Description
Book SynopsisExplores the complex gender symbolism that permeates Kabbalistic literature. Focusing on the nexus of asceticism and eroticism, the author seeks to define the role of symbolic and poetically charged language in the erotically configured visionary imagination of the medieval Kabbalists.
Trade Review"Wolfson subjects the sexual elements to an unprecedented, and radical examination. This book is sure to be controversial and generate much discussion." -Choice Elliot R. Wolfson's _Language, Eros, and Being_ is a prodigy of scholarship. From the book's core, the construction of sexuality in religious consciousness and practice, three voices radiate: Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis; mysticism in Hellenistic, Christian; Islamic, and Buddhist traditions; and the esoteric dimension within Judaism known as Kabbalah. Because of the artful way in which Wolfson orchestrates the polyphony of their fugue-like conversation, the voices converge, dissolving into concord, without ever losing their definitive particularity. Read one way, Wolfson allows Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Blanchot to introduce and clarify the poetics of Sufi or Kabbalistic thought. Read another way, Wolfson allows Zen masters, Gnostic myths, Ibn al-Arabi, Rabbi Hayyim Vital and authors of the Zohar to introduce and clarify poststructuralism. Throughout the conversation, Wolfson never indulges in apologetics or New Age gobbledygook. He never stumbles into the trap of ahistorical, apolitical, disembodying "mystocentrism." He never loses sight of his polemical focus on Judaism's lamentable androcentrism. He never compromises the most rigorous demands of historical-philological argumentation. Making the opposites of diverse discourses to coincide, Wolfson has rendered Kabbalah intelligible and useful to the world of critical learning. -- -Kalman P. Bland Duke University "In Wolfson's work each tradition and each field of thought retains its specificity and yet they all come together on the page to talk with each other." -Modern Theology "One is tempted to say that Wolfson's Language, Eros, Being is alchemical: Amazingly, it transforms the base metals of hermetically sealed Jewish studies into the gold of exoteric humanities." -AJS Review "Elliot Wolfson's new volume is massive in every respect: it is massive in scope, in intellectual reach, in methodological range, and in thematic sweep. Readers will be especially interested in his formulation of a poetics of Jewish mystical language, and in the new and strong articulation of his insights into the topics of gender and the dialectics of absence and presence in the sources. This is a major work that will certainly stimulate much discussion and interest." -- -Michael Fishbane Nathan Cummings Professor of Jewish Studies The University of Chicago The University of Chicago Divinity School
