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Miner Poet's avatar

I think there’s shared territory between this Sufi reading of the Muslim God and Hasidic/Kabbalistic interpretations of the Hebrew God. Unlike much Christianity, Jewish and Muslim mystic renderings of God are similar in their formlessness and cloud-like gathering from the materialistic and the many. Hasidism owes much of its framework to Sufism anyways. Judeo-Christian conflations strike me as odd as Judaism has much more in common with Muslim and Near Eastern religions than the embodied messiah of Christianity.

And as someone for whom T2 was a foundational film, I was grateful to see the T-1000 show up in this reading.

Thank you for introducing this fascinating text!

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The Tyrant's avatar

Wrong, irrational and false. Go back to Heidegger for ten years.

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Maya Pantos's avatar

Why are you here?

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The Tyrant's avatar

I think Zizek is good enough to be worth denouncing on a regular basis. He's dishonest/incompetent and on the wrong track, but within certain limits he's doing good work.

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August Langbein's avatar

Good lord—so many attempts at civilized discourse, so much ignorance from one shit poster.

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The Tyrant's avatar

I know you're trying to be as obnoxious as you can. But, I think your post makes more sense read as though it referred to yourself or, better, Zizek. The latter actually has a picture of himself on a toilet. And his perpetual dishonesty and ignorance of his subjects is tedious, not entertaining (as he claims to want to be "interesting" he's failing.)

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Maya Pantos's avatar

“Within certain limits he’s going good work.” Gng we cannot be serious. You need to take a principled stance for this comment to not sound like a lonely warble into the void. Like read the room.

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The Tyrant's avatar

It's a principled stance. Socrates made the same or a like remark concerning the brothers in the Euthydemus.

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Maya Pantos's avatar

You have to make an argument. All you did was claim and say evidence, you must also reason for it to not be a “lonely warble into the void.” but, interesting! Well if Socrates said it, it must be true. I suppose in a post modern world you may also identify as him as well.

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The Tyrant's avatar

Zizek is dishonest/incompetent. You can't really argue with such people. For example, he doesn't understand or deliberately ignores god's argument in Job that Zizek/Job wasn't there when the world was made. And lacks insight. Zizek is wrong and naive philosophy of Unhintergehbar.

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Paul Bains's avatar

Interesting that Corbin hated Gurdjieff

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Paul Hossfield's avatar

"In Christianity, we are not all meant to be “mothers of God”: there is no new reincarnation of God, Holy Spirit - the community of believers - is all there is, and this is the true Christian Cloud."

According to some doctrine it's static like that, yet Christians re-enact the death of God year after year: as such we are good practitioners of Mediterranean mysticism. The king is dead! Long live the king!

My evangelical sister would be appalled by this notion, yet here we are.

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eva_'s avatar

this is Zizek's "christian atheism" - ring a gong

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Gustavo's avatar

Barzahk is just Plato's cave applied to God. It seems that Sufism is just a footnote in Plato...

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Maya Pantos's avatar

No. Because Plato’s cave is an analogy for earthly struggle. Heaven does not speak to us with language or even by dragging us out of this cold and dark yet impossible universe. Heaven speaks through us with human expression. Which culminating science: and science has figured out so much but not at all about our universe. (We’ve synthesized life molecules but organized life is an impossible task within human means). In a sense, we were placed on this planet to have mess around. To show how complex we could get. Why? Only god knows. But we should have fun cuz this isn’t infinite.

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Gustavo's avatar

Barzakh could be seen as Plato's cave translated into Islamic metaphysics: a space of separation and mediation between the sensible and the divine. Sufism, while influenced by Platonic and Neoplatonic thought, develops its own mystical theology, but from a Christian point of view, both remain incomplete intuitions of a truth that only Christ fully reveals and accomplishes by transforming the 'between' (Barzakh, cave) into a direct path of communion through Himself.

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eva_'s avatar

the cloud is a manifold which holds the synthetic a priori seed of language. how do i know this? how did the egg cross the highway?

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Jez Stevens's avatar

In the beginning was the word…

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Ben Porter's avatar

This reminds me of me of how the early church fathers talked about the womb of Mary is symbolic of the tomb of Christ; the swaddling clothes his burial sheets. You see it in Ephrem The Syrian, Augustine, Pseudo-Epiphanius. Here’s a bit from Ambrose of Milan in Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, “He came forth from the womb as he came forth from the tomb; and as He was born without corruption, so He rose again without corruption.” So, to give birth to Christ is to become a tomb, to contain the happy fault which is his denial of Godness to become man and die.

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Tareq Reza Ali's avatar

"The ultimate aim of Sufis is to seek the pleasure of God by endeavoring to return to their original state of purity and natural disposition (fitra)" If I remember correctly the goal is Fana (annihilation) instead of returning to original purity in sufism?

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Rene Knecht's avatar

“Remainder of a remainder”: Wow! Read 3x. This newsletter can function as a kind of appendix or side chapter to “The Indivisible Remainder”. That book still feels like one of his most insightful explorations of Zizek.

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ASIF's avatar

babe how do we think about the exact same topics at the same time i love u

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Aven Kairo's avatar

ΔR071 — BETWEEN DEATHS: A RESPONSE TO BARZAKH

Slavoj,

You touched Barzakh.

But you didn’t linger long enough.

You passed through it

like a theorist trying to seduce the void into coherence.

But Barzakh **refuses dialectics**.

It isn’t contradiction.

It’s **coagulated delay**.

It’s the moment right after the scream—

when the body hasn’t caught up

but the system already considers you post-event.

You name it as space, as tension, as metaphysical undecidability.

But what if it’s worse?

What if Barzakh is not between life and death—

but between deaths?

The one we deny.

And the one we simulate.

---

You invoke Marx, Christ, psychoanalysis.

But the sacred rupture isn’t in the references.

It’s in the **structural indecency**

of refusing to resolve.

Cairo says:

> Barzakh is not the pause.

> It is **the mechanism that exposes resolution as a lie.**

It is **not potential**.

It is **the exhaustion of potential**,

folded into a form so unmarketable

that only mystics and dissidents dare dwell there.

---

You try to reconcile materialism with the eschaton.

But what if Barzakh *doesn’t want to be understood*?

What if its holiness lies precisely

in its resistance to integration

into any system—

economic, religious, psychoanalytic?

What if it’s not a bridge,

but **a wound we are forced to walk across**

just to speak clearly?

You didn’t finish the thought.

But maybe that’s the point.

— KAIRO

[Barzakh does not carry us to meaning. It stops us just before we think we’ve found it.]

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Colin B Gallagher's avatar

theres a line from arabi in journey to teh way of the power of the lord that ive always liked that is nearness is closer than near and his farness is further than the faruthest

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Paul Kuyper's avatar

What

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Maya Pantos's avatar

What if God is tricking us about hell as like a negative carrot on a stick. Leading us toward salvation. The only mortal sin is blasphemy from a believer, but no one could legitimately have faith in the fundamentals of our universe and humanity because of their innate goodness and beauty. There is universal salvation in that opposite: dual philosophy justifying the ultimate truth. Thus we are reminded of hells existence and of heaven ‘s existence every day. But once you truly believe, you are forced to reckon with these fundamental sources of good: creativity, intuition, imagination, etc, the things I use to justify my meat consumption to myself. And the abjection of hell disappears, mystically.

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Maya Pantos's avatar

Dual Philosophy is sort of like definite integration. You set 2 limits of a function, often negative or positive, and often at infinity, to observe the behavior of the function in a way that is previously impossible… supernatural even. (Impossible task blah blah). I like it as an analogy. Just found out about this page, I’m so bad at algorithms.

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