In their introduction to Manifestos of World Thought (2011, Rowman & Littlefield), Jason Bahbak Mohagheg and Lucian Stone write, "World thought must be understood as an immense distancing from all prior concepts of the world, an outsider calculus of betrayal and defection leading us to tread elsewhere in search of new visionary occasions." In this conversation, Milad Odabaei invites Mohaghegh and Arshin Adib-Moghaddam to draw on contributions to the Manifesto to reflect on "Iran as a space of world thought." The Iran that emerges in this conversation is not the Other in a civilizational dialectic with the West. It is not an identity, a distinct episteme, or a political geography. Rather, Iran is at once a site of the wreckage and displacement of modern civilizational clashes. As a place of ruin, it is a site of unbound and impersonal imagination, of fugitive itineraries, images, and words. Iranian masters of abstractions join those of the non-West and subvert and subsume the global demand to give voice to the other by advancing world thought. 

Watch the conversation.