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Abstract
This article reflects on the nuances and insinuations of a conceptualisation of “lament” as an inability to appropriate any object, or to turn the lost object into a fetish. While mourning, melancholia, and fetishism ultimately remain entangled with the ego (i.e., within a narcissistic configuration), lament goes beyond that, hinting at a loss of ego, a disintegration of the autonomous self. As a sonic expression of the failure of language, lament is a manifestation of the negativity or void at the core of language. However, in lament this negativity is radicalised. This extreme obstruction, which impedes all connection, imparts to lament abstractive powers, ultimately qualifying lament as a political force. The last part of the article argues that the social imaginary of Iran, steeped in numerous failed attempts to rise above domination and subjection (as evident in myriad revolts and two revolutions in the twentieth century), could serve as promising material for the concretisation of such a theory of lament.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
I would like to thank Morad Farhadpour for our discussions of the issues raised in this essay. I also wish to thank Salah El Moncef and the anonymous Angelaki reviewers for their consideration of this work.
1 In fact, certain considerations lead Freud to suspect that a loss in the ego may suffice to produce melancholia regardless of any object, that is, as a result of a purely narcissistic blow to the ego. See “Mourning and Melancholia” 253.
2 In his discussion of the split image of Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” torn between melancholia and destruction, Khatib similarly poses the question of whether “there is also a non-perverse reading of melancholy – a promise of undoing melancholic fixation by traversing the fantasy of loss in order to exit it.” See Khatib 29; cf. Comay, “The Sickness of Tradition” 95.
3 Benjamin considers Hamlet as an example of such a Saturnine duality. See The Origin of German Tragic Drama 150. In Stanzas, Agamben provides myriad examples for melancholic equivocations.
4 Lament’s object (or “non-object”) is akin to Lacan’s account of the object of anxiety: un passant objet, un objet passant. Accordingly, anxiety is not simply without an object, which would imply a “frictionless spinning.” See Lacan 100; cf. Comay and Ruda 26.
5 Daniel Weidner has written about the methodological problem of a hermeneutic interpretation of this text due to its hermetic nature. However, this should not pose a problem for us, because this essay is not a commentary on Scholem’s text but instead takes up his insights as a groundwork towards a more political theorisation of lament. See Weidner 203–31.
6 As we will see, Scholem’s conception of myth as a closed, inaccessible totality is congruent to the inwardness of the tragic self in Rosenzweig’s theory. See “On Lament” 318.
7 To venture beyond Scholem’s esoteric language, I suggest that in the footsteps of Adorno “revelation” could be considered in a materialist sense. Adorno’s materialist conception of revelation is similar to Scholem to the extent that he also defines revelation as a language of positivity, communicability, and openness.
8 I would like to draw an analogy between lament and what Gilles Deleuze calls the “great complaint” [la grande plainte]. For Deleuze, the latter is neither juridical nor reduceable to simple, self-defeating “nagging,” but instead embodies significant expressive and transformative power, being part and parcel of poetic creativity. Like lament, the great complaint does not ask for a response. It does not merely stem from a particular, concrete ordeal or lack, but is grounded on an all-encompassing force beyond the individual. This is why, as Schuster explains, the complainer’s kvetching is often addressed to God, fate, or forces of nature, to some impersonal, overwhelming force that seems to be the cause of the complainer’s agony. See Abécédaire qtd in Schuster 16–18.
9 For a provocative general treatment of the category of negativity in contemporary thought, see Benjamin Noys.
10 Ultimately, both Hegel’s the Absolute and Heidegger’s Ereignis are oriented towards a having-been [Gewesen] of which they represent the consummation. See Agamben, Language and Death 104.
11 To see precisely how this “indication” comes about, see Agamben, Language and Death.
12 This division of language in Western thought is the one between what can be shown, corresponding to the very taking place of language, and what is said in this taking place. Agamben describes different versions of this scission: in Aristotle (between the first ousia and the other categories), Heidegger (between Sage and Sprache), Wittgenstein (between showing and telling), and modern linguistics (between langue and parole).
13 As Agamben explicates:
Now perhaps it becomes clearer why Hegel, at the beginning of the Phenomenology, thinks of indication as a dialectical process of negation: that which is removed each time in speaking, this, is the voice. And that which is disclosed each time in this removal (through its preservation, as Voice, in writing) is pure being, the This as a universal; but this being, inasmuch as it always takes place in a having-been, in a Gewesen, is also a pure nothing […] (Language and Death 37)
14 To clarify this idea of the repetition of originary interruption, we can turn to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound. Brassier maintains that the compulsion to repeat does not simply repeat some traumatic and therefore repressed experience, but something that in the beginning could not register as an experience. The trauma is real but falls outside the realm of experience as “what cannot be lived or consciously apprehended.” See Brassier 236. Alenka Zupančič also elaborates on this repetition of originary interruption in Lacan’s thought: “what is repeated is not an original traumatic experience, interrupting whatever has taken place before, but the interruption itself (which he relates to the Real).” See Zupančič 117.
