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introduction

peter hallward

Born in Algiers in 1949, Christian Jambetspecialises in Islamic philosophy. He emerged inthe late 1970s as the most brilliant of HenryCorbins students, and has now taught philoso-phy for many years at the lyce Jules Ferry, atthe Institut dtudes Iraniennes (University ofParis III) and the cole Pratique des Hautestudes. Influenced by Mao and Lacan, the trans-lator of Rumi and Oscar Wilde, an attentivereader of Foucault, Deleuze, and Badiou,Jambets range of interests makes mainstreamwork in comparative philosophy look positivelyparochial. Whatever its immediate occasion, agenuine philosophical act takes place when itssubjects overturn their conception of the world,when, breaking with prejudice or habit, theydevise ways of thinking along lines indifferent toall received representations of the world.Philosophy is not a matter of knowledge or opin-ion, it is not a matter of internalising correctideas: it is a reflexive work of transformationapplied upon oneself, an entering into discordwith oneself so as to accord with a way of think-ing that holds, in principle, for anyone at all.1

As a student, inspired by the events surround-ing the Chinese Cultural Revolution and May1968, Jambet was a member of the Maoist groupsUnion des Jeunesses Communistes (Marxistes-Lninistes) and Gauche Proltarienne. When hevisited China in 1969 he was witness to theconfiguration of a world in which it seemed thatthe masses themselves were the active subject ofpolitics.2 Disappointment with the directionsubsequently taken by Maoism in both Chinaand France led to Jambets eventual break withorganised revolutionary politics and provided the

immediate occasion for his early collaborativewritings with Guy Lardreau. The uncompromis-ing or angelic theory of subjectivity developedin their books LAnge (1976) and Le Monde(1978) is designed to preserve a purely revolu-tionary commitment, one that is both irreducibleto dialectical forms of antagonism and independ-ent of any doctrinal, institutional or historicalcontamination.3 Revolution, in short, becomes anessentially spiritual affair, and its most immedi-ate enemies are those (Pol Pot, Khomeini, etc.)who seek to harness its force to merely social orhistorical ends. Jambets preferred interlocutors,by contrast, remain those who both in their livesand their philosophies sought to maximise thegap between spirit and historical world, toattribute to spirit an absolute freedom and

christian jambet

translated by andrew asibong

SOME COMMENTS ONTHE QUESTION OFTHE ONE

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/03/020033-09 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/0969725032000162558

A N G E L A K Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 8 number 2 august 2003

creativity. Jambets decisive encounter withCorbin during these same years is what deter-mined him to look for such points of referenceprimarily in esoteric Shiite philosophy, in whichthe struggle between world and spirit (between aliteral or law-bound conception of the Quranand one that urges the invention of new forms ofinterpretation) is particularly acute. The ques-tion posed today by the likes of Khomeini andbin Laden is the question that has divided Islamfrom the beginning: is Gods will essentiallymediated by rules and institutions and thuscaught up in the enforcement of law, or is Godcreative freedom, pure spontaneity, such thattrue believers express this divine freedom intheir own spiritual practice, as so manyinstances of boundless spontaneity?4

Any conception of spirit as absolute creativitymust have at least three fundamental attributes,which return again and again as the dominantthemes of Jambets work. In the first place (forreasons similar to those embraced by Spinoza),an unlimited creative force can only be singular,unique. The most basic tenet of Islamic faithconcerns the identity of God and the One,and much of Jambets work concerns the onto-logical implications of the effort to think beingin terms of a One that is both beyond being andthe real of being.5 In the second place (forreasons similar to those embraced by Hegel),pure creativity can only be thought as subjectrather than as object, and the only subjectadequate to the One is God himself. God cannotbe conceived or represented as any sort of objec-tive thing, he can be conceived only as heconceives himself, as absolute subject. In thethird place, then (for reasons similar to thoseembraced by Bergson), we ourselves can knowGod only in so far as God thinks through us, inso far as we are directly inspired by God. Theonly true principle immune to radical doubt hereis not I think but I am thought (by God) cogitor rather than cogito.6 Understood in thissense, truth is indifferently a matter of inventionor of revelation, and the whole effort of spiritualIslam is to transcend the apparent differencebetween the two, so as to realise the propheticessence of man. We speak truly in so far as weare spoken by God and thereby experience, in

the endless analysis of this speech, both the infi-nite gap between absolute Speech and its humanvoice, and the essential univocity that expressesitself in the thinking of this very gap this gapwhich is nothing other, for the Jambet who readsMulla Sadra in the light of Lacan, than the realof thought.7

