enowning
Saturday, April 27, 2013
 
Shia International News Associationn repurposes Iran’s Quest for Cultural Authenticity, from Telos earlier.
Heidegger’s ideas were not disseminated in a systematic manner with methodological concerns; propagators of Heidegger in Iran were claiming that there “is a degree of similarity between his philosophy and the true traditional Islamic philosophy”. Essentially, Fardid claimed that the “westerners replaced thinking about the cosmos with the idea of a metaphysical God and eventually ended up with a type of individualism, which is devoid of all religious and spiritual meaning”. Because a godless West also implies a lack of morality, Ahmad Fardid “reaches the conclusion that Gharb (the West) has to be abandoned both as an ontology and as a way of life”. This idiosyncratic interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy via Fardid not only concretized the binary between the West and Iran but also led to the extremely fashionable discourse of Weststruckness, which was coined by Fardid yet popularized by Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–69). Thus concurrent with the representation of the concealed revelatory powers of the authentic East, was an image of a subject alienated from this potential, forever grasping at the West for meaning. This ailment called gharbzadegi—most often translated as Weststruckness—refers to a loss of cultural identity, which occurs in efforts to imitate the West.
If your national holiday is Death to America day, then you're always already Weststruck.
 
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