Baraneh Emadian

This article problematizes two dominant approaches to the Twelve-Day War, which we delineate under the rubric of localism and campism. Drawing on state theory, these approaches can be considered as ramifications of two conceptions of the state. Localism treats the state as one or a particular state, focusing on the internal dynamics and circumstances of a particular nationstate. Campism, on the other hand, treats the state as an abstract universal, approaching it with a broad brush as a generic political form rather than attending to the concrete determinations of any one state. What is overlooked in these dual conceptions, it is argued, is the parallax gap between the two, which brings to light the actual force fields among states. Dwelling within the transpositional movement, the parallax gap exposes the limitations inherent in focusing exclusively on either perspective, which masks the antagonistic relationships that exist among actual states—namely, the persistent reality of war. This is even more palpable in our contemporary conjuncture in which wars and military conflicts have increasingly turned into a fundamental facet of capital accumulation and its complexities. Failing to recognize this parallax moment has critical consequences for radical politics, which will be explored in this article in the context of the Twelve-Day War.

This introduction gives an overview of the dossier, bringing together contributions on Israel's invasion of Iran during the Twelve-Day War from inside Iran as well as from exiled researchers and activists. It advances an internationalist position that seeks to move beyond both imperialist narratives and campist apologetics by taking struggles for liberation as its point of departure. While situating this war within the broader process of transformations of the Middle East that primed October 7, 2023, and subsequent reconfiguration of the region through violence, warfare and the genocide in Gaza, this piece delves deeper into the genealogies of this war. Alongside the two nationalist tendencies of ethno-nationalism and patriotism described here, a third alternative began to emerge in the wake of the war, distinguished by its qualitatively different and emancipatory character. This alternative was articulated by both political organizations and activists inside Iran such as independent labor organizations and political prisoners, as well as diasporic leftist collectives. Constructed around a “dual negation,” this stance expressed a call for genuine democratic transformation grounded in grassroots mobilization and solidarity. It offered a critique not only of the immediate protagonists involved in this war but also of the broader structures underpinning violence and domination in the region, ultimately highlighting an internationalist path forward.

We live at a time of the unleashing of inflation in all different registers. This indicates that inflation is an integral part of capitalism in the entirety of its spatiotemporal growth and, as such, must be analyzed in both economic and non-economic contexts. Although economic inflation is the first thing that comes to mind, it is inflation in the register of language that problematizes the difference between meaning and truth. Since meaning tends to be ensnared in the circular movement of overproduction (as in the overproduction of words, signs, and doxa in the era of social media), it is prone to compulsive repetition and devaluation. Truths, however, disrupt the logic of meaning or knowledge driven by accumulation and inflation, denoting dis-accumulation and subtraction (disinflation or deflation). Drawing on philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, this chapter first reflects on this difference and its link to political and libidinal economies. It then explores the possibility of interrupting inflationary modalities through the subtractive / deflationary capacity of radical politics.

This article reflects on the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprising in Iran (2022/23) in light of the politicisation of mourning. It argues that this uprising represented a singular afterlife of Antigone’s impediment of burial. In other words, the initial event of the murder of a Kurdish woman that sparked this uprising should not be reduced to the tension between one woman and the clerical class over the compulsory dress code, the clash between two value systems or worldviews, nor to the saga of a heroic individual fighting abstract institutions as the liberal narrative would have it. Rather, at stake is the Marxian problem of the exposure of contradictions and cracks in the social reality itself, the unveiling of deep-rooted antagonisms of a power structure grounded on the simultaneous acknowledgment and disavowal of a great portion of the population. The article shows how the very bodies of the dead protesters became the sites of relentless struggle and subversion. The excessive violence of the state in this uprising manifested itself in the denial of proper burial rites and blockage of funerals, a deprivation and violation that came back to haunt the state and challenge its symbolic power. Just like the unburied corpse of Polyneices, the mistreated dead bodies of the demonstrators bring to light what remains unconcealable and uncontainable in the desperate, brute force of the power-structure to prolong its own lifespan and buy legitimacy for its reign.

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.

