Continued ☝🏼 — The Task of the Intellectual in an Age When Politics Has Died: A Writing for Mostafa Mehrayeen

He repeatedly emphasised that consciousness is a product of dialogue, not of isolation. Dialogue in this sense is not merely an exchange of sentences; it is an ontology.
Only in encounter with the other do I move beyond myself. A society that eliminates the other deprives itself of the possibility of self-consciousness.

This is why what he said about love was not romantic; it was structural. Love is the central idea in Mehrayeen’s thought and, like Rollo May’s reading, is not an emotion but a “will”: a will that moves beyond mere negation and thinks about building. Rollo May warned that if resistance is expressed only through negation, our being becomes identical with the non-being of what we negate, and hatred will swallow the highest ideals. Mehrrayeen said essentially the same thing: if resistance is not rooted in love, it becomes an identity of anger.

Agamben has shown, as presented here, that in post-totalitarian systems elections can become mechanisms for the controlled channelling of opposition without changing the core of power. But the central issue is not even this. The question is whether society can recover its own language outside the rituals of power.
He sought the answer in civil society, in peaceful negative resistance, in a “No” arising from a prior “Yes” to freedom.

Mehrrayeen’s most important central claim is that the greatest crisis of our society is not despotism but the absence of love and compassion. This was not an exaggeration, because he took Levinas seriously and understood that politics without an ethics of the other is merely a technique for managing death.

My message to his jailers is that history possesses a memory longer than prisons. Thought, once it has settled into minds, cannot be detained. What is imprisoned today is a body, not the conceptual apparatus planted over years among students, young people and those who were seeking understanding.

Today, amid this immense national grief, our task is not only mourning; it is preserving memory. Revolutions do not occur only in the street; they occur in meaning.
Those who shift the structures of meaning are part of every historical transformation, even if they are silenced in the present moment.
If power today imagines that by imprisoning people like Mehrayeen it can silence thought, it has forgotten that once thought has spread among others, it no longer belongs to a single individual.

And perhaps what must be said above all is this: in an age when faces are being removed, insisting upon seeing the face of the other is itself a revolutionary act.

My final words are addressed to Professor Mostafa Mehrayeen:
Now that power has answered your thought with prison, that answer is nothing other than confirmation of what you have always said.
The history of thought shows us that the person who preserves their relationship to truth remains in a deeper layer of time, and you have preserved that relationship.
Amid this great grief, I want you to know that your voice, even under imposed silence, is still circulating, and truth, however delayed, is never forgotten.