Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis

Description

While many scholars have noted Martin Heidegger’s indebtedness to Christian mystical sources, as well as his affinity with Taoism and Buddhism, Elliot R. Wolfson expands connections between Heidegger’s thought and kabbalistic material. By arguing that the Jewish esoteric tradition impacted Heidegger, Wolfson presents an alternative way of understanding the history of Western philosophy. Wolfson’s comparison between Heidegger and kabbalah sheds light on key concepts such as hermeneutics, temporality, language, and being and nothingness, while yielding surprising reflections on their common philosophical ground. Given Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism and his use of antisemitic language, these innovative readings are all the more remarkable for their juxtaposition of incongruent fields of discourse. Wolfson’s entanglement with Heidegger and kabbalah not only enhances understandings of both but, more profoundly, serves as an ethical corrective to their respective ethnocentrism and essentialism. Wolfson masterfully illustrates the redemptive capacity of thought to illuminate common ground in seemingly disparate philosophical traditions. Dedication Epigraphs Contents Introduction: Belonging Together of the Foreign 1. Hermeneutic Circularity: Tradition as Genuine Repetition of Futural Past 2. Inceptual Thinking and Nonsystematic Atonality 3. Heidegger’s Seyn/Nichts and Kabbalistic Ein Sof 4. Ṣimṣum, Lichtung, and Bestowing Refusal 5. Autogenesis, Nihilating Leap, and Otherness of the Not-Other 6. Temporalizing and Granting Time-Space 7. Disclosive Language: Poiēsis and Apophatic Occlusion of Occlusion 8. Ethnolinguistic Enrootedness and Invocation of Historical Destiny Bibliography Index