Roughly speaking, Jambets three majorworks to date correspond to three of the mostconsequential inflections of this otherwisebroadly consistent set of principles. In LaLogique des Orientaux (1983), a book dominatedby the figure of the Iranian mystic Suhrawardi(115491), absolute creativity is expressed interms of light and imagination, and is limited bywhatever offers an opaque resistance to light(corporal solidity, stasis, prejudice, etc.). TheOne as such, the source of light, is hidden andinaccessible. What emanate from the One,according to a broadly neo-Platonic logic, are somany reflections or images of light whichcohere on an imaginal plane of pure inspira-tion.8 Human beings begin their lives in relativeshadow, in an occidental exile from the lightthat is their source: redemption involves pullingaway from the shadows so as to become a translu-cent prism for the radiance of the creator. Ouraccess to the light is always refracted throughparticular souls, particular acts of imagination orspirit. Jambet distinguishes, in this way, suchIshraqi illumination from the simple extinctionof the individual in mystical union with the One:the imaginal plane corresponds precisely with anintermediary or angelic revelation, where theangel appears between the divine and the humanintelligence. The Angel is what is accorded to usfrom the absolutely hidden Other or One.9

Suhrawardis angel is a figure with two wings,one in shadow and one in light, and his imaginalworld is populated by individuals conceived asimmaterial but distinct imaginings of God.

In LActe dtre (2002), Jambet turns hisattention to Irans most celebrated philosopher,Mulla Sadra (15711641). Inspired bySuhrawardi, among others, Mulla Sadras greateffort is to think all being in terms of the self-sufficient, self-necessitating or divinely creativeact that sustains it, i.e. to think (again in termsthat resonate with Spinoza, to say nothing of

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Deleuze) the whole of being as unceasing andinfinitely mobile creation, framed by the funda-mental equation of the real, of being, and of theOne.10

If Mulla Sadra seeks to bend Suhrawardisangelic orientation towards a fully immanentconception of being, Nasir ad-Din Tusi(120174) and the other Ismaili thinkers studiedin Jambets La Grande Rsurrection dAlamt(1990), by contrast, reinforce the dualismimplicit in the transcendence of a one beyondbeing. What Jambet analyses here as the para-doxical One is a superinfinite creativityunmediated, so to speak, by any creaturelypersistence (any quidditas) at all.11 Reality eruptsinto being from a real that itself remains unin-telligible, unsayable. This apophatic conceptionof God opens, as the space of true spiritual expe-rience, a searing gap between reality and the real,between historical time and messianic revelation,between the world of experience and a pureimperative that commands with a force indif-ferent to the distinction of freedom and neces-sity.12

notes

1 Jambet, Interview avec Christian Jambet(1997).

2 Jambet, Un souverainiste nomm Mao (2000).Today, remembering his Maoist affiliation, Jambetaccepts its lack of immediate historical conse-quence in France: less than a sequence endowedwith an historical posterity, he thinks of it interms of its trans-historical persistence, alongthe lines illustrated in a different context by Joanof Arc (whose impact endures despite or perhapsbecause of her lack of direct historical influence)(ibid.).

3 The transcendental question at issue in thesebooks, and sustained in a different form in theremainder of Jambets work, concerns the possi-ble autonomy of revolt (Jambet, Allez! in LAnge233). For more on LAnge, see the introduction toGuy Lardreaus essay in the present issue.

4 Jambet, Entre Islam spirituel et Islam lgalitaire,le conflit est dclar, Le Monde 25 June 2001; cf.Jambet, LActe dtre 2124. Corbins influence isespecially important here: see, for example,

Henry Corbin, Le Paradoxe du monothisme (Paris:LHerne, 1981) and Corbin, Philosophie iranienne etphilosophie compare (Paris: Buchet-Chastel,1985).

