Review
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”
Wolfson subjects the sexual elements to an unprecedented, and radical examination. This book is sure to be controversial and generate much discussion.– “–Choice”
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
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 FishbaneNathan Cummings Professor of Jewish StudiesThe University of Chicago, The University of Chicago Divinity School
About the Author
Elliot R. Wolfson is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Between 1987 and 2014, he was the Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton University Press, 1994); Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (Fordham University Press, 2005); A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (Zone Books, 2011); Giving Beyond the Goft: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (Fordham University Press, 2014); and The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (Columbia University Press, 2018).
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