Majid Parvanehpour

During the last two decades, many thinkers on Iranian cinema have had many things to say about censorship, especially the issue of the veil imposed on women’s gender by the authorities in Iran. In this paper, I will describe Hamid Dabashi’s narrative as related to the concept of “truth” to show further that the veil issue has reached a new phase in Iran. Although much of what Dabashi defines as the absented body of women in his article “Body less faces: Mutilating modernity and abstracting women in an ‘Islamic cinema’” may still hold, I believe his over-arching narrative doesn’t contribute enough to our understanding of the new relations among the authorities and actresses’ Fashion styles on red carpets. This paper’s method is connected with cultural and visual studies through Roland Barthes’ semiotics. I first focus on Hamid Dabashi’s conception of “truth” and how he believes “truth” is related to Islamic ideology and embodied in Iranian post-revolutionary cinema to further (through analysing photos of Iranian actresses’ clothing who attend festivals) conclude that Iranian women try to adopt new resistances in choosing their costumes compared to the early two decades of post-revolutionary Iran. The presence of Iranian women in festivals especially regarding what they wear has established a new interwoven relationship with authorities which has somewhat not been surveyed properly. By surveying the photos of their fashion and style I conclude that they are in constant negotiation with authorities through what they rebelliously wear.

This paper would attempt to illustrate some possible links between Deleuze’s way of thinking and the practice of modern and post-modern artists. This analogy is defined and explained in the context of Deleuze’s anti-Platonism to see if there is a relation between Deleuze’s struggle to oppose anti-Platonism, his desire to create a new way of thinking, and what modern artists actually did in their practice. Hence, after defining some of the concepts and showing the importance and function of them in modern art, the paper would try to trace the same concepts in Deleuze’s thought. It will then explain Deleuze’s anti-Platonism putting emphasis on the concept of simulacrum; meanwhile, it will briefly answer Badiou’s critique of Deleuze’s anti-Platonism. Finally, it would show that Deleuze, relying on this opposition, and in fact inspired by intellectual processes used by post-modern artists, is trying to find a third way for thinking to a world full of images. He introduces a path that neither goes back and nor, as we find with Baudrillard, sees the world as an apocalyptic world of images in which we wander.