Elliot Wolfson | University of California, Santa Barbara (original) (raw)
Papers by Elliot Wolfson
Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts , 2022
In this study, I examine the seventh of Scholem's ten unhistorical aphorisms on the kabbalah. Rem... more In this study, I examine the seventh of Scholem's ten unhistorical aphorisms on the kabbalah. Remarkably, Scholem considered the blurring of the distinction between the Neoplatonic theory of emanation and the kabbalistic concern with the structures of being to be a most fatal error. Why did Scholem deem the theory of emanation—unceremoniously dismissed as the laziest of all theories—unsuitable to understand the kabbalistic doctrine of the sefirot? This essay sets out to explain Scholem's perplexing remark and his seeming disavowal of Neoplatonism in contrast to his apparent appreciation of Husserlian phenomenology .
Beloved David , Advisor, Man of Understanding, and Scribe: A Festschrift in Honor of David Stern, 2024
This study explores the interplay of apophasis and kataphasis in the negative theology of Maimoni... more This study explores the interplay of apophasis and kataphasis in the negative theology of Maimonides and its influence on Meister Eckhart. In spite of Maimonides’s positing that the perfection of the human species consists of the individual rising to the level of the Active Intellect, the last of the separate intelligences, by actualizing the rational potential and escaping from the material world of generation and corruption, it seems that, epistemologically, it is not possible for an embodied human being to divest the mind completely of corporeal images in accessing truths through an allegedly imageless intellection; there is always a need for the imagination and metaphor even if it is to imagine the unimaginable and to render metaphorical the nonmetaphorical. Analogously, Meister Eckhart extolled the possibility of the naked essence of the soul finding the naked, formless essence of divine unity, the superessential being, and hence to become godlike, one must become as nothing in emulation of the divine, who possesses neither image nor form. In the purity of the ground, there is no speech or utterance that can name God’s unnameability. The mystical path is to attain this nothingness that is beyond the theisitic personification of God in the Trinity. Thus, Eckhart paradoxically expressed the matter in one of his sermons, "I pray to God to make me free of God." The silence that this ineffability demands must itself be voiced recurringly. The via negativa, on this score, is a process that foregoes any stasis and thus it does not portend a goal that can ever be fully realized. Transmuted into theological terms, we do not get beyond the God of theism absolutely, and indeed, the path beyond the theistic deity to the Godhead is through that deity, and in that sense, we must appreciate the constant wavering between kataphasis and apophasis. The same dynamic can be elicited from Maimonides.
Note to the reader: Because of the constraints of the word limit imposed on me, the discussion of Eckhart is much abbreviated. This insufficiency will be rectified in a revised version of this study to appear in a future monograph on apophasis and infinity in philosophical and kabbalistic sources.
El Prezente , 2022
This study examines the concept of Ein Sof in Hִayyon’s theosophical musings over a few major exc... more This study examines the concept of Ein Sof in Hִayyon’s theosophical musings over a few major excerpts from the Zohar anthology, such as Idra Rabba and Idra Zuta, which are known for their intricate symbolism. His commentary leans on Abraham Miguel Cardoso’s Raza di-Mehemanuta. Hִayyon included this work in his own book, Oz l'Elohim, under the title Mehemanuta de-Kholla. Hִayyon took issue with the kabbalists who maintained that the term Ein Sof denotes ‘a single object that is categorically simple’. Hִayyon claimed that the term refers to the dissemination of light that extends ad infinitum from Attiqa Qaddiša de-khol Qaddišayya – the loftiest revelation of the divinity. From the mystagogue’s standpoint, one can preserve the philosophical taxonomy of an unambivalent essence en route to signifying the boundless First Emanator (ma’aṣil rišon). For this reason, it is impossible to even define the latter as “number one” from a mathematical perspective, even if we accept the paradox that the confirmation of this
essence attests to its negation. Positively speaking, Ein Sof denotes the spread of the light from the impalpable essence, whose quiddity is comprised of a lack of intangibility. This process is akin to lighting a candle’s flame, wherein the flow is also equated with a receiving vessel. Hִayyon drew a distinction between the Ein Sof and the mystery it contains, on the premise that the word raza hints to ‘the foundation of the matter itself ’. This mysteriousness refers to either the concealed portion (ṣeni'u) of the Attiqa
Qaddiša de-khol Qaddišin, which is hidden in the light it emits, or to nišmeta
de-khol nišmatin (the soul of all souls) dwelling therein. Since the concealed element (the interiority of the First Emanator’s desire) is responsible for the ṣimṣum—a process that was set in motion by the feminine ability to define—we can assume that it should be classified as a female.
Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 32, 2024
In this study, I examine Susan Taubes's criticism of Heidegger's Seinsdenken that pivots around h... more In this study, I examine Susan Taubes's criticism of Heidegger's Seinsdenken that pivots around her contention that he absolutized the nothingness of being in a manner that is analogous to but yet significantly different than the role assigned to the Godhead on the part of many mystical visionaries. The common denominator is in Heidegger's insistence on being to the neglect of fully engaging with the rhythms of life. As a consequence, there is no purchase on the chaotic, which falls outside the purview of what can be signified, and in the absence of the unsignifiable, there can be no signification. Every attempt to reconstruct the broken world into a totality contains the flaw of an ontological untruth. The effort at totalization is not only the methodological weakness of tragedy and mysticism, but it is also the nihilistic basis of the role accorded to the nothingness of being in Heidegger's Seinsdenken. The erroneous nature of the world is not denied by Susan, but she struggled to uphold the ontological untruth that what is most wrong in our existence is what is most precious. The paradoxical retrieval of the truth of this untruth affords the poetic soul the opportunity to confront the limit by breaking it, an infringement of boundary that is redolent equally with the enduring transience of love and the transient endurance of death.
Modern Jewish Thought on Crisis: Interpretation, Heresy, and History, 2024
In this essay, I explore the crisis of modernity in the thought of Edith Wyschogrod as it pertain... more In this essay, I explore the crisis of modernity in the thought of Edith Wyschogrod as it pertains to what she labeled the death event. The crisis of the death event goes to the core of how the finitude of human life is to be evaluated, which is to say, how we comprehend the inexorability of our exorability, the predictability of our unpredictability.
Ayin , 2023
The essay that appeared in Ayin is based on the second chapter of my book The Philosophical Patho... more The essay that appeared in Ayin is based on the second chapter of my book The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope, published by Stanford University Press, 2023. I am grateful to Shaul Magid who encouraged me to publish the essay with the hope of reaching a wider audience.
The Song of Songs Through the Ages: Essays on the Song’s Reception History in Different Times, Contexts, and Genres, 2023
Marginalia , 2023
The acclaim for Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob is demonstrated in its receiving the N... more The acclaim for Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob is demonstrated in its receiving the Nike Award, Poland's top literary prize. Tokarczuk, the first Polish female prose writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, has been praised for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." My review will investigate more carefully the nature of this crossing of boundaries that one may elicit from Tokarczuk's novel as it relates specifically to the relationship between fact and fiction in both her own text and the historical phenomenon that it theatrically and artistically dramatizes. The Books of Jacob is an epic novel that spans many centuries and countries. However, the core of its narrative revolves about the eighteenth-century Polish Jew Jacob Frank, born Jakub Lejbowicz (1726-1791). This extraordinary and admittedly eccentric figure spearheaded a messianic movement based principally on the claim that he was the reincarnation of the Turkish Jew Sabbatai Ṣevi (1626-1676), the self-proclaimed savior of the seventeenth century, designated by Tokarczuk as the "forbidden prophet." Just as the true believers, who accepted the messianic pretense of Sabbatai Ṣevi, believed in his apotheosis, so too with respect to Frank, his adherents avowed his divine status by identifying him as part of the Trinity. Historically, the ground for the Frankist movement was laid by the proliferation in Eastern Poland (now Ukraine), especially Podolia and Galicia, of secret societies of Sabbatians, known as the Dönmeh, the crypto-Jews who, following their redeemer, converted outwardly to Islam but inwardly preserved Jewish practices and beliefs.
