Joan Copjec on Corbin & Schelling and more!

Joan Copjec

Her most recent work, which is focused on the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian filmmaker, and medieval Islamic philosophy, will be published in her next book, tentatively titled Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran.

Cloud, Precinct of the Theological-Historical

Joan Copjec

Psychoanalysis and History, Volume 20 Issue 3, Page 277-291, 

ISSN 1460-8235 

Available Online Nov 2018

Keywords: imaginal world, Cloud, tautegory, expression, Corbin, Lacan, Laplanche, Freud, Schelling, abyss, Abgrund, après-coup, Nachträglichkeit, tautegory

(https://doi.org/10.3366/pah.2018.0269)

Abstract

Regarded by many as the pre-eminent Islamicist of the twentieth century, Henry Corbin is also the subject of much criticism, aimed primarily at his supposed overemphasis on the mythological aspects of Islamic philosophy and his idiosyncratic privileging of the concept of the imaginal world. Taking seriously an unusual claim made by Steven Wasserstrom in Religion after Religion that the redeployment of Schelling's concept of tautegory by Corbin reveals all that is wrong with his work, this essay seeks to defend both the concept and Corbin's use of it. Developed by Schelling in his late work on mythology, the concept of tautegory turns out to be, for historical and theoretical reasons, a revelatory switch point. Not only does it make clear why the imaginal ‘locus’ is key to understanding the unity of God – the oneness of his apophatic and revealed dimensions – it also gives us profound insights into the links connecting Islamic philosophy, German Idealism, and psychoanalysis, which all take their bearings from the esoteric or mystical idea of an unconscious abyss.