Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark

by Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

This short book engages the myriad dimensions of Night, through ancient rituals, medieval storytelling, modern philosophy, and futuristic images, in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark. It thereby tracks Night through the prisms of its most fascinating namely, those who keep strange hours and navigate the various potentialities of nocturnal experience (both of terror and enchantment). The Thief’s Night; The Runaway’s Night; The Drunkard’s Night; The Insomniac’s Night; The Revolutionary’s Night; The Lunatic’s Night; The Sorcerer’s Night. Undoubtedly, each of these conceptual figures provides a unique gateway into understanding the powerful sensorial effects of evening, as well as its vast connections to larger questions of time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, vision, secrecy, criminality, monstrosity, and the body.

Genres: Philosophy

136 pages, Paperback

Published January 3, 2020

About the author

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College. He is the author or editor of The Chaotic Imagination: New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East (2010), Inflictions: The Writing of Violence in the Middle East (2012), The Radical Unspoken: Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought (2013), and Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism (2015).

Reviews

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es un ensayo con una prosa muy hermosa. No sé qué me llevo. Quizás nada.

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Middle Eastern version of the one jawn I read over the summer about the one insomniac

[Arianne X · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deepest Darkness Reveals the Leading Light

I can relate to the author’s presentation of philosophy as enlightenment or as a dark trek. By philosophy as enlightenment, the author means philosophy as a legitimate discipline in search of truth with the embrace of reason and order. By dark trek, the author means philosophy as an exercise in rogue speculation and rejection through the embrace of abandonment and subversion.

However, it is not a matter of ‘or’, it is a matter of ‘and’. I do not find there to be a “…violent conflict (of) two diametrically-opposed sides” as claimed by the author. I have found philosophy to be both enlightenment and a dark trek with the enlightenment coming from the darkness. The either-or choice is a fallacy that masks innumerable additional positions along a continuum of enlightenment and darkness. I was surprised to see the book open with this simple and easily avoidable fallacy. There is no schism between the darkness and the light as the author presents it. It is the darkness that restores the awareness, allows us to see the void of our Being in clear light, to understand the colossal mistake that just is the existence of consciousness awareness, and the awareness of this awareness. We are cursed with the awareness of our misfortune and misfortune of our awareness.

Mine is the path of finding the will to withdraw into the darkness. But still, a part of me is found searching in the gaps that divide the light from dark - lurching forward looking for a friend in this ambiguous place where the whole of me does reside. My own path is the way of feeling the pangs of paradox, a persistence in searching for the things only found in the cracks of existence. It is a quest for that which cannot be had even in a bright flash of darkness. When the crises of true enlightenment comes, its cast will be incomprehension and darkness. Reality will be found in contact with this apprehension crises, an incomprehensible incomprehension will be so earned. The dark is found within the great ambiguity of many lights. Herein is the reality of my incompletion wherein my genuine autonomy is found. The darkness is the truest source of the light in the void. There is nothing to avoid and nothing to fight for there is no fright in the light of Nothing.

Having said this, the author has his own beautiful epigrammatic prose style that borders on poetry and is a pleasure to read.