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This book grapples with the extent to which several twentieth-century Jewish thinkers—Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas—were all keenly aware of the pitfalls of scriptural theism and the penchant of the human imagination to conjure false representations of transcendence, and yet, in differing degrees, they each gave in to the temptation of personifying that transcendence, even as they tried either to circumvent or to restrain it by apophatically purging the kataphatic descriptions of the deity. Derrida and Wyschogrod, by contrast, carried the project of denegation one step further, embarking on a path that culminated in the aporetic suspension of belief and the consequent removal of all images from God, a move that seriously compromises the viability of devotional piety. Following the path of these thinkers, the book calls for a more far-reaching apophasis that surpasses the theolatrous impulse that lies coiled in the crux of theism, an apophasis of the apophasis, based on the acceptance of an absolute nothingness—to be distinguished from the nothingness of an absolute—that does not signify the unknowable One but the manifold that is the pleromatic abyss at being’s core. On this score, the much celebrated metaphor of the gift would give way to the more neutral and less theologically charged notion of an irreducible and unconditional givenness in which the distinction between giver and given collapses. To think givenness in its most elemental phenomenological sense is to allow the apparent to appear as given without presuming a causal agency that would turn that given into a gift.
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).
—Aaron W. Hughes:“This is a wonderful contribution to the field of philosophy and theology by one of the most important thinkers writing in English. His command of the material is masterful and his argument persuasive. It is outstanding and a real intellectual tour de force."
—Kevin Hart:We are used to apophatic theology in the service of Christianity. Here, though, Elliot Wolfson brings his deep knowledge of Kabbalah and modern Jewish thought to a rich consideration of apophaticism in Judaism. His readings of Buber, Cohen, Derrida, Levinas, Rosenzweig, and Wyschogrod are nothing less than riveting, as are his readings of thinkers such as Heidegger and Marion. This is a book that all students of modern Jewish thought and its interactions with European philosophy will want to read.
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