The End of a Utopia

Conflict is the father of all things, the king of all things.

Heraclitus

Now that Hezbollah has set its mind on avenging the assassination of Ali Khamenei, many Lebanese appear to be discovering both the party’s dependence on Tehran and its frankly suicidal disposition. To have believed that a possible “Lebanonization” — some measure of moderation — was genuinely within reach was to have ignored the very nature of the party: a paramilitary organization emanating from, and directly commanded by, the Revolutionary Guards and the wali al-faqih; and, above all, a Gnostic millenarian sect animated by a mystique of violence. An esoteric militia, in other words — akin to the Ismaili Assassins of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries — whose entire universe is collapsing at this very moment… and which will no doubt persist in denying its own demise until its very last breath.

Destruction is precisely where everything begins and where everything ends. Such is the engine of history, Hezbollah-style. From the twin bombings that inaugurated its existence in 1983, through the assassinations of public figures and the militia expeditions of the 2000s and 2010s across Lebanon and Syria, violence — intrinsic to its millenarian revolutionary identity and its hegemonic project — has presided over the entirety of its trajectory. But since the cursed operation of October 7, 2023, history has taken on the quality of a tragic acceleration for the Hezb, with a boomerang effect to boot. Its war in support of Gaza cost it its entire military directorate, as well as the assassination of its totemic figure, Hassan Nasrallah — leaving it more vulnerable than it had ever been, to the point of finding itself confronted by a proactive local and international will to disarm it. Yet it continued to posture, muffling the signs of its — impossible! — decline.

And then, on the twenty-eighth of February 2026, Iran itself — the vibrant heart of the party’s spiritual and political world — finds itself in the crosshairs. The unthinkable happens, and immediately: Khamenei is killed — Khamenei, the wali al-faqih in person, the Supreme Guide, the substitute imam, the divinely authorized presence in the political order of the world, the one whom Hezbollah had erected as the transcendent guarantor of its own existence… And with him, the senior cadres of the Pasdaran, the theological and praetorian corps of the empire, the armed arm and doctrinal brain of the Khomeinist revolution for forty years.

An unprecedented traumatic shock.

And what does Hezbollah do in response to catastrophe? It “chooses” — obedience compels it — precisely to lunge forward, and opens hostilities, as in 2024, as though every disaster called for a higher stake, and as though annihilation were never anything but a new trial on the road to Malakūt, that intermediate world…

Hezbollah thus exposes, by ideology and by hierarchical discipline, all of its territories to massive Israeli reprisals. Tel Aviv orders the Lebanese to evacuate South Lebanon entirely as far as the Litani, along with certain villages in the western Beqaa and, above all, the southern suburbs of Beirut — the symbolic bastion of militant Shiism in the Arab hemisphere. The machinery of destruction is once again set in motion. A second invasion of the South has begun. The revolutionary heartland is being progressively reduced to rubble.

There is in this something that exceeds mere strategic or military defeat — something that resembles the most irrefutable refutation a system of belief can endure in human time. And yet this system holds, sufficiently to reproduce sacrifice once more and to produce martyrs at the very moment when the cause for which they die has been objectively reduced to dust.

The reason for this phenomenon belongs more to the domain of the sociology of the sacred — or indeed to the psychoanalysis of institutions — than to geopolitics: how can a movement survive the refutation of its own world? By what mechanism does invulnerability persist in the face of the glaring evidence of vulnerability? And above all — is this invulnerability a matter of calculation, of propaganda, of conscious manipulation, or is it sincere, deep, and structural, inscribed into the very architecture of belief?

The answer is clear: Hezbollah has believed, and believes still, in the very midst of disaster, in its own invincibility — sustained, moreover, by the contagious megalomania of its superiors in Iran. And it is precisely for this reason that the tragedy is so immense for Lebanon — and more particularly for the Shiite community — who have been paying the price of this delusion of grandeur for more than three decades.

A Time That Knows No Defeat

Hezbollah’s suicide was inscribed in its genes from the very beginning. Its political battle was never “material,” in that sense. It always aimed at something deeper, of a conceptual and imaginary order — beyond institutions and power structures: the representations themselves of time, justice, and reality. What Iran and Hezbollah have always sought to overturn is not so much the mulk al-siyassi, the domain of power — even if that appeared to be the manifest stake — as time itself: chronological, rational, historical, Western time, the time that measures victories and defeats, that dates events and inscribes them in a causal chain. The time that is heir to Hegel and the philosophy of history. That time, Hezbollah wished to control in order to abolish it, or at least to suspend it — and to substitute for it another time: the time of Malakūt.

