Haunting Friendships: Notes on Poetics and Politics of Mehr

Abstract

This article examines a notion of friendship-as-haunting (mehr) in the writings and films of the Iranian poet-filmmaker Férydoun Rahnéma (1930–1975). Traveling across a vast geography, the hybrid Indo-Iranian term mehr encompasses a network of keywords central to understanding the political as the relation of sovereign subjects, including “contract,” “friendship,” “gift,” “community,” and “sovereignty.” In Rahnéma’s works, in dialogue with classical Persian poetry, mehr relates to techniques of editing that underline the spectrality of cinema—the haunting of each passing image or frame by preceding ones and the memory of a past image transformed by the contingency of the future. Although criticized as apolitical, these techniques register Rahnéma’s evolving understanding of the political as responsiveness to formless specters. The article traces the trajectory of mehr through three sources: (1) Rahnéma’s internationalist French poetry of the early 1950s in dialogue with Paul Éluard; (2) his adaptation of the tragedy of Siavash in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (1010 CE); and (3) his reinterpretation of Eisenstein’s theory of montage, questioning the “sovereignty” of the image in post-1953-Coup Iran. Rahnéma’s notion of mehr critiques the self-presence of the subject at a moment when competing discourses of colonial modernity and anti-colonial authenticity sought to produce a unified historical subject.