion is not courage by itself.

For this reason, doubt must itself become an object of doubt. A philosophy that merely celebrates doubt remains incomplete. The harder task is to ask what a particular doubt does: what it interrupts, what it leaves untouched, what it makes visible, what it suspends, whose speech it authorizes, and whose speech it weakens. Doubt becomes serious only when it submits its own authority to examination.

If doubt were ever to grow old, the world would grow old with it. A world without doubt would be a world in which inherited certainty no longer encounters resistance. It would be a world without renewal, without interruption, without the possibility of asking whether what stands before us has any right to stand. Such a world would not be stable; it would be exhausted.

If doubt were to die, the world would not merely become dogmatic. It would end as a human world. Not because mountains would collapse or stars would go dark, but because the movement by which the world remains open would disappear. Without doubt, there would be repetition without awakening, obedience without distance, certainty without memory, and life without the possibility of beginning again.

Doubt is not the opposite of philosophy. It is one of philosophy’s recurrent beginnings: the unrest by which consciousness is kept from sleeping inside its own forms. It remains young because history continually gives it new forms in which to return. It remains dreamlike because it refuses to let reality become final. In this refusal, doubt preserves the unfinished horizon of the real.

Inledning

Ibland börjar historien en människas berättelse just där hennes liv har upphört: med en kropp som i åratal lämnas kvar på galgen; med ett lik som torkar i vind och sol; med ett avhugget huvud som ingen längre kan finna; och med en mor som får veta om sin sons död först efter alla andra. Hon skriker inte. Hon faller inte till marken. Hon bär en sorg så djup att de som bevittnar den gråter blod över hennes smärta.

”Hasanak blev kvar på galgen i nästan sju år, tills hans fötter helt hade nötts bort och torkat, så att inget spår av dem återstod. Därefter tog man, på befallning, ned honom och begravde honom, fastän ingen visste var hans huvud fanns eller var hans kropp låg. Hasanaks mor var en kvinna av stor själsstyrka. Jag hörde att man dolde saken för henne i två eller tre månader; och när hon fick höra om den, klagade hon inte högljutt… Snarare grät hon med sådan smärta att de närvarande grät blod av hennes sorg. Sedan sade hon: ’Vilken stor man han var, denne son till mig: en kung som Mahmud gav honom denna värld, och en kung som Mas‘ud gav honom den nästa.’ Och hon höll sorg efter sin son på det ädlaste sätt.”

— Abu’l-Fazl Bayhaqi (ca 995–1077)

Ur denna scen löper sju vägar åt olika håll. En leder mot kroppen och galgen, mot det fasansfulla ögonblick då en människa och redskapet för hennes död börjar likna varandra. En annan leder mot modern, mot en sorg som börjar innan budet anländer, innan språket kan ge förlusten ett namn. En tredje leder in i arkivet, där historien bevarar namnet men förlorar kroppen, nedtecknar domen men inte såret. En fjärde träder in i själva språket, där rep och trä bara fullbordar det som orden redan har gjort möjligt. En femte rör sig mot mytens halvdunkel, där de döda inte försvinner utan förblir upphängda mellan himmel och jord. En sjätte vänder sig mot samvetet, mot det krav som en kropp utan grav riktar till de levande. Och den sista sjunker ned i nästan-ingenting, där en röst fortfarande återvänder efter att kroppen har försvunnit.

Hasanak är därför mer än en historisk gestalt. Han är en etisk och politisk gåta: gåtan om en människa som utplånas ur världen, ur minnet, ur berättelsen och till och med ur sin egen kropp. Var Bayhaqi den ende berättaren om hans öde? Fanns det någonsin bara en Hasanak? Eller är Hasanak ett namn för historiens många Hasanaker: de som lämnats hängande i minnets mörker, med endast ett namn i en krönika efter sig, en kropp skild från sig själv och en dunkel, spöklik bild i de levandes föreställningsvärld?

