Overview

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.

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Elliot R. Wolfson, is Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Distinguished Professor of Religion Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of many publications including most recently The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism and the Jewish Other (2018); Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (2019); Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality (2021); The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope (2023); and Nocturnal Seeing: Hopelessness of Hope and Philosophical Gnosis in Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod (2025).

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