But what is Malakūt? It is the intermediate world in esoteric Islamic cosmology — the isthmus between the sensible and the pure intelligible, the barzakh of the soul and of the event — what Henry Corbin, following Sohravardi, called the zaman al-latif: the subtle time, the time between times, outside all calendars and outside all history. The true locus of every Great Event. For Sohravardi, the theorist of the Ishraq, of the philosophy of illumination, the inner dawn of the Orient reveals the vanity of Western sensible reality — which he names “the trap, the fiction.” It is in Malakūt that the hidden imam, the Mahdi, abides in his Occultation, awaiting the moment of his return. It is there that the true event unfolds — the one unmeasurable by historians, the one the enemy can neither see, nor comprehend, nor reach.

Hezbollah lives in that time. Not metaphorically. Ontologically. It has no use for losses and gains tallied in kilometers or in the bodies of senior officers. Its calendar is eschatological, and every event is reread in the light of Karbala — the founding martyrdom of 680 AD that transformed, once and for all in the Shiite memory, the most crushing military defeat into absolute spiritual victory. Consequently, in the mental universe of Hezbollah, nothing is truly what it appears to be. To lose is not truly to lose, but to fulfill; to die is not to die, but to bear witness; and, above all, to be annihilated is not to be annihilated, but to be purified in preparation for the imminent return.

This is why the death of Khamenei, the destruction of the southern suburbs, and the collapse of the axis of resistance do not constitute, in Hezbollah’s internal logic, arguments against its own legitimacy. They constitute, on the contrary, its most blazing confirmation. The imam is not dead. He is more hidden still. And he will return — beyond violence, destruction, and chaos — through this very medium, even. It is the promise of eternal return and of victory over material life through martyrdom.

Gnosis as Armor: What the Enemy Cannot See

To understand the psychic architecture of this invulnerability, one must return to the sources with Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, whose works on original Shiism constitute without doubt the most rigorous excavation ever undertaken in the foundational strata of this esoteric Islam. What he demonstrates, from the fundamental sacred texts composed between the ninth and tenth centuries, is that the figure of the imam was not, from the beginning, that of a political or even spiritual guide in the ordinary sense. The imam of the earliest Shiite communities is a master of wisdom, clothed in occult and magical powers — the alpha and omega of teaching and the earthly manifestation of the hidden God. Wilaya — devotion to this imam — is the indispensable foundation of Shiite faith. A religion deprived of wilaya is mutilated in what it has that is essential; it is nothing more than an empty shell. One thus better understands the speed with which the Iranian Assembly of Experts seeks to replace Khamenei. Without the wali al-faqih, reality is suspended, null and void.

This Gnostic substrate — for it is one, nourished by the esoteric currents of late Antiquity circulating in the Sassanid-Mesopotamian space, a syncretic amalgam of Docetism, Manichaeism, and Hermeticism that irrigated nascent Shiite Islam — bears a direct consequence for the construction of the movement’s collective identity. The true Shiite believer possesses an ʿilm bātin: a science of hidden realities, an inner knowledge inaccessible to the adversary. He sees what the other cannot see. He knows what the other cannot know. He is, by definition, beyond visible history — in that space between worlds where the true truth, the truth of Malakūt, alone resides.

The doctrine of wilayat al-faqih forged by Khomeini is the political transposition of this gnosis. By proclaiming that the Iranian Supreme Guide is the temporary representative of the hidden imam — his lieutenant in the sensible world — Khomeini was not merely legitimizing a theocracy: he was transferring onto a political institution the ontological invulnerability proper to the imam. To attack Hezbollah thus becomes, by definition, an offense against the divine — what Hassan Nasrallah repeated word for word, refusing to acknowledge the distinction that even the great Shiite reference authorities in Lebanon, such as Mohammad Mahdi Chamseddine or Mohammad Hassan al-Amine, had always maintained between a debatable juridical doctrine and an intangible religious creed. Khomeini had created a mental universe in which politics and the sacred had fused to the point of indiscernibility — and in which he was the absolute demiurge, master of the temporal and the spiritual.

