COLLAPSE II
Islamic Exotericism:
Apocalypse in the Wake of
Refractory Impossibility
Reza Negarestani
Unlike other strains of monotheism, Islam cannot be said to
include the idea of an apocalypse in the sense in which we usually
understand this word. In fact, the radically external, ‘impossible’
(non potest) nature of Allah renders the judaeo-christian apocalypse
structurally impossible (impugnable). At the same time, Islam posits
an apocalypse that is neither feared, hoped for or expected, but which,
in the ideal of pure submission, is inhabited by the faithful as pure
impossibility. In order to comprehend what appears, in its violent
irruption into western chronology, as the apocalypticism of radicalized
Islam, we must understand how Allah’s absolute externality has as its
consequence a different conception of temporality, different mechanisms
for the maintaining of faith, and an apocalypse which cannot be
reduced to a chronological moment or a possibility in unification.
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THE OUTSIDE OF OUTSIDERS. The Islamic account of
Genesis spirals around a non-ontological unity. Firstly, as
Mollasadra (1571-1640), the Iranian philosopher,
emphasizes,1 Allah is not ‘Being’ (yet neither is it nihil); its
truth can never be known, either through being or through
non-being, either before or after the Apocalypse. Secondly
(and in parallel with the foregoing), Man can never attain
an integral unity with God – such a unity as would, in
other strains of monotheism, exalt and transform Man
from his former (quondam) state. Man can only return to
Allah, not unite with him. Unity or completeness in terms
of the human is only entailed by affordance,2 a state of
mutual affordability or an economical openness: the state
of being open to. In Islam, however, God is constantly
external to Man, and only ‘unlives’ through the impossible,
an absolute potestas so ultimate that it is im-posse-ible for
Man; Al Farabi (870-950CE) in his chef-d’oeuvre, On the
Principles of the Views of the Inhabitants of the Excellent State,3
clearly brings into conjunction the possibility of possessability and impossibility, to suggest an im-possess-ability.
1. Al Farabi, On the Principles of the Views of the Inhabitants of the Excellent State, trans. Seid
Jafar Sajjadi (Tehran: Ministry of Culture and Islamic Affairs, 2000).
2. Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, in his works focused on ontology – written
after breaking from Husserl’s phenomenology through a critique of transcendental
idealism – expounds on the problem of openness and affordance, suggesting that
closure (or modulated/economical openness) is a priority for open systems, and
analysing niches as power projection zones and inhibitors of unwanted interactions
and communications. The openness of the niche protects itself from what makes it
open, by opening itself to what makes it closed. Only through such an openness can
the existential moments be afforded, and modes of Being are then able to emerge.
For more details on affordance, see my ‘Militarization of Peace’ in Mackay (ed.)
Collapse Vol. I, 72n.11.
3. Mollasadra (Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi), The Beginning & the End on Transcendental
Philosophy (Al-Mabda wa'l- Ma'ad fi'l-Hikmat al-Muta'aliyyah), Vol. 2 (Tehran: Sadra
Islamic Philosophy Research Institute, 2002).
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Possibility must be afforded if it is to be reached, its potenz
must be attained, possessed and sometimes even activated
through a dynamic course of action in order for it to be
released (X is possible for Y if and only if Y affords X i.e.
if Y is able to reach X and authenticate its possibility; or, Y
must attain the capacity to afford X as a possessable
objective). But Farabi bifurcates impossibility into a
‘Latent/Passive Impossibility’ (an impossibility characterized by its quiescence) and an ‘Active/Unfailing
Impossibility’, where the former is merely a symptom of a
subjective capacity or temporary lack of mutual
affordance. That is to say that Latent or Passive
Impossibility describes a situation where, once Y achieves
the desiderata necessary to capacitate itself and afford X,
the Latent Impossibility will be actuated as Possibility.
Latent impossibility attests to the fact that the impossible
object(-ive) (X) still remains in the horizon (boundary) of
the subject in relation to which we attribute its impossibility; it is necessary only that it be afforded and that it
mutually afford the subject in order for it to become
possible (possess-able). At the same time this makes it
certain that the latently impossible object(-ive) remains
bound to the logic of the boundary, of conditions and characteristics (having its own idiosyncrasies which must be
afforded in order to be activated and become achievable
for the subject Y). Thus it remains existentially perusable
and intrinsically inert and transient (it is not permanently
and fully impossible). And it is neither functionally nor
spatially external to the subject Y; on the contrary, it (latent
impossibility: X) exists just as the subject Y exists, waiting
to afford X to turn it into a possible (possess-able).
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Christian luminary Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464AD)
argues in De Possest (a neologism best understood by
breaking it down to its pre-existing elements posse est) that
‘God alone is what (He) is able to be.’4 Nicolaus Cusanus
expounds on a microcosmic proto-monadic system which
is shaped around his term Possest (Posse Est or Können-Ist)
which draws an intrinsic and interiorized line of alliance
between Able-ness (being able to) or Actuation, and Potentia
or Possibility. To exist is to be possible in the sense of
possest; or more accurately, ‘able-ness’ and ‘actuation’ are
immanent to potency and possibility. Possibility alone
renders existence, just as potency alone renders able-ness.
According to Cusanus, possest means that ‘possibility itself
exists’ (‘posse est’); then he concludes that because what
exists, exists actually (existence is the actuation of
possibility), the ‘possibility to be’ or the ‘potentiality to be
able’ exists insofar as the ‘possibility to be’ is actual.
Cusanus calls this possest. In other words, and from a
different etymological and biblical perspective of the term
possest, it means that the ‘potentiality to be’ exists as effectuation and able-ness (posse/possibilis).
The proposition ‘God is possest (actualized-possibility
and able-potency)’ captures an omnipotent quality, to be
opposed to created beings who can never completely fulfill
their potentialities and can never fully reach their possibilities. This intrinsic and autonomous transition in possest
between possibility and actualization, or potentiality and
able-ness, can only be established in the presence of
4. See Nicholas of Cusa, Metaphysical Speculations, Volume 2, trans. Jasper Hopkins
(Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 2000), A Concise Introduction to the
Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: The Arthur J.
Banning Press, 1986), and Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H.
Lawrence Bond (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1997).
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capacity or affordability; because actualization or able-ness
emerges when possibility or potentiality achieves and
satisfies a certain capacity (i.e. in the case of chemical
processes, reaching a certain gradient in potency to trigger
a specific action) that leads to a certain actuation and effectuation. Designated actuation is the matter of designated
affordability, or the range of capacity for a potency which
must be fulfilled (afforded).
The necessity of capacity as the ground on which
possibility and actuality are mapped together, or in other
words, capacity as what connects possibility and actualization together, can now be examined through an apagogical
argument (reductio ad impossibile) and in conjunction with the
theological context at stake here. To this purpose, we shall
assume that the connection between possibility and
actualization (or potentiality and able-ness) is direct and
immediate, and they operate in regard to each other
without an intermediary, a capacitas which can contain
something.
