Preface to the English Edition
Disputing the Conditions of Im-possibility: A Clarification of What is at Stake

More than twenty-five years have passed since the first edition of the present volume, and for ten years now I have wanted it not to be published in its original form. Between the first publication and today, my studies have taken on ever broader and more unfamiliar dimensions. During these two decades, I intended to prepare a more detailed edition, something that did not prove possible for reasons that do not need to be entered into here, but I can at least say that the great numbers of notes I had prepared stayed behind in Iran, and this journey for treatment ended up taking so long that I suspect that even if I had access to those notes, it may be the case that the strength to profit from them all no longer exists. I had no option then but to prepare this edition with the modest possibilities at hand, and here I present it to the readers. Out of all of my works, the object of this one, as well as that of The Decline of Political Thought in Iran, possesses particular characteristics, certain points of which I shall attempt to refer to in this preface. This work starts with an explanation of the ‘conditions of im-possibility’ (sharāyeṭ-e emtenāʿ) and makes various references to an enquiry Ārāmesh Dustdār set out in two or three books three decades ago. Although these references to Ārāmesh Dustdār’s writings have a more or less polemical form, the reader should not imagine that this polemic is about finding fault or pedantic nitpicking. All of Dustdār’s apparently ‘philosophical’ enquiry falls into the category of polemic, and it is evident that no philosophical enquiry will ever be possible by relying on these kinds of quarrel, nor has it been possible before now. Dustdār has his supporters (dustdārān) and opponents but, so far, no one has appeared claiming to be the continuator of the ‘path’ that he opened up. The very great many incorrect premises in his writings, the ill-measured conclusions drawn from those premises, his extremely basic Iranophobia (irān-setizi), his fundamental religio-phobia (din-setizi) which, logically speaking, rubs shoulders with a kind of ‘religio-philia’ (din-khuyi): all these are signs of the lack of the logic of philosophical enquiry in his writings, and it seems that with the decline of ‘the causes’ he considers to be the complete cause of ‘the impossibility of thinking’ (emtenāʿ-e andishidan), the scandal of Dustdār’s religio-phobia, and the ‘impossibility of thought’ (tafakkor) religion supposedly produces, themselves being a form of the religio-philia he affects to despise, will be made public, and nothing will remain of the theory that made its bow with great fanfare as an epoch-making philosophical enquiry. The difference between Dustdār’s unphilosophical enquiry and actual philosophical enquiry lies in a single hidden word, which does not appear in Dustdār’s coinage ‘the impossibility of thought’ (emtenāʿ-e tafakkor), but does appear in the enquiry into the ‘conditions of im-possibility’ (sharāyeṭ-e emtenāʿ). Earlier I mentioned that emtenāʿ-e tafakkor is a description – incorrect – of a state of affairs that came about in Iran centuries ago. In this description, as in any other, there may be certain points that are correct but, once the number of incorrect points in such a description is superior to the number of correct ones, that description will suffer fundamental damage. In Dustdār’s description of the condition of emtenāʿ-e tafakkor, because of his surrender to partisan feelings (ʿaṣabiyat-hā), some of which we will cite later, more of those incorrect historical data exist than will allow the reader who has a certain familiarity with the history and culture of Iran to take those descriptions seriously. Such a description, if it requires a fundamental correction of its data, has nothing to do with history, but is like a faded image, worth nothing and which may be torn up and consigned to the dustbin. Enquiry into the ‘conditions of im-possibility’ is of another order: it is possible to debate with and correct the data on which a theory is based for as long as it is not possible to explain their being incorrect with another theory, as well as to deepen that theory’s conclusions, since a theory does not seek to describe the real (amr-e vāqeʿ), but is rather in a position to explain a state of affairs that must cast light on the complexities of its logic. The coinage emtenāʿ-e tafakkor is a theory for the political activist, that is to say it falls within the scope of ideology and is focused on relations of power, since in such a theory there exists no conclusion that is incompatible with premises that have been selected beforehand. In his statement of the emtenāʿ-e tafakkor, Ārāmesh Dustdār has drawn on all the data that might be compatible with the conclusions, all of which are in reality among the premises of his enquiry. Contrary to Dustdār’s perspective, and on this basis, the ‘conditions of im-possibility’ are a philosophical enquiry, since what makes enquiry into ‘im-possibility’ philosophical are its ‘conditions’. As a result, there is no cause for astonishment that the harder Ārāmesh Dustdār tried to prepare a firm foundation for his ‘theory’, the more he rolled down into an ‘impossibility of non-religio-philic thinking (emtenāʿ-e tafakkor-e nā-din-khuyāneh)’, which is, in its severity and zealousness, like the other side of the coin of religio-philia (din-khuyi) and, without himself realizing – or wanting to realize – he has left the tail of the cock of ideology dangling from the sleeve of the cloak of pretentious ‘thought’.2 One regrettable point in Dustdār’s position is that, because he knows nothing of politics, he mixes a great deal of it in his theoretical discussion, but cannot know how this ignorance of the forms that politics very often takes has meant that politics is present in all the pores of his theory.

The enquiry into ‘religio-philia’, such as Ārāmesh Dustdār envisages and explains in his writings, in the interpretation of it that is employed in the present work, goes back to the enquiry into the ‘conditions of possibility’ of the thought of modernity (tajaddod) in Europe and the ‘conditions of its im-possibility’ in the world of Islam. There is no need to mention that the second form this enquiry takes, which is also focused on the condition of Iran, is fundamental. Whatever position we might adopt in this discussion, it cannot be doubted that the thought of modernity is the dominant thought – put otherwise, the dominant paradigm – of the new epoch. It is evident that belief in the dominance of the paradigm of the new thought has serious opponents but, by paying careful attention to what the opponents of the dominance of the thought of modernity have said until now, this kind of opposition can be considered symmetrical to the dominance of the paradigm of modernity. That the discourse of all traditionalists (sonnat-madārān) is focused, not on the theory of tradition, but rather on the theory of modernity and their opposition to it, shows that even the traditionalists, if they do not find their place as an appendage to ‘the philosophical discourse of modernity’, will stutter in defence of tradition. Ārāmesh Dustdār’s enquiry falls under the category of irreligiousness (bi-dini) – or it would be better to say phobia of religion (din-setizi) – and, on this basis, may be defended to the same extent as the opposite position but, in the new epoch, neither one of these positions constitutes a philosophical enquiry; they are rather, with the ideologization of religion and tradition in recent decades, positions in the relations of power. Philosophical enquiry into religion (diyānat) has to do with its relationship with reason, which has meant that only during certain periods of the history of thought has it turned into such an object of philosophical enquiry. This relationship of reason and faith (imān), if we set aside its long history in the history of thought, as certain theorists of the ‘legitimacy of the modern age’ have explained, entered a new era when faith was rationalized and, as Jürgen Habermas has shown, the new epoch began with this new relationship, that is to say the new balance that came about in the new epoch with the rationalization of faith.3 In the history of Iran’s Islamic period, during those centuries that have been interpreted as ‘the golden age of Iran’s culture’ or ‘the Renaissance of Islam’, a balance of this sort came into being, one upon which I have...