Marginalia , 2016
a tribute to leonard cohen to mark his passing
Religion in Reason: Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in Hent de Vries, 2023
In this essay, I reflect philosophically on Freud’s understanding of Jewish iconoclasm as a compu... more In this essay, I reflect philosophically on Freud’s understanding of Jewish iconoclasm as a compulsion to worship an invisible God. The plausibility of worshipping an invisible God pushes phenomenology as an eidetic science to the limits of the phenomenological and demands of us to establish criteria for a postphenomenological phenomenology centered on the intentionality of the nongiven. Insofar as the invisible can be manifest only as the event of presence in excess of being present, the absent presence that continuously withdraws from the spectacle of its present absence, we must be prepared to speak of a phenomenology of the nonphenomenalizable, the term that denotes not a reified or transcendent essence but the epistemic condition of all phenomenality, the unseeing that enframes every act of seeing. The invisible is not to be construed as a potentially visible phenomenon that is presently not manifest but rather as the nonphenomenal dimension that makes all phenomena visible by always eluding visibility. Worshipping the one God without images was predicated on smashing the idols of other gods, but if this one God were to be truly deprived of all imagery, including the apophatic image of a God that has no image, then there would be nothing not to see and, consequently, nothing to venerate as what cannot be seen. Invisibility itself would finally be reckoned iconologically as visible in virtue of its invisibility, a disrobing of the naked truth fully attired in the cloak of untruth.
Marginalia Review of Books, 2022
Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism is not an ordinary book on anti-Semiti... more Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism is not an ordinary book on anti-Semitism. The conceptual complexity raises the discourse to a level that is rarely seen with regard to this issue. In the introduction, Lapidot states the hypothesis that informs his philosophical meditation: "the present critique of anti-anti-Semitism does not intend to defend anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it suggests a fundamental affinity, and so a certain complicity between a dominant critique of anti-Semitism and the criticized object, anti-Semitism itself, a complicity between these two wars. This book critiques a certain discourse that frames, organizes, and generates both anti-Semitism and anti-anti-Semitism." Lapidot's reflections are driven by the "fundamental question" regarding the relation-at once both possible and impossible-of philosophy, theory, or thought to anti-Semitism, which necessitates of course, the relation to Judaism, hence the title of the book Jews Out of the Question.
All Religion is Inter-Religion: Engaging the Work of Steven M. Wasserstrom, 2019
Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy , 2022
Since late antiquity, a connection was made between Jews and the psychological state of desponden... more Since late antiquity, a connection was made between Jews and the psychological state of despondency based, in part, on the link between melancholy and Saturn, and the further association of the Hebrew name of that planet, Shabbetai, and the Sabbath. The melancholic predisposition has had important anthropological, cosmological, and theological repercussions. In this essay, I focus on various perspectives on melancholia in thinkers as diverse as Kafka, Levinas, Blanchot, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Bloch, Scholem, and Derrida. A common thread that links these thinkers is the hopelessness of hope imparted by the messianic belief in a future that must be perpetually deferred.
Depeche Mode: Jacob Taubes between Politics, Philosophy, and Religion , 2022
Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 50, 2021
Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah, 2021
When all dharmas are seen as the Buddha-Dharma, then there is delusion and realization, there is ... more When all dharmas are seen as the Buddha-Dharma, then there is delusion and realization, there is practice, there is life and there is death, there are buddhas and there are ordinary beings. When the myriad dharmas are each not of the self, there is no delusion, and no realization, no buddhas and no ordinary beings, no life and no death. Dōgen, Genjōkōan
Tsimtsum and Modernity: Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology, 2021
A Tribute to Hannah: Jubilee Book in Honor of Hannah Kasher, 2018
Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts , 2022
In this study, I examine the seventh of Scholem's ten unhistorical aphorisms on the kabbalah. Rem... more In this study, I examine the seventh of Scholem's ten unhistorical aphorisms on the kabbalah. Remarkably, Scholem considered the blurring of the distinction between the Neoplatonic theory of emanation and the kabbalistic concern with the structures of being to be a most fatal error. Why did Scholem deem the theory of emanation—unceremoniously dismissed as the laziest of all theories—unsuitable to understand the kabbalistic doctrine of the sefirot? This essay sets out to explain Scholem's perplexing remark and his seeming disavowal of Neoplatonism in contrast to his apparent appreciation of Husserlian phenomenology .
