Merleau-Ponty Continued

With the continual recreation of time and therefore its perpetual incompleteness, the world of perception and language also meet their limits. The language of perception and the perception of language express their mutual affinity for one and other as a cornerstone for Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Wolfson notes this. In his prologue, whole volumes of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophic work are distilled down to a few sentences that nonetheless make a huge impact. Wolfson introduces the notion of the chiasm from Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible to illustrate the interlocking nature of perception and language in the following mediation:

Indeed, as Merleau-Ponty insists, the dynamics of perception and syntax of language are both chiasmic ; just as no word can render meaning so transparent that the need for interpretation is eradicated, so the gap that abides between seer and seen assures one that what one is seeing will never be the whole of it. (22)

Photo by Nava Crispe 2012

The work of interpretation can never be circumnavigated nor prematurely aborted. Successful criticism demands a sustained effort that must focus less on the achievement of a single end then on the perpetuating of the process. For those familiar with kabbalistic literature with all of its internal radical hermeneutics, the conversion of the goal into the process shouldn’t come as a surprise. The hallmark of so many of the texts of Jewish mystical literature has always been their self-sanctioned requirement for reinterpretation, heaping commentary upon commentary out of the fecundity of an infinite conversation.

Although it is outside the scope of our present discussion, a topic to be saved for more sustained treatment in another work would be to outline the range of internal interpretative approaches within the expositors of kabbalistic tradition. I would project that, in many cases—either within the life’s work of a particular mystic or within the framework of a particular kabbalistic text—one will discover both a classical philology in progress as well as the play of anachronistic hermeneutics.

These parallels to “outside” academic methodology suggest that the once iron clad distinction between the “inside” and “outside” of perspectives within a field of study (all the more so with the study of this mystical tradition) do not hold up under scrutiny. Are we not consequently exiled outside the distinction between “inside” and “outside”? Perhaps this new place or non-place marks the movement of redemption rather than exile? We find cause for reflection when we hear the sounds of modernity and post-modernity reverberating in the text of Hasidic master R’ Moses Hayyim Ephrayyim called Degel Mahaneh ‘Efrayyim where:

The innovation of the deed of creation is [tantamount to] the innovation of the world that [the people of] Israel are innovating each and every day by their innovations of the Torah, as I heard from my grandfather, blessed be his memory, that the book of the Zohar has each and every day another interpretation, as it is written in the Gemara, “I have put my words in your mouth” “to fix the heavens in place and form the earth, and say to Zion: You are my people.” Do not read ‘ami [my people] but ‘imi [with me] with a hiriq, which means by cooperation: Just as I create heavens and earth by speech, you also [can do] so. And the meaning of the verse “I have put my words in your mouth” in order to “fix the heavens in place and form the earth” by the innovation that Israel are innovating in the Torah of Truth, and all the things that are emerging in the world, emerge by the innovation of the Torah that Israel are innovating by their looking into [the Torah] in accordance to their innovation in the Torah, so is the innovation in the world…In accordance with the innovations that they innovate while they learn and study, so does the Holy One, Blessed be He, innovate the deed of creation. (23)

We can keep our options open, open to the creative process of interpretation running through the course of time. Each day will bring its own innovations, innovations that can potentially shake and change heaven and earth, self and society, text and history. This openness depends on recognizing a new benchmark in the methodology of scholarly approaches to Jewish mysticism—one in which I certainly feel more at home with—where as Wolfson’s prologue has shown, there are alternatives whose time has arrived, the time of a prologue which has redefined the meaning of a prologue, where:

Suffice it to say, however, that if linearity is not the determinative characteristic of time, common sense and pragmatic concern notwithstanding, then there is no compelling reason to privilege a hermeneutical approach based on a serialized conception of history as the only or even the best way to narrate the historical account. (24)

Armed with these newly acquired time sensitivities, I suspect that the academic study of Jewish mysticism is in for a turn. A turn or re-turn forged from the desire to know that “time, on this account, is at once the partition that bridges and the bridge that partitions.” (25)

This assessment strikes at the heart of the limits of temporality that impede the historian while promising the transcendence of these limits. Perhaps, it would be more acceptable to say that transcendence is itself a limit. If we compare transcendence to the bridge and the partition to the limit then we may reformulate this paradox as a case where the establishment of a limit already implies its transcendence—as though one cannot fix a fence without straddling both sides simultaneously. So too, transcendence of limits might be understood as the limiting of limits—as the exception that both proves and transgresses the rule. Cultivating an awareness of this twist of logic means many more experiences can be illuminated, histories written and narratives recounted till the poetics of Kabbalah resonate with greater and greater fidelity. The full range of applications of this method are still cooking.

²² Ibid. p.xxiii.

²³ Degel Mahaneh ‘Efrayyim as quoted and translated in Moshe Idel’s Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation. p. 41.

²⁴ Ibid. p. xxiv.

²⁵ Ibid. p. xxvi.

Bibliography

Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Translated by John Felstiner. New York: Norton, 2001.

Dastur, Francoise. Telling Time: Sketch of a Phenomenological Chrono-logy. Translated by Edward Bullard. London: Athlone Press, 2000.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2004

Idel, Moshe. Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Rosenthal, Sandra B. Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy: A Pragmatic Engagement with Contemporary Perspectives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Wolfson, Elliot R. Language Eros Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005

Wood, David. The Deconstruction of Time. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001.

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