Rendezvous in the Mire, a new book by Sarah Gholizadeh Aghghale, has been released — a philosophical treatise that turns, in poetic and somber prose, toward one of the least-spoken conditions of human existence: the moment memory collapses and all that remains is the body.
Presented under the subtitle A Treatise for the Post-Human, the work is structured as an introduction followed by twelve chapters. Its form carries a distinctive feature: each chapter opens with a short, symbolic story and then moves into philosophical reflection. A city whose ground never hardens, a man who cannot remember his own wounds, a library that kills stories — these brief narratives serve, in practice, as gateways into the book’s abstract ideas.
Throughout the work, the author rests on one central concept: the memoryless body. In her view, the human being imagines itself as a creature made of memory and narrative, yet when these two collapse, something barer remains — neither soul nor recollection, but only matter and weight. The “mire,” in this book, is not a simple metaphor for filth but the name of a fundamental condition: the very place where forms dissolve and meaning gives way.
Gholizadeh Aghghale writes of the death of narratives, of ethics in an unstable world, of the loneliness of matter, and finally of the return to earth. She begins philosophy not at the summit of consciousness but from below — from the point thought does not dare to look at. As she puts it, “No philosophy begins from the heights.”
In style, Rendezvous in the Mire belongs to the tradition of writers such as Emil Cioran and Maurice Blanchot: a fragmentary, dark, and musical prose that seeks less to prove than to transmit an experience to the reader. The book closes with the line: “And in the end, nothing remained of us except the earth, which had always been right.”
Rendezvous in the Mire is the author’s first published work, written for readers drawn to continental philosophy, the literature of ideas, and contemplative texts.
