Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran: Kiarostami/Corbin/Lacan

by Joan Copjec

A theoretical examination of veiling, shame, and modesty in the films of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami through the lenses of Islamic philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis.


In Between Paris and Tehran, Joan Copjec examines the films of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The key to these films, she argues, lies in the image of a fragile yet sheltering tree that appears in several of his films. This simple image depicts a central concept of Islamic philosophy, which is known as the “Cloud” or the “Imaginal World.” It designates the place out of which all the things of this world manifest themselves and “covers,” or veils, that which must remain hidden.

The concept of the Cloud plays a significant role in 1) the unique nature of the Islamic God, who is not a creator or father; 2) the nature of the image, which assumes a priority and a greater power than it is elsewhere accorded; and 3) the nature of modesty, shame, and sexuality.

Copjec walks her readers through the thicket of Islamic philosophy while demonstrating how its abstract concepts produce what audiences see on screen. The most ambitious aspect of the book lies in its attempt to demonstrate the inheritance by psychoanalysis of a new notion of knowledge, or gnosis, formulated by Muslim thinkers, who radically redefined the relation between body and thought.

208 pages, Paperback

Published May 6, 2025

About the author

Joan Copjec is a philosopher, theorist, author, feminist, and prominent American Lacanian psychoanalyst. She is the director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University of Buffalo.

Reviews

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Copjec's latest offers a rather transversal move: a reading of Kiarostami's filmography through Corbin's readings of Iranian Sufism (and, secondarily, in connection to Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts). Yet while she wants to avoid a certain naïve Orientalism, it is still an open question as to whether or not she herself does not fall into one of her own. I think this largely turns on why she decides to recourse to Sufist concepts in order to read an Iranian director's filmography: outside of a thoroughgoing explanation, it might seem as though she has reified some notion of an "Iranian mind" in which Sufi conceptology qua ontological picture automatically resides within any Iranian product, since no connection is biographically drawn between Kiarostami and Sufism that would suggest that he is consciously mobilizing these concepts within his films. I think, counter to this, Copjec wants the strength of the reading itself to carry the day: in other words, the justification is to be found simply in the fact that the concepts cohere, that a strong reading can be produced. Yet I am a bit hesitant on the judgment of the quality of the result, for sometimes it seems like the reading is a bit too heavy, imposing something onto the "text" that isn't necessarily there (to be fair, I haven't seen all of the films to which she references). There's also the problem of the lack of "primary" material referenced here: she relies heavily on Corbin for her readings of Sufism, which lends for a particularly "French" read, without much by way of tracing back to original sources, and the homology that she finds with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is perhaps less surprising when one considers that Corbin is swimming in the same philosophical sea as Lacan, and thus the concepts they develop are necessarily imbricated. We see this problem again in her constant use of the term "Islamic philosophy," when what she really means is something much narrower, for she is really only interested in Shi'ism/Sufism/Illuminationism, or even narrower, a French reading of Sufism/Illuminationism. Raised with a Sunni background, the notion of "cloud" is completely inscrutable to me on the basis of this context. Nevertheless, if we limit ourselves to Copjec's reading of Corbin, and in connection to Khomeini's reading of Sufism and the legacy of the Iranian Revolution, we get a much more fruitful discussion. The "imaginal world" to which she refers leads to a robust reading of apophaticism, as a "third domain" from which God can only be actualized through our singularity. There's something vaguely "Platonic" about this reading that bodes well for me. The discussion of the rejection of "corruption" on this view, in connection with the rejection of Christ as the embodiment of God and in connection to the ideology of the veil as one that presupposes corruption through contact, is particularly strong. This is tied to the notion that contact is not a surface phenomenon, and therefore not susceptible to "inmixing," but rather that what is foreign to us is simultaneously what is most "inward," God as extimacy. There's a long aside on the "ontology of shame" via Sartre, Levinas, and Lacan (perhaps the text's "weakest" point is that it is a somewhat short collection of essays rather than a true monograph, which renders it rather repetitive), that finally cashes out in a suggestion that the implications of the discussion will necessarily implicate both sides of the veil debate, but that aren't actually spelled out. Essentially, the idea is that, in shame, one can disappear by appearing, or disappear behind their appearance, which undercuts the standard frame of the debate in which both sides assume that to veil is to cover, while to unveil is to reveal. But what this new "ontology of shame" actually does to the debate remains unclear, beyond unsettling its coordinates. Copjec mobilizes this notion in order to challenge Dabashi's charge of impropriety against Kiarostami, revealing a sort of false male feminism behind the force of Dabashi's condemnation, which is fair enough, but I think this is simultaneously letting Kiarostami off the hook too easily. This is where his status as a multi-rapist is sort of brought to the fore as completely unacknowledged within Copjec's work: I don't think we can take such an uncritical approach towards reading Kiarostami's treatment of gender in his filmography in light of such accusations. Copjec's reading of rootedness and uprootedness in culture, when not bogged down by the constraints of contemporary discourse, is enlightening enough, for it tends to cut transversally across them, and I appreciate the discussion around the close-up and the image in relation to Kiarostami's cinematic technique. The final chapter, where Copjec turns to sexual difference, in a sort of intentional nod to the structure of Read My Desire, which ends with the infamous "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason," starts off with an incredibly strong defense of the category, most exemplified in the works of Kristeva, Irigaray, et al., against its denunciations and subsequent turn to "gender theory," perhaps best exemplified by Butler, through recourse to monotheism: namely, that a universal in no way (over)determines its singular instantiations (and this as the core tenet of apophatic mysticism). I think this is brilliant and exactly correct, and Copjec even manages to convincingly defend Freud's claim that there is only one libido and that it is male on this account, which doubles as the universality of the castration complex / phallic function thesis.

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bit disappointed by the readings of Kiarostami. They were short and felt like they were more in service of illustrating the arguments being made around Corbin and Lacan than ones immanent to Kiarostami's films themselves. I suppose Copjec needed something concrete to ground the theory in, but anything would of served just as well (like the use of may '68 in one essay does). But that complaint aside the rest of this book was compelling.

Especially enjoyable were the linking of gnostic Sufi/medieval apophatic concepts of god/the One with psychoanalytic concepts of sex / jouissance / drive, employing these apophatic concepts of monotheism as a defense against postmodern nominalism (looking at the relation between the One and the many), and an extensive look at the affects of anxiety and shame. This is more a collection of essays than a focused monograph, so it reads like a meandering exploration of the various homologies between Corbin's Sufism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Moments of brilliance but without a center.

Reminds me of The Signifier Pointing at the Moon: Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism by Raul Moncayo in its rubbing up of Lacanian psychoanalysis with an esoteric spiritual tradition to produce insights.