Presentation 1

First draft abstract:

On one afternoon of February 1987, my grandfather, Hussein Mroueh, a marxist thinker who was once a Shi’ite scholar in Najaf during the British mandate rule of Iraq, was prepared to start writing the third volume of his book on materialist tendencies in Arab-Islamic philosophy. The first two volumes of the book comprised of an expansive analytical account of the histories of knowledge production in Shi’ite Mu’tazala, a movement in Islam known for its revivalist ideologies. On that afternoon of February 1987, my grandfather was shot dead in his apartment in Beirut. No official investigation of his assassination ever took place, but the discontent with my grandfather’s latest book was no secret at the time, and that was an era when post-revolution Iran and the consequent emergence of a new Shi’ite class created new struggles in war-struck Middle East, amid global tensions that would soon lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Today, new phenomena have emerged, requiring an updated reading of Islamic philosophy within a current global situation were an ever accelerating info-shere is shaping our political imaginary. With the emergence of the Islamic State on global information markets, it is necessary to investigate the new givens that have shifted our understanding of political and economical sovereignty. Over the course of the past year, I have been trying to research and explore the different techno-linguistic hegemonies that operate our social and political body. I was particularly interested in how a post-internet globalised machine of mobile capital, labor and information has created, together with an embedded linguistic automatism, a new model of virtual governance: just as financial capitalism emancipated the economy from the field of bodies, transforming the economy into a semiotic activity, it has also emancipated states from land, transforming our political imaginary into a mere act of language.

Today I wonder, if I could travel back in time to 1987, formal and semiotic way that attempts to exaggerate the current complicity between financial-linguistic technologies and

Art references:

- Australian net.artist mez | Mary Anne Breeze | 2003:

- New World Summit | Jonas Staal | 2012:

http://newworldsummit.eu/about/

Bibliographic references:

- First Principles of Islamic State | About A’ala Al MAudoudi | 1974

- Materialist Tendencies in Arab-Islamic Philosophy | Hussein Mroueh | 1978

- Words Made Flesh | Florian Cramer | 2005

- The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance | Franco Berardi | 2012

- A New Kind of State | The Rise of the Virtual State | Richard Rosecrance | 1999

- Accelerationist Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics | Alex Williams and Nick Snick | 2013