{"title":"Elliot Wolfson","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"language-eros-being-book-elliot-r-wolfson-9780823224197","title":"Language, Eros, Being","description":"This long-awaited, magisterial study-an unparalleled blend of philosophy, poetry, and philology-draws on theories of sexuality, phenomenology, comparative religion, philological writings on Kabbalah, Russian formalism, Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig, William Blake, and the very physics of the time-space continuum to establish what will surely be a highwater mark in work on Kabbalah. Not only a study of texts, Language, Eros, Being is perhaps the fullest confrontation of the body in Jewish studies, if not in religious studies as a whole.  Elliot R. Wolfson explores the complex gender symbolism that permeates Kabbalistic literature. Focusing on the nexus of asceticism and eroticism, he seeks to define the role of symbolic and poetically charged language in the erotically configured visionary imagination of the medieval Kabbalists. He demonstrates that the traditional Kabbalistic view of gender was a monolithic and androcentric one, in which the feminine was conceived as being derived from the masculine. He does not shrink from the negative implications of this doctrine, but seeks to make an honest acknowledgment of it as the first step toward the redemption of   an ancient wisdom.  Comparisons with other mystical traditions-including those in Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam-are a remarkable feature throughout the book. They will make it important well beyond Jewish studies, indeed, a must for historians of comparative religion, in particular of comparative mysticism.  Praise for Elliot R. Wolfson:  \"Through a Speculum That Shines is an important and provocative contribution   to the study of Jewish mysticism by one of the major scholars now working in this field.\"-Speculum","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50029769556241,"sku":"GOR013841302","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008634519825,"sku":"NIN9780823224197","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0823224198.jpg?v=1750849667"},{"product_id":"suffering-time-philosophical-kabbalistic-and-hasidic-reflections-on-temporality-book-elliot-r-wolfson-9789004449336","title":"Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic Reflections on Temporality","description":"No one theory of time is pursued in these essays, but 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 by Wolfson from a host of philosophical and mystical sources--both Jewish and non-Jewish--buttresses 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 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50029943456017,"sku":"GOR013841475","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9004449337.jpg?v=1768560541"},{"product_id":"alef-mem-tau-book-elliot-wolfson-9780520246195","title":"Alef, Mem, Tau","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50045012902161,"sku":"GOR013844116","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53521279484177,"sku":"NLS9780520246195","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0520246195.jpg?v=1750697870"},{"product_id":"dream-interpreted-within-a-dream-book-elliot-r-wolfson-9781935408147","title":"A Dream Interpreted within a Dream","description":"An exploration of the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness.Dreams have attracted the curiosity of humankind for millennia. In A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, Elliot Wolfson guides the reader through contemporary philosophical and scientific models to the archaic wisdom that the dream state and waking reality are on an equal phenomenal footing--that the phenomenal world is the dream from which one must awaken by waking to the dream that one is merely dreaming that one is awake. By interpreting the dream within the dream, one ascertains the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness. Assuming that the manner in which the act of dreaming is interpreted may illuminate the way the interpreter comprehends human nature more generally, Wolfson draws on psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and neuroscience to elucidate the phenomenon of dreaming in a vast array of biblical, rabbinic, philosophical, and kabbalistic texts.To understand the dream, Wolfson writes, it is necessary to embrace the paradox of the fictional truth--a truth whose authenticity can be gauged only from the standpoint of its artificiality. The dream, on this score, may be considered the semblance of the simulacrum, wherein truth is not opposed to deception because the appearance of truthfulness cannot be determined independently of the truthfulness of appearance.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50099068240145,"sku":"GOR013854764","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50403917562129,"sku":"CIN1935408143G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51056922231057,"sku":"NIN9781935408147","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53272951587089,"sku":"CIN1935408143VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1935408143.jpg?v=1750726872"},{"product_id":"footdreams-and-treetales-book-elliot-r-wolfson-9780823228201","title":"Footdreams and Treetales","description":"Footdreams and Treetales is a collection of ninety-two poems spanning several decades. Like paintings that attempt to render visible the invisible, the poems reflect Wolfson’s interests in philosophy, the history of religions, and, in particular, the mystical dimensions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism.   Although explicit references to the divine are rarely found in the poems, they issue from an encounter with the mystery of transcendence, performatively embodying the dialectic of concealment and disclosure.  Seeking to articulate the unsaying that makes possible all saying, a response always on the way, a word as yet unspoken, these poems can be imagined in liturgical terms. They do not utter words of conventional prayer but are a contemplative gaze at what eludes contemplation—a present that comes to be in the future awaiting its past. For Wolfson, the poem is an opening to time, which is, at once, an embrace of life and a preparation for death.   friday’s hymn  pour oil on my head,  before the burning ends,  let us rise to count the minutes,  to dot the hours,  let us rise to wake the children  who must bury the dead.  night approaches day,  neither black nor white,  her sun is my moon.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50276744855825,"sku":"CIN0823228207G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008540868881,"sku":"NIN9780823228201","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0823228207.jpg?v=1751076747"},{"product_id":"apophasis-and-envisioning-the-invisible-book-elliot-r-wolfson-9789004744356","title":"Apophasis and Envisioning the Invisible","description":"In this monograph, two of the most complicated theoretical topics confronting the scholar of mysticism (apophasis and infinity) are tackled. Writing about apophasis presents a unique dilemma as the term itself connotes the inability of language to name the namelessness of ultimate reality. Yet, the apophatic is a gesture of speaking-not, which entails saying the unsayable, as opposed to not speaking, which is the reticence appropriate to silence. The exploration of infinity presents an equally daunting demand as the intellect embarking on this path is summoned to circumscribe the uncircumscribable. Just as communicating the incommunicable is an endless enterprise of speaking the unspeakable, so mapping infinity is an unremitting pursuit of delimiting the limitless. The two subjects thus intersect at the vanishing point where the human mind reaches its limit by confronting the limitlessness that can be described only as indescribable.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53056645431569,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53056645529873,"sku":"NIN9789004744356","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9789004744356.jpg?v=1769508454"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/de-ch\/collections\/autor-buecher-von-elliot-wolfson.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}