Giving Beyond the Gift : Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania / Elliot R. Wolfson.
Wolfson, Elliot R., author.
2014
B5800 .W65 2014eb
Available Online

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Title Giving Beyond the Gift : Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania / Elliot R. Wolfson.
Author Wolfson, Elliot R., author.
ISBN 9780823255733
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823255733
Published New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2014]
Copyright ©2014
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (576 p.)
Item Number 10.1515/9780823255733 doi
Call Number B5800 .W65 2014eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 181/.06
Summary This book explores the co-dependency of monotheism and idolatry by examining the thought of several prominent twentieth-century Jewish philosophers-Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. While all of these thinkers were keenly aware of the pitfalls of scriptural theism, to differing degrees they each succumbed to the temptation to personify transcendence, even as they tried either to circumvent or to restrain it by apophatically purging 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.The inquiry into apophasis, transcendence, and immanence in these Jewish thinkers is symptomatic of a larger question. Recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition to construct a viable postmodern negative theology, a religion without religion, are not radical enough. Not only are these philosophies of transcendence guilty of a turn to theology that defies the phenomenological presupposition of an immanent phenomenality, but they fall short on their own terms, inasmuch as they persist in employing metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence and thereby runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other.The logic of apophasis, if permitted to run its course fully, would exceed the need to posit some form of transcendence that is not ultimately a facet of immanence. Apophatic theologies, accordingly, must be supplanted by a more far-reaching apophasis that surpasses the theolatrous impulse lying coiled at the crux of theism, an apophasis of apophasis, based on accepting an absolute nothingness-to be distinguished from the nothingness of an absolute-that does not signify the unknowable One but rather the manifold that is the pleromatic abyss at being's core. Hence, the much-celebrated metaphor of the gift must give way to the more neutral and less theologically charged notion of an 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.
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System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
In Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
Available in Other Form print 9780823255702
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Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Imagination and the Prism of the Inapparent
1. Via Negativa and the Imaginal Configuring of God
2. Apophatic Vision and Overcoming the Dialogical
3. Echo of the Otherwise and the Lure of Theolatry
4. Secrecy of the Gift and the Gift of Secrecy
5. Immanent Atheology and the Trace of Transcendence
6. Undoing (K)not of Apophaticism: A Heideggerian Afterthought
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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