In the absence of capacity and affordability as bases
which underlie both possibility and actualization, every
possibility could lead to any actualization and any ableness could be ensued by a potentiality with no required
gradient or degree of quality or quantity. Or in other
words, no particular ability would exist, since it is the
capacity and gradient of fulfillment that lead a certain
potentiality towards its able-ness. Once we assume that
capacity and its subsequent affordability do not exist in the
transition of possibility to actualization – ergo the possest of
God – there would not be any boundary (limit) or compass
for the actualization of a possibility, or vice versa.
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Consequently, in the absence of capacity, the possibility of
being God and actualization of that possibility – being the
Divine, that is – for Man would be equal to the possest of
God itself: so to speak, Man and God would be potentially
and actually at the same level; a theological conclusion that
is not only invalid for monotheism but also confutes its
own grounding structure. Therefore, to this extent, the
relationship between possibility and actualization, both in
the actualized-possibility of God (possest) and possibilities of
Man, is subjected to the economy of capacity and ability –
in the sense of tolerance (range of modulation) – which is
an economy of affordability rather than openness, environmental surround rather than radical outside. Now if
capacity is latently and potentially attainable at all times
(can be afforded at any time) and it constitutes the
grounding nexus of possibility and actualization for both
God and Man, then Man can afford the Divine all the time
– which is not the same thing as ‘Man being God’ or
‘becoming the Divine instantaneously’. God can be
afforded all along. This affording of God – which is
delineated as the possibility of Man being actualized as
God (ultimate actualized-possibility or possest) and is not ‘to
be God itself’ – incessantly maintains the position of the
Divine within the range (confinium) of Man’s affordability
(either incapaciousness or capaciousness: capacity), or in
other words, interior and endemic to Man’s ecologia and
existence.
Following Cusanus, in God’s possest, actuality and
possibility can correspond and conform to each other
symmetrically (with an equal scale) only if the capacity
between them is equal to the unit distance or the unit
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capacity. That is to say, ab is posed as the unit measure
(unus: 1) for any other variation in actuality, possibility and
capacity i.e. a unit in the threefold of existence.
Accordingly, possest can be diagrammed as ab, which is
equal to the unit capacity and the symmetric fold between
actuality and possibility (see Diagram 1). To put it
differently, possest as the complete symmetry and corresponding state of possibility and actuality (God) can only
come to existence if both actuality and possibility are
aligned with the Absolute or the un-conditioned (x=0);
since any condition, or more concretely, any variable step
(gradum) or status, either in possibility or actuality, is
formulated as a deviation (d) from the unit distance or the
unit capacity (d 1). To this point, beings are perpetuated
as variations, and their existences are deviations from the
unit capacity (ab), which is immutable to variation and
digression. For created beings, either actuality or
possibility is characterized as the ratio of this deviation to
its corresponding capacity. For instance in Diagram 1, for
possibility of a created being this ratio of deviation is b1b,
i.e. b1 to b1o (similar to a cosine function: b1/b1o). Likewise,
the existence of a created being becomes tangential to the
existence of God. The existence of a created being is
posited as the ratio deviation of both its actualities and
possibilities (a1, b1) to the unit capacity (ab) which is possest
Diagram 1. The Threefold of Existence
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or God itself (similar to the tangent function): (a1b1)/(ab).
Here the qualitative or quantitative characteristics of
One and its formation as a specific com-plexus (or according
to Cusanus, God’s complicatio/enveloped in relation to the
world’s explicatio/developed), namely unity, should not be
presented as the reductive ‘indifference of the unity itself
toward itself’ (Hegel) by way of totalization or exclusion.
Unity here serves monotheistic theology only by the virtue
of its (i) positioning, (ii) the alignment it takes and (iii) the
fold it plaits (as a fold-line which is itself a plait) in the
threefold of existence. It is by way of these three acquired
attributes (subsidiary to its unitary quality) that unity – as
of God – more than being the exclusive oneness, is posited
as the unit capacity, the measure (metron) of affordance.
And affordance is the only and exclusive destination for
the openness between Man and God in this territory and
the ontological relevancy between possibility and actuality.
Only through economical (dyslogistically economical, of
course) possibilities of affordance or reciprocal affordability, can actuality be posed as the ideal realization of
possibility, an end in itself, an entelechy. Unity of and
through God is the fold of connection and communication
made in the name of affordability and capacity (so long as
one can afford). Neither unity nor its formative processes
(unification) are totality or exclusion in themselves. To
highlight the problematic of ‘Unity as immanent totality’, it
can be suggested that different numeric principles can be
applied to unity itself, in the same way that Kazimierz
Twardowski5 proposes that Leibniz’s spiritual system is
5. Kazimierz Twardowski, Selected Philosophical Writings (Wybrane Pisma Filozoficzne),
(Warszawa: PWN, 1965), 200-4
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subject to two different numeric principles. Consequently,
Leibniz’s system only includes monism of kind but not
numeric monism. Unity as a process is perpetuated by two
main numeric systems – of which at least one is manifold
– which are applied synchronously together from both
ends in the process of unification. In Christian theology,
one is the numeric multitude or the participation of people
(Man) in God; and the other is the numeric monism of
God, which also envelopes the monism of kind. Moreover,
one can embarrass the presupposed tautology (‘I be that I
be’ [Exodus 3:14]) that is associated with One not only by
the logic of exception (which again is directly extracted
from oneness as counter-generalization) but also by the
singularity function of One by which One separates from
its unitary predeterminations. At the same time, from
another direction, infinite growing processes can
encapsulate the same singularity of One and develop the
same ‘object conception’6 that is applied to One. If One
consolidates everything under its banner by any means
possible, every anomaly, unilateral development,
exception, germinal multiplicity and constant driftage –
that is to say, infinite perversion (d 1) – can also be
gathered under the flag of One. This is the remobilization
program (in a military sense) that is harvested from the
double-dealing dynamism of heresy. If God basks in his
house, let us reconstruct it according to the laws of
demons.
To this end, the monotheistic theology in which the
existence of beings is tangential to the unit course
6. Ed Dubinsky et al, ‘Some Historical Issues and Paradoxes Regarding the Concept
of Infinity: An APOS Analysis: Part 2’, in Educational Studies in Mathematics, Vol. 60,
No. 2 (The Netherlands: Springer, 2005), 253-266.
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(unbedingt) of God makes sense; but only at the cost of
postulating the existence of God as capacity, or more
accurately, the unit capacity in the threefold of existence.
The possest of God is transversally interposed between
actuality and possibility, an imposition that not only
establishes a monopoly of God, for which beings are mere
excursions, but also economizes existence. God is the
metron of affordance; Man’s affordability tangentially folds
over and contains God (see Diagram 1).
