Nima Taheri - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Nima Taheri
Forum for World Literature Studies, 2022
Based on insights offered in the Symbolist oeuvres of Mallarmé and Yeats, this paper posits an in... more Based on insights offered in the Symbolist oeuvres of Mallarmé and Yeats, this paper posits an interpretation of the Idea as the quasi-originary source of language, tracing the origins of the poetic to the notions of rituality and iterability. These qualities are characteristic of the prayer (considering, in particular, the Angelus devotion) and the neume (the earliest form of musical notation, which amounts to a chanting without words, a pure vocalization): the essence of poetry requires a suspension of knowledge, as in learning "by heart." We ultimately locate the beginnings of the poetic in the "body of the letter" or the "carnality of sense": at the zero point of metaphor where meaning is purely literal, the poematic, as passion of and for the origin, entails a self-voiding of language, a casting-aside of being. The contact with the body of sense is only possible if the poetic soul, bypassing the cogito, can derail absolute knowledge, since the quasi-originary promise of language-as the very condition of its possibility-is anterior to reason and to knowledge.
This study aims to provide a novel understanding of W. B. Yeats's systematic view of reality and ... more This study aims to provide a novel understanding of W. B. Yeats's systematic view of reality and human experience, generally referred to as his Vision. De Man's deconstructive reading of Yeats has demonstrated that this vision operates according to a particular mode of logic that differs radically from the standard economy of binary oppositions. Building on de Man's findings, and with reference to Shelley's poem "Witch of Atlas," this paper attempts to re-configure the primary-antithetical structure of Yeats's Vision in terms of 'repetition within difference,' interpreting his view of personal and historical reality as a 'graft' of lives and destinies-layer upon layer, none erased yet all under-erasure, like a palimpsest. In this respect, the fatalistic strain within Yeats's vision is read as a heterogeneous play of Fate and Destiny. The remainder of the paper thoroughly examines Yeats's iconic metaphor of mirror vs. the lamp regarding the role of the poet as imitator vs. creator and the theological analogy of the poet as God. Applying the insights derived from the study, and with reference to Goethe's idea of "repeated reflection," the lamp-mirror divide is argued to be governed by the undecidable logic of the palimpsest.
Brno Studies in English, 2018
This essay aims to study Seamus Heaney's vision of poetry, particularly concerning his early oeuv... more This essay aims to study Seamus Heaney's vision of poetry, particularly concerning his early oeuvre, in the light of Heidegger's approach to poetic language, memory, and dwelling. A Heideggerian reading of the prominent rural and agrarian sensibility of Heaney's early poems demonstrates how objects and topological features as poetized in his work exceed symbolic representation, and bring forth the aletheia of Being, and how the sense of the unhomely/uncanny in the poet's work serves to gather his community in the same vicinity where co-pre-sencing, letting-be of the other [Gelassenheit], and staying with things assure the unity of the fourfold. The bog, as the principal trope of Heaney's oeuvre, is closely studied, in a cautiously de-politicized context, to reveal a feminine, pre-reflective realm of memory traces, inviting the reader to listen in thoughtful remembrance to the call of Mnemosyne. Thus, Heaney's poetic vision is rendered in terms of an authentic attunement to the maternal-feminine silence of Being, recorded as "rhythm" or the "sound of sense" at the threshold of the pre-linguistic origins of language.
The study of subjectivity is especially relevant to psychoanalysis since it avoids social and pol... more The study of subjectivity is especially relevant to psychoanalysis since it avoids social and political qualifications, and focuses on the structure of the narrative voice. In this respect, Kristeva " s innovative psychoanalytic notion of melancholia, as an incapacitating desire not to let go of the Real m/Other, is applied in the present article to the ontological impasse of the impoverished figure of Samuel Beckett " s The Unnamable (1958, 2003). It can be formulated as an ontological shade lingering within this precarious state, cast between life and death, and seeking the unnamable Thing which would be the real silence, corresponding at last to a voice of his own, the voice of voicelessness. Kristeva " s solution for this suicidal predicament, adopted in this study, is an aesthetic resort to the poetical dimension of language retrieving traces of the dead m/Other, and the fundamental function of denegation at once affirming and rejecting the m/Other. A semiotic analysis of The Unnamable, considering, among others, the pronouns and commas will reveal a latent materiality in the text: formal derangement. We propose that, through the metaphorical dialectic of the semiotic process and the symbolic representation, the unnamable-reader achieves, on a trans-symbolic scale, a melancholy sublime, the jouissance of formlessness before the unpresentable presence of the m/Other. This will yield our interpretation of the unnamable as an idealized subject-in-process (sujet-en-process) in terms of a pure flow of words: novel as mere " going on. " Therefore, the study presented here is an attempt to bring together the Beckettian destitution of the novel and Kristeva " s black sun through a jouissant dynamism of signs undermining the laws of the very language in which they are continuously generated.
