A Secular Kabbalah
“Every question possessed a power that was lost in its answer,” a Rabbi tells Elie Wiesel at the beginning of his memoir Night (1956).
I first encountered this idea from Elie Wiesel himself, when I saw him speak in Vancouver BC in 2015, and I would be remiss if I did not confess that this statement has had a profound effect upon me to this day. One could say that it forms the essential interrogative stance of both Kabbalah and psychoanalysis; an attempt to remain within the power of the question. The subtlety and nuance of Freud’s style resides within this tradition and that continues throughout the psychoanalytic literature. See for example the hem and haw style of Adam Philips as an example of this intentional undecidability.
One way of historicizing the psychoanalytic project—that has only just struck me like yesterday—is as a form of secular Kabbalah; that is, as the practice of a Kabbalah stripped of all transcendence; a Kabbalah without god. Freud’s great mystical insight is that the other world intuited by the mystics, is less transcendent than radically immanent; rather more intimate and more real than we can ever know or understand, and yet one that unilaterally determines the psyche in the last instance. In my view he borrowed this other world directly from the Kabbalah.
A growing body of literature has been tracing the historical relation between Kabbalah and psychoanalysis. While Freud could be rather coy at times regarding his Jewish origins, and—as far as I know—never mentions Kabbalah by name, it is becoming increasingly apparent that he knew a great deal about both the Torah and the Kabbalah as practiced in the Hasidic communities of Mitteleuropa in and around where he grew up; his father came from an Hasidic family after all. This literature claims that everything that is magical and strange in psychoanalysis, every unexpected reversal and spatial inversion, all the inverted worlds, and every hidden truth, finds its origin in the millennia spanning tradition of Kabbalah. So much so that the Hegelian dialectics that Lacan and Zizek read into Freud amount to a kind of white-washing of this most esoteric of Jewish mystical practices; for is not dialectics just a cheap Teutonic hermeticism?
Borges gave an extemporaneous lecture on the Kabbalah and declared that he hardly had the right to speak of such matters. I am perhaps no less an imposter. Nevertheless the strange connections between my chosen profession and these arcane techniques are too peculiar to pass without mention.
Here is a rough outline of the Kabbalistic cosmos.
In the beginning only god existed, the Ein Sof, the unthinkable godhead. God created from nothing—Ayin—the torah says and the Kabbalists take this literally so that the Ein Sof godhead is itself a void and pure nothingness even while being the absolute plenary source of all creation; it’s the extreme form of the apophatic god of negative theology, remaining totally indifferent and prior to any representation whatsoever.
But the godhead was lonely, or bored maybe, and so he created a void within himself, a womb the size of the universe and into this womb he places creation, which form a series of nested vessels; the zim zum. Into these vessels of creation he places the dude Adam Kadmon, who is meant to redeem the creation, (and by doing so redeeming God, who is kind of fucked up in that way), but Adam Kadmon neglects his duty by, instead, getting it on with Eve.
At this point all hell lets loose, which is not hell but rather the incinerating light of god that shatters the vessels and scatters shards of divinity all over creation and so it is now the destiny of the elected few—for example the Hasidic rabbis of Williamsburg—to collect the scattered divine sparks of the deity and so redeem the godhead’s manifestation upon earth. The godhead is continually emanating this incinerating light and it is only the pure of heart, who have studied torah for decades and have been ritually cleansed many times, who can withstand the rays of god and apprehend the worldly manifestations of the divine and unthinkable void as they appear in the guise of emanations, the saphires, or sephirot, each organized along a human shape.
The historian notes that Kabbalah, in its written form, was developed as a direct response to exile, in particular when the Jews were banished from catholic Spain in the 13th century. That is, the Kabbalah is essentially a very complicated clandestine practice by which to process or understand the nature of evil: or as the religious-studies nerds like to say, a theodicy. Eli Wiesel’s Night is one such text, located within the Kabbalistic universe, exploring the divine paradox that it is only when God is most absent that he reveals his true presence.
