Description: Writing has come face-to-face with a most crucial juncture: to negotiate with the inescapable presence of violence. From the domains of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, this book stages a powerful conversation on questions of cruelty, evil, rage, vengeance, madness, and deception. Beyond the narrow judgment of violence as a purely tragic reality, these writers (in states of exile, prison, martyrdom, and war) come to wager with the more elusive, inspiring, and even ecstatic dimensions that rest at the heart of a visceral universe of imagination. Covering complex and controversial thematic discussions, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh forms an extreme record of voices, movements, and thought-experiments drawn from the inner circles of the Middle Eastern region. By exploring the most abrasive writings of this vast cultural front, the book reveals how such captivating outsider texts could potentially redefine our understanding of violence and its now-unstoppable relationship to a dangerous age.
Brief description: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is a philosopher, literary theorist, and professor of comparative literature at Babson College. His work tracks movements of radical thought across the so-called East and the West, with particular attention to concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, extremism, mania, disappearance, night, evil, secrecy, and apocalyptic writing. He has published nine books to date, including two volumes titled Omnicide I and Omnicide II on madness, and two volumes on night titled Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark and Night II: A Philosophy of the Last World. He is also the founding director of the Future Studies Program, Programmer of Transdisciplinary Studies for The New Centre for Research & Practice, and co-editor of the Future's Theory and Suspensions book series for Bloomsbury Press.
Review Quotes: "Perhaps the major merit of Inflictions is not only the strength of its argument, but it is more the book's relentless counter canonical approach - a timely political-methodological intervention which boldly contemplates the inscriptions of real violence as integral to the very movement of absolute laceration of writing itself and the ultimate depleting of the metaphysics of presence ... From this multi-dimensional perception of how we ought to begin reading violence, from this deferred universe, the ideas of post-apocalyptic visions emerge and unfold. By all means, one can only hope that this book excites more inquiries peeling through more engravings-of-thought contained in concealed poetic, fictional, and philosophical palimpsests waiting for their moments to emerge." --Youssef Yacoubi, The Ohio State University, SCTIW Review