Act One to the End: Ask the Ayatollah, a Play (with Henry Corbin)

ABSTRACT

This play is based on the author’s ethnographic and archival research on the French philosopher Henry Corbin’s years in Tehran, Iran. Corbin taught in Tehran between 1947 and 1978 (the eve of the Iranian Revolution) at the Institute of Philosophy, which he founded. The play is a dialogue between a fictional university student, Ali, and his mentor, the French philosopher Henry Corbin, with interjections from the angel of history. Ali is trying to come to grips with his love of Islamic mystical philosophy and its dangerous appropriation by political actors of the time, as well as with a deeply personal mourning. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Revolution
• mysticism
• belief
• theory vs. practice
• war
• theater

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Roxanne Varzi is a writer, artist, filmmaker and Associate professor of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine. She held the first Fulbright to Iran since the Revolution, and was the youngest Distinguished Senior Iranian Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. Her writing has been published in The London Review of books, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Annals of Political and Social Science, Feminist Review, Public Culture, American Anthropologist, and other venues. She is the author of two books, Warring Souls: Media, Martyrdom and Youth in post-Revolution Iran, Duke University Press, 2006 and 2016 Independent Publishers Gold Medal Award-winning Novel Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic novel of Iran Stanford University Press. Her film, Plastic Flowers Never Die, 2009 is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources and has been shown in Festivals all over the world.

Notes

1 See Benjamin (1968).

2 See Blaser (2008).

3 From William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

4 See Corbin (1969).

5 Kashf al-mahjûb, a revered Persian treatise on Sufism, signifies precisely “the unveiling of that which is hidden.” Is that not precisely the activity of the phenomenologist, an activity which – in unveiling and in bringing the hidden meaning, occulted beneath the outward appearance, beneath the phenomenal, out into manifestation – fulfills in its own way the program of Greek science: sôzein ta phainomena (to save the phenomena)? Kashf is the unveiling (Enthülling, Entdecken) which causes the true meaning itself, initially occulted by that which is the apparent, to emerge into manifestation, the phainomenon (here we might do well to call to mind what Heidegger has said about the concept of alêtheia, or truth). We are ourselves the veil so long as we abstain from the “act of presence,” so long as we are not being-there (da-sein), at the hermeneutic level in question.

6 See Varzi (2006).

7 See Filippani-Ronconi (1954).