promise of violence

"Younes Saramifar delivers a dazzling and intellectually fearless book. With a uniquely empathetic touch, this study traverses multiple disciplines to uncover the paradoxes of revolution through a close reading of one of the greatest examples: Iran. Both conceptually bold and deeply personal, this work of rare erudition will leave a lasting imprint on debates about the politics of memory, revolutions, and the Iranian experience in particular."Prof. Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, SOAS, the author of What is Iran? and Psycho-nationalism: Global Thought, Iranian ImaginationsRevolutionaries in Iran choose to identify memories of the Iran-Iraq War as their ‘collective’ memory to mark the war era as the temporal reference in history – the time of times, or sometimes even a time beyond time. Can a sole event and its violence truly become – for some – the all-encompassing, constituting element of history and memory? This book pursues this question and follows revolutionaries in the maze of ‘collective’ memory to offer a temporal account of the breakdown of happenings – as well as the mending of happenings through the force of remembrance.