15 This point could be also articulated in psychoanalytic language. For Lacan, the originary negativity repeats itself in the shape of certain symptoms and signifying formations. For a productive comparison of original negativity in Deleuze and Lacan, see Zupančič 110–19.
16 It is crucial to notice that for Rosenzweig the tragic hero of the classical attic tragedy (as distinct from later forms of tragedy) represents the original state of Western man. The “metaethical” self is marked by silence. That is why Aeschylus (in whose tragedies the hero is often silent while the chorus speaks) is the tragedian that Rosenzweig has in mind. For Rosenzweig, the muteness of the tragic hero ends with the emergence of Judeo-Christian “revelation.” So although my theorisation of lament is political rather than theological, the significance of the movement from the ancient Greek to the Judeo-Christian social imaginary in Rosenzweig’s thought should be kept in mind.
17 Intriguingly, Freud writes in this text: “Aphasias simply reproduce a state which existed in the course of the normal process of learning to speak.” See On Aphasia 42.
18 Scholem’s conception of lament as a transformation of myth (or mourning) has been already discussed. Mythical reality, Scholem notes, consumes itself within the sonic form of lament.
19 Similarly, Alain Badiou shows that truths are based on a constitutive exception. See Badiou 4.
20 Ashura is on the tenth day of Muharram in the Islamic calendar, a day of enormous sorrow for the Shi’ites due to the tragic events of the Battle of Karbala. In this battle, the rebellious Husayn ibn Ali (the third Shi’i Imam) had been massacred by the Umayyad army with his small group of followers after they had been made to suffer several days of thirst.
21 Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is an epic poem (consisting of around 50,000 rhyming couplets), considered to be the most complete source of ancient pre-Islamic myths recorded in post-Islamic Persian.
22 Amir-Moezzi and Jambet also generally remark on the intermingling of Shi’ism in Iran with “elements of ancient Iranian religions (Mazdaism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Zurvanism).” They detect a conjunction between the “persecuted Shia and the conquered and frequently humiliated Iranians.” See Amir-Moezzi and Jambet 28; cf. Meskoub 88. The point I will try to bring home in the passages that follow is that such convergences make the social imaginary of Iran more susceptible to modes of political insurgencies that are related to mourning and its radicalisation in what I have termed “lament.”
23 The beginning of ancient Persian history dates back to the establishment of the first world empire by Cyrus the Great over two and half thousand years ago. This empire was conquered by Alexander the Great in 330 bc. The Arab/Muslim conquest of Persia (ad 633) was followed by a thousand years of successive invasions by central Asian tribes whose leaders became rulers of the country. See Fisher.
24 To put it briefly and at risk of oversimplification, the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11), which epitomises the founding moment of modernity in Iran, was defeated as a result of internal conflicts and, in particular, the intrusions of the British and Russian governments in 1911–12. At last, with the coup of 1921 and the ascension of Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran regressed into unconstitutional monarchy once again. The Revolution of 1979 was the greatest mass uprising of the second half of the twentieth century in which people from all walks of life participated, but it led to the hegemony of the Islamic faction in the morning-after of the revolution, at the expense of the purge of all other revolutionary forces (i.e., Marxist, Nationalist, and secular factions that played a major role in the toppling of the monarchy and victory of this revolution).
25 As Afary puts it, mortality and protest propelled each other forward. See Afary.
26 On the whole, in such circumstances the “mechanical” aspect of rituals operates as a kind of “spiritual Kenosis” that strips the subject of all pathological content, reducing it “to the void of negativity that is at the core of subjectivity.” See Žižek 32.
27 For a perceptive analysis of this movement, see Farhadpour and Mehrgan. It is worthwhile to remember that the reversal of revolutions or defeat of revolts brings about a relapse from lament to the passive dimension of melancholia. The possibility of a relapse from history to myth therefore never ceases to exist. This push and pull continues in Iran up to this day as evident in the widespread insurgency in many Iranian cities in 2019 that led to the death of hundreds (more than one thousand in undocumented accounts) of protesters.
28 As a vehement critic of the post-revolutionary government, Hossein-Ali Montazeri’s title of Grand Ayatollah had been withdrawn and he had been under house arrest for years.
29 I’m indebted here to Deleuze’s favourable allusion to Peguy, stating that it is not Federation Day that commemorates the Fall of the Bastille, but the latter that celebrates and repeats in advance all Federation Days. See Deleuze 1.
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