Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is an Iranian-American philosopher and literary theorist whose works explore rising movements of world thought across both East and West, focusing on concepts of chaos, illusion, violence, disappearance, delirium, silence, madness, apocalypse, night, and futurity.

[4] He is also the Programmer of Transdisciplinary Studies for the New Centre for Practice and Research[5] where he has taught original seminars on Deception, Night, Neo-Madness, The Master, and Evil.

The first book unravels a comparative thread in the fascination with “silence” between certain visionaries of so-called Western thought—Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud, Gaston Bachelard—alongside iconic luminaries of so-called Middle Eastern literature—Sadeq Hedayat, Nima Yushij, Forugh Farrokhzad, Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, Joyce Mansour—to trace the relation of “the unspoken” to experiences of solitude, catastrophe, the dream, the body, and the outside.

The second book, however, isolates four prototypes of extreme subjectivity—the insurgent (rebels), the poet (avant-garde writers), the mystic (here including experimental filmmakers), and the sectarian (founders of secret societies, undergrounds, cult factions)—to devise a rare alternative approach to the question of the postmodern age.

The first project—consisting of Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-In-Delirium (MIT Press/Urbanomic/Sequence, 2019)[11] and Omnicide, Volume II: Mania, Doom, and the Future-In-Deception (MIT/Urbanomic/Sequence, 2022)—forged a configuration of over 150 distinct manic categories (cataptromania: the obsession with mirrors; thalassomania: the obsession with the sea; colossomania: the obsession with giants) to break open unforeseen realms of madness or delirium that went beyond psychoanalytic models of dementia, derangement, delusion, schizophrenia, hysteria, paranoia, melancholia, and obsession[12][13] The second/final volume continues along such manic trajectories while also punctuated by four chapters titled The Book of the Eleventh Hour (philosophy of doom), The Book of the Opium Den (philosophy of smoke), The Book of Poor Games (philosophy of play), and The Book of the Liar (philosophy of deception).