The affordability of God (i.e. God being afforded or
God within the fold of Man’s existence) perpetuates the
Divine as domestic or in-the-house (cohabitant) in
connection to Man. The Almighty’s omnipotence is merely
effectuated in the wake of its confinement, which includes
and covers Man too; while the latter is a part, the former is
only environment, the neighbouring, the one that is
tethered to the part’s capacity. If the Triune God is existentially possible, it is because this God cohabits the same
space in which Man resides, which is functionally bound
by the economical closure of affordance between the two
(Man and God) and is rendered volumetrically limitless by
the opposition between ‘the becoming of Man’ and ‘the
Being of God’, which determine the ongoing perpetuation
of affordance (see Diagram 2). The affordance or mutual
affordability between God and Man is an economical
openness through which overlap and ‘radical communication’ (indifferent to capacity) are not attainable. Here, communication and overlap can only take place in the presence
of and within a third capacitor, which is situated as an intermediate state (meso-philic) by both sides and interposes a
buffer between them capable of consociating and bringing
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the sides to one capacity, coordinating a domain of
communication for God and Man. This capacitor is
partially shared by both sides and does not preexist for
them individually; it is conceived and formed by the
movements of Man and God to each other (see Diagram
2). Coexisting contemporaneously and dynamically, these
diametric movements whose course of action is affording,
participate – in the sense of orchestration – in the coordination of a communal capacity, a hospitium. The hospitality
of axes, here, cannot be exalted into an act of conjoining,
unless through the act of lodging each party on the basis of
their regulations, ineptitudes and failures toward each
other and in themselves – the hospitality associated with
the foundation of lazar-houses or the erection of hostels as
loathsome places of dejection and parsimony. If God and
Man are incapable of fusing with each other outside of
their affordability, and for that reason their oneness is
eternalized through a shared vessel (vehiculum) which
renders both subordinate to each other, they never fully
overlap each other; though at the same time they do
overlap on a bounding level. In other words, the
affordance or mutual affordability between God and Man
can only lead to unity (continuity in and of One, un-us)
when the boundary of Man is afforded (economically
affirmed) by God. In the wake of Franz Brentano7 and
later, more concretely, Roderick Chisholm’s theories of
coincidence, which propose ‘if something continuous exists
as a boundary, it must be in connection with other
boundaries and it must pertain to a continuum of higher
7. Franz Brentano, Philosophical Investigations on Space, Time and the Continuum, trans.
Barry Smith (Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988).
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dimension’,8 the continuity of God and Man in a ‘shared
capacity’ determines and marks out not only the boundary
of Man, but also of God. Unity cartographically outlines
the shared and coinciding boundaries of Man and God, the
afforded boundary. In unification as culminating
affordance, all possibilities – including the possibility of
unity and the possibility of Man’s deification – are molded
Diagram 2. Monad Mechanics
by the capacity and boundary of Man which necessitate a
boundary for God as the continuity of Man’s boundary in
unity. The possibility of unity entails the possibility of a
coincidence of boundaries in the congenial company of
8. R. Chisholm, On Metaphysics (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1989), 83-90.
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Man and God.
Having ratiocinated the threefold of possibility,
actualization and – en passant – meso-philic capacity, the
investigation of Possibility and Impossibility for Man and
God can be pursued by, and in conjunction with, Farabi’s
Islamic question of Active/Unfailing Impossibility.
For Farabi, Being and being united with God
demarcate a passage that is trodden through the intersection of Latent/Passive Impossibility and Possibility
(symbolised as A∩Β), and whose boundaries are outlined
by the ‘symmetric’ difference of Latent/Passive
Impossibility and Possibility which is the union of both
Diagram 3. Union and Symmetry in Possest
(After Nicolaus Cusanus’ De Possest)
minus their intersection and can be symbolized as
(A∪B)–(A∩B). Farabi refutes any manifestation of
‘possibility of Being’ in the existence of God, because
possibility of Being is – with the same scale or sun-metron –
symmetrically determined by the relative complements of
A and B (symbolised as A–B and B–A) which maintain
existence by exclusion and debarment of other parts
(simultaneously full A and full B) (see Diagram 3).
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The Christian doctrine of Apocalypse and Return to
God adheres to the model of Latent/Passive Impossibility;
it is maintained that the Unity with God which is now
impossible will eventually be afforded, and, as possible,
will ensue. Affordance, or ‘the openness to possess’, is the
causa causans of ‘possibility (posse) to be able and actualized’.
In the presence of affordance, possibility is assumed as the
capacity (amplitude) or the containing possibility to do
something. Possibility as affordability – in its economical
receptivity and investment – exists prior to possibility as
ontological potency. Parallel to, but entirely dissociated
from, Latent Impossibility, it is the other impossibility (impossess-ability) delineated by Farabi that designates the
plane on which Allah pervades everything in Islam; it is
Active or Unfailing Impossibility, which cannot be afforded
under any circumstance. Hence it perpetuates and
postulates itself outside of possibility and possess-ability –
that is to say, potentiality for Being and being united.
Farabi’s Active Impossibility, which suggests itself as
consistent and radical, equals radical externality. Allah’s
externality renders it im-possess-able; its active impossibility originates and reinforces its un-existence or im-possessability for all modes of existence. But at the same time this
un-existence is not that of the nihil, since it is immanent to
existence and all modes of being. Allah does not afford, but
is the total openness which must be afforded, regulated,
grounded and moderated in order to be transformed into
modes of existence, into survival; otherwise, its active impossess-ability would be the resolute terminus of all beings.
According to Islam, then, existence is the consequence
of the prevailing impossibility of Allah, and Allah’s
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absolute openness can only be afforded (that is, submitted
to economical communication or the affordable passage
from passive impossibility to possibility) but not radically
communicated. Ontological modes of openness or
‘openness bound to existence’ cannot be absolute, since
they would thereby transgress their existential necessity
(first and foremost, they must survive and their openness
is bound to their logic of survival). They merely afford this
active impossibility and maintain their survival through its
im-possess-ability, since possessing it in its entirety would
be the undoing of affordance, and consequently of the
survival that affordance makes possible and maintains.
Absolute openness cannot be communicated, it can merely
be afforded; and existence emerges out of this very lack of
radical communication with the Absolute Openness (or in
Islam, the impossibility or im-possess-ability of Allah) and
its pathological symptom, affordability.
The revelational conclusion or the unitary apotheosis
with God is defined as coming to union with God by
participation, or participation in God through the Son. In
this revelatory process, the aperture of man's epistemological focus in relation to the Divine must surpass his
ontological isolation by means of a third capacity outside
his own capacitance or the state of his capacity: an extenta
whose boundary (or boundedness) ontologically shares
and overlaps that of Man, and whose epistemic expanse (of
unboundedness) intersects with the Divine. The
mechanism of ‘coming to Union’ or unificatory disclosure
of the Apocalypse (Revelation), while it is subjected to
variations of either ontological or epistemological
directions, constantly partakes of a fundamental revelatory
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process in a monadic or unitary sense: participation by the
necessity of incompatible entities or parts and their
ordained unity, i.e. difference, and adding a quality or
amount (a content) to the difference to satisfy and fill it.
This attributable content which takes form as contentum (the
conjoiner) and contentus (the satisfier) cannot be anything.
