“Mystical Nihilism, Theopolitics, Ethics, and the Law Beyond Law” with Elliot Wolfson, UC Santa Barbara, Emeritus

 

This lecture will explore the notion of venturing to the law beyond the law particularly as it is implied by mystical nihilism. My argument pivots around the assumption that the skepticism of faith, endemic to nihilistic encounter with the nothing on the part of mystics, resonates with the insubordinate proclivity of the Jewish esoteric tradition, what I have referred to in my previous scholarship as the hypernomian trespassing of the boundary that preserves the very boundary that is trespassed. The shift in nomenclature from antinomianism to hypernomianism conveys that the mystical does not coerce an anarchic suspension of the law but rather its irresolute overcoming through relentless undergoing, the surpassing of the path by suffering its unremitting abiding. Kabbalistic sources impart the truism that release from the law is not attained by discarding the law but by executing the law with an intensity that pushes past its perimeter even as that perimeter is preserved in the act of defiance. The limitlessness of the hypernomian is thus confined within the limits of the nomos.

 

Elliot R. Wolfson, PhD, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies; and a Distinguished Professor of Religion 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).