Beloved David , Advisor, Man of Understanding, and Scribe: A Festschrift in Honor of David Stern, 2024
This study explores the interplay of apophasis and kataphasis in the negative theology of Maimoni... more This study explores the interplay of apophasis and kataphasis in the negative theology of Maimonides and its influence on Meister Eckhart. In spite of Maimonides’s positing that the perfection of the human species consists of the individual rising to the level of the Active Intellect, the last of the separate intelligences, by actualizing the rational potential and escaping from the material world of generation and corruption, it seems that, epistemologically, it is not possible for an embodied human being to divest the mind completely of corporeal images in accessing truths through an allegedly imageless intellection; there is always a need for the imagination and metaphor even if it is to imagine the unimaginable and to render metaphorical the nonmetaphorical. Analogously, Meister Eckhart extolled the possibility of the naked essence of the soul finding the naked, formless essence of divine unity, the superessential being, and hence to become godlike, one must become as nothing in emulation of the divine, who possesses neither image nor form. In the purity of the ground, there is no speech or utterance that can name God’s unnameability. The mystical path is to attain this nothingness that is beyond the theisitic personification of God in the Trinity. Thus, Eckhart paradoxically expressed the matter in one of his sermons, "I pray to God to make me free of God." The silence that this ineffability demands must itself be voiced recurringly. The via negativa, on this score, is a process that foregoes any stasis and thus it does not portend a goal that can ever be fully realized. Transmuted into theological terms, we do not get beyond the God of theism absolutely, and indeed, the path beyond the theistic deity to the Godhead is through that deity, and in that sense, we must appreciate the constant wavering between kataphasis and apophasis. The same dynamic can be elicited from Maimonides.
Note to the reader: Because of the constraints of the word limit imposed on me, the discussion of Eckhart is much abbreviated. This insufficiency will be rectified in a revised version of this study to appear in a future monograph on apophasis and infinity in philosophical and kabbalistic sources.
El Prezente , 2022
This study examines the concept of Ein Sof in Hִayyon’s theosophical musings over a few major exc... more This study examines the concept of Ein Sof in Hִayyon’s theosophical musings over a few major excerpts from the Zohar anthology, such as Idra Rabba and Idra Zuta, which are known for their intricate symbolism. His commentary leans on Abraham Miguel Cardoso’s Raza di-Mehemanuta. Hִayyon included this work in his own book, Oz l'Elohim, under the title Mehemanuta de-Kholla. Hִayyon took issue with the kabbalists who maintained that the term Ein Sof denotes ‘a single object that is categorically simple’. Hִayyon claimed that the term refers to the dissemination of light that extends ad infinitum from Attiqa Qaddiša de-khol Qaddišayya – the loftiest revelation of the divinity. From the mystagogue’s standpoint, one can preserve the philosophical taxonomy of an unambivalent essence en route to signifying the boundless First Emanator (ma’aṣil rišon). For this reason, it is impossible to even define the latter as “number one” from a mathematical perspective, even if we accept the paradox that the confirmation of this
essence attests to its negation. Positively speaking, Ein Sof denotes the spread of the light from the impalpable essence, whose quiddity is comprised of a lack of intangibility. This process is akin to lighting a candle’s flame, wherein the flow is also equated with a receiving vessel. Hִayyon drew a distinction between the Ein Sof and the mystery it contains, on the premise that the word raza hints to ‘the foundation of the matter itself ’. This mysteriousness refers to either the concealed portion (ṣeni'u) of the Attiqa
Qaddiša de-khol Qaddišin, which is hidden in the light it emits, or to nišmeta
de-khol nišmatin (the soul of all souls) dwelling therein. Since the concealed element (the interiority of the First Emanator’s desire) is responsible for the ṣimṣum—a process that was set in motion by the feminine ability to define—we can assume that it should be classified as a female.
Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 32, 2024
In this study, I examine Susan Taubes's criticism of Heidegger's Seinsdenken that pivots around h... more In this study, I examine Susan Taubes's criticism of Heidegger's Seinsdenken that pivots around her contention that he absolutized the nothingness of being in a manner that is analogous to but yet significantly different than the role assigned to the Godhead on the part of many mystical visionaries. The common denominator is in Heidegger's insistence on being to the neglect of fully engaging with the rhythms of life. As a consequence, there is no purchase on the chaotic, which falls outside the purview of what can be signified, and in the absence of the unsignifiable, there can be no signification. Every attempt to reconstruct the broken world into a totality contains the flaw of an ontological untruth. The effort at totalization is not only the methodological weakness of tragedy and mysticism, but it is also the nihilistic basis of the role accorded to the nothingness of being in Heidegger's Seinsdenken. The erroneous nature of the world is not denied by Susan, but she struggled to uphold the ontological untruth that what is most wrong in our existence is what is most precious. The paradoxical retrieval of the truth of this untruth affords the poetic soul the opportunity to confront the limit by breaking it, an infringement of boundary that is redolent equally with the enduring transience of love and the transient endurance of death.