What occurred in 2024 — with the systematic neutralization of Hezbollah’s structures by Israeli intelligence, the penetration of encrypted communications, the simultaneous explosion of pagers, the elimination of Nasrallah in a bunker believed to be impenetrable — can be read, in this light, as something more than a tactical victory. It is a Gnostic violation of unprecedented existential depth. What was, by doctrinal definition, to remain invisible — the underground network, the secret caches, the chain of command, the hidden knowledge — was seen. Symbolically, the enemy had penetrated Malakūt. The ontological armor had been pierced. And this wound is without doubt more shattering, for a movement built on the irreducibility of the bātin, than any military defeat. It is perhaps this wound, more than any territorial or human loss, that explains the decision of March 2026 following the inconceivable disappearance of the Guide: an eschatological forward flight — the last recourse of a belief system that unhesitatingly prefers annihilation to revision.

Martyropathy: The Spiral That Devours Its Own Ashes

The Iranian sociologist and anthropologist Farhad Khosrokhavar — specialist in Islamism — forged, in his works on contemporary Islamic martyrology, a concept whose relevance to reading these years seems almost cruelly precise, and which fits Hezbollah and its universe to perfection: martyropathy. The term does not merely designate the valorization of martyrdom in a culture or a doctrine. Martyropathy is a psychic and collective economy in which death is the primary engine — the organizing structure of action and of existence. In accomplished martyropathy, the movement no longer accepts defeat, because it has transformed defeat into a positive spiritual category. It is the failure of jihad, says Khosrokhavar, that guarantees the legitimacy of martyrdom. The martyr’s death does not close a lost battle; on the contrary, it retrospectively founds it as holy, just, and necessary.

Original Shiism carried within itself a quietist dolorism — a melancholy meditation on the mourning of Karbala — which nothing necessarily invited toward political mobilization. It was Khomeini — and before him Ali Shariati, the ideologist of the Islamic cultural revolution — who effected the decisive transmutation: converting this dolorism into a mobilizing force, transforming the memory of martyrdom into a program of action, and making voluntary death not the heroic exception but the structuring norm of resistance. The result is a spiral that Khosrokhavar describes in terms that borrow as much from psychoanalysis as from sociology: the more martyrs fight against the enemy, the more they prove through that very struggle the enemy’s superiority — and the more they must redouble their sacrifices to compensate for that proof. Martyropathy feeds upon itself. It is irrefutable by construction, because it has integrated defeat into its own logic as confirmation.

There is something here that, seen from outside, resembles madness — but which, seen from within, possesses a formidable coherence. Formidable and — one must say it plainly — clinically identifiable. Psychoanalysts recognize in structures marked by defensive omnipotence the recourse to a fantasized all-powerfulness, rigid and compulsive, serving to ward off an anxiety of annihilation that the subject — individual or collective — cannot consciously tolerate. The ego that cannot bear the representation of its own vulnerability produces a compensatory conviction of invulnerability — which becomes all the more inflexible as the real vulnerability is great. Transposed to the scale of an institution, this structure becomes doctrine, ritual, an entire symbolic architecture — as attested by the place of the martyr’s body in Hezbollah’s culture: unwashed according to ordinary rite, already sanctified before death, a direct passage toward the divine presence, a body that is not a defeated body but an accomplished one.

This world in which one cannot lose, Hezbollah has built stone by stone over forty years. And when the real world presented its accounts, the latter was simply declared illusory. The problem is that the bombs do not know they are falling on a fiction. Or perhaps they do. After all, do they not come from another delirium of omnipotence that founds its legitimacy on a word allegedly given by God to Abraham nearly four thousand years ago…? One can almost hear the posthumous sighs of René Girard confronting this mimetic violence — founded on an esoteric mythology to underwrite an essentialist, integralist political project upon the bodies of all those who do not belong to the “chosen”… And the inevitable, apocalyptic escalation to extremes that follows…