Till en början tycks vi stå inför en enda man och en enda berättelse: visiren Hasanak, angiven av sammansvurna, dömd genom anklagelser om kätteri, hängd på order av sultan Mas‘ud av Ghazni och bevarad åt oss av Abu’l-Fazl Bayhaqi. Men utanför Bayhaqis skildring blir Hasanak bilden av alla dem som hängts i historiens förvirrade mörker. Han tillhör det förflutna endast därför att berättelsen har gjort honom möjlig: därför att några bevarade handskrifter har dragit honom tillbaka från glömskan. Kraften i hans bild ligger just i dess osäkerhet: i de sår, rispor och utplåningar som lösgör kroppen från varje enskilt öde, varje enskild plats, varje enskilt språk. Kanske är Hasanak en allegori över den dödsmärkta region i historien som ständigt återvänder, med olika ansikten, på olika språk, i olika århundraden.

Det finns åtminstone sju återberättelser om Hasanak. Vi vet inte om de talar om sju Hasanaker på sju galgar, eller om en enda Hasanak med sju ansikten på en och samma galge. Jag återger dem här utan att döma; inte för att avgöra vilken av dem som är sannast, utan för att visa att Hasanak, vare sig han var en eller många, har avrättats om och om igen i vår historia. Kanske i går. Kanske nu, medan jag skriver om hans minne. Kanske nu, medan du läser dessa rader. Kanske avrättas historiens många Hasanaker fortfarande i städer nära och fjärran, på platser som, likt Hasanaks borteroderade kropp under dess sista år, inte längre går att urskilja tydligt. Hasanak kommer ur det förflutna, men galgen han står på tillhör aldrig endast det förflutna.

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Hasanak lämnades kvar på galgen i nästan sju år. I denna återberättelse hänger kroppen inte bara från dödens redskap; den blir långsamt oskiljbar från det. Hans fötter vande sig vid träet, tills galgen blev hans boning och han slog rot i den. Gränsen mellan människa och apparat började upplösas. Hasanak blev galgen, och galgen blev Hasanak. När ordern slutligen kom att ta ned honom fanns nästan ingenting kvar som ännu kunde kallas en kropp. Bara ett gammalt plagg som vred sig i vinden, likt ett baner som en gång rests för erövring men nu fallit över erövrarnas egna ansikten och gjort dem blinda för världen. De tog inte så mycket ned Hasanak som rubbade den struktur som hade upptagit honom i sig. Det var som om själva galgen måste ryckas upp ur jorden. Ingen visste var hans huvud fanns, var hans händer låg, vart hans fötter hade tagit vägen. Efter sju år var han inte längre en kropp man kunde röra vid, inte heller en röst man kunde höra och besvara. Han hade blivit ett offentligt stoff: trä, rep, luft, frånvaro. En man vars död inte hade tagit slut, en händelse som inför allas ögon hade förvandlats till ett bestående föremål.

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I en annan återberättelse är det verkliga måttet på Hasanaks död inte galgen, utan fördröjningen med vilken budet når hans mor. Sju år passerade över honom som år passerar över trä: upprätt, torrt, ändlöst. Solen slog ned; vind och regn nötte bort hans ben; långa nätter höll månen och stjärnorna ovanför hans kropp. Men någonstans, innan budet anlände, hade en annan form av tid redan börjat: tiden hos en mor som känner en frånvaro innan den får ett namn. När man till slut berättade det för henne, skrek hon inte. Kanske tillhör den plötsliga sorgen endast dem som inte redan har levt inuti den. Det som återstod var inte triumf, inte straff, inte ens död, utan den långsamma frånvaro som en mor kanske redan hade lärt sig att känna. Sorg börjar inte alltid med ett meddelande. Ibland börjar den tidigare, i kroppen, före språket, när en mor anar att världen har öppnat en plats för en outhärdlig tomhet. I denna återberättelse mäts Hasanaks avrättning inte genom straffets varaktighet, utan genom tystnaden mellan död och vetskap.

