The Lover as Subject: A Foucauldian Analysis of Real and Earthly Love in "Qalandar and Qala" and "Ghazal, the Deer of Zafaranieh Garden"

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 University of bojnourd

2 Department of persian language and literature, kosar university of Bojnord, Bojnord, Iran

10.22034/lda.2024.141193.1022

Abstract

Persian literature traditionally distinguishes between two forms of love: spiritual and earthly. Spiritual love, rooted in religious belief, is often understood as love for the divine. In contrast, earthly love is a human connection between two individuals. The turning point of both of these definitions is that the nature of love creates a platform for the parties of this discourse to interact with each other on two heterogeneous sides. The hegemony of the lover's power leads to the subjugation of the lover-subject. Therefore, it can be said that love is a source of power. Foucault, a pivotal figure in contemporary thought, challenged traditional notions of power.  Building upon his work, this study employs a descriptive-analytical approach to examine the intricate interplay of power relations within both spiritual and earthly love discourses. In this research, by employing discourse analysis, the discursive systems governing spiritual love in the story "Qalandar and Qala" and earthly love in the novel "Ghazal, the Deer of Zafaranieh Garden" have been examined. To this end, the discursive system of Spiritual love in the story of “Qalandar and the Qala”, which is about Suhravardi, has been compared with the discursive system of earthly love in the novel Ghazal, the Deer of Zafaranieh Garden. The results showed that what distinguishes divine love from secular love is merely the difference in the way the beloved’s desires are fulfilled. In secular love, depending on the initial situation, the beloved decides what the lover should do; although it may seem that in both types of love (divine and secular) the beloved influences the lover’s actions, in reality, in divine love, the lover, due to their resistance to norms and escape from the accepted social systems within the beloved, ascends to a higher state, whereas in secular love, the beloved themselves cannot transcend the limitations of social power, and thus the lover undergoes a process of decline and decay in reaching the beloved.

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