The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, translated, with a preface and notes, by Richard Francis Burton, introduction by A. S. Byatt (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 7–8.
While it may seem that I am altering A Thousand and One Nights, actually I am emending the text, not through historical, textual and/or archival research but through creative writing and thus untimely collaboration with one or more of its creators, restoring it partly to how it was before undergoing corruptions in the form of some of the interpolations and alterations and erasures it underwent during its long history.
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, 12.
Ibid., 12–14. Taking into account the parallelism between the two scenes (in both the two kings espy the events from a distance, at least initially, and in both they are privy to a woman’s unfaithfulness), it is reasonable to suspect that King Shahrayâr’s first wife was also captured by his army or abducted by his agents on the very night she was to be wed to another.
Prince Hamlet’s words to his mother in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (3.4.55–65).
Mark 8:18.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet 3.4.66–67.
Ibid. 3.4.68. Had the vizier exclaimed, “You cannot call it jouissance,” he would also have been right—not because it is not jouissance, but because jouissance is not open to the call. Romeo says to Juliet: “Call me but love …” (Shakespeare,Romeo and Juliet 2.1.92–94); no one can accurately write or say, “Call me but jouissance …” On the relation of love to the name and the call, read my book Graziella: The Corrected Edition (Forthcoming Books, 2009; available for download as a PDF file at →).
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, 15–16.
Ibid., 16.
The scene is itself repeated in A Thousand and One Nights, since it is first seen by Shâh Zamân, who ends up informing his brother King Shahrayâr about it, the two then witnessing it again. It would be intriguing to exhibit Inci Eviner’s Harem in the lobby of a film theater screening Lynch’s Lost Highway, the audience members witnessing the two dreadful extremes: repetition compulsion and exhaustive variation.
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, 16.
Ibid.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid.
I provide in my book Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 2005) a variant but complementary manner of considering the title: The Thousand and One Nights “refers to … the one thousand nights of the one thousand unjustly murdered previous one-night wives of King Shahrayâr plus his night with Shahrazâd, a night that is itself like a thousand nights … We could not write were we as mortals not already dead even as we live; or else did we not draw, like Shahrazâd, in an untimely collaboration, on what the dead is undergoing. If Shahrazâd needed the previous deaths of the king’s former thousand one-night wives, it was because notwithstanding being a mortal, thus undead even as she lived, she did not draw on her death. That is why she cannot exclaim to Shahrayâr: ‘There’s something I am dying to tell you.’ And that is why past the Night spanning a thousand nights, Shahrazâd cannot extend her narration even for one additional normal night” (102). Both of my manners of considering the title are at variance with the widespread way it is read and according to which it refers to the number of nights Shahrazâd tells stories to Shahrayâr.
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, 11.
Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory, translated and with a preface by Rosette Lamont (Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1990), 4.
On the missing night in A Thousand and One Nights, read “Something I’m Dying to Tell You, Lyn” in my book Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You, 101–103: “Were I to become the editor of a future edition of The Thousand and One Nights, I would … make sure that one of the so-called nights is missing, i.e., that the edition is incomplete.… Since the ‘thousand nights’ of storytelling are the extension by Shahrazâd of one night, there is something messianic about The Thousand and One Nights. I gave my beloved Graziella a copy of The Thousand and One Nights in the Arabic edition of Dâr al-Mashriq, rather than in the Bûlâq edition republished by Madbûlî Bookstore, Cairo, certainly not because it is an expurgated edition, but because it does not contain at least one of the nights—night 365 is missing. ‘According to a superstition current in the Middle East in the late nineteenth century when Sir Richard Burton was writing, no one can read the whole text of the Arabian Nightswithout dying’ (Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion). Borges: ‘At home I have the seventeen volumes of Burton’s version (of The Thousand and One Nights). I know I’ll never read all of them …’ Until the worldly reappearance of al-Qâ’im (the Resurrector), there should not be a complete edition of The Thousand and One Nights. The only one who should write the missing night that brings the actual total of nights to a thousand and one is the messiah/al-Qâ’im, since only with his worldly reappearance can one read the whole book without dying.”
I therefore suggest that a DVD of Eviner’s Harem be attached to copies of A Thousand and One Nights.
Were it the case, there would be something amiss in Eviner’s rendition of the harem, since she would have omitted altogether the conservative religious members of the harem, their prayers and orthodox behavior and rituals.
See →, accessed, July 18, 2010.
To be more precise, the scene of undressing and sexual intercourse in the palace’s garden in A Thousand and One Nights enfolds two variants: one of desire, witnessed by both kings, and one of jouissance, fantasmatic, apprehended by Shahrayâr alone—this may in part account for why Shâh Zamân does not have a similar compulsive reaction as Shahrayâr.