Modern Jewish Thought on Crisis: Interpretation, Heresy, and History, 2024
In this essay, I explore the crisis of modernity in the thought of Edith Wyschogrod as it pertain... more In this essay, I explore the crisis of modernity in the thought of Edith Wyschogrod as it pertains to what she labeled the death event. The crisis of the death event goes to the core of how the finitude of human life is to be evaluated, which is to say, how we comprehend the inexorability of our exorability, the predictability of our unpredictability.
Ayin , 2023
The essay that appeared in Ayin is based on the second chapter of my book The Philosophical Patho... more The essay that appeared in Ayin is based on the second chapter of my book The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope, published by Stanford University Press, 2023. I am grateful to Shaul Magid who encouraged me to publish the essay with the hope of reaching a wider audience.
The Song of Songs Through the Ages: Essays on the Song’s Reception History in Different Times, Contexts, and Genres, 2023
Marginalia , 2023
The acclaim for Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob is demonstrated in its receiving the N... more The acclaim for Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob is demonstrated in its receiving the Nike Award, Poland's top literary prize. Tokarczuk, the first Polish female prose writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, has been praised for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." My review will investigate more carefully the nature of this crossing of boundaries that one may elicit from Tokarczuk's novel as it relates specifically to the relationship between fact and fiction in both her own text and the historical phenomenon that it theatrically and artistically dramatizes. The Books of Jacob is an epic novel that spans many centuries and countries. However, the core of its narrative revolves about the eighteenth-century Polish Jew Jacob Frank, born Jakub Lejbowicz (1726-1791). This extraordinary and admittedly eccentric figure spearheaded a messianic movement based principally on the claim that he was the reincarnation of the Turkish Jew Sabbatai Ṣevi (1626-1676), the self-proclaimed savior of the seventeenth century, designated by Tokarczuk as the "forbidden prophet." Just as the true believers, who accepted the messianic pretense of Sabbatai Ṣevi, believed in his apotheosis, so too with respect to Frank, his adherents avowed his divine status by identifying him as part of the Trinity. Historically, the ground for the Frankist movement was laid by the proliferation in Eastern Poland (now Ukraine), especially Podolia and Galicia, of secret societies of Sabbatians, known as the Dönmeh, the crypto-Jews who, following their redeemer, converted outwardly to Islam but inwardly preserved Jewish practices and beliefs.
Marginalia , 2016
a tribute to leonard cohen to mark his passing
Religion in Reason: Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in Hent de Vries, 2023
In this essay, I reflect philosophically on Freud’s understanding of Jewish iconoclasm as a compu... more In this essay, I reflect philosophically on Freud’s understanding of Jewish iconoclasm as a compulsion to worship an invisible God. The plausibility of worshipping an invisible God pushes phenomenology as an eidetic science to the limits of the phenomenological and demands of us to establish criteria for a postphenomenological phenomenology centered on the intentionality of the nongiven. Insofar as the invisible can be manifest only as the event of presence in excess of being present, the absent presence that continuously withdraws from the spectacle of its present absence, we must be prepared to speak of a phenomenology of the nonphenomenalizable, the term that denotes not a reified or transcendent essence but the epistemic condition of all phenomenality, the unseeing that enframes every act of seeing. The invisible is not to be construed as a potentially visible phenomenon that is presently not manifest but rather as the nonphenomenal dimension that makes all phenomena visible by always eluding visibility. Worshipping the one God without images was predicated on smashing the idols of other gods, but if this one God were to be truly deprived of all imagery, including the apophatic image of a God that has no image, then there would be nothing not to see and, consequently, nothing to venerate as what cannot be seen. Invisibility itself would finally be reckoned iconologically as visible in virtue of its invisibility, a disrobing of the naked truth fully attired in the cloak of untruth.
Marginalia Review of Books, 2022
Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism is not an ordinary book on anti-Semiti... more Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism is not an ordinary book on anti-Semitism. The conceptual complexity raises the discourse to a level that is rarely seen with regard to this issue. In the introduction, Lapidot states the hypothesis that informs his philosophical meditation: "the present critique of anti-anti-Semitism does not intend to defend anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it suggests a fundamental affinity, and so a certain complicity between a dominant critique of anti-Semitism and the criticized object, anti-Semitism itself, a complicity between these two wars. This book critiques a certain discourse that frames, organizes, and generates both anti-Semitism and anti-anti-Semitism." Lapidot's reflections are driven by the "fundamental question" regarding the relation-at once both possible and impossible-of philosophy, theory, or thought to anti-Semitism, which necessitates of course, the relation to Judaism, hence the title of the book Jews Out of the Question.