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I arkivet både finns och finns inte Hasanak. Krönikan bevarar hans namn, men inte hans kropp. Den bevarar domen, men inte såret. Den berättar att han hängdes, men inte hur sju år passerade genom honom. Historien nedtecknar händelsen, men händelsen förblir ogenomtränglig. Vem tog ned det som återstod av honom? Var begravdes han? Vart tog hans huvud vägen? Dokumentet svarar och undanhåller på samma gång. Dess sanning är inte fullständig närvaro, utan skadad överlevnad. Hasanak blir en suddig gestalt vid den historiska kunskapens rand: varken martyr eller brottsling, varken helt synlig eller helt förlorad. Arkivet räddar honom inte från försvinnandet; det ger försvinnandet en form. Det lär oss att historiskt minne inte är glömskans motsats. Ibland är det den form glömskan antar när den skrivs ned. Hasanaks sanning ligger därför kanske inte i uppteckningen av hans avrättning, utan i de luckor som uppteckningen inte kan sluta.

4

I den fjärde återberättelsen dör Hasanak först i språket. Innan repet sluter sig kring kroppen har orden redan berett dödens plats: fatwa, anklagelse, befallning, kätteri, lydnad. Galgen är inte bara en träkonstruktion på ett offentligt torg; den tillhör suveränitetens språkspel. Inom detta spel dödas inte en kropp helt enkelt. Den namnges, klassificeras, döms och görs tillgänglig för dödande. Repet är en sats. Schavotten, en grammatik. Domen lär folkmassan hur den ska se mannen framför sig: inte som Hasanak, utan som det bruk till vilket ordet ”Hasanak” nu har satts. Hans betydelse är inte längre dold någonstans bakom namnet; den produceras i dess cirkulation — i domarens utslag, i sultanens order, i Bu Sahl Zawzanis illvilja, i folkets rädsla, i moderns tystnad och själsstyrka. Att följa regeln är att veta var man ska stå, när man ska böja sig, vem man ska anklaga, när man inte ska tala. Kanske begravdes ingenting i strikt mening, eftersom hans död inte bara hade ägt rum i världen; den hade ägt rum i världens grammatik. Därför visar han sig på nytt varje gång hans namn uttalas. Att säga ”Hasanak” är att träda in i ett språk där en människa, utplånad ur livet, förblir som en sats som ingen livsform har kunnat upplösa.

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Det finns också en återberättelse där Hasanak inte längre tillhör torget, hovet eller krönikan. Han tillhör halvdunklet där historien blir dröm. Sju år på galgen framstår inte längre som varaktighet, utan som själva upphängdheten: mellan vara och icke-vara, minne och glömska, historia och myt. Hasanak är inte längre en konkret människa. Han är ett spöke som vandrar genom berättandets korridorer, en av de gestalter som lämnar historien utan att lämna den bakom sig. Hans fötter är borta, hans kropp kan inte samlas ihop, hans grav kan inte hittas; ändå fortsätter han. Kanske är den närmaste sanningen att Hasanak aldrig togs ned alls. Någonstans bland ruinerna och huvudstäderna där gamla befallningar fortfarande ekar, slår kanske vinden ännu mot hans kropp. Kanske öppnar någon en bortglömd bok och ser honom där, varken levande eller död, upphängd mellan himmel och jord. Ibland fullbordar döden inte en människa. Den förvandlar henne till en form av väntan.

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En annan återberättelse börjar med kroppen utan grav. Hasanak, inte längre levande och inte längre riktigt ett lik, blir ett krav riktat till de levande. Tiden nöter bort hans läppar; vinden passerar genom hans tomma tänder; kroppen upplöses i den offentliga luften. Men försvinnandet frikänner ingen. Det påtvingar en svårare fråga. Vad är de levande skyldiga en kropp som inte kan återställas, en kropp som ingen kan begrava på rätt sätt, en kropp som har gjorts både synlig och omöjlig att finna? Han begravdes inte som en okänd död man, utan som en namnlös sanning — och just därför som en sanning som förpliktigar. Det som återstår är inte ett monument över sorg, utan ett sår i historien: samvetets börda inför en människa som inte längre kan tala och ändå fortfarande hörs. En kropp som upplöses i luften bryter mot de dödas vanliga lag. Den vägrar graven. Den blir en fråga som de levande inte längre är fria att inte höra.

