Jacob Frank: A Study in Transgression - Academia.edu (DOC) Jacob Frank A Study in Transgression

Jacob Frank's Dreams of Profanation Many of the sayings in Jacob Frank's The Collection of the Words of the Lord  take the form of dreams or visions — modes of speech that resist verification and refuse the binary of true and false. By casting revelation in this indeterminate register, Frank unsettles the epistemic and nomian boundaries that ordinarily separate the holy from the profane. If, as Carl Jung suggests, the unconscious might produce a dream “which proposes an irrat

Frankism's Androgynous Messiah Though Jacob Frank’s engagement with Jewish mystical literature was ambivalent, he appears to have drawn on a central motif of the Zohar. There, every soul is said to descend as a single, unified entity before being split into male and female upon entering the world, reunited only in marriage when (says the Zohar) “they again constitute one body and one soul, forming as it were the right and left of one individual.” This myth of primordial andro

Into the Field of Edom: Poland and the Frankist Imagination   For three millennia the lands of Israel and Judea have stood at the heart of Jewish national imagination. They are the terrain of biblical kings, the stage on which the Judeans confronted Rome, and the ground on which the modern State of Israel now stands. Everywhere else is spiritual and physical exile.  Against this backdrop, it is striking to discover that Poland, rather than Judea or Israel, held decisive signi

Re Joyce (James) O happy days Ireland does re joyce   A gnol a devol a nur reviv   Upfinnegan w/ (s)laughter   He hung up   St Jimmy O’Sinner of Dublin,   O fella no Bloom-  Ing flower, petals crushed   In Molly’s coddled bed   His ruptfirm godlike (Ya, H C E)  Twicer he hollowed onaphone   Linguefiction’s penman is Shaun to a quill,   Sing T, even stephen   She Anna runs along the river lippy yes now   Here she comes here comes   everybody  Now   Is yes

She Stands Alone She stands alone,   a single bulb lighting   an entire room,   the walls curved   into her private sphere.     No doors.   No windows.   No-one can break in.   Her world is the only world   and all things lie within her scope,   sealed within her soul.     Solitary appetites   she pursues   in consecrated isolation,   in this her sacristy,   her prison, her cell —   an inside   with no conceivable outside.

Private Language In / creasing thought, the self   doubles / folds  inwards,  suppose a private language  against the world’s shared grammar —   self-authored, a book   written for no .  one.    A page     torn away, stains     in the margins, a footnote    wrongly numbered, the letter ‘i’    faintly printed.      Such is the pain of the man  who yearns  for his whole self   between the covers of biography   and meets only   estrangement.

Dark Matter: Jacob Frank and Georges Bataille Jacob Frank remains one of the most unsettling figures in the history of religious thought — not simply because of his antinomian theatrics or his deliberate profanations, but because his teachings articulate a vision of matter that resists both classical gnosticism and rationalist secular materialism. While the gnostic imagination traditionally casts the material world as a prison to be escaped, Frank inverts the schema: matter b

Poetry Isn’t Trending   Out of fashion now —   The long hours spent   Making and doing,   Turning and shaping lines,   For a dwindling clientele   Of other poets and academics   Who might notice   The grain of a line,   A phrase honed smooth   Or left rough as timber.   No one else cares to look.     And yet the trade persists —   If trade is even the word —   Since there is nothing to gain.   A dying art   Like the fletching of arrows,   Or the mending of clocks   With a dex

Trigger Warning       This article examines the lives, writings, and legacies of Jacob Frank and the Marquis de Sade, including their engagements with sexual transgression, religious antinomianism, coercive practices, and violence. It discusses explicit themes such as sexual exploitation, ritualized power dynamics, and philosophical justifications of cruelty within historical contexts.     The analysis is scholarly, but the material may be disturbing or overwhelming for some

Dreams, Memories, Visions    Of life as a ‘story   of the self-realization   of the unconsciousness’ ... p. 17     Digging up bones   and a little light in fog ... pp. 104, 107     Walking through a valley   to hand a goddess an umbrella ... pp. 155, 161     § Of trees as the embodiments   of life’s incomprehensible meaning ... p. 86     The bitterness of Freud   and the analogy   with God ... pp. 75, 175     A white dove transformed   into the ghost   of a customs official .