At the time of the disintegration of “actually existing socialism” in the 1990s, it appeared that the inexorable flux of globalization was going to consume the nation-state. However, recent years have witnessed the increasing role of the states in both the Global North and South. The relationship between the state and capital is a frequently traversed subject, but what needs further illumination is the persistence of “many states” and its relation to capitalism as both a national and global formation. While globalization of capital suggests a movement from multiplicity toward a dehistoricized abstraction, a global state has never been actualized. This implies that, unlike capital, the state cannot be dehistoricized or dedifferentiated; therefore, the only way to think about the state is to observe concrete, multiple states. In view of this difference and drawing on Nicos Poulantzas’s and Kōjin Karatani’s inquiries into the states system, this article examines the multi-state system as an internal and external limit to Marxist thought.

This essay reflects upon the category of femonationalism as theorised in Sara Farris's book, In the Name of Women's Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism, with a focus on her critique of theories of populism. Farris's approach, it is argued, productively pinpoints the exceptional position of Muslim and non-western migrant women in the reproduction of the material conditions of social reproduction in western Europe. However, the force of Farris's Marxist theorisation of femonationalism is partly undermined by the absence of any reference to the conditions of the countries these women come from. A critique of neoliberal capitalism, which centres on the problem of Muslim migrant workers in Europe, should not be indifferent to different complex configurations of Islam with capitalism. Furthermore, while Farris's account of the power politics of different factions in Europe and their fusion of reaction and emancipation is invaluable, she does not articulate her insights into a global politics of emancipation or anti-capitalist struggle. In other words, the book does not address the question of how migrant women could attempt to liberate themselves from their ‘victimhood’ under the conditions lucidly depicted in this book.

György Lukács’s Marxist phase is usually associated with his passage from neo-Kantianism to Hegelianism. Nonetheless, Nietzschean influences have been covertly present in Lukács’s philosophical development, particularly in his uncompromising distaste for the bourgeois society and the mediocrity of its quotidian values. A closer glance at Lukács’s corpus discloses that the influence of Nietzsche has been eclipsed by the Hegelian turn in his thought. Lukács hardly ever mentions the weight of Nietzsche on his early thinking, an influence that makes cameo appearances throughout his lifetime writings. During the period of his adherence to a Stalinist approach to communism, his new subjectivity seems to be re-constituted through a disavowal of his earlier romantic anti-capitalism. Implicit in Lukács’s attack on Nietzsche in the Destruction of Reason (1952) is an acerbic reaction to the mute presence of the latter in his earlier thought. Apart from his ignorance of the unreliability of the collection of the Will to Power edited by Peter Gast and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, his battle against the anti-proletariat Nietzsche in the Destruction is waged on a metaphysical, non-historical plain. Lukács’s pre-Marxist works (Soul and Form, On Poverty of Spirit, and The Theory of the Novel) in a sense betray the instance of a writer who writes most of someone where he omits his name. Thus perceived, Lukács’s early corpus lends itself to a symptomatic reading. This essay seeks to extract the Nietzschean undercurrents of Lukács’s work through a reflection on the romantic anti-capitalist tendencies that the young Lukács shared with Nietzsche. For although it may appear that Nietzsche lacked a clear politics, his criticism of the bourgeois ethos as a structure based on debt/guilt [Schuld], and his critique of modern value-system and nihilism paved the way for the emergence of Lukács’s theory of reification. Nietzsche’s category of 'transvaluation of values’ suggests a total transfiguration of reality, a radical rupture with the ordinary state of things, and as such carries within itself a revolutionary promise. Drawing a distinction between political romanticism and romantic politics, I argue that romantic anti-capitalism contains a potential for the latter. The essay further traces the link between Lukács’s ‘romantic politics’ and the persistence of a thought of the tragic (a ‘tragic vision’) in his texts that, despite its temporary decline during his realist period, is undismissable in different constellations of his thought.

The relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis has been frequently debated; nonetheless, one rarely comes upon a thoroughgoing, in-depth treatment of this connection. The Capitalist Unconscious is therefore a belated but welcome inquiry into the points of intersection between the two, a project whose contours could be traced back to the works of Marx and Freud. It is in the work of Lacan, however, that this correlation between Marxism and Psychoanalysis becomes visible. This article explores Samo Tomšič’s analysis of the logical, epistemological, and political continuity of Marx’s critique of political economy and Freud’s theory of libidinal economy, meanwhile appraising the possible emancipatory potential of this project.