“When God created Adam, there remained a surplus of the leaven of the clay from which He created the palm tree, Adam’s sister; yet this creation, too, left behind a remainder the size of a sesame seed, from which […] God created an immense Earth, the whole of our universe, in which was hidden so many marvels that their number cannot be counted”
“its temporal inversion: the inaugural act—the creation of “the whole of our universe”—arrives belatedly, as the final consequence of a series of leftovers”
“disorientation deepens: this cosmos, so vast as to harbor innumerable hidden marvels, emerges not from an overflowing plenitude but from a diminishing remainder”
“In Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran (2025), Joan Copjec seizes on this creation myth for the way it foregrounds repetition”
“it insists and reiterates: being emerges through repetition, each event leaving behind a remainder”
“The creative act, paradoxically, does not advance along the arrow of linear time but curls back upon itself; it yields a surplus, a bit of clay, that retroactively returns to the origin—to creation itself”
“what is this notion—that events do not unfold obediently in chronological time but instead return to and reconstruct what has already occurred—if not the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit?”
“Copjec flirts with a conclusion she cannot, for conceptual reasons developed over the course of the book, bring herself to assert directly: that Freudian psychoanalysis is the heir of Islamic philosophy itself”
“Copjec—a pioneering psychoanalytic and feminist theorist best known for her engagements with the work of Jacques Lacan—traces the genesis of this project to her admiration for Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian filmmaker whose luminous cinema guides Copjec’s conceptual work”
“Kiarostami’s images are properly understood only through attention to their subterranean relation to the tradition of Islamic philosophy that Copjec is not the first to detect in his work”
“the recurring motif in several Kiarostami films—a zigzagging path etched into a hillside, ascending toward a lone, leafy tree—turns out to reproduce a 14th-century Persian miniature illustrating the Avicennan notion of “visionary geography.””
“In Kiarostami’s films, as equally in the Islamic philosophical corpus Copjec engages, one finds less a case for the application of psychoanalytic theory than a theater for new theorizations of psychoanalytic concepts themselves”
“Kiarostami’s is instead a cinema of “illumination,” in alliance with Persian philosopher Suhrawardi (1154–91) in attempting to produce “an image capable of capturing the reflection of what has no image,” to represent that which constitutively eludes representation”
“the nonbeing that shadows being itself: the irreducible remainder, the internal limit. In the Gnostic tradition of Islamic philosophy, this unpassable threshold is nothing less than God. But psychoanalysis, too, has a word for the very same limit: the unconscious”
“Copjec’s guide to Islamic philosophy is the late Iranologist Henry Corbin, her main influence and key interlocutor in the book. Within the field of Islamic philosophy, Corbin’s work is controversial for its singular focus on the concept of the “imaginal world” (“alam-al-mithal”), an intermediary realm between mind and body, abstraction and sensation, that Corbin claimed was the central insight and contribution of Islamic philosophy”
“What it names for Corbin, Copjec, and the Islamic philosophers like Avicenna and Ibn Arabi who are their guides is something more proximate: the “other world” that exists within this world—a third realm between the intelligible and the sensible, where “being is suspended.” It marks a site of situatedness in relation to being that cannot be located within the “‘situated world’ of actual being.””
“To the extent that Kiarostami’s films seek to unveil anything at all, Copjec contends, it is “hiddenness itself”—truths that resist revelation, that cannot be brought to light. A “bait of falsehood,” Copjec suggests, is necessary in order to “snag a carp of truth.””
“the imaginal world “does not exist.” It may appear within the world, but it is not of it. Not another of the actually existing things of the world, the imaginal world is instead that which “inexists between them.” At stake is the very status of “inexistence” itself, which here emerges as not merely the “nothing that is not there,” as Wallace Stevens has it, but also “the nothing that is.””
“For Copjec’s mystics, God, too, is nothing—He does not exist. Yet this apophatic theology, in which God is neither father nor progenitor but devoid of attributes by which He might be known, culminates in neither atheism nor nihilism. Instead, it generates an attunement to the “power[s] of constraint and separation,” a capacity to individuate, to render being more than a plain, simple continuum”
“Islamic philosophy has a name for this power of separation: barzakh”
“Copjec again directs us to Ibn Arabi:
A barzakh is something that separates … two things while never going to one side …, as for example, the line that separates shadow from sunlight. […] Any two adjacent things are in need of a barzakh, which is neither the one nor the other but possesses the power of both. The barzakh … separates a known from an unknown, an existent from a nonexistent, a negated from an affirmed, an intelligible from a nonintelligible”
“What matters most about the barzakh, for Copjec, is not only its function as a limit and “membrane of division” but also the fact that, strictly speaking, the barzakh does not exist—it is completely imperceptible to the senses, empirically unverifiable. As Ibn Arabi warns, if one is able to sense the limit between two things, then “it is one of the two things, not the barzakh.””
