Abstract
“Imaginal Bodies” heads the title of the paper Elliot Wolfson is scheduled to offer at a session on “Incarnation in Judaism and Christianity” at this year’s American Academy of Religion conference in Chicago (November 18-22). If you place that headline alongside the careful, critical textual reading you would expect to find in Wolfson’s work, then you may have an icon of the activity that characterizes some our members’ recent work in postmodern Jewish philosophy. It is an activity of reading foundational Jewish texts in a way that is informed, at once, by reasoned, disciplined criticism and by some presence (or presences) that somehow hovers over the reader, awakening this perception or that, urging this concern or that, and providing a relationship with respect to which criticism also upholds and imagining also discerns. One could redescribe the metaphysical, methodeutic, or grammatological descriptions offered by a variety of thinkers as offering different descriptions of this presence: Plato’s ideas; Philo’s principles or archetypes; the real signs or symbols emerging in the work of Augustine then Poinsot then Charles Peirce; Martin Buber’s basic word-pairs; Max Kadushin’s “value-concepts”; Garrett Green’s notion of the “paradigms” of the imagination that inform scriptural hermeneutics; Michael Fishbane’s notion of the mythopoesis that informs rabbinic midrash; Peirce’s notion, again, of the “leading principles” that inform acts of interpretation. Any of these might work to identify the presence that leads the critical but engaged or faithful reader, provided we imagine them embodied in the kind of presence that also merits the term “imaginal body” or, perhaps, spiritual body? The point may be restated this way. To account for the way some of our contributors write, it may not be enough to appeal, on the one hand, to some “method of reasoning” even a “postmodern” one nor, on the other hand, to some “emotive or personal engagement.” It might prove more convincing to refer to some relationship between an identifiable method of rational criticism and a less visible being that behaves at once like a concept (or, rather, a logos) and like a person.
Recommended Citation
"Old Series: Volume 3, Number 3 (October 1994)." Journal of Textual Reasoning Old Series: Vol. 3 (1994): 92-133. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/jtr/vol0/iss3/3