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I den sista återberättelsen försvinner Hasanak nästan helt. En gång hade människor vetat vad de skulle kalla hans kropp. Sedan upphörde även namngivandet. Hans fötter torkade och nöttes bort, tills inget annat än frånvaro återstod. Vinden passerade genom hans ben. Solen sken över det som inte längre riktigt var en kropp, bara ett bleknande minne i de förbipasserandes sinnen. En kvinna gick förbi och skakade på huvudet. Ett barn sprang, små fötter över dammet som en gång hade varit en del av honom. Den dag Hasanak hade försvunnit helt kom ordern: Ta ned honom. Repet hade ruttnat. Knuten hade lösts upp. Hasanak hade blivit ingenting. Han hade ingen tyngd. Jorden var tom, luften var tom, stoftet, stoftet, stoftet. Inget huvud. Ingen kropp. Och då, just ur detta ingenting, återvänder en röst. Kanske viskar ännu nu, i gamla och sårade städers mörka gränder, ett lik som inte längre är ett lik i de levandes öron: Vart tog jag vägen?

Efterord

Dessa sju återberättelser förekommer i historiska verk, men de har inte förblivit instängda i böcker. De har gått från mun till mun, färdats från stad till stad och rört sig från en tidsålder in i en annan. Vi vet att när Hasanak togs ned från galgen tillhörde han inte längre jorden eller vinden, varken marken eller himlen. Han var upphängd mellan historia och legend, minne och glömska.

Och ändå vet vi inte vilken återberättelse som är sannare. Vi vet inte ens om de talar om en Hasanak eller sju; om sju Hasanaker i en och samma tid, eller om Hasanaker som i olika århundraden blev offer för sin egen tid. Kanske har Hasanak, i denna mening, aldrig existerat alls. Kanske var han bara ett namn som gled från en historikers bläck ned på papperet och därifrån in i språket. Kanske avrättar varje tidsålder sin egen Hasanak. Kanske är vi själva Hasanak, i en annan tid, på ett annat språk, på en annan plats.

Om en röst vid midnatt, i en mörk passage, stiger upp och frågar: ”Vart har jag tagit vägen?”, hur kan vi då veta att Hasanaks kropp inte fortfarande hänger någonstans i vår historias långa geografi, ännu nött av vind och regn? Hur kan vi veta att rösten kommer utifrån oss, och inte inifrån? Kanske är vi själva den Hasanak som hör sin egen röst från galgen.

Om Hasanak

Hasanak, känd som Hasanak visiren, var en framträdande ämbetsman vid det ghaznavidiska hovet under 1000-talet. Han tjänade som visir under sultan Mahmud av Ghazni åren 1024–1030 och avrättades 1032 under Mahmuds son, sultan Mas‘ud. Hans öde är framför allt känt genom den persiske historikern Abu’l-Fazl Bayhaqi (ca 995–1077), vars verk hör till den klassiska persiska prosans viktigaste texter. Hasanak drogs in i hovets maktstrider och anklagades för religiös och politisk illojalitet. Enligt Bayhaqis skildring lämnades hans kropp kvar på galgen i nästan sju år.

Men Hasanak tillhör inte endast det förflutna. Hans gestalt har överlevt därför att den rymmer något som ständigt återkommer i historien: hur makten först namnger en människa, sedan dömer henne, utplånar hennes kropp och försöker bestämma hur hon ska bli ihågkommen. I denna mening är Hasanak inte bara en person ur den persiska historien, utan bilden av en återkommande politisk erfarenhet.

Hans aktualitet ligger inte i att hans tid till det yttre liknar vår, utan i att frågorna kring honom fortfarande är våra: Vad händer med en kropp som makten gör till exempel? Vad bevarar arkivet, och vad förlorar det? Vem bär ansvaret för de döda som saknar grav, röst och plats? Hasanak står därför kvar, inte endast i Bayhaqis krönika, utan i varje tid där en människa görs till varning, tecken, tystnad eller frånvaro.