Precisely speaking, it should be – by the virtue of its
satisfying function – determined and individuated by
exclusion, or the logic of negativity, to locally fill and
neutralize the effect but not the cause of the difference –
that is to say, to be ‘something specific’ at last. This ‘specific
something’ must share the contents of both the Divine and
Man without transgressing their capacities or boundaries
outlined by affordance, which actuates the coincidence of
boundaries (viz. necessitating both the existence and
coincidence of boundaries) between God and Man; it can
be the groundwork of participation and affordance if and
only if it is perpetuated by the sum exclusion of both sides
– neither outside of X nor outside of Y. To this extent, this
certain content reinvents the autonomy of participation in
ostracism and repels the ephemerality of its existence by
double-satisfaction. The Son is the ultimate contentus of
Revelation and Unification, the double-satisfier of Platonic
participation. If according to Hans Urs von Balthasar, transcendence to Christ manifests the apocalyptic consummation of History and Christ gives the world (the exteriora of
the created world, the interiora of human essence and the
superiora of heavenly order) its Gestalt, then both the configuration and consummation of the world (essence itself)
exist only in affordance and economical participation
through capacity.
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We shall become Sons by participation (methexis)
(Cyril of Alexandria)
Totus Christus, Caput et Corpus
Four factors are involved in neo-Platonic and later
Augustinian doctrines of methexis (participation): (i) The
divine source of experience or the horizon (horismos: whose
formation is characterized by an inner hegemonic
boundary – perata – and an external boundlessness) of participation, which affects the spiritual senses of the human
beings. Apart from this horizon there is no motivation for
participation, since methexis presupposes the lack of an
autonomy between participants, i.e. participants undergo
methexis through their lack of autonomy and the hegemonic
autonomy of the Divine. (ii) The telos of experience or the
intention of the source, the purpose and goal for human
being, which is unity with the Divine. Methexis presupposes
myriad levels of being necessarily emanating from the
Divine to unify later with the Divine as the ultimate One.
(iii) The transformation brought about through
experience which is based on the capacity/affordability
between participants (participans) with each other, on the
one hand, and the participant with the Whole or the
contentus of participation (participatum), on the other. The
persistent interference of capacity and affordance in participation, and in the reciprocal relation between participation
and participants, imparts a self-correcting or gravitational
quality to the collectivizing process of participation towards
a satisfactory collectivity – thereby constraining in its collectivization dynamics – for the participants and the
content of participation. This state of participation
undertakes the together-ness of relationship as long as the
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capacity of nexus can be fulfilled; therefore, it operates as
‘coming together (com) under a bound or an obligation
(munis)’. This is an Obligation that can only exist as One
(unus) because it is directed and achieved by and through
capacity and affordance between entities in participation,
or to be exact, by the collective affordance or the ‘shared’
capacity, the capacity shared by all as the sum affordability
that can be fulfilled by all. For such an obligation, which
can only survive and influence as a shared capacity, the
plane of movement is necessarily one of convergence and
concentration. Here, the participation dynamic inexorably
describes a transition from munis (collective obligation) to
unus (being one) in the wake of a collectivity (com) which
perpetuates itself through affordance (see Diagram 4). This
is why, in the New Testament, discussions and references
to participation are mostly expressed in terms of koinonia (in
its Platonic sense) which signifies sharing, and suggests an
obsession with economic fixation, rather than Methexis (participation). (iv) The affective states that accompany the
experience of participation are already modulated by the
affordance between participants and the Whole, and the
hegemonic autonomy of the Divine, which imposes unity
with itself upon all modes of participation – methexis.
The Christian apotheosis promises a final unity with
the God through a transcendental participation or methexis
(or what Theodore Runyon calls Orthopathy)9 – with the
Son (as an indispensable intermediary or channel-regime of
this exchangeability, the double-binding chain of the
Atonement, the double-satisfier) and the other sons (men)
9. Theodore Runyon, ‘The Importance of Experience for Faith’, in Aldersgate
Reconsidered (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 93-108.
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Diagram 4. Monad’s Communication Dynamics
taking part in a process of concrescence (the theological
becoming grounded upon economic participation or
methexis) oriented towards unification with God. But Islam
openly rejects such a theologically relieving covenant. Man
can never be unified with Allah and Allah will never be
revealed to Man; the knowledge of Allah can be obtained
neither through the affirmative desire of cataphasis nor the
logic of negativity and emphatic negation of apophasis. In
more precise terms, in Islam, unity with the Divine is
eventuated neither on the ontological nor on the epistemological level. The son can never return to the father since
there is no son and no father; there is only Allah, external
to all beings and their surrounding outside i.e. the possibilities of their transgression. Because transgression is
conveyed on the plane of affordance and the dynamics of
‘being open to’, a tactical line of openness constrained by
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the plane of logistics rather than the subjective line of
command. This radical outsideness, however, is not
prompted by the jealous impulsions of God, passed on to
the victim(-ized) body of Man (a parasitic creed stubbornly
energized and exploited by the exchangeability between lex
talionis and victimology, their double-binding system carved
on to the monopoly of God), but rather that immensity
that is the undoing of Man, of all potential sons and the
Father alike.
While God was the exclusive source of the revelation to
Muhammad, God himself is not the content of the revelation. Revelation in Islamic theology does not mean God
disclosing himself. It is revelation from God, not revelation of God. God is remote. He is inscrutable and utterly
inaccessible to human knowledge [...] Even though we are
his creatures whose every breath is dependent upon him,
it is not in interpersonal relationship with him that we
receive guidance from him.10
Islamic Apocalypticism is not a contemplating process,
a river (a flowing transcendence or a process of concrescence [A.N. Whitehead])11 tending towards unification
with God, as the complete state of its refinement. It is a
process which seeks to ultimately and fundamentally
10. Edmund Perry, The Gospel in Dispute: The Relation of the Christian Faith to other
Missionary Religions (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 155.
11. Concrescence emphasizes an economical participation through the theological
doctrine of Diaconate which assembles a regulating all together; the itinerary of this
process is continuously guaranteed by the responsibility of each entity to serve and
survive for the other, becoming a passive negotiator-field to save the continuity of
the self-refining flux. In such a participation (methexis), one cannot escape and still
survive; the entities which cannot bear this dynamic but fully economical participation are automatically forced to leave the dynamic network of pseudo-flux (forced to
be dumped out of the dynamic course of the flow).
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‘surrender’ to the impossible which remains external to
being (absolute surrender or pure Islam). Submission
occurs according to the imperceptible Will (Hoda) of the
im-posse-ible (Allah). Everything is preserved and
maintained by a pure externality, not because of the power
– ontological or epistemological sovereignty – it imposes
upon being, but for the sake of externality itself – the
radical outsideness that simultaneously provides the
possibility of being, affordance and survival. The process
of surrendering and submitting (or Islam) which leads Man
towards God is suddenly disrupted by Qiyamah (Ghiamat)
which is wrongly translated as Apocalypse. Ghiamat is a
vast desert where Man finds that he can never reach
(possess or afford) the Absolute or the Unconditioned
(unbedingt). Here Man is totally disillusioned (one of the
functions of Ghiamat is an awakening, in the sense, not of
resurrection, but of disillusionment, entebaah) of everything
he ‘believes’ himself to possess, and of existence as
ontological corollary of affordance. Islamic Apocalypse
occurs where (not when) Man grasps the utter externality
of God to himself (an externality based on the radical
outside-ness of function and an unaffordable openness of
communication – rather than on a distance, which in the
Islamic account of the divine is regarded as the utter glory
and generosity of God to Man). Deleuze and Guattari12
diagram the Absolute in terms of a movement qualitatively different to relative movements but necessarily
associated to them. In Islamic Apocalypse all movements
which give rise to the Absolute (and flow ‘through’ and ‘as’
Islam) abruptly cease to process (they cannot install Man
12. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 509.