All Religion is Inter-Religion: Engaging the Work of Steven M. Wasserstrom, 2019
Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy , 2022
Since late antiquity, a connection was made between Jews and the psychological state of desponden... more Since late antiquity, a connection was made between Jews and the psychological state of despondency based, in part, on the link between melancholy and Saturn, and the further association of the Hebrew name of that planet, Shabbetai, and the Sabbath. The melancholic predisposition has had important anthropological, cosmological, and theological repercussions. In this essay, I focus on various perspectives on melancholia in thinkers as diverse as Kafka, Levinas, Blanchot, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Bloch, Scholem, and Derrida. A common thread that links these thinkers is the hopelessness of hope imparted by the messianic belief in a future that must be perpetually deferred.
Depeche Mode: Jacob Taubes between Politics, Philosophy, and Religion , 2022
Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 50, 2021
Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah, 2021
When all dharmas are seen as the Buddha-Dharma, then there is delusion and realization, there is ... more When all dharmas are seen as the Buddha-Dharma, then there is delusion and realization, there is practice, there is life and there is death, there are buddhas and there are ordinary beings. When the myriad dharmas are each not of the self, there is no delusion, and no realization, no buddhas and no ordinary beings, no life and no death. Dōgen, Genjōkōan
Tsimtsum and Modernity: Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology, 2021
A Tribute to Hannah: Jubilee Book in Honor of Hannah Kasher, 2018
Stanford University Press - Cultural Memory in the Present, 2025
In this work, Elliot R. Wolfson explores philosophical gnosis in the writings of Susan Taubes, Gi... more In this work, Elliot R. Wolfson explores philosophical gnosis in the writings of Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod. The juxtaposition of these three extraordinary, albeit relatively neglected, philosophers provides a prism through which Wolfson scrutinizes the interplay of ethics, politics, and theology. The bond that ties together the diverse and multifaceted worldviews promulgated by Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod is the mutual recognition of the need to enunciate a response to the calamities of the twentieth century based on an incontrovertible acknowledgment of the decadence and malevolence of human beings, without, however, succumbing to acrimony and despair. The speculation of each of these philosophers on melancholia and the tragicomedy of being is unquestionably intricate, exhibiting subtle variations and idiosyncrasies, but we can nevertheless identify a common denominator in their attempt to find the midpoint positioned between hope and hopelessness. As Wolfson articulates, Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod exemplify a philosophical sensibility informed by a nocturnal seeing, which is not merely a seeing in the night but rather a seeing of the night. Ultimately, the book reveals the the potential for these thinkers' ideas to enhance our moral sensitivity and to encourage participation in the ongoing struggle for meaning and decency in the present.
The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope, 2023
The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes offers a detailed analysis of an extraordinary figure in... more The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes offers a detailed analysis of an extraordinary figure in the twentieth-century history of Jewish thought, Western philosophy, and the study of religion. Drawing on close readings of Susan Taubes's writings, including her correspondence with Jacob Taubes, scholarly essays, literary compositions, and poems, Elliot R. Wolfson plumbs the depths of the tragic sensibility that shaped her worldview, hovering between the poles of nihilism and hope.
By placing Susan Taubes in dialogue with a host of other seminal thinkers, Wolfson illumines how she presciently explored the hypernomian status of Jewish ritual and belief after the Holocaust; the theopolitical challenges of Zionism and the dangers of ethnonationalism; the antitheological theology and gnostic repercussions of Heideggerian thought; the mystical atheism and apophaticism of tragedy in Simone Weil; and the understanding of poetry as the means to face the faceless and to confront the silence of death in the temporal overcoming of time through time. Wolfson delves into the abyss that molded Susan Taubes's mytheological thinking, making a powerful case for the continued relevance of her work to the study of philosophy and religion today.
Unveiling the Veil of Unveiling: Philosophical Aphorisms & Poems on Time, Language, Being, & Truth, 2022
The aphorisms and poetry presented in this book seeking and suffering for truth are a journey ble... more The aphorisms and poetry presented in this book seeking and suffering for truth are a journey blending aesthetics and sophisticated philosophy through concise words. These words guide the reader inwards to unbind words, to reveal the illusory sense of language and perception encompassing everything that could be said or thought. It is a treasure of wisdom from the east and west, implicitly incorporating insights from Zen Buddhism, through Continental Philosophy, to Jewish Mysticism, posing the questions of our paradoxical being as being in time.
Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality is a collectio... more Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality is a collection of eight studies by Elliot R. Wolfson on the nature of temporality. While no one theory of time is pursued in these essays, a major theme that threads them together is Wolfson’s signature idea of the timeswerve as a linear circularity or a circular linearity, expressions that are meant to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle. The conception of time elicited from a host of philosophical and mystical sources buttressed the contention that it is precisely structural invariability that engenders interpretive variation. This hermeneutical axiom is justified, in turn, by the presumption regarding the cadence of time as the constant return of what has always been what is yet to be. The telling of time, Wolfson contends, wells forth from the time of telling. One cannot speak of the being of time, consequently, except from the standpoint of the time of being, nor of the time of being except from the standpoint of the being of time.
Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiesis is the first sustained comparative ... more Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiesis is the first sustained comparative analysis of Heideggerian and kabbalistic thought. Many scholars have noted Heidegger’s indebtedness to Christian mystical sources, especially Meister Eckhart and Angelus Silesius, as well as affinity with Taoism and Buddhism, but I have expanded the canvas by including kabbalistic material, which, I suggest, may have been transmitted to Heidegger through secondary channels such as Jacob Böhme and Friedrich Schelling. Implicit in my argument is an alternative way of thinking about the development of Western thought in the modern period and continuing into the twentieth century and beyond. I highlight the importance of esotericism and mystical gnosis informing the development of Western philosophy from the renaissance to the modern period. The comparison of kabbalah and Heidegger that I have undertaken yields reflections on the same within which the differences shall become more blatant in light of common ground. Given Heidegger’s personal involvement with National Socialism, his disparaging use of some standard anti-Semitic tropes, his steadfast silence about the victims of Nazi brutality, and his concerted effort to avoid engaging any Jewish thinker or text, thereby banishing Jews from the history of philosophy, it is all the more remarkable that the path of his thinking can be illumined by and can illumine the theosophic ruminations of the Jewish esoteric tradition. The juxtaposition of the ostensibly incongruent fields of discourse, the belonging together of what is foreign, will not only enhance our understanding of both, but, in an even more profound sense, will serve as an ethical corrective of their respective ethnocentrisms, thereby illustrating the redemptive capacity of thought to yield new configurations of the unthought colluding on disparate paths of contemplative thinking.
World of Bob Dylan, edited by Sean Latham and Brian Hosmer, 2020
For as wisdom grows, vexation grows; To increase learning is to increase heartache. Ecclesiastes ... more For as wisdom grows, vexation grows; To increase learning is to increase heartache. Ecclesiastes 1:18 Always remain obscure in order to exist. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 14a I've paid the price of solitude, but at least I'm out of debt. Bob Dylan, "Dirge" Many have written about Bob Dylan's complex relationship to his Jewish upbringing. The scope and magnitude of the knowledge of Judaism that Dylan received as a child in Hibbing is debatable, but what is incontestable is that his lifelong quest for matters of the spirit was inspired by the priestly predilection to distinguish sharply between transgression and pious devotion, the prophetic sensibility to demand social justice, and the rabbinic propensity to resist systematic totalization in favor of interrogating issues incessantly-to answer a question with another question-and propagating multiple interpretive perspectives. One can safely assume that Dylan's advocacy for the downtrodden and his restless search for integrity in a world of guile-searching for a gem in this age of fiberglass 1-were shaped, in part, by these dimensions of the Jewish tradition. Even the occasional refusal to undertake his mission-"It's never been my duty to remake the world at large/ Nor is it my intention to sound the battle charge" 2-is reminiscent of the reaction of a number of prophets who reluctantly accepted their calling.
State University of New York Press, 2021
This volume critically explicates D. G. Leahy’s philosophical thinking, introducing readers to th... more This volume critically explicates D. G. Leahy’s philosophical thinking, introducing readers to the immense challenge of this new categorically transformative thinking—a post-modern universal particularism that thinks absolute unity in the form of absolute difference. It features an expository introduction for new readers, glossary of key terms, comprehensive Leahy bibliography, Leahy biographical sketch, list of contributors, and index. The 13 contributors include Elliot R. Wolfson, Cyril O'Regan, Edward S. Casey, and Thomas J. J. Altizer.
SUNY Press, Theology and Continental Philosophy series, edited by Doug Donkel.
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-7179-d-g-leahy-and-the-thinking-now-.aspx