Were it not for the last, angelic section of Patrick Bokanowski’s The Angel (1982), I can imagine screening this film in a museum as a loop—among other things, the angel guards against the compulsion to repeat, the loop.
When Predrag Pajdic wished to include my video The Lamentations Series: The Ninth Night and Day (60 minutes, 2005) as a looped work in one of the exhibitions and screenings he curated in various venues in London in the summer of 2007 (Tate Modern, etc.), I declined his request, insisting that the video should not be looped but rather screened in a movie theater at scheduled times since the repetition in this video is not of the compulsive sort and since this video is a durational work. In his “Ritualizing Life: Videos of Jalal Toufic,” Art Journal 66, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 83–84, Boris Groys ends his text with, “Already Nietzsche asserted that after the death of God, immortality can be imagined only as the eternal repetition of the same—as ritualized life. Contemporary video technique can be seen as a technical realization of this Nietzschean metaphysical dream. The videos of Toufic show time and again scenes of sleep, disappearance, and death. But their ritual character suggests the possibility of repetition that negates the definitive character of any loss, of any absence. Today, the only image of immortality that we are ready to believe is a video running in a loop,” notwithstanding that my video Lebanese Performance Art; Circle: Ecstatic; Class: Marginalized; Excerpt 3 (5 minutes, 2007) has the intertitle, “An Original Video Should Be Watched at Least Twice (Rather than Looped),” and that indeed the video proper, which is two minutes and ten seconds long, is then repeated; and notwithstanding that I had published in 2000 “You Said ‘Stay,’ So I Stayed” in my book Forthcoming (Berkeley, CA: Atelos, 2000), a text that provides a radically different reading of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence in its relation to the will and thus to the abolishing of death and to one of the forms of the new.
For a different conception of hell, read my book Undying Love, or Love Dies (Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 2002; available for download as a PDF file at →).
Here are some of muharram’s other meaning: “made, or pronounced, sacred,or inviolable, or entitled to reverence or repect or honour” (The entry hâ’ râ’ mîmin Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, 8 volumes (Beirut, Lebanon: Librairie du Liban, 1980)).
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), 53–54.
Apple’s Dictionary.
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume V (1900–1901), The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part) and On Dreams, translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, the Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974), 577. Cf: “The unconscious is quite timeless. The most important as well as the strangest characteristic of psychical fixation is that all impressions are preserved, not only in the same form in which they were first received, but also in all the forms which they have adopted in their further developments.” Ibid., volume VI (1901), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 275.
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell; with an introduction by Robert Hass (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 151.
Read “You Said ‘Stay,’ So I Stayed” in my book Forthcoming.
David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, third, enlarged edition (New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 18.
Ibid., 12.
Is one ever prepared for certain things one may have done the utmost to make possible, for example what “comes across directly onto the nervous system” or a successful resurrection? “Her eyelids ‘opened to reveal something terrible which I will not talk about, the most terrible look which a living being can receive, and I think that if I had shuddered at that instant, and if I had been afraid, everything would have been lost, but my tenderness was so great that I didn’t even think about the strangeness of what was happening, which certainly seemed to me altogether natural because of that infinite movement which drew me towards her’ (Blanchot’s Death Sentence). The far more frequent and regrettable phenomenon in these resurrections is that just as the eyes of the resurrector and those of the resurrected come into contact, and the resurrector sees in the latter a reflection of the dreadful realm where the resurrected was, he or she in horror instinctively closes the resurrected’s eyes. This, rather than shutting the eyes of the corpse, is the paradigmatic gesture of closing the dead’s eyes. Indeed, the gesture of closing the eyes of the corpse probably originated, at least in the Christian era, in witnessing someone hurriedly shutting the eyes of a dead person whom he had resurrected. Were humans one day to no longer believe in resurrection and to have forgotten it consequent of a withdrawal of the epoch when some people were resurrected, it is likely that they will no longer close the eyes of the corpse. I find it disappointing that none of the vampire films I have seen, and I presume no vampire film at all shows what is likely to take place during the initial encounter of the vampire with his living guest: what the guest apprehends in the undead’s eyes is so horrifying, he instinctively raises his hand toward the vampire’s eyes to close them, only to hear the vampire, who had already had to tackle this reaction numerous times, say: ‘Your arms feel very tired. You long to rest them against your hips.’ Hypnotized, the guest let his now very heavy hands fall down.” Jalal Toufic, (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film, revised and expanded edition (Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 2003, available for download as a PDF file at →), 219–220.
Were it not the case, then I can very well imagine that there is something hidden behind the drapery in Velásquez’s painting and that that something is Bacon’s pope in Study after Vélázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953). Could the pope of Velasquez have performed an exorcism of the pope of Bacon?