Drafts by Nima Taheri
This reading models the concepts of time and fraud in “Good Old Neon” respectively on the Deleuzi... more This reading models the concepts of time and fraud in “Good Old Neon” respectively on the Deleuzian Aion and the enigmatic signifiers. The type of temporality presented by Wallace is argued to be the immaterial empty form of time which is free from movement and moments. This is linked to the notion of nearness as a playful presencing of time. Fraud, on the other hand, is shown to be the positive face, as ineluctable as the human personality. Self-fraud marks the otherness of the person to himself and is the ultimate failure of authenticity since it questions the very act of authentication. The infinite consciousness at the timeless time of Aion provides Wallace’s singular suicidal freedom from his paradoxical fraud.
In this article, Sartre’s analysis of the Other in Being and Nothingness is used to demonstrate I... more In this article, Sartre’s analysis of the Other in Being and Nothingness is used to demonstrate Inez as a sadist figure and the other two as masochists. The three characters are viewed as a triangle of mirrors, an endless play of sadomasochist impressions, through discourse controlled by Inez. Inez is formulated as a Sadean pervert using Barthes’s idea of diversifying Sadean mirrors and Klossowski’s theory of the obsessive singular gesture of the pervert. The infernal eternity of the condition is jointly explained through the Sadean intersection of ultimate secrecy and death as a state of living death (connected to the Lacanian Real) and Derrida’s reading of the impossibility of “my death” as ruination_ a terrifying immortality of fragile discourse.
This paper is an attempt to disentangle the bleak, self-mocking ontology of Beckett's world, part... more This paper is an attempt to disentangle the bleak, self-mocking ontology of Beckett's world, particularly in The Unnamable, through a deconstructive mode of psychoanalysis known as the matrixial borderspace theory. The comma is radically redefined as the caesura of alliterative prosody, rather than the line-break, and subjectivity as a tympanic site of resonances in a Penelopean textuality of fragments, woven and unwoven aterminably, leaving shreds of sense as the very expression of this absurdity which amounts to the will to “go on.”. These traces are gathered in an untensed space of possibilities for a non-phallical approach to Beckett’s schizo-text.
This translation introduces a rather original analysis of high-modernist textuality for research... more This translation introduces a rather original analysis of high-modernist textuality for researchers in English Literature in which field French Nouveau Roman and its radical narrative and stylistic potentialities are rather underrepresented, whereas there exist intimate theoretical links between, for instance, Beckett, Simon, and Faulkner. Ilias Yocaris and David Zemmour, in this paper, investigate the textual equivalents of the analytic cubist painting methods, such as passage, drawdown, employing the facets, fragmentation, enallage, etc. in Claude Simon's oeuvre to argue that Simon, particularly in La Route des Flandres, has succeeded in creating an "ecriture cubiste", through a specific filtering of perceptual data and modalities of referentiation which enact a process of fusion to represent the "same" object "simultaneously" from "several" points of view: thus the text assumes a "polyhedral appearance" and the governing principle of the prose style is not unity but pure "variation." The excerpts cited from Simon's novels are my translations, except for one which is cited.
Using chiefly mythological figures throughout The Cantos, Pound paints an archetypal vision of th... more Using chiefly mythological figures throughout The Cantos, Pound paints an archetypal vision of the feminine dimension of humanity: the feminine personae all meld into each other and represent symbolically the same Neoplatonic motifs of " light, " " love, " and the " crystal " despite their different narrato-mythological orientations. This paper is an attempt, at first, to clarify the major theoretical orientations of Pound's epic enterprise, along with a related analysis of a number of Mallarme's poems (esp. considering the phrase "pli selon pli") and then to provide a close, comparative reading of the fictional female figures in The Cantos.
