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

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

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

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

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

Wittgenstein's Willing Subject: How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life [complete] New on Academia.edu (DOC) Wittgenstein's Willing Subject: How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life [complete]

Ludwig Wittgenstein Wittgenstein's Willing Subject: How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life (Part One) New monograph on Academia.edu...

A Vagabond Jew from Lithuania: A Poem on Salomon Maimon It took a vagabond Jew from Lithuania   to strike the wick that Königsberg’s sage   had hid and let go out in dark’s old age.     Said the synagogue’s rude son:   Let there be German with a Yiddish tongue ,   and from his restless mind   concepts flowed   like fire onto the page.     With quid facti?  and  quid juris?    as his lamps,   he lit the lecture halls   and shadowed nooks   of Europe with flame incandescent,  

The soul of the king an out-of-tune lyre with harpstrings for guts – many sharps and flats. Sent by the LORD the holy pneuma's hand scrapes unholy noise. It maddens the king with dissonant thought – the fatal vibration of blood in the heart until he is dead.

God turns -- and the fishes dance blue gold silver beneath a yellow sky. Another turn, the boughs of thick trees become as air: invisibly...

Cometh the Lion    Cometh the Lion, cometh the hour.   On his head is my name; on his back is my power.   The time is narrow, and the world is wide   And the Lion comes now with a spear in his side.     Look how he bleeds; his flesh is a prize   For the cross-hearted hunter with blood in his eyes   (Brimming red in the heat of the noon)   And vowing to return by the light of the moon.     ‘Come follow me,’ the Lion commands,   ‘Or the hunter will come and hack off your hands.

When we were there in the crooked hell of that scarlet and black room, the world was a useless idol broken and beyond repair. But now we...

Photo credit: Rachel Posner / Posner Family Estate, courtesy of Shulamit Mansbach, Haifa, Israel / yadvashem.org “Our holiday has been...

The Moses Tree From the tangle of its roots, To the nests in its hair The tree blazed white and blue. And the tree sang the Lord’s name...

And so the gods of lead and brass, The idols and their thrones, The teraphim made of fibreglass The mummified skulls and bones, Are...

By lamp and by oil, we hunger the hours as the dusk's frost sets in. There is time: The trucks to Treblinka are not ready yet and...

Prayer hall inside the Grand Choral Synagogue It is It is a place, It is a place, Makom, It is a place, Makom, where animal and man,...

When He planted in the earth a tree of life, a tree of death (the latter with a curse of woe) did God say that this was good? And when He...

Yehudah, I Make You Mine From out of the banks of the muddy  Jordan River, I make you  Mine.  Into shape I press the grit, into shape I...