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as multiple or even One); the process of rendering a Unity
by exception or subtraction fails before it is initiated.
Before such an impossibility, the Deleuzian escapism to the
Outside is an aesthetic movement based either on the
idealism of reaching/possessing the Impossible (the active
im-possess-able) or on becoming open to an absolute
openness which can only be economically afforded and
explored by the survivalist policy of ‘being open to’ and its
escapist lines. This radical openness is so unrestricted that
it turns all modes of openness (‘being open to’ in
particular) and lines of escapism into a romantic struggle to
tolerate it. However, every instance of toleration of this
immense openness (even in the form of economical
openness, escapism or ‘being open to’) results in a suffering
which affordance and all economic regulations carry with
themselves as the consequence of their restrictions and
survivalist moderations. Economical openness (or
escapism, which employs its dynamism on the plane of
‘being open to’ i.e. economical openness) as an instrument
for moving towards Absolute Openness, operates in the
form of an economic reformation of affordance and
suffering. For such an economical openness relies on a
movement or escape according to a subjective capacity –
bound to the capacity of the Whole – which can crack at
anytime, leading to a crisis of survival and toleration at
different levels. This crisis or symptomatic side-effect
associated with economical openness is both the result of
the lack/capacity it must include in order to survive
(regulation of communication) and of the radical openness
which affordance cannot fully regulate and which,
therefore, will eventually cut it (the subject of economical
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openness) open. Is escapism on the plane of ‘being open’
therefore a reformation of Atonement, its reinvention in
another territory?
Escapism presupposes that openness all happens on the
plane of ‘being open to’ (it excludes the radical side of
openness or openness from the Outside i.e. ‘being opened
by’). The propulsive body of ‘the line of flight’ (Deleuze
and Guattari) runs on this plane of openness to explore the
Outside, or in other words, to be open to the Outside.
Consequently escapism is involuntarily prone to unlimited
appropriating functions and restrictions of capacity, since
these maintain the openness for both the subject that
escapes and the environment that affords and supports
this escape – the capacity or affordance of the Whole.
As the escape reaches critical levels in opposing the gravitational forces (territory, the State, organic life, etc.), its
capacity for ‘being open to’ becomes a burden of tolerance
and confinement (the limits of capacity) rather than a
propulsive engine. To this extent, the over-tolerance for
escaping becomes equal to suffering (thlipsis megale) for
salvation. When it comes to the exigency of capacity, a
scintilla of openness on the plane of ‘being open to’ –
which is always oriented in opposition to the function of
gravity but is aligned with affordance – can be likened to a
tribulation whose conclusion (salvation) is not liberation
from capacity but arriving at, shifting to, a reformed
capacity.
In Islam, Man does not reach the Absolute, nor does
the Apocalypse manifest the Absolute. Unlike other
apocalyptic revelations, Islamic Apocalypse is a disruption
for a transcendental process towards an Absolute which is
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impossible; a cessation, manifesting neither a succession
nor an interlude but an utter terminus for transcendental
Absolutism. Islamic Apocalypse is a momentary process
for dismantling all manifestations of Absolutism, only
highlighting the absolute externality of God as the
Imperceptible or irreducible exteriority – ‘The secret of
God is eternally ungraspable by Man’; the Quran does not
speak about the concealment of a secret but of the utter
inaccessibility of the radical externality of God. This latter
always remains secret, not in the sense of a mystery [muein]
whose accessibility varies between the initiated and the
uninitiated and according to the epistemological tools at
ones disposal, but in the sense of ‘being ungraspable and
unthinkable forever’ for everyone. According to Islamic
scholars, it is the limitless generosity of this externality that,
despite its radicality, makes ‘being’ possible for Man by
posing itself as refractory impossibility. Theology in
general, particularly Christian theology, is vigorously
involved with the act of giving or the biblical didômi, and
the measure of this act is determined by the emphatic limit
of the act of giving in the sense of the Divine which is
Revelation, or the epistemological Gift. The Gift of
Revelation – by the necessity of the aforementioned
affordable structure of Revelation – abstains from excess
and ceases to be radical in itself and in the act of donation.
The principle of gift-economy consolidates around its compensability. When a gift is afforded by the receiver of the
gift, it can also – potentially and by virtue of the capacity
of the receiver who has already met the expense or level of
the gift – be paid back or re-gifted at least with a gift of
equal or lesser value. When the gift is Revelation or the
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ultimate giving and Man is the receiver, the potential re-gift
is proportionally equal to the possibility and the existence
of God (Esse) itself in Revelation. The radicality of the gift
originates from its exorbitance (it is outside the cycle of
exchangeability), the absence of any opportunity to counterbalance or compensate it, and its externality to satisfaction, hence reducibility to a content. In Islamic theology
and according to explicit Quranic verses, the ultimate gift
from Allah averts satisfaction and does not satisfy Man in
terms of providing what the human deems enough (satis).
Nor can it be exchanged or compensated. Allah’s gift
attests to the immensity of the ultimate act of giving: the
ultimate gift is essentially external to possession and possessability. If Allah’s gift were to satisfy, or position itself as
exchangeable, it would bring human being to extinction,
an epistemological inferno and an ontological eradication;
the gift then would contradict the act of giving and its giftness by becoming the act of absolute seizure or
abolishment in the name of confiscation. The gift is merely
the disclosure (in terms of unfolding) of Allah’s externality
on a radical and all-encompassing level, the affirmation of
refractory impossibility and the repudiation of the
possibility of an apocalyptio (unveiling) of a content, whether
of God or of Man, which again should be differentiated
from the content of the Divine in the usual understanding
of Apocalypse. Disillusionment is the function and
realization of such a gift. Islamic Ghiamat manifests enlightenment under the holocaustic luminosity of radical
outside, and presents human possibility, of both
ontological and epistemological potentialities, in the wake
of refractory impossibility.
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To this extent the monotheistic belief – hena theon, unum
deum – does not describe a rewarding destiny in Islam; it
submits the cogito to an externality for which belief is at the
same time a plethora of uselessness and a minimally
organized line necessary for attaching to the eradication of
itself as it blindly pursues the eternal Unrevealable. Islamic
Apocalypse is an anti-absolute politics. God is the only
Unconditioned; it is neither grasped nor unveiled and thus
cannot ‘come into being’ transcendentally; it is eternally
external to Man, it is the Absolute as the desert of
un-restriction (ab-solvere) for which Man or ontological
potency is a restriction, a modus and a deterrent. Upon such
an unfathomable externality, Man is left deserted; yet he is
not abandoned, for this externality is mapped as an extraproximity, utter and ungraspable closeness (‘We are closer
to him than his jugular vein’ – thus the Quran). This is a
panorama similar to the Survival Economy (libban, of
Germanic origin) or what is commonly called life but is the
territory of living (afforded Life or the process of affording
life) and (un)Life, or life in its externality to affordability.