Forum for World Literature Studies, 2022
Based on insights offered in the Symbolist oeuvres of Mallarmé and Yeats, this paper posits an in... more Based on insights offered in the Symbolist oeuvres of Mallarmé and Yeats, this paper posits an interpretation of the Idea as the quasi-originary source of language, tracing the origins of the poetic to the notions of rituality and iterability. These qualities are characteristic of the prayer (considering, in particular, the Angelus devotion) and the neume (the earliest form of musical notation, which amounts to a chanting without words, a pure vocalization): the essence of poetry requires a suspension of knowledge, as in learning "by heart." We ultimately locate the beginnings of the poetic in the "body of the letter" or the "carnality of sense": at the zero point of metaphor where meaning is purely literal, the poematic, as passion of and for the origin, entails a self-voiding of language, a casting-aside of being. The contact with the body of sense is only possible if the poetic soul, bypassing the cogito, can derail absolute knowledge, since the quasi-originary promise of language-as the very condition of its possibility-is anterior to reason and to knowledge.
This study aims to provide a novel understanding of W. B. Yeats's systematic view of reality and ... more This study aims to provide a novel understanding of W. B. Yeats's systematic view of reality and human experience, generally referred to as his Vision. De Man's deconstructive reading of Yeats has demonstrated that this vision operates according to a particular mode of logic that differs radically from the standard economy of binary oppositions. Building on de Man's findings, and with reference to Shelley's poem "Witch of Atlas," this paper attempts to re-configure the primary-antithetical structure of Yeats's Vision in terms of 'repetition within difference,' interpreting his view of personal and historical reality as a 'graft' of lives and destinies-layer upon layer, none erased yet all under-erasure, like a palimpsest. In this respect, the fatalistic strain within Yeats's vision is read as a heterogeneous play of Fate and Destiny. The remainder of the paper thoroughly examines Yeats's iconic metaphor of mirror vs. the lamp regarding the role of the poet as imitator vs. creator and the theological analogy of the poet as God. Applying the insights derived from the study, and with reference to Goethe's idea of "repeated reflection," the lamp-mirror divide is argued to be governed by the undecidable logic of the palimpsest.
Brno Studies in English, 2018
This essay aims to study Seamus Heaney's vision of poetry, particularly concerning his early oeuv... more This essay aims to study Seamus Heaney's vision of poetry, particularly concerning his early oeuvre, in the light of Heidegger's approach to poetic language, memory, and dwelling. A Heideggerian reading of the prominent rural and agrarian sensibility of Heaney's early poems demonstrates how objects and topological features as poetized in his work exceed symbolic representation, and bring forth the aletheia of Being, and how the sense of the unhomely/uncanny in the poet's work serves to gather his community in the same vicinity where co-pre-sencing, letting-be of the other [Gelassenheit], and staying with things assure the unity of the fourfold. The bog, as the principal trope of Heaney's oeuvre, is closely studied, in a cautiously de-politicized context, to reveal a feminine, pre-reflective realm of memory traces, inviting the reader to listen in thoughtful remembrance to the call of Mnemosyne. Thus, Heaney's poetic vision is rendered in terms of an authentic attunement to the maternal-feminine silence of Being, recorded as "rhythm" or the "sound of sense" at the threshold of the pre-linguistic origins of language.
The study of subjectivity is especially relevant to psychoanalysis since it avoids social and pol... more The study of subjectivity is especially relevant to psychoanalysis since it avoids social and political qualifications, and focuses on the structure of the narrative voice. In this respect, Kristeva " s innovative psychoanalytic notion of melancholia, as an incapacitating desire not to let go of the Real m/Other, is applied in the present article to the ontological impasse of the impoverished figure of Samuel Beckett " s The Unnamable (1958, 2003). It can be formulated as an ontological shade lingering within this precarious state, cast between life and death, and seeking the unnamable Thing which would be the real silence, corresponding at last to a voice of his own, the voice of voicelessness. Kristeva " s solution for this suicidal predicament, adopted in this study, is an aesthetic resort to the poetical dimension of language retrieving traces of the dead m/Other, and the fundamental function of denegation at once affirming and rejecting the m/Other. A semiotic analysis of The Unnamable, considering, among others, the pronouns and commas will reveal a latent materiality in the text: formal derangement. We propose that, through the metaphorical dialectic of the semiotic process and the symbolic representation, the unnamable-reader achieves, on a trans-symbolic scale, a melancholy sublime, the jouissance of formlessness before the unpresentable presence of the m/Other. This will yield our interpretation of the unnamable as an idealized subject-in-process (sujet-en-process) in terms of a pure flow of words: novel as mere " going on. " Therefore, the study presented here is an attempt to bring together the Beckettian destitution of the novel and Kristeva " s black sun through a jouissant dynamism of signs undermining the laws of the very language in which they are continuously generated.
