Inexistent Night (with Yasunari Kawabata)

ABSTRACT

This piece theorizes the myriad strange possibilities of “the inexistent night” – that is, a minor temporal-existential break in the after-dark that nevertheless enables both disastrous and euphoric transformations to take hold. To illustrate this subtle turn, the focus rests upon a close analysis of a text by the twentieth-century, avant-garde, Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata titled House of the Sleeping Beauties. This is a minimalist tale of enigmatic encounters in which characters embody different cyclical moods relating night to anonymity, solitude, and impermanence. In the final stride, an entire conceptual edifice of the inexistent unfolds – amid radical disorientations of identity, desire, movement, and sensation – combining the architectonics of ghostliness with the atmospherics of shadow to suggest a more cryptic world beyond all existential centers.

KEYWORDS:

• Night
• darkness
• shadow
• sleep
• existence
• Kawabata

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College. His focus is on tracking currents of experimental thought in the Middle East and the West, with particular attention to exploring concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, sectarianism, mania, disappearance, and apocalyptic writing. He has published several books to date, including: The Chaotic Imagination: New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Inflictions: The Writing of Violence in the Middle East (Continuum, 2012); The Radical Unspoken: Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought (Routledge, 2013); Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism (SUNY, 2015); and Elemental Disappearances (co-authored with Dejan Lukic; Punctum Books, 2016). His two forthcoming books–Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium (MIT Press/Urbanomic, 2019) and Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark (Zero Books, 2019)–are close engagements with the conceptual territories of “madness” and “night.” He is also the co-editor of the Suspensions book series (Bloomsbury), and the co-founder of the 5th (Dis)Appearance Lab (www.5dal.com).