By Jesse Gelburd-Meyers · Wednesday, July 15, 2009 Roy Ben-Shai’s article “Schmitt or Hamlet: The Unsovereign Event” appears in Telos 147 (Summer 2009). Jesse Gelburd-Meyers follows up with some questions.
Jesse Gelburd-Meyers: If the irruption of the “real” into the play both constitutes an event and leads to the transformation of the play into a tragedy, then does the irruption of the sovereign’s political decision into the flow of historical reality make that drama which takes place on the world stage into a tragedy? Under this framework, is the concept of the political one which is fundamentally tragic?
Roy Ben-Shai: On the one hand, yes. I think that if we apply the categories Schmitt develops here to his discussion on the political, then the political can be shown to be fundamentally “tragic.” On the other hand, my emphasis in this essay, which I take to be Schmitt’s own emphasis, is on the non-subjective nature of the tragic as such, and by implication perhaps, of the political. In other words, no less important than seeing the continuity of this essay with Schmitt’s earlier and more famous texts, is to see the revision it contains. What is being dropped out is the moment of decision as the ground (subiectum) of the tragic/political event. As far as individual characters go, the tragic is what befalls, not what is enacted or decided upon. But this feature is essential to the tragic as such. Here, in this modern tragedy, we identify no specific guiding force, neither an immanent nor a transcendent sovereign entity, but only an imbrication of human beings living through the impacts of a transitional and chiasmic period.
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By Rasoul Nafisi · Monday, July 13, 2009 Instead of engendering a renaissance of interest among Western intellectuals in the conditions of the 1979 revolution, the post-electoral crisis in Iran has unfortunately obfuscated what was already a complex historical event. Given that the protests in Iran cannot be understood without an adequate knowledge of their historical precedent from 1979 and earlier, we are making available here an edited version of Rasoul Nafisi’s “The Genesis of the Clerical State in Iran” from Telos 51 (Spring 1982). Telos 51 is available for purchase here.
The Genesis of the Clerical State in Iran
by Rasoul Nafisi
The religious state that has emerged in revolutionary Iran poses serious questions that, because of the rapidity of developments, have remained unanswered. In order to understand the Iranian revolution and the emergence of the clerical state, therefore, it is necessary to analyze the revolution’s genesis, its course, its aftermath, and, most importantly, the clergy’s role as a key sector of the power elite and its alliances.
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By Matthias Küntzel · Friday, June 26, 2009 The Iranians who are resisting the electoral putsch are not only being humiliated and beaten by the batons and bullets of the Pasdaran but also by the inaction of the so-called freedom-loving world: no call for a special session of the UN, no threats of sanctions, no boycott declaration, no economic embargo, not even the smallest warning—let’s just not take sides or make any commitments as long as the result of the struggle in Iran remains open. The West, so the argument goes, has to be careful to avoid providing any pretext to vilify the Iranian opposition. So Obama doesn’t need days but weeks to slowly pull back his outstretched hand, while the German Foreign Ministry argues all the more emphatically for a dialogue with the putsch-regime. Undauntedly, the German-Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Tehran advertises the building of a German-Iranian Business Center in Berlin, while the German-Iranian Chamber of Commerce in Hamburg reported today that its upcoming seminar on “Export Certification in Iran Trade” (July 13) is already overcrowded. And haven’t we gotten along somehow or other with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the past four years?
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By Editors · Tuesday, June 23, 2009 Joshua Robert Gold, Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut, died on June 3, 2009, at the age of 38.
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By Soraya · Monday, June 22, 2009 Via BBC Farsi. Watch who wins at the end.
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, June 20, 2009 Remember the streets filled with demonstrators to protest the Iraq War? Or the outrage over Gaza? Today, in the face of the repression in Iran, that camp is silent: no solidarity with democrats, no enormous gatherings in London or Paris or New York. There is a terrible calculation at stake. To support the democracy movement in Iran might imply that there is something deeply wrong with the regime in Tehran—as a previous regime in Washington understood. And that line of thought would upset the applecart of appeasement. As Iran approaches its Tiananmen moment, the righteous and politically correct are silent. The rights of people are sacrificed to the logic of diplomacy, in Iran as much as in Korea (as if they were part of an axis).
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