Literary/Political Serendipities

I'm half-way through Reading Lolita in Tehran, in the chapter, "James," in which Nafisi has run smack up against the conflict between her values and the values of the regime of "bearded God-fearing men", in a parallel to HH, that executes a "confiscation of Lolita's life", making its women over into their imagination of women with, "no where else to go", leaving our Nafisi to wonder, "What do people who are made irrelevant do?" (27, 36, 44, 169). They might assimilate. They might withdraw into a kind of hermitage (see recent numbers of CK). They might engage, as our Nafisi does. To teach, to try to insist on teaching without her veil, then at least to teach, but to wear the veil inattentively, little rebellions, assertions of selfhood. And as she is working around these decisions, Nafisi remembers the (in)famous and oft-decontextualized Nietzsche line,

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (in Nafisi 180)

Even the abyss seeks ratification of its being, eyes the subject-self as an other. We really must learn to put this exchange at the center of the order of things. We have denied it too long.