The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 28.
Ibid., 37.
Ibid., 141.
It is fitting that Godard did not include Las Meninas among the paintings Jerzy tries to do a tableau vivant of, for he, Godard, is incapable of presenting by creating what is to the other side of its represented canvas.
It is disappointing that the four brief scenarios that Kierkegaard gives of this test in the “Exordium” of his book Fear and Trembling all assume that awake Abraham was commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, i.e., that Kierkegaard’s variations remained relative to one of the two mainstream versions, missing the other altogether. “There were countless generations who knew the story of Abraham by heart, word for word, but how many did it render sleepless?” (Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, edited and translated with introduction and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 28). It appears that Kierkegaard was one of those whom the story of Abraham rendered sleepless—this possibly deprived him of an additional opportunity to intuit that Abraham received the command to sacrifice his son in a dream; and it is manifest that he did not actually know the story word for word, since certain words were missing from the version he knew, for example: “in a dream”; and it seems that he was oblivious of (what the sufis term) the sirr (innermost, secret heart; secret). How little kashf (supersensory unveiling) Kierkegaard had; one can say the same of Derrida when he writes in a seemingly inclusive gesture, “The sacrifice of Isaac belongs to what one might just dare to call the common treasure, the terrifying secret of the mysterium tremendum that is a property of all three so-called religions of the Book, the religions of the races of Abraham” (Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 64), either ignorant or repressing his knowledge that the son Abraham was commanded to sacrifice has no specific name in one of these Books, that of Moslems, the Qur’ân; that according to Tabarî, “the earliest sages of our Prophet’s nation disagree about which of Abraham’s two sons it was that he was commanded to sacrifice. Some say it was Isaac, while others say it was Ishmael” (The History of al-Ṭabarî (Ta’rîkh al-rusul wa’l-mulûk), volume II, Prophets and Patriarchs, translated and annotated by William M. Brinner (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 82; see pages 82–95 for the various traditions regarding which of the two sons Abraham was commanded to sacrifice); that Ibn Kathîr opts for Ishmael as the son Abraham was commanded to sacrifice (Al-imâm al-Hâfiz ‘Imâd al-Dîn Abî al-Fidâ’ Ismâ‘îl ibn Kathîr al-Qirashî al-Dimashqî, Qisas al-Anbiyâ’, ed. al-Sayyid al-Jumaylî (Beirut, Lebanon: Dâr al-Jîl, 2001), 155–160); and that in most later Islamic tradition Ishmael (Ismâ‘îl) is considered the son whom Abraham was commanded to sacrifice—in a dream.
Ibn al‘Arabi, “The Wisdom of Reality in the Word of Isaac,” in The Bezels of Wisdom, translation and introduction by R. W. J. Austin, preface by Titus Burckhardt (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 99–100.
Ibid., 100.
Full disclosure: I am the elder son in my family.
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume V (1900–1901), The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part) and On Dreams, 509.
Sigmund Freud: “Among the dreams which have been reported to me by other people, there is one which … was told to me by a woman patient who had herself heard it in a lecture on dreams … Its content made an impression on the lady … and she proceeded to ‘re-dream’ it, that is, to repeat some of its elements in a dream of her own … The preliminaries to this model dream were as follows. A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.… The explanation of this moving dream is simple enough and, so my patient told me, was correctly given by the lecturer. The glare of light shone through the open door into the sleeping man’s eyes and led him to the conclusion which he would have arrived at if he had been awake, namely that a candle had fallen over and set something alight in the neighbourhood of the body.… the content of the dream must have been overdetermined and … the words spoken by the child must have been made up of words which he had actually spoken in his lifetime and which were connected with important events in the father’s mind.… We may … wonder why it was that a dream occurred at all in such circumstances, when the most rapid possible awakening was called for. And here we shall observe that this dream, too, contained the fulfillment of a wish. The dead child behaved in the dream like a living one: he himself warned his father, came to his bed, and caught him by the arm … For the sake of the fulfillment of this wish the father prolonged his sleep by one moment. The dream was preferred to a waking reflection because it was able to show the child as once more alive. If the father had woken up first and then made the inference that led him to go into the next room, he would, as it were, have shortened his child’s life by that moment of time.” Ibid., 509–510.
“Ten followers of the mystic Islamic Sufi movement were killed last night … According to a US military briefing, the crowd of Sufi worshippers was attacked by a suicide car bomber in the village of Saud, near the town of Balad, about 425 miles north of Baghdad, late last night.… Sufi mystics are a target of Islamic extremists, who dispute their interpretation of the Koran. Twelve people were also injured in the explosion. Ahmed Hamid, a Sufi witness, told the Associated Press: ‘I was among 50 people inside the tekiya (Sufi gathering place) practicing our rites when the building was hit by a big explosion. Then, there was chaos everywhere and human flesh scattered all over the place.’” Sam Knight, Times Online, June 3, 2005, →.
