Namjoo and His Return
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A friend’s reaction to one of the passages below prompted me to explain further and turn that passage into a longer piece.
محسن نامجو شاخه عجیب ولی واقعی، رسته از ریشه اندیشه حاکمیت جنایت جمهوریاسلامی بود و به نوعی فریاد عقدههای نسل دوم هم آن اندیشه حاکم. حالا هم به آغوش پدر بازگشتنش، صرفا یک رجعت منطقی و آشناست. همگان از روز نخست ابلهانه او را باور نکرده بودند که حالا بخواهند تعجب کنند یا برآشوبند و شکست عشقی بخورند. کسانی مانند من هم بودند که از ابتدا او را تیری «کمانه» کرده از تاروپود متناقض و پیچیده اندیشه حاکم بر جمهوریاسلامی میدانستند. کسی که خودش را (دست کم) گم و پرت کرده بود به غرب و غربت و حالا دوباره در بحران گذار از میانسالی به خانهاش بازگشته است و این حق اوست که در این همه «لذت» هم ببیند. حالا جمهوری اسلامی حتما میگوید: «نگفتمت مرو آنجا که آشنات منم»؟!
اثر تنها زمانی از آفرینندهاش میتواند حیات جداگانه «هم» پیدا کند که آفریننده را نشناسی. اگر بشناسی، دیگر موضوع بیعرضگی و بیمایهگی و همچنین تنبلی شنونده یا بیننده اثر و یا در مواردی بیماری اوست اگر نتواند بهای دانستنش را بپردازد. شناخت آفریننده یک «اطلاعات حاشیهای» نیست. شعار «اثر را از مؤلف جدا کن» شاید برای کسی که مؤلف را نمیشناسد یک وضعیت طبیعی باشد، اما برای کسی که میشناسد، به معنای تعلیق بخشی از معرفت و شعور است. به معرفت و شعور خود احترام بگذاریم.
این پاره را در پاسخ به روند بیمارگونهای نوشتهام که گویی آدمها چون دلشان نمیآید از شنیدن یک اثر که بدهی احساسی برایشان ایجاد کرده دست بکشند و بهای دانستنشان را با تغییر خود بپردازند، شروع به تئوریزه کردن به مثابه یک مکانیسم دفاعی میکنند که «اثر را باید از مؤلف جدا کرد». حال آدمی از این شیادی ناخودآگاه و خودآگاه به هم میخورد.
Mohsen Namjoo’s return should not be presented merely as an artist’s geographical return to his homeland. At least as a psychoanalytic hypothesis, it is a kind of return to an object from which he had never completely separated: a homeland he once had to flee, but whose emotional investment, identifications, and part of the inner order that that “place” had formed in him had never fully been resolved for him. From this perspective, his return contains something of the logic of repetition compulsion; a re-entry into the scene of an old conflict, this time not in the position of someone compelled to leave, but as someone who can say, “I myself chose to return.”
But what draws my attention more than anything is the expression on his face—the state of ecstasy, satisfaction, and elevation visible in his pose and narrative. It is something that strives to produce a state of “transcendence,” but is in fact nothing more than a manic defence in the Kleinian sense: the transformation of anxiety, loss, and contradiction into a feeling of triumph, mastery, and transcendence; a position in which it seems as though Mohsen Namjoo has realized something in his old age that we “others” are still incapable of understanding, and we must be careful about how we react, lest we later “regret” it.
The artist’s ability to create meaning and the theorist’s ability to explain his own action apparently make Namjoo’s defensive move more complex, because intellectualization allows him to turn a return that is deeply conflicted—and entirely obvious to many—into a narrative of freedom, reconciliation, or even transcendence and understanding, through the language of art, thought, and philosophical complexity. This, of course, does not deprive him of a right: he has the right to return to his homeland, and his cultural record is not erased by this choice. The point of critique lies elsewhere: we may say that the distance he had taken for years from an authoritarian order (on what I consider the correct assumption that he had no plan or program whatsoever) may have been more merely geographical and conscious than psychological and internal; and that what is now being presented with the airs and appearance of transcendence and self-exaltation is, on another level, a return to an object and an order that had never truly ended within him.