“Mystical Nihilism, Theopolitics, Ethics, and the Law Beyond Law” with Elliot Wolfson

The lecture will explore the notion of venturing to the law beyond the law particularly as it is implied by mystical nihilism. My argument pivots around the assumption that the skepticism of faith, endemic to nihilistic encounter with the nothing on the part of mystics, resonates with the insubordinate proclivity of the Jewish esoteric tradition, what I have referred to in my previous scholarship as the hypernomian trespassing of the boundary that preserves the very boundary that is trespassed. The shift in nomenclature from antinomianism to hypernomianism conveys that the mystical does not coerce an anarchic suspension of the law but rather its irresolute overcoming through relentless undergoing, the surpassing of the path by suffering its unremitting abiding. Kabbalistic sources impart the truism that release from the law is not attained by discarding the law but by executing the law with an intensity that pushes past its perimeter even as that perimeter is preserved in the act of defiance. The limitlessness of the hypernomian is thus confined within the limits of the nomos.
Elliot R. Wolfson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Distinguished Professor of Religion Emeritus at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of many publications including Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (1994); Along the Path: Studies in Kabbalistic Myth, Symbolism, and Hermeneutics (1995); Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (1995); Abraham Abulafia—Kabbalist and Prophet: Hermeneutics, Theosophy, and Theurgy (2000); Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (2005); Venturing Beyond—Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (2006); Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (2006); Luminal Darkness: Imaginal Gleanings From Zoharic Literature (2007); Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (2009); A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (2011); Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (2014); The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (2018); Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (2019); Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality (2021); The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope (2023); Nocturnal Seeing: Hopelessness of Hope and
Philosophical Gnosis in Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod (2025); Apophasis and Envisioning the Invisible: Unveiling Veils of Infinity (2026).