Le magazine Littéraire

Le Magazine Littéraire is one of those special french journals that every now and then (if not always) publish a volume on a special subject and making a great collection about the subject from well known writers and thinkers. This is happened more often in some other french journals such as Le point, Le mond or L'Histoire but seldom I have found the same collections in English language journals. 

The cover story of the volume 503 (december 2011) of Le magazine Littéraire is about the play writer Jean Genet.  

I suggest to all francophone to read this special issue of Le Magazine littéraire.

He is one of my favourite dramatists. He had an extra ordinary life full of ups and downs. He born from a young prostitute and had grown by a carpenter first year of his life. He was a great student in school and a good thief too.  One of his most famous works, The thief journal is a part-fact part-fiction autobiography of the author himself.

One my 5 favorite plays is his The Blacks: a clown show. 

This paly was performed in storeroom of Tehran Theater directed by Hamed mohammad Taheri. It was amazing. The other masterpiece of him is The maids. First time that I have seen this play, I found it a normal paly. After reading the critics of Jean paul Sartre on the play, I found that it was the weakness of the director and the play was very deep and have had various layers. Jean Paul Sartre has a book called Saint Genet on Jean Genet “to prove that genius is not a gift but the way out that one invents in desperate cases”. 

Genet was intensely touched by Sartre's analysis and stopped writing for the next five years.

 

One of the other special issues of this journal is an old volume on Solitude (loneliness).  That is also an awesome reunion of articles on the loneliness from various points of view. 

The power of Suggestion

Suggestion, besides its daily meaning has another meaning: "the psychological process by which one person guides the thoughts, feelings, or behaviour of another". The second sense of the suggestion plays a great role in our society and culture. A great part of our taste has been made by the suggestion of the Other! The Other with a big O, according to Jacques Lacan, "it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term"(1). In the other word, what we desire to have is what makes us happy to be acknowledged by the Other. In a way this was one of our priority to our cousins, Chimps, and help us to survive better through the evolution by mimicking and learning from the others, but nowadays can be abused as the origin of modern marketing and branding. To do what our Other ask you to do hence to be accepted kindly in a flock! Isn't it sad that the whole life is based on what other people, who they themselves do what others like, want us to be? 

1)Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique 1953–1954 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), ISBN 978-0-393-30697-2

To democracy!

I don't know if these uprisings of Middle East will follow the destiny of the Animal Farm, but I found a social evolution in that part of the world. A contagious evolution that by domino effect spreads out to all the countries of Middle East. An effect that might start from the after election coup d’état in Iran. The fact that Egyptians come to the point that not only believed but also acted against the ridicules monopoly of Mubarak power, will be a turning point in the history of Egypt even though the pleasant results will be felt many years from today.  The resignation of the Mubarak and Ben ali revealed that the public of the middle eastern countries are much more advanced and civilized than their leaders. This time the Tunisians and Egyptians came to the point that ask for a non-imported democracy with origins inside of the country.
Although at the same time I am sure this path will have several ups and downs but in long term it will result in a modern, peaceful middle east. 

Yesterday, thousands of Iranian people had a manifestation to not only show their support to Egyptians and Tunisians but also to show that the green anti-governmental movement of Iran is still alive.  The Story of Iran is a bit different. The totalitarian regime of Iran, decide to resist against the public with any means. On the other hand, the number of the pro-governmentals is still high enough to support the government. Although this will prolong the inevitable procedure of the democratization in the world, but can never block it.

Education is the only mean that can increase the speed of the progress in the world. Maybe the best support from the free world is to educate people.  By people I mean, not only the protester but also the totalitarians. In the world of knowledge it will be too difficult to abuse the ignorance of the people with fictions, ideologies and religions.