Entropy Interviews Maged Zaher About Newest Book, The Consequences of My Body

At Entropy, a unique conversation with Maged Zaher, whose latest volume, The Consequences of My Body, is just out from Nightboat Books. Joe Millazo writes that "[t]he diaristic musings of The Consequences of My Body ask whether desire can be rehabilitated. Yet the libidinal odes that face (confront?) that quotidian theorizing suggest that the problem may be that we ever thought desire needed to be rehabilitated at all… if not what our historical attempts at such rehabilitation have wrought." Millazo talks to Zaher about desire, the olfactory, Badiou, and more. An excerpt:

8) On page 67, the reader encounters a poem in Arabic script. If this poem itself is translated elsewhere within The Consequences of My Body, it is not marked or identified in any way. Likewise, the reader is not privy to whether these Arabic lines constitute an original composition, or whether they are the work one of on those predecessor poets introduced later in the book. What hinges upon the un-translation of the poem on page 67?

So much hinges on this un-translation and its typeset — so much — I will leave it at that.

9) Alain Badiou has written extensively on love as an event, and thus a site of actual (existential) revolution. The poems in The Consequences of My Body render themselves vulnerable to images of upheaval and radical social change: “I woke up and there was no proletariat”; “we are left to combat the middle class / With mere hands”; “You appear in the middle of the revolution / To comfort the radicals for nights and nights —”; “… The / community has disappeared, they burned a few things then / left to experience history”. In this book, does the revolution precede love, or is love—and, as Badiou would have, love’s disclosure of the previously unrepresented, the “excluded part”—a necessary condition for revolution?

I think there is a dialectic there — none is a precondition or precedes the other — I would argue that both are necessary and they can be encouraged or supported by each other — I would think freedom is a necessity before any love or revolution is practiced successfully — but I would absolutely not define freedom in personal liberal terms — I would probably rely on a different definition — this is a tough question for me to answer

10) If you had no other choice but to respond, how would you respond to a reader who deems the unabashedly male gaze, obsessions and privileged dolor articulated by The Consequences of My Body’s persona objectionable?

The book comes from a privilege to speak — but the phenomenology of the daily experience of the subject is not — to me — privileged at all — it is actually trying to negotiate love with other beings that some of them are more privileged — I think the book poses a different form of male subjectivity (I like to think so) — one that is not on sure grounds — it would be sad if this was missed in the reading of the book —

Much more at Entropy!