Return to Greco-Latinity

Abstract

Three key words in the subtitle of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s most recent book announce the thematic limit of its drastically absolute title Omnicide. On the face of it, mania, fatality, and the “futureindelirium” are matters the book deals with in an attempt to excavate the most recent trends (from the middle of the last century or so) in literatures in Arabic, Persian, and French by Arab and Iranian writers. It does so in the format of a lexicon of manias, each of which are illustrated, elaborated, exemplified, echoed, and imaged through leitmotifs quoted from snatches of text from “vanguard” writers from that part of the world. The book is built around this format of lexicon, quotation, and thematic elaboration to perform a set of readings that transcend the territoriality attached to the literatures of the East and recuperate the texts’ maniacal energies. It does so with such deliberation that despite its playful presentation, a distinct thesis emerges at the intersection of three axes corresponding to its three subtitles: an antipsychological understanding of mania, a poeticfigural preoccupation with fatality, and an unselfconscious, even undramatic heralding of a futureindelirium that, according to the book’s narrative, is already underway. There are echoes here of preoccupations of several EuroAmerican modernisms: this review will focus on the deliberate, untheorized resurfacings of EuroAmerican theory in this otherwise innovative book about some avantgarde literatures of the East. In its partial archiving of “middleeastern” manias, we will note signs of a GrecoLatinity,