A Letter From Tehran

“Your freedom or your life! If he chooses freedom, he loses both immediately—if he chooses life, he has life deprived of freedom.

There must be something special about this. This something special we shall call the lethal factor. This factor is present in certain divisions shown us by the play of signifiers that we sometimes see at play at the heart of life itself … We shall find a parallel to this function in a rather peculiar statement, by introducing death itself into one of these fields.

For example, freedom or death! There, because death comes into play, there occurs an effect with a rather different structure. This is because, in both cases, I will have both. (Lacan, Seminar XI, pp. 212–13)

In the streets of Iran, there is a battle for freedom situated between life and death, even though they are hard to distinguish when viewed through the smoke of the burning fires. What if the possibility of life is suppressed, disguised, or taken hostage by subjecting freedom to death through the horrifying power of terror? What if people, those who dare to protest against the brutal killing of a young girl who was not “sufficiently covered” by a hijab, are changing the discourse by trying to extract life from its depravity? What if it takes death (drive) to reach life? If this is the case, is there any possibility for a compromise? For a symptom that would synthesize life and death in a way that we can tolerate? To reflect on such a form of conserving or life-preserving, we must pay attention to how tangled the situation is, for terror leaves no room for conservation.

The movement is portrayed in the faces of lost young lives, specifically the eager faces of brave young women. It’s the most widespread movement in the last decade of Iran. It is symbolized by an absolutely touching slogan: woman, life, freedom! To understand how this slogan resonates with so many people in Iran and in the world we need to think about the way the signifiers of woman (e.g., the hijab) and death ha