From Erziehung to Bildung: Sadegh Hedayat’s Experience of Modernity(A Figurational Sociological Reading of Temporality in The Blind Owl)

Sadegh Hedayat’s cultural modernism formulates an enlightened subjectivity, which founts the historical sociology’s experience of modernity in Iran. His literary experience conceptually differentiates Erziehung and Bildung. For him, a critical encounter with ideology forms Bildung, while Erziehung is subtle thinking informed by an encounter with an-other. Debilitating the sensorial paradigm of Iranian modernity is a social action that is only possible through a decoding of its temporality, all of which explains the chaotic narrative form of The Blind Owl. Investigating Hedayat’s experience is only possible through the non-I and other realisations in The Blind Owl. By suspending the ideological representations and mental structures, Hedayat represents a waned reality. In The Blind Owl, attention to places, recollection of memories, and dynamic forces that affect subjectivity and inform a migrative nurture. The Blind Owl is the structured explication of the chaotic experience of modernity in Iran. It is the roadmap of a heterotopia which leads to India, or an other within the self – as a promise.