The Romance of the Indo-European Family: Globalatinization, Philology, and the Space of Christian Semantics

339 Pages·2017·3.073 MB·English

by  Navid Naderi

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

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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

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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.

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Contents

Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... vii
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1
2. Tahrir and the Limits of Civilizational Imagination, or عازن لحم ریر حت ................................. 15
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

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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.

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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.

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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

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