BARZAKH: AN EXERCISE IN MATERIALIST MYSTICISM

Our entire universe, with all its innumerable marvels, thus originates from something no larger than a tiny sesame seed.

Comrades,

After a series of political pieces, here is a short jump into the most basic mystical speculation, my reaction to Joan Copjec's book on Sufi mysticism. Next week, we'll return to actual politics. Enjoy this one on me.

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(Photograph: a still from an Abbas Kiarostami picture)

In her pathbreaking Cloud¹, Joan Copjec deploys a close analysis of Sufi Gnosticism from the early Muslim era through its peak in the 13th century to its 20th-century European discovery, activated by Henry Corbin. Copjec doesn’t just focus on Sufi thought as such-she elaborates in detail on its link with European Christian mysticism (Jacob Boehme), certain tendencies in German idealism (especially Schelling), and, of course, Freud and Lacan. As if this network of complex links were not enough, her starting point is the films of Abbas Kiarostami. It was her fascination with Kiarostami’s films that opened her to Sufi spirituality, and, in accordance with her own reading of Sufi Gnosticism, Kiarostami’s films are not just an external illustration of Sufi thought to be discarded like a ladder after we enter the thought itself; they are this thought in its imaginal materiality. Ignoring all this wealth, I will just focus on Copjec’s basic metaphysical claims.

Although Copjec’s reading opens new horizons of thought, we should always bear in mind that Sufi Gnosticism offers a mythological narrative-a type of discourse totally different not only from modern science, but also from German Idealism, as well as from Freud and Lacan. Even the direct link between Sufi Gnosticism and the Rhineland mysticism of Eckhart and Boehme is problematic. Although the idea that the same basic notion persists across history and repeats itself in a kind of short-circuit, bypassing linear historical progress, may sound like Walter Benjamin’s “dialectics in suspense,” we should insist on the retroactivity of such a reading: it is only from Lacan’s standpoint that the past can be read in this way. So what are the implications of this neglected retroactivity? Let’s begin by quoting a passage from her favored reference, the 13th-century Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi:

“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, from this tiny fragment, God created an immense Earth, the whole of our universe, in which was hidden so many marvels that their number cannot be counted.” (45)

Our entire universe, with all its innumerable marvels, thus originates not just from a remainder but from a redoubled remainder, a remainder of a remainder, something no larger than a tiny sesame seed. How can such a tiny particle contain the whole world? Here we get the ultimate coincidence of opposites: as in a Möbius band, a tiny particle (say, a small tree) and the immaterial “imagined” cloud are one and the same element on opposite sides of the band-like a surplus that cannot be abolished (remainder of a remainder) and a lack (void), like object and subject, like imagination and reality. What first appears as the end, the final moment-the remainder of the remainder of a repetitive operation of differentiation-simultaneously comes first:

“In the beginning was the Cloud. This we know because when he was asked, ‘Where was our Lord before he created his creatures?’ the Prophet responded without hesitation, ‘He was in a Cloud; there was no space either above or below.’” (45)

The term ama used in the Quran literally means “a thin and subtle cloud.” So how does the Cloud, the first form of otherness with regard to God Himself, come to be? According to Ibn Arabi, otherness occurs in the sensuous Self-disclosure through God’s exhalation of “the first dense, transparent, luminous mass,” the “compassionate vapor” (al-bukhar al-rahmani), that is, the divine Breath. What is this compassionate vapor? And why did God exhale before the act of creation proper? What would become God was in a state of anxiety and distress (karab), crying out for externalization. Bali Efendi, the sixteenth-century Sufi, compares this to the holding of one’s breath within and the associated “painful sensation of extreme compression” as the breath seeks an outlet. Only when one breathes out does this compression cease. Similarly, Efendi says, “the Absolute would feel the pain of compression if it did not bring into existence the world in response to the demand of the Names.” This state of distress caused “the sadness of the primordial solitude” that made God yearn to reveal Himself: “I was a hidden Treasure, I yearned to be known. That is why I produced creatures, in order to be known in them.”²

All is contained in the divine Breath like the day in “the morning’s dawn”: the world actualizes the forms potentially disseminated in the Breath, in the same way the day brings about all the events already ordained in its first moment, the dawn. The divine imagining of the forms of the world coincides with producing them through the Breath, hence the conflation of the divine acts of breathing and imagining. Through the notion of breathing-as-imagining, Ibn Arabi attempts to reconcile the eternity of the world as immutable essences with the dogma of creation ex nihilo. This name derives from ibda’, which means “to bring forth something original, novel, unprecedented,” and from which the term bid’a means “originality,” “novelty,” and “heresy.” The creation of our world is characterized as badi’ because objects in it are not created according to any preceding “model,” “likeness,” or “form” (mithal).

