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The "Other Side" of Taboo: The Equidistant Sacred and Abject in the Zohar

Sun, December 16, 4:15 to 5:45pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 3 Ballroom

Abstract

Nowhere does the cultural-modernist lust for the convergence of "high" and "low" appear more symptomatically than in the wide diffusion of the "taboo" trope from its origins in Western anthropological fantasy. Freud gave the trope its most influential formulation, declaring that it signifies the "sacred" and the "consecrated," but also the "forbidden" and the "unclean," placing taboo at the center of his grand narrative of instinctual ambivalence. Whatever the source of its hold on the modernist imagination, taboo seems uncannily suited for framing certain aspects of Zoharic poetics and normativity. "If it is forbidden to gaze upon a holy, sublime place, how much more so upon a distanced, contaminated place!" (Zohar III:84b). One finds a closely related para-halakhic norm in the Zoharic prohibition to gaze upon an angry person, an act equivalent to idolatry since the text views the angry person as possessed by the demonic. Such prohibitions clearly evoke the biblical prohibition to gaze upon the divine, often cast in terms of divine wrath, the very source of the demonic in Zoharic myth. Such statements demand reflection not only on the nature of the visual and the transgression involved in the gaze, but on the parallel human stances toward the two "sides" of the cosmos, divine and demonic. The para-halakhic norms that apply equally to the two poles must also be read as artifacts of the drive in Zoharic poetics toward rhetorical parallelism between divine and demonic entities. Such phenomena suggest a convergence between experiences of the divine and the demonic - one further uncanny convergence between cultural-modernist and Zoharic phenomenology.

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