A01=Elliot Wolfson
aqiva
Author_Elliot Wolfson
azriel
babylonian talmud
bahir
bahiric text
berakhah
binah
buddhism
buddhist
Category=QDTS
Category=QRJ
death
destiny
eastern philosophy
eastern religion
emet
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
esoteric religion
historical context
immortality
islam
judaism
kabbalah
kabbalism
literary history
medieval
medieval kabbalah
medieval philosophy
medieval religion
mystic
mysticism
nature of time
philosopher
philosophy
rebirth
religion
religious history
religious studies
semiotics
temporality
time
western philosophy
western world
world religion
Product details
- ISBN 9780520246195
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 05 Apr 2006
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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This highly original, provocative, and poetic work explores the nexus of time, truth, and death in the symbolic world of medieval kabbalah. Demonstrating that the historical and theoretical relationship between kabbalah and western philosophy is far more intimate and extensive than any previous scholar has ever suggested, Elliot R. Wolfson draws an extraordinary range of thinkers such as Frederic Jameson, Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig, William Blake, Julia Kristeva, Friedrich Schelling, and a host of kabbalistic figures into deep conversation with one another. Alef, Mem, Tau also discusses Islamic mysticism and Buddhist thought in relation to the Jewish esoteric tradition as it opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality and the conquering of time through time. The framework for Wolfson's examination is the rabbinic teaching that the word emet, 'truth,' comprises the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, alef, mem, and tau, which serve, in turn, as semiotic signposts for the three tenses of time - past, present, and future.
By heeding the letters of emet we discern the truth of time manifestly concealed in the time of truth, the beginning that cannot begin if it is to be the beginning, the middle that re/marks the place of origin and destiny, and the end that is the figuration of the impossible disclosing the impossibility of figuration, the finitude of death that facilitates the possibility of rebirth. The time of death does not mark the death of time, but time immortal, the moment of truth that bestows on the truth of the moment an endless beginning of a beginningless end, the truth of death encountered incessantly in retracing steps of time yet to be taken - between, before, beyond.
Elliot R. Wolfson is Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Among his most recent books are Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (2005), Pathwings: Poetic-Philosophic Reflections on the Hermeneutics of Time and Language (2004), Abraham Abulafia - Kabbalist and Prophet: Hermeneutics, Theosophy, and Theurgy (2000), and Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (1994).