The Beast Between the Marble and the Heap, Or: The Mammoth    Between the marble wall of City Hall   and the slow‑rotting heap   of broken crockery and dusty old books —   the beast stirred.     To think it once tore open the earth   with its tusks,   raising mountains,   or guarding the spirits of the underworld.     Now its fur rotted to a brittle husk —   the mammoth   preserved without reason —   the mammoth.     Among the first of God’s works,   it had been among us from

Between Messiah and Monster: A Brief Biography of Jacob Frank   Jacob Frank — born Jakub Lejbowicz in Podolia in 1726, then a province of Poland and now part of Ukraine — was the son of Leib Buchbinder and Rachel Hirschl. Through his father he inherited a link to the scandal‑ridden Sabbateans, the heterodox Jewish movement that continued to uphold the messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth‑century Ottoman rabbi, Kabbalist, and apostate whose doctrine of redemption

Pillars of Ash In the beginning Nature had no voice. Then the gods threw a pest Of fire called language Upon the world And are watching it as it blazes. Now fire clings to the palate, Burns the throat. The smoke of rhetoric smarts our eyes. Tongues of fire consume the page — Paper curling into ash, Perusing fingers sifting to ash, Bodies stiffening into ash, Pillars of ash that’ll topple and disperse In the coming wind and rain .

Before the Clocks Struck Three (Mr. Eliot Had an Apparition in Salford and It Was Very Foggy)   Salford is the rainiest place, getting   Inside my shoes, wetting   Tired feet in undarned socks.     Yesterday, before the clocks   Struck three, three old horses   Munched wet grass   Among the relics   Of Clifton’s Wet Earth Colliery:   Which on reflection,   Were beautiful objects   Of rust, time and toil.     Fog swirls, curls   Around the clock tower,   The quays, the trees —

The Art of Seeing: Visions of Manchester The seventeen works presented below originate from black-and-white photographs I captured across Greater Manchester many years ago. Through digital brushes and filters, these images have been reimagined and transformed, shifting from documentary records into expressive artworks. Each piece reflects both the architectural memory of place and the creative act of refashioning, where the familiar urban landscape is rendered anew in color,

The Irwell - a river poem Rock-solid ground loosens,    shifts to liquid,    slips fast away beneath my feet.      The water dreams of boats, of willow banks,    not a foul stream of refuse    but a seam alive with freshwater shrimp,    roach, and brown trout.      A mallard halts —    strums his feathers,    beats the air into rhythm,    poised to rise above this stretch,    this blue-lined artery    we call the River Irwell.

No God but the Gold Forged in the Furnace of Flesh: A Poem on Jacob Frank       Jakub Lejbowicz slithered east   Beneath a heretic’s curse.   A worm of rot, crowned in Ottoman dust,   He wore another man’s face —   Berukhiah reborn   Jacob Frank, Westerner of Podolia,   Messianic pretender.     In Salonica, blasphemy transmuted:   Sin kissed the breasts   Of someone else’s wife.   Torah pressed into palpable skin,   White fire turned utterly black.   Apostates writhed.   A th

Spinoza’s Hatchet and the Ethics of Objecthood      By Richard Mather       “For the only perfection and the final purpose [...] of an instrument is to duly fulfil the duties that are assigned to them. For instance, when a carpenter finds himself best served by his hatchet in the construction of a piece of work, then has his hatchet attained its end and perfection; but if he were to think, ‘This hatchet has now served me so well that I will let it rest and not require any mor

Opulent Absurdities:    The Aristocrat as Pataphysician       Lord Ardenforde opens a jewellery box to reveal  a platinum brooch, rhodium watch, immortal diamond choker;  and on the quiltwork, a tiger-eye necklace pendant.  Exclamations clamour as seven yellow balloons ascend  to the Taj Mahal painting that hangs from the ceiling beams.  Soap-skinned Valentine looks on astonished,  an obsequious grin dripping from his amazing hollow face.  Plush telephones purr polite