Life is external to survival yet survival is allowed to live by
means of the very ‘possibility of containing’ – or capacity –
that Life makes accessible for it (either for the eradication
of survival or in order to lure it elsewhere). What is given
to Man is precisely what unlives for him. According to
Islam, Man is liberated in Ghiamat not by joining the divine
but through a disillusionment from his own being, a disillusionment made possible by the externality of God not the
quiddity of this externality (i.e. the Wesen of God). Behold the
Outside, you shall not explore it! For such an openness comes
forth as a reactionary extinction by and through being, an
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inevitable self-destructive repercussion triggered by the
affordance of capacity. But its unfathomability can be
grasped; this indeed is the way that ‘Return to God’ is
depicted in Islam. According to Islamic commentators,
Ghiamat (the Insurgency) – which, again, is wrongly
translated as Apocalypse (the moment of uncovering or
revelation, apocalyptio) since even in Ghiamat, Allah is
ungraspable and unrevealed to Man – promises a simultaneously brutal and glorious encounter of Man with what is
radically external yet closest to him; awakening this
externality for Man and awakening Man to grasp the
radicality of this externality – the Unrevealable, the
irreducible, full-fledged horror.
Revelation is extruded from the dynamic vector of a
‘loving to know the unknown’ as Augustine suggests, but
not a loving of the unknown itself. In Islam, however, the
Unknown itself is venerated in its full externality to the
cogito and to love. Reverence then is influenced by an
outsiding glory (radicality of outsideness) as an affect
passing and emerging through existence, not in the sense
of an advent or arrival from an outside which affords a
tendency, that is to say, a constraining extension, but as a
perpetual foreigner. Advent can only be registered as an
event when it is fulfilled or reaches its tendency, a status
where its foreignness ends (arrives at an orientation).
Anything that has the quality and movement of an advent
is bounded by a condition and a destination corresponding
to that condition; its outside-ness is only provisional. To
approach an unattainable without anticipation of reaching
it and in the absence of a destination as a position to be
possessed, the movement and its affect must be inherently
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upheld in relation to xenos, as a resident but ceaseless
outsider (xeno) – insistent alien.
When the Unknown is unknown because of its radical
externality, not because it is superior to human
knowledge13 – a position which can be afforded if not
communicated or fully identified in itself – epistemological
disciplines, in the same vein, unfold as alien tools. For such
an unknown imbued with refractory impossibility,
mysticism or contemplative theology proves itself to be not
only otiose but a romantic project, a symptom of the loss
of hope in a rigorous encounter with radical externality. If
mysticism culminates in the form of an epistemological
salvation or deliverance through initiation, its principles are
constantly refuted by refractory impossibility, as simultaneously pusillanimous and irrelevant exploitations of
ignorance on behalf of a redeeming unknown.
‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a
narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated
by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation and spatial
insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.14
13. The latter is exemplified by the theologies of Augustine or Aquinas. (‘In finem
nostrae cognitionis Deum tamquam ignotum cognoscimus’ [Thomas Aquinas, Boetium de
Trinitate]). Following Aquinas who did not pursue the heretical trail of his remark
and did not travel to the outer limits of his theology, one comes to this conclusion
about the Divine as the superiora of knowledge: that ‘God exists as ignorance’. This
does not denote that God is ignorant or is ignorance in itself but that God
existentially registers itself in human knowledge as Supreme Ignorance. Therefore,
the true existence of God as the ultimate knowledge (immutable wisdom and
knowledge in its full presence) is dependent on human knowledge or real ignorance
as something capable of being transcended, if the God’s true face is to be unveiled
(namely, ‘God as ignorance’ realized as ‘impeccable knowledge’).
14. John J. Collins, ‘Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,’ in
Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, ed. John J. Collins (Semeia 14, 1979), 9.
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Schelling’s obsession with Revelation (Philosophy of
Mythology, Philosophy of Revelation) which re-presents the
Judaeo-Christian account of Revelation and is a pivotal
quodlibet in non-Islamic monotheistic religions, is rendered
completely obsolete in the Islamic account of Apocalypse
(Ghiamat) and is regarded as heresy. It is described by
Schelling as ‘that which exists [...] only in order to see if I
can get from it to the divinity’. Such a statement is based
on the primal prophetic promise of Revelation, the promise
that the divinity must be eventually revealed or exposed to
Man through transcendence and its anabatic movements.
The true glory of the lord is exposed to Man when it is
revealed [‘God can be known’(John 1:18; 14:7; 17:3,6)]. In
Islamic Apocalypticism, such a promise is absent and is
regarded as Kufr (apostasy). Motahari, the Iranian Islamic
scholar, once suggested that the glory of Allah bursts forth
at the exact moment when Man realizes that nothing of
Allah can be revealed to him. According to Islam, in such
a moment one encounters the utter mercifulness of God,
for if God reveals itself, all modes of survival and being
would be rendered impossible. If God were to reveal itself,
everything would be overkilled. According to Islam, the
most merciful moment (supreme glory) is the moment
when Allah shows Man that despite its utter externality to
all beings, they exist precisely by virtue of this externality.
Allah’s radical supremacy is delineated more according to
its degree and radicalness of externality and openness than
to its authority over being (According to Islamic literature,
Allah does not need to enforce authority; authority is the
consequence of this externality which maintains the
survival of all beings for if Allah reveals itself, the undoing
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of Man will be inevitable).
On the topic of external sovereignty, Islamic scholars
pose the question: if God is external and sovereign, then
how can beings exist? This question is answered by
recourse to an ungraspable generosity (not forgiveness)
and Glory (both of which are purged of any quality) which
surge up through beings as the only reason for their
existence. Even the purpose of this Mercy and Glory will
remain unknown, Outside: nothing of God itself will be
revealed. With the consequence that applying the term
Revelation (apokalypto) to the Islamic account of Apocalypse
is highly problematic. Even on a technical level,
Apocalypse, constitutive as it is of monotheism, is not
designed for or capable of the particular functions that it
presents in other monotheistic threads in the Last Day.
Ghiamat (or Qiyamah), whilst it includes the diametric
discourse of the Judgment Day and its monopoly on
inevitability, as Al Faruqi points out, also adds a new and
radical twist to the Apocalyptic politics common to all
strands of monotheism; Ghiamat does not mean apokalupsis
(involving the process of lifting the veil). Rather, it heralds
Ghiam or rebellion, which is connected to Sura Al-Takvir
(overthrowing). The Quran depicts Ghiamat – Ultimate
Insurgency – as being governed not by a climax-oriented
narrative, based on the consumption or depletion of the
number of its possibilities, but on a series of participations,
a chain of minor insurgencies (ghiams) which bring with
them possibilities external to the capacity of the narrative.
