On the Affective Moods of Being: A Philosophical Exploration of Affects in Ibrahim Niasse’s Thought

The Center for Advanced Studies “Philosophizing in a Globalized World” invites you to a book launch and discussion with Philipp Valentini on his new monograph On the Affective Moods of Being: A Philosophical Exploration of Affects in Ibrahim Niasse’s Thought (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026).

The book stages a sustained philosophical encounter between the Senegalese Sufi scholar and Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (1900–1975) and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Both thinkers, Valentini argues, approach the question of Being not in the abstract but through the affective moods in which human existence discloses itself to itself. From this shared point of departure their paths diverge sharply: where Heidegger thinks Being from the horizon of death as the definitive limit of finite existence, Niasse thinks it from the horizon of apocatastasis — the return of all that is to its divine origin.

The book proceeds through a sequence of prophetic figures drawn from Niasse’s Qur’anic commentary, each condensing a particular affective tonality: Adam and the mood of confusion; Ibrahim and a plant-like attunement of being; Solomon and the experience of being-with-another-than-self; Moses and the labour of enduring the long passing of time; Jesus and the tone of vengeance; and finally the Prophet Muhammad and the manifold paternal moods that form the keystone of Niasse’s soteriology.

Each tonality is placed in conversation with Heidegger’s analysis of the same affect in its bearing on Being and Beying, until the book culminates in a comparison of the orienting decisions that shape each thinker’s project: Heidegger’s call to render the earth habitable, and Niasse’s circling around the Muhammadan election.

Departing from earlier scholarship that has either historicised Heidegger’s relation to the Islamicate worlds or hybridized the two traditions into a single discourse, Valentini insists on holding their analogies and their differences in productive tension. The result is a work of intercultural philosophy that takes modern Sufi thought seriously as a philosophical interlocutor on its own terms, while pressing the reader to consider a more searching question: what guiding idea should preside over our own affective experience of Being?

Impressions

Information about the Author

Philipp Valentini is an independent researcher based in Strasbourg, working at the intersection of modern Sufi thought, phenomenology, and political theology. He completed his doctorate at the University of Fribourg in 2020 with a dissertation on French Sufi theopolitics and the twentieth-century reception of Ibn ʿArabī among Francophone Perennialist intellectuals (Guénon, Valsan, Corbin). He is co-editor, with Mahdi Tourage, of Esoteric Lacan (Trivent, 2019), and co-author of Protecting Nature, Saving Creation: Ecological Conflicts, Religious Passions, and Political Quandaries. His current research focuses on modern Sufi theopolitical imaginaries from Ismail Haqqi to Ibrahim Niasse and their relevance for contemporary debates on Being, consciousness, and embodied knowledge.