The Irresistible Totalitarian Temptation

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt describes something she called the logic of an idea — an idea that detaches itself from its ordinary relationship with the real and ceases to be a tool of understanding in order to become a closed world, impermeable to whatever refutations experience might offer, because it has developed its own internal logic that integrates every event as confirmation. This ideology is not simply false — a simple error can be corrected: it is structured to be incapable of correction. And its central axiom is not, as in ordinary nihilism, that everything is permitted — but, far more dangerously, that everything is possible: that nothing in the course of human events can obstruct the free deployment of the superior laws to which the Movement obeys. By way of example: the laws of Race under Hitler; the laws of History under Stalin… or, one might say, the laws of God and of the occult imam under Khomeini and his heirs…

What strikes one in Arendt’s analysis is the impossibility for such a movement to stop. A totalitarian movement that were to halt on a given territory, accept the limits of a stable regime, and recognize a fixed hierarchy and structures, would betray itself — because it would cease to be a movement and become an institution. Now, an institution can lose; a movement inhabited by the superior laws of the universe cannot.

This is precisely what explains why Hezbollah — of which everyone, in informed circles, knew in October 2023 that it was not ready for total war — nonetheless chose to enter it, and did so again in March 2026. No doubt, once again, there is a part of calculation responding to stakes specific to Iranian regional strategy, as in 2006 and 2024 — and Tehran, as always, gave the signal to its hired swords to rush toward martyrdom. But to abstain would also have been to admit that there exist situations in which political prudence overrides divine law. Such an admission, in the Hezbollah psyche, is simply unthinkable.

More than the instrument of a regime that seeks to maintain itself, terror — in the Arendtian system — constitutes the essence, the very law governing the conduct of men when the possibility of free and spontaneous action has been structurally eradicated. In an organization governed by wilayat al-faqih, there is no political space in which a cadre could stand and say: we are losing, Lebanon is dying, let us change course. That space has been suppressed doctrinally — because the doctrine itself has rendered it unthinkable. There is no course to change when one obeys the laws of the hidden imam; only to advance — until annihilation, which will be experienced within the framework of Malakūt as the fulfillment of the divine promise.

Terror, in that sense, ends by turning against those who exercise it as much as against those who endure it. It eliminates individuals for the good of the Cause. It sacrifices Lebanon for the good of the Revolution. And it does so with an absolute clear conscience — because real Lebanon, that plural, fragmented country irreducible to any single project, is merely a platform, a deployment territory within a wider space: that of the Iranian empire. It is not, has never been, and will never be an end in itself.

Lebanon as a Sacrificed Object

One must now pose the most difficult question — the one that truly preoccupies the Lebanese: why has Hezbollah been able to lead this country to the abyss, at least three times, without this producing in it the slightest questioning of its own legitimacy? The answer is not cynical, even if cynicism would be tempting — even if the temptation is great to reduce this history to a calculated manipulation of a community by its leaders. The answer is structural, and thereby far more troubling.

Lebanon as it has been constructed — in its pluralism, its contradictions, its refusal to be defined by a single identity, its vertiginous relationship to West and East that makes its singularity in the region — this Lebanon is ontologically incompatible with the logic of “Malakūt on earth” that Hezbollah wishes to impose. A country that negotiates, compromises, admits the pluralism of truth, recognizes that justice can be a universal secular value, that the West is not incarnate Evil, that international justice is a legitimate power and not an emanation of the infernal machine of modern times — such a country contradicts, at every instant, the phantasmatic image Hezbollah holds of it, steeped as that image is in syncretic mystical philosophy and Iranian-style Islamic revolution.

Once again, the gradual coup conducted by Hezbollah from 2005–2006 onward aimed not only at reducing bodies to impotence, but the soul and thought as well. What the Hezb and its ideologue Naïm Qassem wished — following Sohravardi turned political program — was to make the inner dawn of the Orient triumph over the sensible reality of the West, perceived as trap and fiction. What was aimed for was a definitive exit from the Lebanese exile — the exile of Western values and rationality — to recover what they consider the pure vision of the Orient. What was aimed for was Malakūt. And Malakūt leaves no room, by definition, for what Lebanon has that is irreducibly its own.

There is in this story a double bind of tragic perversity. For forty years, Hezbollah presented its armed presence as the only protection of Lebanon against the external enemy. But the external enemy was partly summoned, maintained, at times deliberately provoked — through the firing on Galilee, through support for Gaza, through participation in the regional wars of the axis of resistance — to justify and perpetuate this domination. This is the structure of the perfect, inescapable double bind: Hezbollah protects Lebanon from the war it has itself made inevitable. And when the war arrives — in 2006, in 2024, in 2026 — it simultaneously proves the necessity of its armed presence and its absolute indifference to the fate of the country it claims to defend. Once again: Lebanon is perfectly expendable.

