The Romance of the Indo-European Family: Globalatinization, Philology, and the Space of Christian Semantics by Navid Naderi Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano, Co-supervisor ___________________________ Walter Mignolo, Co-supervisor ___________________________ Fredric Jameson ___________________________ Bruce Lawrence Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 i v ABSTRACT The Romance of the Indo-European Family: Globalatinization, Philology, and the Space of Christian Semantics by Navid Naderi Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Walter Mignolo, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Fredric Jameson ___________________________ Bruce Lawrence An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 Copyright by Navid Naderi 2017 Abstract This dissertation explores the idea of “history” as a general theory of meaning in its rapport with Christian political theology and its liquidation into the secular idea of a world divided into “familial,” “civilizational,” “national,” “racial,” and “religious” entities and collectivities. The author attempts to demonstrate that the relevance of historical meaning expands globally with Christian colonialism and imperialism, and that historicization ultimately amounts to racialization (“race” here standing as at once the most charged and the most neutral term of division that although is not one with “family”—as in “linguistic families”—“civilization,” “nation,” and “religion,” expresses best the common mode of theologico-political division that these modern signifiers are deployed to effect). Acquisition of historical meaning is the rite of entry into the world of nations, and history ultimately figures the political collectivities that it founds and bestows meaning upon as “communities of blood,” or communities in possession of a sacred shared substance that persists over time, is often constituted by means of purging from it what is produced as “foreign,” and has to be protected and immunized against exterior contamination. The process of acquisition of modern racial-historical meaning and formation into a national situation is particularly explored with reference to Iran. A variety of scholarly and literary texts are read and recited, alongside an exploration of postmodern war and democratic politics in an attempt to demonstrate the iv theological underpinnings of historical meaning. Interrelations of “religion” and “race” are particularly explored and the idea of “secularism” is questioned specially in its rapport with Christian imperialism, Orientalism, and the philological history of “Semitism” and anti-Semitism. The text is largely sui generis, self-referential and poetic in method: it explores the resonances and dissonances of various texts and strives to express the semantic noise of these juxtapositions all the while that it seeks to explore the obscene undersides of contemporary political ideas and ideals. The text does not reach as much a conclusion at the end as it seeks to raise questions and create problems. It asks, for example, whether there is a “secular” erotic and psychic investment in sexually humiliating the “religious;” whether we standardized humans are addicted to the pornography of war and find murder beautiful; as well as whether exploring the philological co-dependencies of “race” and “religion” raises a question about the logic and function of the analytical separation between racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia. v Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... vii 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 15 ................................. تحریر محل نزاع Tahrir and the Limits of Civilizational Imagination, or .2 3. Mystified Body, Enlightened Mind: On History as Brutal Free Love ............................. 51 4. On Hating Lovingly (addendum to qršt) ........................................................................... 266 5. P/F, or, Filological Dislocation—On Becoming Nationally Situated ............................. 279 6. Conclusions ............................................................................................................................ 324 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 325 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 331 vi Acknowledgements I am infinitely indebted to my advising committee(s) for allowing me to get lost, take turns and detours, and change “my project” at every turn. Thank you for allowing me to seek the masochistic pleasure of seeking knowledge and form and failing at knowing and finding form. vii 1. Introduction Race—or the “idea of race and the operations of racism”—Wahneema Lubiano writes, is “a distorting prism.” It mystifies what “would be readily apparent to anyone existing on this ground” (my emphasis). As a semantic operator, “race” mys-trans-lates: it mystifies the apparent by removing—as it were—those on this ground, from here to another place, where, mediated by a collective self-image, they appear otherwise to themselves; as if unrelated to that social reality that is apparent there. In “the United States” for example, where Lubiano writes, this “distorting prism … allows [the] citizenry to imagine itself functioning as a moral and just people while ignoring the widespread devastation directed at black Americans particularly, but at a much larger number of people generally.”1 In this sense race disorients political antagonisms and constitutes dislocated political collectives based on a fundamental denial of the social realities on the ground. What race mystifies—or covers (as the media “cover”) in layers and layers of social and historical meaning and spectacular light—is an apparent injustice and inequality that is constitutive of modernity: what Walter Mignolo calls the “coloniality” of modernity. As a modern signifier—and it should be readily apparent that “race” is a 1 Wahneema Lubiano, “Introduction,” in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), vii. 1 modern signifier—race enables modern human collectives to be imagined as unique, as it were, “peoples,” “nations,” “communities,” etc. each with their own “history,” “literature,” “culture,” “language,” etc., while at the same time it projects a general image of where “humanity” is headed in its imagined totality. In our postmodern world “humanity” seems to be (still) headed toward what has been referred to as “the end of history,” that is to say, toward the full globalization of the so-called “free” market and “political” democracy as the most noble ideals and achievements of post-Enlightenment thought. The idea of race is not separable from this grand outline of Human History— neither is the there where democratic majorities imagine themselves to be moral and just despite the plethora of signs that point to the otherwise here, where social realities are forcefully and popularly denied. Gil Anidjar traces the coming to the world of the idea of race, alongside that of the “nation,” to the becoming central of the rite of the Eucharist to medieval Western Christian Church. Imagining that the Sacrament—the consumption of the pure blood of Jesus Christ—has purified the Christian community’s blood, there emerges in Christian imagination a division between bloods: Christian blood is different from non-Christian blood. This way, Anidjar argues, the Christian community comes to reimagine itself as a community united by a shared sacred substance that is in dire need of security and immunity. The racial, or national, community as a community of blood thus comes into 2 the world as what we might call today a “religious” community, imagined in terms of “consanguinity.”2 By nineteenth century, however, the secular science of philology—a modern science of comparison and classification that is later on divided (or dissolved) into several distinct branches of modern human sciences such as history, anthropology, comparative literature, comparative linguistics, and the comparative study of religion—transforms the political-theological idea that there are different kinds of blood into a providential theory of a “humanity” divided into different “families” whose imagined sanguine differences—assumed to be the real cause of “progress,” or the forward movement of “history”—comes to be generalized into “historical facts,” to use Ernest Renan’s formulation, with the advent of “world religions.” The latter themselves being modern inventions of Christian philologists who constructed such ideas as Judaism, Mohammedanism, Islamism,