Forwarded | Elliot Wolfson Book Talks

Panel Discussion With Elliot Wolfson,
Bettina Bergo, and Shaul Magid

January 30, 2025, 3-5pm, Conference Room, CSWR
Registration is required. Please REGISTER to attend.

This book panel will focus on Elliot R. Wolfson’s book Nocturnal Seeing: Hope of Hopelessness and Philosophical Gnosis by Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod (Stanford University Press, 2025).

As Wolfson articulates, these three philosophers exemplify a philosophical sensibility informed by nocturnal seeing, which is not merely seeing in the night but rather seeing of the night. Ultimately, the book reveals the potential for these thinkers’ ideas to enhance our
moral sensitivity and encourage participation in the ongoing struggle for meaning and decency in the present.

The event will feature a presentation by the author, Elliot Wolfson, CSWR Visiting Scholar in Jewish Studies, Mysticism and Philosophy of Religion, and a discussion with Shaul Magid, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and Bettina Bergo,
assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola College.

Elliot Wolfson Book Talk:
Infinity at the Perimeter of Thought, Silence at the Edge of Language

Thursday, January 30, 2025 5:30–7pm
CSWR Common Room
Registration is required. Please REGISTER to attend.

In this lecture, Elliot R. Wolfson, CSWR Visiting Scholar in Jewish Studies, Mysticism and Philosophy of Religion, will introduce his new monograph Unveiling Veils of Infinitivity: Philosophic and Kabbalistic Ruminations on Apophasis and Envisioning the Invisible. Wolfson argues that the two subjects, infinity and apophasis, intersect at the vanishing point where the human mind reaches its limit by confronting the limitlessness that can be described only as indescribable. “To speak of the nothing of infinity is a far greater challenge than to have nothing of which to speak. If the cessation of speech is the goal of the mystical path that culminates in cogitating the nature of infinity beyond comprehension and linguistification, then muteness would be the appropriate response. But, in fact, the way of the mystic demands the much more difficult task of speaking the unspeakable.”
ELLIOT R. WOLFSON, PhD, CSWR Visiting Scholar in Jewish Studies, Mysticism and Philosophy of Religion, 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 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).