Hoder, Or how not to 'do' theory

Hossein 'Hoder' Derakhshan, of Editor:Myself, long hailed in the Anglophone world as the young Iranian blogger par excellence, needs to drop out of graduate school. Those of us who have kept up with the Tehran-born penman's posts have watched on in horror as names like Laclau and Foucault have crept with increasing regularity onto Editor:Myself. In one recent post Derakhshan implores us to read Laclau and Mouffe's 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy to illuminate, presumably, the various futilities that inhere in revolt. Indeed - and surely unaware of the irony given his newfound hostility to reformist forces in his country of birth - Hoder has taken to posting entire articles from Foucault's largely - and mercifully - ignored 1978 dispatches from Tehran, later published in Corriere della Sera. He's even shown hostility to the recent activity in Lhasa.

By no coincidence, Hoder's reformist stock has precipitously declined. Indeed, 'Ahmadinejad made Bush show respect to Iran,' reads the title of one recent post, and, commenting on a piece about the president's base, Hoder writes that he was 'simply brought...into tears' and proceeds to perform a contrition of sorts: 'I really regret the time I was so against him as a result of reading so much crappy "journalism" that the reformists and their foreign allies have been publishing....'

The culprit?

'I have started a Masters programme in Media studies at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London this Autumn. The wonderful thing about this programme is that it is structured under Anthropology with a post-colonial and post-structuralist leaning. So all of us are going through an amazing experience of breaking our previous Euro-American centric intellectual habits or knowledge structures that has been imposed on us for decades.'

Oh dear. Hoder's creeping nationalism and growing intolerance for opposition in general seems to have found an intellectual buttress of sorts. Seems being central here. Laclau, who was a professor of mine at Northwestern, may have limited sympathy for what we might call 'authoritarianism in the South' - I vaguely remember him leaving the seminar for a week to do some consulting with the Venezuelan government - but I doubt he would be quite so charitable in this case.'Worse - and immanently, we might say - Hoder's lack of nuanced sympathy for the Iranian opposition (we are surely not all obligated to love Voice of America) suggests that he has fallen victim to a problematic with which Heidegger was fixated and which Derrida would later give the full treatment: That is, encountering opposition without simply effecting a reversal and therefore a reproduction of that precise hierarchy. The Buddhist schools have also been acutely aware of the problem. We have, I suppose, seen Hoder on both poles. Rather, we must, as Derrida writes in Spurs, consider the operation that Heidegger identified with Umdrehung, 'in which the opposition which has been submitted to reversal is itself suppressed.'

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to admire Ahmadinejad - most of them just happen to be aesthetic.