Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh - The chaotic imagination: cruelty, fatality, shadow-becoming, annihilation, the inhuman

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East: The Chaotic Imagination, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.



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




"In an inspired piece of criticism, Mohaghegh tracks the idea of chaos into the contemporary philosophical and cultural imagination of the so-called ‘Third Worlds’, exploring its vital role in the formation of an emergent avant-garde literature. Concentrating on writings of the twentieth-century Middle Eastern new wave, including the chaotic configurations of Sadeq Hedayat and Ahmad Shamlu, Mohaghegh uncovers provocative experiments with the outer boundaries of thought and text. What surfaces, in the end, is a rising language of blindness and burial, one that has cast an enigmatic shadow across the future of world literature."

“A timely and original intervention into current discussions concerning the status of a putatively unified ‘West’ and the ruin it continues to inflict upon the lands and regions outside of Euro-America. Mohaghegh has taken a productive detour from post-colonial discourse, and its endless effort to establish equivalence with the West through ‘negotiation,’ even as it recuperates precisely the hierarchical relationship it is dedicated to overcoming. Instead, he has rather turned to those (forgotten) writers and thinkers who have sought to express their resistance to both imported hegemonic literary and philosophic forms and those derived from their ‘received’ traditions by starting from a ‘zero-ground’ fraught with torment and ambivalence in order to find a voice that belonged to neither the canonical narrative of the ‘West’ nor the cultural conventions of a failed and negative ‘tradition.’ Readers will find in Mohagegh's account not simply the rescuing of a lost moment but also its continued embodiment in his own writing.”—Harry Harootunian
“In this brilliant, wholly original work, Mohaghegh traces the emergent cultural critique in postcolonial fiction. He finds acts of provocation in the voices and cultural poetics of this literature, generativity in its techniques and stealthy routes of circulation, creative violence in the projects that are hidden and on guard within it. Here the postcolonial is not an ‘easily locatable cultural mimicry’ but a rogue arsenal of displacements and delirious incantations. It as at once material and ephemeral, vulnerable and a prism of extremity, excess and exhaustion. The reader is viscerally transfixed by the dynamics of form and transmogrification, embodiment and disembodiment, and the moves of dispossession, eviction, and dream in the disquieting of worlds.” — Kathleen Stewart
"Some books speak to us about the beyond and others embody it. It is the later that affect us the most. Those books that are the beyond (i.e. that which goes further than the expected, the unpredictable, the surprising) make us shudder through the senses that are mostly forgotten: ecstasy and joy (those primary acts of writing and living). This work is an encounter with the style of writing that infuses thought with power, directly and uncompromisingly. Mohaghegh's analysis of literary and philosophical landscape of the Middle East thus exceeds the confines of a geographical context. His writing instructs us not only about the chaotic imagination of the Middle East but, more importantly, how to construct new categories of perception. Simply put, this book, this irreversible gesture of philosophical and poetic expenditure, intensifies us, drowns us, and elevates us." - Dejan Lukic




Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh teaches courses in comparative literature, Middle Eastern studies, world literature, and modern philosophy. He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University, with an interest in global intersections of the avant-garde, existentialism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. Professor Mohaghegh's scholarly focus is upon tracking emergent currents of experimental thought in the Middle East and the West, with particular attention to exploring the concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, sectarianism, and apocalyptic writing.


He has published six books to date—The Chaotic Imagination: New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Inflictions: The Writing of Violence in the Middle East (Continuum, 2012), The Radical Unspoken: Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought (Routledge, 2013), Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism (SUNY, 2015); Born Upon the Dark Spear: Selected Poems of Ahmad Shamlu (translation; Contra Mundum, 2016); Elemental Disappearances (co-authored with Dejan Lukic; Punctum Books, 2016). ​ He is also the co-editor of a book series titled Suspensions: Contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate Thought (Bloomsbury), which is dedicated to showcasing cutting-edge movements in literature, philosophy, culture, and art across the region, and the co-director of the 5th Disappearance Lab.