What the Hezb Leaves Behind

In March 2026, the revolutionary heartland is being reduced to ashes, and the delirium of invulnerability has no more hearth. The substitute imam is dead. The corps of the Pasdaran has been decapitated. The southern suburbs burn for the second time. The South is invaded for the third. The mass displacement of the population has the authentic appearance of a deportation. And yet Hezbollah continues — because a movement built on martyropathy and totalitarian logic cannot stop, does not know how to stop. Because to stop would be to admit that its entire psychic edifice is a delusion, that the zaman al-latif has not suspended the time of bombs, and that the laws of the hidden imam are worth no more, in the world of facts, than the laws of physics and of war.

There is in this moment something of an absolute refutation — and yet martyropathy cannot recognize it. So it transforms it, ingesting it as fuel for the next sacrifice. This, precisely, is the lucid madness of the Movement — this lucidity turned against itself, the capacity to see defeat and to metabolize it instantaneously as confirmation of the truth one is defending.

Sohravardi — whom one must perhaps wrest once and for all from the hands of those who have made his philosophy a manual for violent revolution — said that the inner dawn triumphs not through force of arms but through illumination: that light which traverses forms without destroying them. But it is not that Sohravardi — relayed by the Islamologist Henry Corbin — that Khomeini retained. And it is certainly not the one that Hezbollah has put into practice. Yet it is perhaps, in the rubble of this catastrophic spring, the only one who can still say something useful to those who survive.

The question that will have to be asked, once the desolation has passed, is whether something can be born in these ruins that is not a new version of the same delirium — a martyropathy of defeat calling for a martyropathy of vengeance calling for a martyropathy of the vengeance of vengeance — infinitely, until there is nothing left to destroy in Lebanon. Whether human communities, laid bare by catastrophe, can find the path to a narrative founded no longer on fantasized invulnerability but on recognized vulnerability. Whether this country — this country whose fragile and magnificent vocation is to be irreducible to nothing: neither to the Orient nor to the West, neither to Islam nor to Christianity, neither to resistance nor to collaboration, neither to the Malakūt-on-earth as fantasized by the Hezb, nor to modernity, but to itself, to its own irreducible complexity — whether this country can survive what one has wished to make of it: the territory of an absolute that was not its own.

Hezbollah’s earthly Malakūt is in ruins. Where is the promised victory — other than in misery and destruction? How does one deprogram and return to reality men who wish to remain in psychosis? The Hezb’s invincibility is no more — and it will no doubt never have been anything more than the result of others’ fallibility: a metastasis born of the feebleness of the Lebanese state and the self-preservation instinct of a political elite too preoccupied with its own interests and endemic corruption to look the monster in the eye.

Who within this elite will have the intelligence, the courage — and the know-how — to extend a hand, once the Nakba is over, to the civilian victims of the Hezb’s fantasies, to take them in their arms and hold them close, to break the obsessive mechanism of violence — in a fundamental gesture of reconciliation with the spirit and being of Lebanon? An anti-hallali gesture par excellence, aimed at breaking the curse of the ihbāt — that mixture of frustration, psychic collapse, Edenic fall, and existential despair that has irredeemably struck, one by one, each Lebanese community in the aftermath of the collapse of its hegemonic and supremacist delusion?

For that, political alternatives are needed — and men.

We are still desperately seeking them.

References

Amir-Moezzi, Mohammad Ali — Le Guide divin dans le shīʿisme originel (Verdier, 1992); La Religion discrète (Vrin, 2006); Qu’est-ce que le shīʿisme? (with Ch. Jambet, Fayard, 2004)

Arendt, Hannah — The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt); The Nature of Totalitarianism (Payot)

Corbin, Henry — En Islam iranien (Gallimard, 4 vols.); Corps spirituel et Terre céleste (Buchet-Chastel)

Khosrokhavar, Farhad — L’Islamisme et la Mort (L’Harmattan, 1995); Les Nouveaux martyrs d’Allah (Flammarion, 2002)

Sohravardi — L’Archange empourpré (trans. H. Corbin, Fayard, 1976)