5 Jambet, LActe dtre 9. As the fundamentalQuranic verse (112: 1) declares: Say: He, Allah, isOne.

6 Jambet, La Logique des Orientaux 118, 22425.

7 Jambet, LActe dtre 1011; cf. 6364.

8 Jambet, La Logique des Orientaux 3751. As onecommentator explains it, the imaginal world [is] that world whose dimensions and extension fallonly within the purview of imaginative perception.It is the world of autonomous imaginal Forms, thatis to say, Forms un-mixed with a corruptiblesubstrate, but suspended, like images suspendedin a mirror (Qotboddin Shirazi, quoted in HenryCorbin, Corps spirituel et terre cleste (Paris:Buchet-Chastel, 1979) 154). Bachelard concludes,in a somewhat similar sense, that the imaginationis not, as its etymology suggests, the faculty offorming images of reality, it is the faculty of form-ing images that exceed reality, that sing reality. Itis a superhuman faculty (Gaston Bachelard, LEauet les rves (Paris: Corti, 1942) 23).

9 Jambet, Prsentation in Henri Corbin, Cahiersde lHerne (1981) 14.

10 Jambet, LActe dtre 14.

11 Jambet, La Grande Rsurrection dAlamt13976. The historical occasion for the elabora-tion of this doctrine is the messianic declaration,sustained by the Ismaili Shiites of northern Iranfrom 1164 to 1210, of an end to the reign of lawand the beginning of a life entirely orientedtowards the immortal and divine.

12 Jambet, La Grande Rsurrection dAlamt17585.

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some comments on thequestion of the one

christian jambet

If there is one conviction shared by the major-ity of contemporary philosophers, this is it:the one is not [lun nest pas]. It seems that inorder go along with the demands of the modernscientific age we must renounce any philosophyfounded on some ultimate principle of existence,such as it was conceived in the theology of thevarious religions of the Book, i.e. through theequation of being, the one, and the real. Onceaffirmed, this conviction converts smoothly intovarious systems of thought, until either everyattestation of the real is renounced, or at leastuntil the real is thoroughly separated from itstheological identity with the one. Lacan, Deleuzeand Derrida are clearly recognisable here, in alltheir conflicting orientations.

Whatever the merits of this decision may be,its unavoidable consequence is to conceal what isat stake, metaphysically, when the mindacknowledges that the highest power resides inthe one. This is borne out, I think, by the way inwhich most contemporary thinkers have workedagainst Hegel, in the margins of Hegel, or withthe express aim of breaking with Hegelian logic.This anti-dialectical thematic has been pursuedin various ways. Foucault, for instance, deploysit in order to expose the way war the constant,silent war that animates the field of social forces has been hidden or overshadowed by the greatconcepts and figures of sovereignty. By reachingthe end of the royal road that led thought to thestate, to the totalising one, Hegel is supposed tohave concocted the most dangerously attractiveof philosophical responses to this war. Thisresponse consisted in positing that negation isthe truth of the one, in such a way that negationitself the absolute transfigured into the nega-tive might be overcome in an ultimate affir-mation of its own resolution. Whether the one isposited in the element of identity or swallowedup in the Bacchic delirium of its negativedevelopment, whether it be conceived as

substance or subject, whether it be the cause ofcauses or the becoming of itself all this wouldappear to change nothing, in the final analysis,since the one remains the major figure ofmastery, which tames every danger and squashesany new irruption of discourse.

The Deleuzean critique of dialectics, as is wellknown, follows a quite different path. It affirmsthe rights not of war but of difference, the kindthat need never succumb to the simplifyingabstractions of duality or contradiction. TheDeleuzian critique of contradiction is homolo-gous to the Bergsonian critique of language. Likethe latter, it maintains that real singularityremains outside the grasp of the kinds of cate-gories and judgments that, from Aristotle toHegel, map out a syllogistic logic.

It is Lacan who must be credited with themost radical dismissal of any theology of the one.Lacan distinguishes the imaginary thesis theone is [lun est] (which he identifies with thethesis everything is everything, everything iswhole, or all) from the thesis appropriate to thereal of the subject: there is one [il y a de lun](itself a consequence of the thesis nothing iseverything, nothing is whole or all).1 Perhapswe need to take a closer look, and ask ourselveswhy Lacan tried to introduce such a break intothe domain of ontology.