Al Faruqi and Alameh Tabatabai both suggest that the
Quran wholly withdraws from the diametric
concealing/disclosing revelation of other monotheistic
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Books, from the opening verse through to the end. It
declares itself as an active cipher; it even shows a radical
cynicism (or even hatred) for the facsimile by twisting the
very foundations of monotheism as expressed in the Bible
or Torah, progressively making itself unidentifiable,
connecting what has already been told to anonymous
(both in the sense of an-onoma and a-nomos) lines which
make its contents accessible through an ulterior structure.
This deviation from the familiar path culminates in the
nomenclatural system usually associated with the Last
Day; Ghiamat (Ultimate rebellion, Insurgency, Standing to
respect, Awakening in the sense of disillusionment)
becomes the substitute for all other names in Apocalyptic
literatures which frequently suggest revelation (with velum
at the center), resurrection or strict judgment (functioning
through the dynamic scaling and measuring processes of
metron).15 The unity of the Advent Hope is frequently
expressed by such phrases as ‘the last days’ and ‘the end of
the age’(Heb 9:26). Apocalyptic thought apparently arose
within Judaism following the sixth century Babylonian
exile of the Jewish people. Although the book of Daniel is
the only complete example of an apocalypse in the Hebrew
Bible, other passages contain ideas that are either
apocalyptic or similar to apocalyptic thought – Examples
15. Metron (Greek origin), to be found etymologically encrypted in English words
such as Dimension (from dimetiri: measure out), meter, etc. Keeping well in mind the
famous doctrine of Protagoras, ‘Man is the metron of everything’ (pantôn chrematôn
metron anthrôpos), metron can be translated as Scale, Measure, Standard, and Value.
According to Sextus Empiricus metron expresses criterium (scale, measure) but
Heraclitus and Sophocles saw it as certifying dominance, a domination over
something. Therefore, metron indicates that both measure and dimension interconnect with Power, Justifying and Reasoning. The critique of metron, then, diagrams
how dimensions (namely metron) bring Power into effect, mobilizing and propagating
it.
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would include Zechariah 9-14, Ezekiel 38-39, and Isaiah
24-27.
In Islam, and particularly in Sunni accounts of Islamic
theology, examples of revelatory apocalypse and even
seeing Allah in Ghiamat can be found (Abu Hurairah, Al
Bukhari, Al Hajjaj, et al). However, most of these
apocalyptic attributes originated from Hadiths – and hence
had been subject to alteration, hadiths having being
collected in different times and by different narrators.
Their authenticity being thus questionable, they could not
maintain a lasting presence in Islamic theology and Islamic
accounts of Ghiamat. Not only because of their disputable
origin (as in the case of Abu Hurairah for example), but
also because of their contradiction of the emphatic
statements in the Quran regarding Ghiamat and absence of
revelation, in Islam apocalyptic theology (in the sense of
revelation and epistemological or ontological unity with
God) did not succeed in extending its influence beyond
classical and early Islamic theology. In Islam, explicit
reference (nas-e sarih) to the Quran is prior to everything
and must not be transgressed. Cultivated by the Al-Azhar
School’s rigor and animated by such figures like Mahmood
Shaltoot who inveighed against the classic theologians who
advocated apocalyptic eschatology of Judeo-Christianity
and worked mainly outside sectarian doctrine, the revelational doctrines were denigrated in Islamic theology.
16. Apokrisis or ekkrisis, the Anaximanderian universal pro-creationist process of
separation which is a prerequisite for unification and ultimate union. The process of
Apokrisis stratifies the universe into properly arranged layers (unlimited appropriation
and regulation by lamination and stratification) which make unification as a dynamic
process possible. This process of separation is prerequisite for the cosmic
union/separation machinery of the ultimate unification, or in other words, the final
union which functionally presupposes a series of separations and unifications leading
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The externality of Allah cannot be oversimplified into
a mere process of separation (ekkrisis).16 Aristotelian
philosophy shows us that separation always presupposes a
unity through a cyclic transcendence of separations (of
chorismos) and unions (of to hen) which rotates – or in more
technical terms, refines itself – towards a distilled
Quiteness or Unity with the Divine, a unity which is not
present in Islam. Moreover, unlike other modes of
monotheism, for Islam this externality is not the result of a
primal moral collapse or original sin (the Revelation
system of Christian redemptive history influenced
primarily by Tertullian [ca.155-220]); it is intrinsic to the
existence of being. Neither does this externality have
anything to do with sinfulness or the concupiscent nature
of Man – who in Judaeo-Christianity must be cleansed,
introduced to katharos – since in Islam the present condition
of Man is not sinful but normal; in the Islamic account, sin
emerges only as a consequence of the mis-perception of
this externality, as a result of latching on to the quiddity of
this externality, Allah.
Islam does not construct itself on redemption and/or
revelation. Redemption (the wayfarer becomes totally at
one with God’s way of redemption) is inseparable from its
consequent hope and boredom or redeeming despair, and
modes of development which are steered by the
conjunctive bonds between these two. The promise of
to a purely distilled Unity (corresponding to the classic distilling mechanism).
Anaximenes, however, developed the process of ekkrisis into the two processes of
rarefaction (corresponding to separation) and condensation (corresponding to
unification); we can follow these processes in the unificatory and distilling
mechanism of Kerotakis (reflux condenser) which was invented and designed
according to the cosmogonic traditions of alchemy and Aristotelian philosophy. On
Apokrisis, see Theophrastus commentaries on Anaximander; also, Hippolytus’
Refutation.
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Revelation presupposes a reward for a vigorous transcendentalism through the loss of sin and the accomplishment
of unity with God – or more precisely, the reformation of
affordance, and the capacity of Man to turn the (latent)
impossibility of the Unity with God into a possessable
possibility. In Islam there is no such reward, no such
promise; there is only the inexhaustible activeness of
refractory impossibility or Absolute Openness, crushing
affordance and the economic regulations of capacity, disillusioning Man from his repressive openness qua
economical self- and environment-protecting communication. Externality is diagrammed by a simultaneous
formidable closeness and externality of function, a concretization of ‘closer to you than your jugular vein’ (what a
vampiristic horror!)
I N I SLAM, CHRONOLOGICS IS A HERESY.
The individual’s encounter through faith and grace with
a personal God then salvation is contained precisely in the
human surrender to God (Islam [Submission]) and that
divine guidance (huda) which according to the Koran
remains or should remain forever unaltered by time and
history. Accordingly, there is no reason to conceive of revelation as something temporal or historical.17
Norman Brown is right to suggest that Islam is
thoroughly apocalyptic but without a sense of ‘Time’ that
could be grounded as the ordinance and understructure of
the spectacles of Grand History (whether Heilsgeschichte or
17. Abdoldjavad Falaturi, ‘Experience of Time and History in Islam,’ in Annemarie
Schimmel & Abdoldjavad Falaturi (eds.) We Believe in One God (London: Burns and
Oates, 1979), 65.
