Journal of Shi'a Islamic Studies

For Maurice Blanchot, the ethical relationship is to be sought not in the developmental and self-reflexive movement of acquiring identity dialectically in the relationship between one entity and the other, but rather in the productive process of attaching and distancing. This makes a neutral relationship in which the human remains in between, in the back and forward movement exploring abyssally his/her own existential potentiality without being reduced into the social or the transcendental purpose. This argument corresponds with Ibn ͑Arabi’s ethics concerning the notion of the perfect man. The perfect man does not carry out perfection by acquiring all of God’s attributes but he/she becomes a neutral space, barzakh, within which God makes a relationship among His attributes through which entities are created. In this sense, the perfect man becomes the very relationship, the medium through which God presents Himself. Beyond the moral and mystical relationship in which the human is striving after God, the perfect man is simultaneously within and outside God.