Jacques Derrida: “As for the sacrifice of the son by his father, the son sacrificed by men and finally saved by a God that seemed to have abandoned him or put him to the test, how can we not recognize there the foreshadowing or the analogy of another passion? As a Christian thinker, Kierkegaard ends by reinscribing the secret of Abraham within a space that seems, in its literality at least, to be evangelical” (The Gift of Death, 80–81). Of a philosopher who wrote in the same book that the sacrifice of the son of Abraham “belongs to what one might just dare to call the common treasure, the terrifying secret of the mysteriumtremendum that is a property of all three so-called religions of the Book, the religions of the races of Abraham,” I would have expected, were his inclusion of Islam thought through, that he reread Jesus Christ’s night at the garden of Gethsemane through the detour of the Qur’ânic episode in which a sleeping father dreams that he has to sacrifice his son. “Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him … Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me’” (Matthew 26:36–38). When he said, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” which death was Jesus talking about? Was it his state of overwhelming sorrow then? Was it his destined imminent death on the cross? No; what Jesus said in the garden by means of ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,’ the Son (Christ) understood but the messenger(s) (Peter and the two sons of Zebedee) did not. His foreboding was confirmed when he went a little farther relative to his three disciples and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39). There was no response from the Father! Christ’s soul was overwhelmed with sorrow to discover that God the Father was then sleeping and dreaming, dead—if in the case of humans, (dreaming) sleep is a sort of “little death,” in the case of God, (dreaming) sleep is death! When Jesus Christ said, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” the death he, “the life” (John 11:25), was speaking about was not, indeed could not be his death, but rather the death of God the Father. While sleeping and dreaming, God the Father could not understand him since in that condition He understands only the dead (in this, He is similar to Daniel Paul Schreber’s God: “Within the Order of the World, God did not really understand the living human being and had no need to understand him, because, according to the Order of the World, He dealt only with corpses” (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. and ed. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 75)). This is one variant of the death of God in Christianity: not the death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, God as the Son (exemplified pictorially by Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521)), but the death of God the Father, the beloved who paradoxically died notwithstanding His eternity (by sleeping and dreaming), forsook His beloved and lover (Matthew 27:46)! Why did the Father go on dreaming during His Son’s first two exoteric prayers to Him on that night notwithstanding that had He awakened He could possibly have spared His son the crucifixion? Jesus went back and forth twice between two kinds of companions whom he had expected to keep watch with him, his disciples (“Keep watch with me” (Matthew 26:38) and God the Father (“He who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:3–4); cf. Qur’ân 2:255: “Allâh! There is no deity save Him, the Alive, the Eternal. Neither slumber nor sleep overtaketh Him” (trans. Pickthal)), but that he found sleeping (and dreaming) (“Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. ‘Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?’ he asked Peter. ‘Watch and pray …’ He went away a second time and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.’ When he came back, he again found them sleeping …” (Matthew 26:40–43)). The sleep and dream of God is (not a night in the world but) the night of the world; I am therefore not surprised that the disciples felt such an irresistible urge to sleep and dream. Christ does not need to be resurrected since he, the life, cannot die (cf. Qur’ân 4:156: “They said (in boast), ‘We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allâh’;—but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them”); he is the resurrection (Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25)) only in relation to others, including and primarily God the Father. Between leaving his disciples for the third time and praying again (“So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing” (Matthew 26:44)), God the Son awakened God the Father by resurrecting Him from the sort of death His sleeping and dreaming is! Jesus Christ’s greatest miracle, his resurrection of God the Father, was not witnessed by his disciples and was not reported in the Gospels. Now, to his third prayer, he received an answer from God the Father; God the Father indicated to him that His will was that he, the Son, be crucified. Then the Son of God “returned to the disciples and said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and resting? Look, the hour is near, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us go! Here comes my betrayer!’ While he was still speaking, Judas, one of the Twelve, arrived. With him was a large crowd armed with swords and clubs.… Then the men stepped forward, seized Jesus and arrested him. With that, one of Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. ‘Put your sword back in its place,’ Jesus said to him, ‘… Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?’” (Matthew 26:45–54). It seems that God fell asleep and dreamt again, with the consequence that “about the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’—which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matthew 27:46). And it seems that crucified Jesus Christ had again to resurrect God—while he was being mocked and challenged: “The chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. ‘He saved others,’ they said, ‘but he can’t save himself! … Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.’ … In the same way the robbers who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him” (Matthew 27:41–44).
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, 64.