The source for a first reason is easily found, inthe earlier break brought about by Galileo. Iagree here with Jean-Claude Milner, whodescribes this point in terms of Koyrs theo-rem. The break on which modern science isfounded consists, according to Alexandre Koyr,in the mathematisation of an infinite universe. Itseems to follow that the very concept of theuniverse, understood in the sense of the univer-sum of the existent, falls apart: the infinity of theuniverse implies the dissolution of that pair ofconcepts on which ancient cosmology wasfounded: the universe, and that which liesoutside the universe. In a sort of post-GalileanEpicureanism, Lacanian logic disqualifies boththe one situated outside the universe and the oneunderstood in the sense of the universe itself.It is clear that such a deduction presumes apreliminary identification of the one with themost perfect being (according to the theological

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argument) and of the one with the all orwhole (according to the definitions of rationalcosmology).

For my part I have tried to show that thisLacanian gesture broke with all the metaphysi-cal consequences of what I call philosophysAvicennian moment. Without going into adetailed analysis of the great Iranian philoso-phers metaphysics, physics and eschatology, letme simply draw attention to the fact that themain Avicennian decision, which consists indistinguishing the meaning of the thing fromthe meaning of existence, is connected toanother, equally important decision. This is theclaim that necessity is the very reality of the actof existing: it is the real as such. The existent,located in the universe, is necessitated by theother [ncessit par autrui], and consequentlyrequires an ultimate cause in something thatnecessarily exists through itself: the realone [lun rel]. This strikes Avicenna asincontestable not only because he is faithful tothe Aristotelian cosmological schema but alsobecause, in its logical and ontological basis,the very meaning of the act of existing isnecessity.

It is perfectly obvious that Lacanian logictargets precisely this assumption of necessity, inso far as it undoes the structure of the threemodalities: the necessary, the possible and theimpossible. It replaces them with a structure inwhich the circle of the real is no longer identifiedwith the modality of necessity, in which necessityslides, so to speak, over to the place where thesymbolic is tied to the imaginary. The knot thatties the symbolic to the real, on the other hand,is marked by what ancient metaphysics under-stood in terms of the idea of contingency. As forthe impossible, it no longer refers to the non-existent, but to the domain where, in so far as weare able, we must strive to conceive the object ofdesire, the cause of the subject where, in short,we conceive the very link between the modalitiesof being. What any such logic or arrangementwill lack, henceforth, is a place of total enjoy-ment, a place that Avicenna situated in God, i.e.in the one, defined as the subject which is itselffor itself, which enjoys itself eternally, infi-nitely.

We should perhaps note in passing that thisLacanian reformation of ontology implicates, inthe general ruin of metaphysics, not justAvicenna but Spinoza as well. And also that thediscovery of the unconscious implies nothing lessthan the repudiation of any conception of thereal that might situate it in the identification(whether immediate or eventual) of the one andof being. The proposition there is one [il y a delun] wants one [de lun] to count only in thenon-total constitution of the subject, i.e. in theprimary affirmation of the subject, an affirma-tion without foundation in being, since its being,the being of a pure subject, can only beexpressed negatively. More than Spinoza it isFichte, the thinker of infinite freedom, whowould be relevant here, if, in its turn, his Ichwas not caught up in an historical sequence of itsown, one that Freudianism understands in quitea different way than did Fichte and then Hegel.

Such are the conditions, it seems to me, underwhich I have had to pursue my own project. Ihave mentioned them very allusively here, andhave skipped over a number of points of refer-ence and mediation. I accord much importance,for example, to the early Wittgenstein, and alsoto Strawson. Since it would be presumptuous totry to say something about them in so short aspace, I would rather move on to a task that isno less delicate but rather easier to justify: theidentification of some of the questions that Ihave been trying to address in the work I havebeen carrying out over the past few years.

