Eternal Determination and Temporal Novelty: Ibn Arabi, Deleuze and the Parallax of Transcendence and Immanence

This article asks what grounds novelty once temporal passage no longer carries metaphysical priority. It approaches this question through a parallax comparison of Ibn Arabi and Gilles Deleuze. At its centre lies the problem of productivity: what makes the new real when time is no longer conceived as a self-moving medium? A brief heuristic reference to selected interpretations of modern physics helps suspend the intuitive privilege of a moving present and sharpen the problem. The article then develops two distinct ontologies of renewal. In Ibn Arabi, novelty is grounded in continuous divine actualisation: each moment receives existence through ongoing bestowal, though immersion in the world covers over this dependence and makes renewal appear as self-sustaining continuity. In Deleuze, novelty is grounded in an immanent temporality structured by contraction, the pure past, and the caesural force of the future, even as habit and recognition can absorb the event back into the familiar and blunt the force of the new. Read together, these accounts show that transcendence and immanence are not rival doctrines added to a shared ontology of time, but competing accounts of how renewal and transformation become real. The comparison further suggests that immanence can account for novelty only by including within itself an irreducible virtual dimension that cannot be reduced to the actual, thereby complicating any simple opposition between immanence and transcendence. The article closes by drawing out the ethical and religious stakes of these ontologies for freedom, responsibility, practice, and memory.