“The barzakh, or “interstice,” is a purely speculative concept, assumed by the rational intellect rather than perceived by the senses. Yet far from a sterile dead end or insuperable limit, this interstice functions as a threshold, a passage: the necessary point of access to the imaginal world”
“barzakh should be analogized to “drive” (Trieb), Freud’s own speculative, mythological concept that, as Copjec put it in an earlier book, “substitutes for an ontology” in his work”
“the repetition compulsion that endlessly circles around the idea of a lost object”
“A concept “on the frontier between the mental and the somatic” (note the affinity with barzakh, a zone of limit and linkage), the drive evokes those limit points where the subject is “inserted” into the world. It marks, Copjec writes, an infinite threshold “through which the light of another, suspended, dimension shines.””
“Following Christian Jambet, another French scholar of Islam and a student of Corbin’s, Copjec reminds us that Islamic philosophy had already made its dramatic entrance onto the scene of Western thought two centuries ago. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, German idealism enthusiastically took up “Oriental” and esoteric thought, including several of the mystics with whom Copjec is engaged—a moment associated in particular with the names of Goethe and Hegel”
“Corbin himself had drawn on the work of F. W. J. Schelling to illuminate the thought of the medieval Islamic philosophers, a move that some have suggested represented a problematic imposition of Western epistemologies on a non-Western tradition”
“Yet Copjec points out that German idealism was itself formed through an engagement with the esoteric thought of figures like 17th-century mystic Jacob Boehme—“the first German philosopher,” in Hegel’s estimation—whose ideas bore remarkable similarities, Corbin pointed out, to those found in Shia Islam”
“Corbin met Jacques Lacan at Alexandre Kojève’s lectures in Paris in the 1930s, and that it is partly thanks to Corbin that Lacan became familiar with the writings of Ibn Arabi”
“these “elementary facts,” as Copjec terms them—that Schelling built upon an esoteric foundation, that Lacan was thinking through Ibn Arabi—point toward a dramatic possibility: that psychoanalysis is not merely conceptually parallel to but also, in a sense, the historical successor of the Gnostic tradition of Islamic mysticism”
“This would be an astonishing conclusion, one that would upend not only traditional histories of psychoanalysis but also prevailing approaches to religion within the field of psychoanalytic theory”
“Slavoj Žižek, the most well-known psychoanalytic theorist today and an interlocutor of Copjec’s, has repeatedly argued for Christianity’s singularity among world religions in the way it transposes the gap separating man from God back into God himself—a transposition effected by the historically unique event of Christ’s crucifixion”
“What dies on the cross, Žižek argues in a Hegelian key, is the “god of the beyond itself,” leaving behind “nothing more than the egalitarian community of believers” with no transcendental authority to guarantee it”
“Copjec, in sum, believes that Islamic mysticism and the concept of the imaginal world get something deeply right about reality, contingency, relationality, and the nature of the image”
“And yet I think it would be wrong to conclude that her aim is to suggest, contra Žižek, that it is the Islamic legacy that is, in fact, worth fighting for. Strong though the temptation might be, Copjec does not, in the end, pursue the historical claim that Islamic philosophy is at the root of the forms of modern art and thought she finds so worthy. Hers is a different kind of claim”
“the origin comes at the end of a series of events rather than at the beginning”
“for both psychoanalysis and the Sufi mystics, the past originates belatedly, its very pastness retroactively established as opposed to fixed by a closed chain of empirical events”
“both traditions nevertheless maintain that the absolute cause, ultimately, does not exist. Which is not to say that it is not real; rather, it is to clarify that, precisely because of the absence of any ultimate ground, being itself—even in the primordial moment, the universe’s first emergence in Ibn Arabi’s cosmology—requires repetition”
“what Copjec argues alongside Kiarostami, Corbin, and Freud (and what Islamic philosophy teaches us) is that repetition repeats not what came before but rather noncoincidence itself—not a second iteration in sequence but a “jamming of the causal chain.””
“In such moments, another world, so close to the eye as to be completely out of sight, shines through”