The first of these questions is not very farremoved from what drove Foucault in hisresearch on war. It can be formulated asfollows: how are we to recognise the demands ofthe two, of non-dialectisable duality [dualitude]?I have long shared the fairly common convictionthat the general movement of German idealismsince Kant, modern philosophy in other words,led to the erasure, the foreclosure, of such a dual-ity. My early training, under the powerful theo-retical influence of Althusser, encouraged me inthis conviction, as did, a little later, the imperi-ous torsion that revolutionary political thought(incarnated, for me, by Mao Tse-Tung) operatedupon dialectics itself. One divides into two, weused to say at the time. It is remarkable that

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when Foucault, in his thoroughgoing critique ofdialectical thought, seeks to derive dialecticsfrom conceptions of state sovereignty, he criti-cises not only (and without naming him) CarlSchmitt as a reader of Hobbes, but also Hegel,Marx and Mao (without naming him either).Foucault entertained few illusionsabout the possibility one that I used to findfruitful of keeping alive a philosophy of deci-sion and sovereignty while at the same timetransforming, in a revolutionary way, the classi-cal conception of dialectics (dialectics as it beganwith Aristotle and ended with Hegel). To main-tain that one divides into two means that thetwo is primary and that the one is in no sensea principle but according to Foucault, to main-tain this is a task that is destined to fail. Theconclusion I draw from this differs from that ofFoucault. I take seriously that conjunction of theone, the real and the absolute which has beenassumed by the various theologies, in order toask myself how, on the basis of the one, identityand war, unity and radical duality, might bearranged in a constantly reversible pattern onethat allows us to think, alternately, both thenature of order and the process of tearing awayfrom the world as it is.

I am led in this direction by the empiricalwork that I embarked upon, following myteacher Henry Corbin, in the field of Islamicsystems of thought. Why this interest in Islam?Why am I so interested in Islam, why has itbecome for me the object of a constant philo-sophical preoccupation, given that I am fullyaware that the theological era has come to end inthe West, given that I have myself been marked,from the beginning of my philosophical educa-tion, by those critical proposals that I havealready mentioned (and which have done every-thing possible to lead us away from an exhaustedmetaphysics)? It is in no sense, I hasten to say, areturn to religion. Less still is it a sociologi-cal interest in a culture that might seem out ofsynch with the times, a culture that might seemworthy of a little general discussion before itmoves on to join the various other forms of spir-ituality that lie in the pantheon of dead ideas.

First and foremost, I set out from thisobservation: that war, the endlessly renewed

confrontation between the forces of submissionand those of liberation, found its chosen terrainin the sphere of the religions of the Book, nodoubt because, in them, the one foments submis-sion as much as it does liberation. Contrary towhat is presumed by the positivist schemaadopted more or less unthinkingly by all modernthinkers, the God whose being is one cannotbe considered as purely imaginary. Not only isGod the existence which (because it exists neces-sarily) was necessary to the foundation of ancientphilosophy, God presents himself, in transhistor-ical fashion, as that point of the real withoutwhich the histories of the monotheistic West andEast remain unintelligible. Not an illusion ofconsciousness, but the real itself, a real aboutwhich, no doubt, our various forms of knowledgehave nothing to say, but whose obvious impactand reality govern a considerable portion of theknowledge essential to our present history. Inthis sense Hegel was not behind us but ahead ofus when he perceived God as being the positionof the subject. God is in the position of thesubject not because he is the totalising one, theultimate pure cause of cosmology, but that he isthe transhistorical name of absolute subjectivity.God is thus not the opposite of freedom but thename under which the unfounded act of freedomcan be thought, at least when this latter is notthought as the simple empirical independence ofan isolated entity or existent.

Since Erasmus, even since Saint Augustine,we can follow the way in which, in the West, thenotion of free will has developed as a conceptessential to our modern institutions. It is clearthat the dissolution of the space of theology andthe disqualification of the one have enabled themore recent elaboration of several alternativeconceptions of singularity, of the one detachedfrom any apprehension of some kind of whole.Even more than that of Locke or of the otherthinkers of natural law, it is the work of Hume,in all its profundity, that is indicative of this irre-sistible victory. But is it not obvious thisvictory has only been won because we haveallowed ourselves to forget the prodigiousachievements of two older systems of thought:neo-Platonism and the dualist theologies? Theymay seem outmoded to us but the present

