The Imaginal World and Modern Oblivion: Kiarostami’s Zig-Zag

Abstract

This paper attempts to give an account of the imaginal world, a central concept of Avicenna and his philosophical followers in Iran in order to demonstrate the ways in which the imaginal continues to operate in the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami. As its name implies, the imaginal concerns the image, but more precisely the image insofar as it is conceived as participating in a political economy of the divine, or within an apparatus that relates the temporal, political order of men to the withdrawn instance of the divine. If the works of the falasifa were anathema to Islamic theology, this had everything to do with the retreat of the divine, which operated in the political order only insofar as it was absent. Kiarostami’s film, Close Up, demonstrates the concept of the imaginary a contrario.