Had the form of the cosmos been identical with the immutable essences in nonexistence, God would not have been badi’, for He would have been creating according to the form already present in His knowledge, and there would be no creation ex nihilo. Forms are not permanent, Platonic models in whose likeness things are made, but are rather things themselves. This holds also for man himself: in the prophetic tradition, “God created man in His image (suratihi),” the same pronoun (“his”) may also refer to “man,” meaning God created man in man’s own image. The paradoxical implication of this alternate sense is spelled out by Ibn Arabi: the form of a thing is its perishable aspect revealed in the Cloud, whereas its “face” is its imperishable reality. So, in relation to the forms of the world, “everything will perish,” but in relation to its realities, the world will not perish, nor is it possible for it to perish.³

James Cameron’s Terminator 2 takes place in 2029, when Earth has been ravaged by the war between the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet and the human resistance. Skynet sends the T-1000; an advanced, shape-shifting prototype Terminator made of virtually indestructible liquid metal-back in time to kill resistance leader John Connor when he is a child. In a scene in the middle of the film, the T-1000 totally melts down in an explosion, reduced to a couple of drops of liquid metal; however, these drops begin to move, unite with each other, and out of them the T-1000 gradually takes its form again. Is this not a perfect case of the distinction proposed by Ibn Arabi? The form of the T-1000 perishes in the explosion, but its eternal “face” remains in the sesame-seed-like remainder of the destruction of its form.

What we find at the beginning is thus not God as the One, one with Himself, as is the case in the neo-Platonic idea that all reality emanates from the immutable One, but “a self-impending gesture that prevents God from becoming one with Himself”(65). God only becomes One through this gesture. In the very last line of her book (a footnote), Copjec quotes a short passage from Lacan’s Encore, pointing out that her entire book “can be summarized as an attempt to spell out the meaning of these brief sentences”(189): “there are three of them, but in reality, there are two plus a. This two plus a can be reduced, not only to the two others, but to a one plus a.”⁴ And, as expected from a Lacanian, Copjec reads this primordial split also as the ultimate foundation of sexual difference, which is not a dyad-the duality of two separate and opposite entities-but a “predual” sexuality: “More originary than the dyad is the cut, a split,” which is not a split of the One into the two determinations of the originary One:

“The One is not that which is split but rather that which is formed from the splitting. Thus formed, the One is paradoxical, a severed One, detached from some (surplus) part of itself from the start”(166).

What then comes first? Is God in the Cloud or is the Cloud in God? The apophatic God is both, revealed in the Cloud (as His first manifestation) and hidden by the Cloud, apophatic. For Copjec, following Sufi thought, the ultimate reality is thus the compassionate interpenetration of the three (or, rather, the two plus one): God, man, and the imaginal Cloud. From a materialist standpoint, however, barzakh comes first, not just for us mortal humans, but in the Real itself. So what is this barzakh? Barzakh is the Cloud itself-the imaginal screen through which we perceive reality and which simultaneously hides what lies beyond. Barzakh as the primordial otherness should not be identified with the Lacanian big Other, the symbolic order: the symbolic order is the order of names which provide identity to created beings, while barzakh is a kind of pre-ontological barrier that constitutes the space in which entities can appear. (Conditionally, one could say that barzakh is like Julia Kristeva’s sémiotique as opposed to symbolique-language in its pre-natal state.)

The notion of the Cloud thus has three, not just two, meanings: a tiny material remainder (what Lacan often calls “a little bit of the real”), an all-encompassing immaterial cloud, and barzakh (“obstacle,” “hindrance,” “separation,” or “barrier”). Barzakh is the symbol of an intermediate state: it is something which separates two other things while never going to one side. It is the barrier between the known and the unknown, the existent and the non-existent. Imagination is the most excellent barzakh in that it is “neither this nor that,” or “both this and that,” or the realm of “He/not He” (Huwa/la Huwa).⁵ This triad vaguely fits the triad of ISR: the “sesame seed” as the little piece of imaginary reality; the cloud as the proto-symbolic space; the barrier as the pure cut of the real.

So, again, how are we to rethink the notion of the Cloud in a materialist way? It is easy to transpose it into the Lacanian logic of the signifier: the first two elements are S1 and S2, and the Cloud is objet a, the remainder of the signifying representation, which is as such a correlate of the “barred” subject, whose representation by definition fails. For Lacan, the subject is the effect of the failure of its own symbolic representation. But we should risk a step further into ontology, where quantum physics provides a model: is it not the case that, at the level of reality itself, “cloud” is the vast immaterial field of quantum waves and oscillations, this pre-ontological real out of which our reality arises through the collapse of wave functions? We can even find a materialist-scientific counterpart to the claim that God breathes the Cloud to evade his oppressing solitude: to account for the collapses of quantum waves into reality, we should posit that quantum waves are not a positive space of excessive productivity which then gets “alienated” in our reality, but are sustained and permeated by a basic “contradiction” or tension which pushes them towards collapse.⁶