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moment reminds us of their importance, andIslamic thinkers have developed their implica-tions brilliantly. In their improbable but realcombination, the Platonic idea of the one whichis not and the Manichaean notion of the founda-tional two, which enter into both conflict andharmony in the metaphysics of Shiite Islam,have allowed me (within the framework of thosemessianic movements that punctuate, in cyclicalfashion, the time of oriental Islam) to bring tolight forms of freedom that are also forms ofservitude. This is borne out by the history ofIsmaili Shiite Islam in particular, and also bythe remarkable synthesis of Islamic metaphysics,in terms that remain broadly faithful to Plotinus,carried out by Mulla Sadra Shirazi and otherthinkers of the School of Ispahan in the seven-teenth century (CE).

If freedom has forms, if it is indeed whatHegel said it was, i.e. the infinite real undermultiple forms, this in no way means that thefreedom of the Orientals is superior to ourown, or that it has a prestige that might justifyanything and everything. But it does mean thatphilosophy must take up once more (and nodoubt in ways that differ from those pursued byGerman idealism) the idea defended by Hegel orSchelling that the question of the one, and notthe question of being, is the question of ques-tions. Or, to put it more precisely: how does thereal that is one (without prejudging its truthwith respect to our modern sciences) producenot only truths, a schema of truth, butschemas and forms of existence? How is the oneimmanent to the constitution of transhistoricalsubjects?

It seems to me that it is possible, in this way,to reactivate a set of questions that have other-wise remained foreign to the recent era of philos-ophy. Foucault alone tried to speak of spiritualpolitics, when it seemed important to him tounderstand what was happening in Iran.Everyone knows the uncomprehending furorethis provoked.2 I had quite a few conversationswith him at the time. I had already embarkedupon my work in the field of oriental studies,work that has continued ever since. It seemedpointless to me (and pointless to Foucault aswell, I believe) to pretend that ontologies of the

one could be treated as superficial forms of ideol-ogy, as foreign and lifeless. To mention just onemajor theoretical issue: it is obvious that theconcept of Islamic revolution would not bewhat it is, with all its considerable and now famil-iar consequences, if it did not translate (anddistort, but in ways that remain analysable) theconcept of substantial movement, of revolu-tion in the act of existing, as it was rigorouslythought out by the great Iranian metaphysicianMulla Sadra (who died in 1644). Must we not payattention, then, to the emergence of this concep-tion of a substance at once indivisible and plas-tic, a substance-subject that owes nothing to itsformal definition but everything to the infiniteand variable emanation, from world to world, ofthe unique act of existing in short, the emer-gence of the one adequate to being [lun adquat ltre]?

How can we understand the question ofauthority, of power, of the mastery of truespeech in Islam, without studying henologies(systems of the one) in which it appears that theone is not? We need to realise that our defini-tions of the one as totality, as total and necessaryexistent entity, are inadequate. We need to goback and think anew the hypotheses of theParmenides not in order to lend metaphysicsa sterile sophistication but so as to inform living,concrete ways of thinking the institution oforder, the subject, and sovereignty, that are alsoways of thinking revolt and insubordination.

What I am now trying to study are theways in which politics, negative theology,and morality, but also infinite freedom andorder, are intertwined, within aphilosophical universe closelyconnected to our own auniverse which in my view isessential to our understandingof ourselves.

notes

1 The French formulation of the two theses toutest tout and rien nest tout allows in the secondcase for a sort of double or unequivocal negationthat is difficult to convey in English. [Translatorsnote.]

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2 Jambet is referring to articles that Foucaultwrote about the Iranian Revolution in 1979, whichhave often been criticised as idealistic or naive.See, in particular, Foucault, Useless to Revolt?and Open Letter to Mehdi Bazargan in Power:Essential Works of Foucault III, ed. James Faubion(New York: New Press, 2000), and Iran: TheSpirit of a World without Spirit in Politics,Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings,ed. Lawrence Kritzman (London: Routledge,1990). [Translators note.]

works by christian jambet

With Guy Lardreau. LAnge: pour une cyngtiquedu semblant. Paris: Grasset, 1976.

Apologie de Platon: essais de mtaphysique. Paris:Grasset, 1976.

