Chapter Seven: A Transnational Public Sphere

Abstract

A major point of contention I was pushing forward in Chap. 7 was to place the body of an innocent citizen at the receiving end of a bullet—for which the conniving ruling regime refuses to accept responsibility—as the singular site of a renewed body politics. My next move is again to exit the Iran scene and to navigate a transnational public sphere upon which national realities are instantly read and interpreted far faster and far beyond their false hermeneutic taming within a dominant official reading. In other words, the world at large is today much more alert and the fictive frontiers of nation-states, I argue, far more porous for any tyrannical regime to have an exclusive claim on what it wishes to become a dominant truth. Here I return to regional and global context of the nation via a critical assessment of the transnational public sphere upon which the nation is fathomed and repeatedly performed. This works toward a detailed account of the public sphere that is transnational in its origins and contexts and embraces and conditions the national destiny. Here my contention is that the very notion of the “nation” has ipso facto a transnational origin and therefore relies on (for it is rooted in) that amorphous framing to renew itself.