While a complete comparison between psychoanalysis and kabbalah has filled a number of books, and no doubt will fill more, I will note here only a few points of interest, strong continuities between the disparate practices. Adam Philips has suggested recently that for any psychoanalyst Freud has no precursor; on the contrary, I argue that Freud’s preeminant precursor are the countless scribes of Jewish esoteric mystical practice.
1. As Without so Within: The peculiar structure of the subject, as laid out by psychoanalysis, found in Jung no less than Lacan’s extimate taurus, is an hermetic structure that can probably be traced to the neoplatonists, if not far older. Kabbalah has adapted this structure, so that the world, as it is encountered by the mystical scholar, is laden with revelatory meaning, the radiating emanations from the divine void.
Freud’s notion of endopsychic perception is the point where this inside=outside structure is made explicit in his new science of psychoanalysis. I have written at length on this concept here. It is the perception of an unknowable psychical reality, cast outwards in the figurations of mythology, fantasy, the uncanny, paranoid delusion; in short, the full panoply of your own constellation of meaning is the reflection of a mystery. This is summed up by the old hermetic saw, as above so below. Using this same esoteric formula Freud may read into the metaphysics of the Kabbalah and extract metapsychology: the unconscious is the plenary/void, a seething cauldron, inaccessible to thought; the continual pressure of the drive is an emanation from the void; fantasy, dreams and parapraxes, repetition and negation are each the manifest figures of these latent emanations, the shards of an unthinkable reality. The void itself, of course, resides under the star infantile amnesia.
2. Nachträglichkeit: The structure of endopsychic perception, when placed into time, becomes nachträglichkeit; deferred action, or après coup: it is pure belatedness: what we are always waking up into. The common phrase from critical theory “always already” is the time of Kabbalah, the time of exile and the essence of the nachträglich; it is the situation that we find ourselves in, if we find ourselves at all. Awakening, if we ever do, to a catastrophe that has already happened. We wake up into a gloaming lit by unconscious fantasy. This is not the movement of dialectic but rather a unilateral determination. We are determined in the last instance by a dynamic force that remains inscrutable, that is foreclosed to thought; as Freud says, it is overdetermined. Thought, and by that I mean, any human thought whatsoever, tends to be late, not to mention reactionary.
3. The Linguistic Turn: But from out of the catastrophe proceeds all of creation. Kabbalah is a supreme idealism: the Hebrew alphabet precedes creation; words are more real than what they are supposed to represent. When Freud speaks, regularly, of the “magic of words,” he may as well be speaking of a Talmudic magic. I first encountered the Kabbalah as it was refracted through the French post-structuralisms of Derrida, Levi-Strauss, and Lacan. Each of these in turn, of course, are refracted emanations from Freud in what has become known as the linguistic turn. But the Kabbalists made this turn long ago. If the Kabbalah is founded upon a sacred book, in Freud’s psychoanalysis the patient becomes this book. Latent and manifest meanings, esoteric and exoteric, are entangled in the speech of the patient, to be loosened and untied, interpreted by the Talmudic analysis of psyche.
The word Kabbalah means received, or reception: in psychoanalysis we are all the receivers of a meaning that has inscribed us, from within and without always already. But the magic of words is the power of creation, as when god spoke and the universe emerged out of nothing. Time and again Freud will describe how the use of language—the drive as our “mythology”—allows us to apprehend the truth of the other world that is our psychical reality. While we have all been inscribed by exile, in the last analysis we are each the arbiter of our own meaning.
Neon Genesis Evangelion, 1995, Sefirot, Tree of life
“It is easy to imagine, too, that certain mystical practices may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for instance, perception may be able to grasp happenings in the depths of the ego and in the id which were otherwise inaccessible to it. It may safely be doubted, however, whether this road will lead us to the ultimate truths from which salvation is to be expected. Nevertheless it may be admitted that the therapeutic efforts of psycho-analysis have chosen a similar line of approach,” Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 1933.
