List of Figures Introduction: The World of Pure Verisimilitude From Truth to Verisimilitude Under the Debris of the Fourth Wall Ostranenie and the Arrested Mimesis of the Body Framing the Performances, Spacing Performativity The Liberating World of Pure Verisimilitudes Mashya and Mashyana Unearthed PART I MEN AND WOMEN 1 Men without Women Lumpens, Intellectuals, Clerics Searching for Deeper Roots From Lumpenism to Fascism Inorganic Intellectuals Lumpenism in Cinema The Mythic Gap of a Gender Imbalance 2 Women without Men The Creative Constitution of a Public Persona Knowledge of the Unknown Seven Shades of Memory Rethinking the Human in Literary Humanism Gleichschaltung Writing Women into Humanism PART II MASCULINE AND FEMININE 3 Masculine/Feminine Men of Honour and Fear of Castration The Metaphoric Body The Colonised Masculinity Dash Akol: The Mythic Man Idolised Contingency of the Body In Search of ‘Authenticity’ The Dialectics of the Body’s Being-in-the-World Sexual Thralldom Mutilating the Feminine Body Where Men are Men … … And Women are Not Men 4 Feminine/Masculine Daybreak Women at Work The Mythically Pregnant Reality Re-Mythologising the Real Mythologies Ritual Birth Urban Legend Meanwhile, the Ma’arefi Family ... Metonymic Mythologies of the Present 5 Liberation in Three Moves The Realism of the Real Fear of the Real Towards a Neo-Realism Reality under Erasure The Taste of Cherry The Bread and the Flower Pot Baran and the Native 6 To Be at Home in the World Dis-Engaging the Metaphysical To De-Oedipalise the Oedipal Re-Configuring the Body Trusting the Camera Subjectivity, Sexuality and the Imaginary Towards a Counter-Symbolic Visions of the Invisible ‘Semiotic Chora’ PART III HOME AND EXILE 7 The Cinema of Solitude A Nocturnal Journey Ice as a Floating Signifier Simple, Solitary and Serene The Site of the Solitary Unknowing Subject 8 The Ballad of Occidental Exile The Exile as the Unknowing Subject Exilic Cinema Exile on Exile: Amir Naderi on Sohrab Shahid-Saless Amir Naderi’s New York Born Again in New York A Migratory and Mobile State of Mind On the Poetry of Concrete and Steel Suspended of All Imported Meanings The Troubadour of the Occidental Exile PART IV MYSTICISM AND MYTHOLOGIES 9 The World of Verisimilitude The Nature and Disposition of Creativity Towards a Culture of Bodily Denials Fabling the World The Metaphysics of the Absolutes Subjection and Re-Subjection Against Dead Certainties A Material Celebration of Life The Sound of Gabriel’s Wing Towards a Cinematic (Counter-)Culture PART V VISIONS IMPERMISSIBLE 10 Visions of the Invisible Art as Postcoloniality Against the Jargon of Authenticity The Publicity of the Spectacle Counter-Imagining the Moral Being Iranian Self-Spectatorship The Aesthetic as Liberating the Subject The Colonial Modernity of Being Iranian Looking Back The Aesthetic and the Sacred Conclusion: Mashya and Mashyana Unearthed My Philosophical Mother is a Poet Overcoming the European Sovereign Subject The Prose and Poetics of a Longue Durée The Battlefield of Pure Verisimilitude From Mazdean Myth to Metonymic Subjectivity Semblance and Subjectivity Pivoting Towards a Liberated Subject and a Liberation Philosophy Mythos as Inheritance Notes Index