نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
عنوان مقاله English
نویسنده English
1. Introduction
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), the French postmodern philosopher, drew upon various fields of knowledge, including mathematics and biology, to explicate his ideas. Although this interdisciplinary perspective made his statements complex, it expanded the scope of critique and analysis in the humanities. “Assemblage” is one of his difficult operative concepts for liberating the word and the concept from the constraints of closure and universal meaning. Its application requires familiarity with complex terms such as becoming, rhizome, exteriority, interiority, simulation, and deterritorialization of the “I” subject. In his transcendental and empiricist philosophy, he refers to the intelligence that reaches assemblage as “sophophilia” and considers it characteristic of literature and poetry.
With the aim of creating new opportunities in literary criticism and familiarizing the reader with the creativity of poets at both the surface and underlying levels of poetry, the present article examines the assemblage of the word “love” in the poetry of two poets belonging to the Khorasani and Iraqi styles, namely Ferdowsi and Hafez. By posing the questions of what kind of assemblage characterizes love in the poetry of the two styles, and which components have caused and developed this assemblage, the article offers a new understanding of their formal and substantive subtleties and capacities.
2. Methodology
The present study, adopting an interdisciplinary approach and based on the method of content analysis, addresses the comparison and juxtaposition of the assemblage, or agency, and the semantic field of the word “love” in the poetry of Ferdowsi and Hafez Shirazi. In order to become acquainted with Deleuze’s ideas and apply his approaches in the analysis, the study has drawn upon library-based documentary research.
3. Discussion
The word “love” and its derivatives in the poetry of Ferdowsi and Hafez possess different phases and semantic spaces. An examination of this difference from the perspective of Deleuzian assemblage demonstrates that the meaning of love in Ferdowsi’s poetry is confined to the lived experience of the heroes of the Shahnameh. Its language is referential, expressive, and signifying; the narrator’s being in the third person and his status as an omniscient narrator restrict the poetry and its meaning to the territory of the “I” and to the subjectivity of individual experiences. The totality of these characteristics makes every attempt to discover the meaning of the word “love” in the Shahnameh dependent upon an arboreal approach; an approach in which the word is dependent upon and fixed within an ordinary and universal meaning, grounded in “being” in the material world and benefiting from “desire” and its machinic exteriority.
This is while the word “love” in Hafez’s poetry has an evental nature and possesses no particular spatial location; like a nomadic gypsy or an itinerant tribesperson, constantly on the move, it avoids settling and remaining fixed within a particular word and meaning, and appears at every moment in a different manifestation and meaning. From the perspective of Deleuzian assemblage, this homelessness of the word “love” in Hafez’s poetry results from its rhizomatic nature, eventality, interiority, simulation, and deterritorialization from the “I” subject. Consequently, Hafez’s poetry becomes a discourse of multiple forms of intelligence and thought, freed from linear referentiality of meaning, description, narration, and direct signification, and acquires a dynamic assemblage. Furthermore, the assemblage of love in Hafez’s poetry gives rise to the creation of creative worlds of meaning. Its existence is liberated from closure and confronted with the uncertainty of meaning. Its propositions extend beyond mere narration. Its plane transcends the three dimensions of reference, expression, and signification and becomes an event composed of different meanings.
4. Conclusion
The outcome of the discussion and analysis presented in this article is that Deleuze’s assemblage-oriented readings, together with his interdisciplinary guidelines and approaches, provide a new space for the criticism and stylistic analysis of literary works. Within this space, the discussion of the subtleties and capacities of these works becomes broader, and literature, particularly poetry, acquires a more comprehensive definition beyond expressive and rhetorical constructions and metrical and rhythmic forms. This is because Deleuze’s philosophy is grounded in postmodern thought and in the removal of all restrictions from the critical analysis of language. Without the presence of such a deconstructive philosophy, language remains confined within the constraints of reference, expression, and signification, and its power to create meaning is marginalized.