This reading models the concepts of time and fraud in “Good Old Neon” respectively on the Deleuzi... more This reading models the concepts of time and fraud in “Good Old Neon” respectively on the Deleuzian Aion and the enigmatic signifiers. The type of temporality presented by Wallace is argued to be the immaterial empty form of time which is free from movement and moments. This is linked to the notion of nearness as a playful presencing of time. Fraud, on the other hand, is shown to be the positive face, as ineluctable as the human personality. Self-fraud marks the otherness of the person to himself and is the ultimate failure of authenticity since it questions the very act of authentication. The infinite consciousness at the timeless time of Aion provides Wallace’s singular suicidal freedom from his paradoxical fraud.
In this article, Sartre’s analysis of the Other in Being and Nothingness is used to demonstrate I... more In this article, Sartre’s analysis of the Other in Being and Nothingness is used to demonstrate Inez as a sadist figure and the other two as masochists. The three characters are viewed as a triangle of mirrors, an endless play of sadomasochist impressions, through discourse controlled by Inez. Inez is formulated as a Sadean pervert using Barthes’s idea of diversifying Sadean mirrors and Klossowski’s theory of the obsessive singular gesture of the pervert. The infernal eternity of the condition is jointly explained through the Sadean intersection of ultimate secrecy and death as a state of living death (connected to the Lacanian Real) and Derrida’s reading of the impossibility of “my death” as ruination_ a terrifying immortality of fragile discourse.
This paper is an attempt to disentangle the bleak, self-mocking ontology of Beckett's world, part... more This paper is an attempt to disentangle the bleak, self-mocking ontology of Beckett's world, particularly in The Unnamable, through a deconstructive mode of psychoanalysis known as the matrixial borderspace theory. The comma is radically redefined as the caesura of alliterative prosody, rather than the line-break, and subjectivity as a tympanic site of resonances in a Penelopean textuality of fragments, woven and unwoven aterminably, leaving shreds of sense as the very expression of this absurdity which amounts to the will to “go on.”. These traces are gathered in an untensed space of possibilities for a non-phallical approach to Beckett’s schizo-text.
This translation introduces a rather original analysis of high-modernist textuality for research... more This translation introduces a rather original analysis of high-modernist textuality for researchers in English Literature in which field French Nouveau Roman and its radical narrative and stylistic potentialities are rather underrepresented, whereas there exist intimate theoretical links between, for instance, Beckett, Simon, and Faulkner. Ilias Yocaris and David Zemmour, in this paper, investigate the textual equivalents of the analytic cubist painting methods, such as passage, drawdown, employing the facets, fragmentation, enallage, etc. in Claude Simon's oeuvre to argue that Simon, particularly in La Route des Flandres, has succeeded in creating an "ecriture cubiste", through a specific filtering of perceptual data and modalities of referentiation which enact a process of fusion to represent the "same" object "simultaneously" from "several" points of view: thus the text assumes a "polyhedral appearance" and the governing principle of the prose style is not unity but pure "variation." The excerpts cited from Simon's novels are my translations, except for one which is cited.
Using chiefly mythological figures throughout The Cantos, Pound paints an archetypal vision of th... more Using chiefly mythological figures throughout The Cantos, Pound paints an archetypal vision of the feminine dimension of humanity: the feminine personae all meld into each other and represent symbolically the same Neoplatonic motifs of " light, " " love, " and the " crystal " despite their different narrato-mythological orientations. This paper is an attempt, at first, to clarify the major theoretical orientations of Pound's epic enterprise, along with a related analysis of a number of Mallarme's poems (esp. considering the phrase "pli selon pli") and then to provide a close, comparative reading of the fictional female figures in The Cantos.