In contrast to Judaism and Christianity, the Muslim God is not a progenitor who creates his son; he is linked to his creatures by compassion. Devoid of features, God does not create humans in his likeness, but in their own likeness-the creation of actual man is not a Platonic act of materializing a pre-existing idea or form; it is an act which simultaneously imagines and creates the form itself. As Corbin, Copjec’s main inspiration, noted, imagination can reveal the hidden only by continuing to veil it, and Copjec convincingly links this to the topic of shame and sexuality. Here, however, we should take into account the two thoroughly different meanings of the unknown: there is the unknown as simply what we do not yet know about reality, a vast domain towards which we are indifferent; and there is the unknown as a secret which we treat as such (like God), the unknown as the mystery created by our veil or cloud. So there is literally nothing hidden by the veil; the veil does not hide any deep secret out of reach to our finite minds, like God-in-himself prior to His manifestation (as in the Sufi notion of the apophatic God) - behind the veil is ultimately just the stupid, contingent, pre-ontological chaos which can, to a large extent, even be the way things appear to us. It is the veil itself which reveals the hidden by continuing to veil it - in short, which creates the illusion that there is some secret behind the veil. The deception is thus redoubled: the veil hides the fact that there is nothing to hide behind it.

To exemplify the structure of such redoubled deception, Lacan evoked the anecdote about the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasios, two painters from ancient Greece, over who would paint a more convincing illusion.⁷ First, Zeuxis produced such a realistic picture of grapes that birds were lured into picking at it to eat the grapes. Next, Parrhasios won by painting a curtain on the wall of his room, so that Zeuxis, when Parrhasios showed him his painting, asked him: “OK, now please pull aside the veil and show me what you painted!” In Zeuxis’s painting, the illusion was so convincing that the image was taken for the real thing; in Parrhasios’s painting, the illusion resided in the very notion that what we see in front of us is just a veil covering up the hidden truth.

This is also how, for Lacan, feminine masquerade works: she wears a mask to make us react like Zeuxis in front of Parrhasios’s painting-OK, put down the mask and show us what you really are! In a homologous way, we can imagine Orlando (in Shakespeare’s As You Like It), after the mock wedding ceremony, turning to Rosalind-Ganymede and telling her: “You played Rosalind so well that you almost made me believe you were her; you can now return to what you are and be Ganymede again.” It is not an accident that the agents of such double masquerade are always women: a man can pretend to be a woman; only a woman can pretend to be a man who pretends to be a woman, just as only a woman can pretend to be what she is (a woman). To account for this specifically feminine status of pretending, Lacan refers to a woman who wears (has) a concealed fake penis in order to evoke that she is phallus - it is in this sense that, for Lacan, phallus is the signifier of castration.

Here we encounter the key separation between Sufi Islam and the subversive core of Christianity, ignored even by Meister Eckhart, who speaks about God being born in man (a believer). For Eckhart, this birth is not a unique event-the birth of Christ-but an event that every believer can repeat: “We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.”⁸ However, if “we are all meant to be mothers of God,” where is the place here for the crucifixion and the death of God? 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.

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), a position which brings them dangerously close to a perverse mysticism in which the subject acts for the pleasure of the Other. In Christianity, the exact opposite happens: not a return to the original state of purity and natural disposition, but the experience of how my fallen state is grounded in the fall of God from Himself. I am one with God when I see how the gap that separates me from God is internal to God Himself.⁹ With Christianity, we thus arrive at a vision of the universe that totally breaks with every premodern view of the universe as a harmonious organic whole of conflicting forces: being is a failed non-being (as Mladen Dolar put it); everything that is comes to be against the background of a barrier that throws the universe out of joint. There is nothing behind the barrier, not even the mystical nothing of some primordial Void - but just unknown stuff which is there in its stupid givenness, posing no secrets. So there is no need for a Hell where we go in our afterlife, Hell is the reality in which we live, and everything follows from this barrier concealing nothing, from modern science to human rights.

1. See Joan Copjec, Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, Cambridge (Ma), MIT Press 2025. Numbers in brackets in this text refer to the pages of Copjec’s book.

2. Copjec is fully justified in seeing an echo of this topic in Schelling’s notion of the “infinite lack of being (unendliche Mangel an Sein)” - see Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein: Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen Dialektik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1975.

3. Cosmic Order in Sufism | Sufi Path of Love.

4. Jacques Lacan, Encore, Paris: Editions du Seuil 1975, p. 49.

5. The Language of the Future | Sufi Terminology.

6. I’ve written on this in many of my last books, most extensively in Towards Quantum History, London: Bloomsbury 2025

7. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1979, p. 103.

8. Quoted from We are all meant to be mothers of God — Paul Vasile.

9. I developed this point much more in detail in my 5 books on Christianity – it is fully deployed already in the first one, The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso Books 2000).