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Melancholy Jouissance and the Study of Kabbalah: A Review Essay of Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2008

Steven M. Wasserstrom
Steven M. Wasserstrom
Affiliation:
Reed College, Portland, Oregon
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Extract

These “kabbalistic musings on time, truth, and death” originated as the Taubman Lectures delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001. Wolfson summarizes them in his preface to Alef, Mem, Tau (henceforth AMT): “The goal of my lectures was to illumine the nexus of time, truth, and death elicited from the symbolic imaginary of the Jewish esoteric tradition known by both practitioners and scholars as kabbalah” (xi). Without attempting further to isolate an “argument,” I can, at least, sketch for the potential reader some salient characteristics of these lectures.

Type
Review Essay
Information
AJS Review , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , November 2008 , pp. 389 - 396
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2008

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References

1. Aleph, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) may be read as the third part of a trilogy that includes Wolfson's, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005)Google Scholar and Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). It may be accurate to observe that not in the forty years since Jacques Derrida published Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology in one year (1967) have the humanities witnessed such a prodigious accomplishment in such a short space of time. A glance at these works encounters density and complexity on every page; they are, in other words, anything but churned out, or journalistic, or diffuse. Wolfson's project, interestingly, connects with Derrida both synchronically and diachronically; his project traces through Derrida to a lineage of phenomenology leading from Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Like the tour de force of Derrida's 1967, it will take time to assess the full measure of Wolfson's trifecta. The rather staggering scale of Wolfson's recent work reminds me of something that Thomas Mann's narrator says of his protagonist: “Contemplating the mere manufacture of the work a steady-going man used to a moderate bourgeois rate of accomplishment might well go pale with terror” (Mann, Thomas, Dr. Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. Lowe-Porter, H. T. [New York: Vintage, 1991], 358)Google Scholar.

2. AMT, 169, on the “closely knit circle” of kabbalists who generated the Zohar, and 172, where Wolfson deprivileges the role that Moshe de Leon reportedly played in those circles.

3. See the discussion of dates in Paul Celan's Meridian in Derrida, Jacques, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Dutoit, Thomas and Pasanen, Outi (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 30–47Google Scholar.

4. Letter of November 22, 1960, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, Hobbes' politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften—Briefe, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2001), 743.

5. Amichai, Yehuda, interview on the art of poetry, Paris Review 122 (1992): 237–38Google Scholar.

6. Ibid., 237–38.

7. Sovereignties in Question, 44, emphasis in original.

8. Where that leaves the author is admittedly hard to grasp—as, in fact, both the author and this reviewer most readily concede.

9. Celan, Paul, Collected Prose, trans. Waldrop, Rosemarie (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1986), 40Google Scholar.

10. Wolfson cites three Altmann titles in the bibliography of AMT, but there is no citation for Altmann in the index.

11. AMT, 122.

12. AMT, 5.

13. Altmann, Alexander, The Meaning of Jewish Existence: Theological Essays, 1930–1939, trans. Ehrlich, Edith and Ehrlich, Leonard H., ed. Ivry, Alfred L. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991), 10–13Google Scholar.

14. In 1987, too frail to complete this article without assistance, he dictated it to his precocious student—Elliot R. Wolfson. See Altmann, Alexander, “‘The God of Religion, the God of Metaphysics’ and Wittgenstein's ‘Language-Games,’” Zeitschrift für Religions und Geistesgeschichte 39 (1987): 289–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Altmann, Alexander, “Franz Rosenzweig on History,” in Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism (Plainview, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 281–82Google Scholar.

16. His natural cohort is identified by Bouretz, Pierre, Temoins du futur: Philosophie et messianisme (Paris: Gallimard, 2003)Google Scholar.

17. Altmann, “Franz Rosenzweig on History,” 282.

18. Alexander Altmann, “Religion and Reality” (1933), in The Meaning of Jewish Existence, 39.

19. Ibid., 177.

20. Mann, Thomas, “Freud and the Future” (1936), in Essays by Thomas Mann, trans. Lowe-Porter, H. T. (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 305Google Scholar.

21. Panofsky, Erwin, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943)Google Scholar.

22. Klibansky, Raymond, Panofsky, Erwin, and Saxl, Fritz, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964)Google Scholar.

23. Panofsky, Erwin, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953)Google Scholar.

24. Cited in Wasserstrom, Steven M., Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Henry Corbin, and Mircea Eliade at Eranos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Can we agree with Wolfson, for example, that gender is the master trope of Kabbalah? I myself am not qualified to judge—nor, I expect, can any but a few readers.

26. Strauss, Leo, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in The Rebirth of Classical Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 29Google Scholar.

27. The philosopher Paul Weiss, describing his colleague Richard Rorty, cited in Hare, Peter H., “Misunderstandings Between Poet and Philosopher: Wallace Stevens and Paul Weiss,” Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics 5 (2006): 58–69, at 67Google Scholar.

28. Faust II: 11589, as cited in Bloch, , The Philosophy of Hope, trans. Plaice, Neville, Plaice, Stephen, and Knight, Paul (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 1013Google Scholar.

29. Bloch, Ernst, The Philosophy of Hope, trans. Plaice, Neville, Plaice, Stephen, and Knight, Paul (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 3:1020Google Scholar.

30. Pathwings: Poetic-Philosophic Reflections on the Hermeneutics of Time and Language (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 2004); and Footdreams + Treetales: Ninety-Two Poems (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). A conference devoted to his painting was held at Rice University in November 2007.

31. Sartor Resartus (1836), in A Carlyle Reader, ed. G. B. Tennyson (New York: Modern Library, 1969), 129.