A Poetic Mythology for an Age of Anger?
The Furious Construction of Subjectivity in 13th-Century Kabbalah

This event occurred on:  In the face of our current “Age of Anger,” Nathaniel Berman turns to the poetic mythology of the Jewish esoteric tradition – replete with tales of the crucial role of fury in the formation of divine, demonic, and human subjectivity.  The Zohar, kabbalah’s central text, declares, “there is anger – and – there is anger”:  foregrounding anger’s often ambivalent role, both igniting destructive hatred and impelling demands for social justice.  Examining Zoharic mythology from rhetorical and psychoanalytic perspectives, Berman shows how it provides a productive language for perennial features of the human condition. 
Dr. Samantha Hill (Political Studies, Hannah Arendt Center) will be responding to the paper.