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Weltgeschichte). ‘Only the moment is real,’ Brown notes,18
but goes no further. The moment is transient, its function
is traced by its escapability, momentary variation and
particle frequency, by its gradus sine vestigio; the moment in
its entirety is an uncogito with a pulsatory intermittent
existence, ungraspable by Man and inaccessible by
mapped courses of action. All that is graspable are the
moment’s trajectories, its tails which complicate and
diagram time according to their spatial multiplicity, rather
than the chronologics of Time. Too many traces left by the
ever-escaping moment result in the loss of time, ‘untraceability of all narrative lines and temporal relations’19
(= The Islamic Apocalypse, Ghiamat), the fall of the
Kingdom – the emergence of a sinister imminence
constructed not upon temporal relations or modes, but
upon the loss of them. Such a constant imminence
surpasses necrocratic terror: when Omega is always
imminent and one cannot look backwards and ask what
happened, the necrocratic fear of death – powered by anticipation of the future as well as the questioning of the
distance to the Outside – is but a neutralized repression.
Time is absent in the Quran; the absence of any
occurrence of the word Zamaan (Time: chronos) is one of its
most noted enigmas. Instead of using the word Zamaan,
the Quran frequently addresses events through the word
vaght, conveying them through vaght and not zamaan
towards Ghiamat. Vaght is concerned with ‘Whereness’
18. N. O. Brown, Apocalypse And/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992).
19. Norman Brown writes, ‘the Quran breaks decisively with that alliance between
the prophetic tradition and materialistic historicism – “what actually happened” –
which set in with the materialistically historical triumph of Christianity.’ (Ibid.)
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whilst also obscuring the quiddity of this whereness as
spatial but unlocalizable ubiquity; it can only suggest an
unchronological Now (neither permanence nor
discontinuity; all entities are regarded as events through a
denuded space with no chronologic dominance), a
‘timeless where’ through which beings are suspended but
not stopped. But ‘Where is Now?’ The Quran never
answers. ‘Now’ always remains anonymous; its everexpanding Where which is essentially based on its
whereness (the quality of its spatial continuity), is
ceaselessly contagious. For whereness engineers terrains to
remain ubiquitous and be actively divergent, a multiplicity
which is a manifest epidemicity. Where is intrinsically and
autonomously contagious. All manifestations of history (or
even histories) are regarded as an infidelity towards this
spatial and contagious Now (vaght) which is the most
functional plane for utter submission (Islam) to the eternal
externality of Allah, the pervading or epidemic impossibility. Now is the only plane on which Being can be saved
from complete extinction by its illusions, which foam
around its grand obsession with unity. Abdoldjawad
Falaturi is possibly the first Islamic commentator who has
rigorously worked on vaght in the Quran and on the
Islamic sense of time (See his Experience of Time and History in
Islam, and other essays).
In the sense of Ghiamat, is it too early or too late? Only
by your ‘participation’ with this spatial Now (vaght), can
you find out. We are always in a premature Ghiamat.
Islamic imminence escapes the doctrine of the Advent
and the Christian Imminence. ‘The great day of the Lord
is near and hastening fast’(Zephaniah 1:14); ‘O Sovereign
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Lord, holy and true, how long before thou wilt judge and
avenge our blood?’(Rev 6:10): such Nearness or
Distance is at the heart of the Christian imminence,
architectonically constructed on Waiting and Patience
(‘Be patient’ [James 5:8-9], James admonishes believers).
The affordable esse of the Christian God posits the Outside
in terms of distance or opening-between (an openness that
is situated in-between is affordance rather than openness).
Distance and affordance realize movement only in the
anticipation of reaching a destination, even if the
destination is not accessible and only exists as an
affordable event or entity. In terms of economical
openness, what is afforded has already been achieved with
the same scale of possibility and actuality. If distance
potentiates destination, and destination actualizes distance,
a movement that either travels according to the distance or
according to and towards the destination would remain
passive in its dynamism, because it would have already
been presupposed by affordance. Such a movement, one
whose course has already been afforded, does not
undertake the risks of venture, instead it accepts the consequences of anticipation (immanent to distance and the
afforded movement). Here opens a horizon of passivity as
the inexorable glorification of patience and chronological
toleration organized by the promise of Revelation, as a
moral urgency of the Advent and Revelational Hope. Or,
to be exact, this nearness of the Christian Imminence is
articulated by the passivity of waiting and patience as the
consequences of anticipation, whose endemic affliction is
expectation, which in turn provokes hope and negative
despair and gives rise to crises of faith (as for the first
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century Christians who expected the grand return of
Christ: ‘“My master is delayed,” the unfaithful servant
complains’[Matt 24:48]). And it is through this prolonging
of hope and persistence as to the affordability of openness
(of both Man and God to each other), that faith is
manipulatively maintained. To this extent, the distance
(wait, patience, nearness, expectation) of Christian
imminence can be metroned (measured) either by Empirical
or Existential Time. But Islamic imminence, spread over
the epidemic Now, has no such bond to expectation,
patience or waiting, and it cannot be measured since it is
entirely based on furious participations (voluntary and
involuntary, triggered by total openness fueled by a
refractory impossibility that cracks affordance ab intera, ab
extra) moved by the loss of the promise of the Revelation
and the eternal externality of Allah.
If Islam’s process of submission affirms the radical
externality of Allah as a refractory impossibility, and if
Islamic Apocalypse supposes the loss of time, then for
Christianity, Islam expands and inflames along the same
chronopolitical dimension in which the Apocalypse
deploys its cremating and concluding machinery, incinerating the western sense of time, cleaving the bonds between
modes of historicity and western chronologics; a plane
along which chronologics shrinks to momentary particles
taking viral and swarming forms to spread through this
spatial Now (or irrevocable imminence). Islamic Ghiamat is
the vertigo of moments. For Christian chronologics,
Islamic chronopolitics is that ‘radical disruption in the
spatio-temporal relevancy of events’ which is generally
called the Apocalypse. If War on Terror, on its western
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front, is haunted not by fin de siècle scenarios but also by the
political manifestations of the Apocalypse and emphatic
finality, it is because western chronologics has engaged an
opponent which only exists as a desert levelled of all idols
or transcendental abominations to Allah. It is the desert
that hosts, and looms as, the Apocalypse. It is a desert
lurking in the disruption of chronologics, the corrosion of
history and the collapse of the spatio-temporal continuity
to the outside, because it is effectuated by refractory impossibility, not the other way around. This is not a question of
a clash between civilizations but a radical Time-war,
between chronologics and chronopolitics or what – by
virtue of its dynamism, that is affected by the Outside and
Impossibility – operates as Apocalypse or time-disruptive
politics within other systems. Each Western tactical line in
War on Terror must inevitably configure its program with
reference to Islamic chronopolitics if it seeks to engage and
afford the ‘conflict principles’ (correspondence with other
war machines in space and time) which every war machine
both upsets and affirms. If, on the Islamic front, the
Ghiamat-apocalypse is always already-there and the entities
of the pax islamica are already desert-nomads of this
contagious Now, for the most part (but not entirely) it is
the Western entities of War on Terror which are subjected
to apocalyptic commotions and disruptions in time. While
the Western chronosphere harbours a chronological
cataclysm for the Islamic front, Islam’s chronopolitics
betrays time and the Western chronosphere altogether.
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