With Guy Lardreau. Le Monde: rponse la ques-tion, quest-ce que les droits de lhomme? Paris:Grasset, 1978.

(Ed.). Henry Corbin: cahiers de lHerne. Paris: Herne,1981.

La Grande Rsurrection dAlamt daprsquelques textes ismaliens. Apocalypse et sens delhistoire. Ed. Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron et al. Paris:Berg, 1983. 11331.

La Logique des Orientaux: Henry Corbin et la sciencedes formes. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

(Ed.). Le Crpuscule des idoles. By FriedrichNietzsche. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1985.

Introduction. Le Livre de la Sagesse Orientale. ByShihab Al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi. Ed. and trans.Henri Corbin. 1986. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.

Preface. Heidegger et le Nazisme. By VictorFaras. Paris: Verdier, 1987.

Alain Badiou, Ltre et lvnement [Reviewessay]. Annuaire philosophique 1. Paris: Seuil, 1989.14183.

Constitution du sujet et pratique spirituelle.Michel Foucault philosophe. Rencontre internationale.Paris 9, 10, 11 janvier 1988. Ed. GeorgesCanguilhem. Paris: Seuil, 1989. 27187.

LExprience de la terreur. Prsences deSchopenhauer. Ed. Roger-Pol Droit. Paris: Grasset,1989. 12434.

Sohraward. Encyclopaedia Universalis. 3rd ed.Paris, 1989.

Y a-t-il une philosophie franaise? Annales dePhilosophie de lUniversit Saint-Joseph (Beirut)(1989): 8597.

La Grande Rsurrection dAlamt: les formes de lalibert dans le shisme ismalien. Lagrasse: Verdier,1990.

LAutre est-il pensable? Revue des Deux Mondes(June 1991): 14652.

Le Concept et la langue. Revue des Deux Mondes(Nov. 1991): 7986.

Lire le Coran au prsent? Revue des DeuxMondes (May 1991): 17178.

Pour Louis Althusser. Revue des Deux Mondes(Jan. 1991): 10310.

Les Conditions religieuses et philosophiques dela rvolution islamique. Rue Descartes (May1992): 12139.

La Pense fondatrice de lIslam. Histoire de laphilosophie, tome I: Les Penses fondatrices. Ed.Jacqueline Russ. Paris: Armand Colin, 1993.16385.

(Ed. and trans.). La Ballade de la Gele de Reading,suivie de Pour un portrait de Sbastien Melmoth. ByOscar Wilde. Lagrasse: Verdier, 1994.

(Ed. and trans.). La Convocation dAlamt: somme dephilosophie ismalienne. Rawdat al-taslim (Le Jardinde la vraie foi). By Nasir ad-Din Tusi. Lagrasse:Verdier, 1996.

Interview avec Christian Jambet. Conducted byStphane Gatti and Michel Sonnet. Le Banquet dulivre Lagrasse 30 (12 Aug. 1997). Available onlineat .

(Ed. and trans.). Soleil du Rel. Pomes damourmystique. By Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Paris: ImprimerieNationale, 1999.

Postface. Les Sept Portraits. By Nezami. Trans.Isabelle de Gastines. Paris: Fayard, 2000.

(Ed. and trans.). Se rendre immortel: suivi du Traitde la rsurrection. By Mulla Sadra Shirazi. Saint-Clment-de-Rivire: Fata Morgana, 2000.

Un souverainiste nomm Mao: entretien avecChristian Jambet. Immdiatement 14 (June 2000).Available online at .

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LIslam et ses philosophies (entretien). Esprit89 (Aug.Sept. 2001): 186201.

Preface. Kant entre dsespoir et esprance. Bylodie Mailliet. Paris: Harmattan, 2001.

LActe dtre: la philosophie de la rvlation chezMoll Sadr. Paris: Fayard, 2002.

LIslam se rduit-il lislamisme? Revue des DeuxMondes 4 (2003): 97103.

jambet

Christian JambetLyce Jules Ferry77 Boulevard de Clichy75009 ParisFrance

Andrew AsibongFrench DepartmentKings College LondonThe StrandLondon WC2R 2LSUKE-mail: andrew.asibong@kcl.ac.uk