Reality in the Name of God, or Divine Insistence: An Essay on Creation, Infinity, and the Ontological Implications of Kabbalah

358 Pages·2012·5.24 MB·English

by  Noah Horwitz

Reality in the Name of God

REALITY IN THE NAME OF GOD, OR
DIVINE INSISTENCE

An Essay on Creation, Infinity, and the Ontological
Implications of Kabbalah

Noah Horwitz

punctum books (cid:1) brooklyn, ny
REALITY IN THE NAME OF GOD
© Noah Horwitz, 2012.

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First published in 2012 by punctum books, Brooklyn,
New York.

punctum books is an open-access and print-on-demand
independent publisher dedicated to radically creative
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whimsical para-humanities assemblage. We specialize
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ISBN-13: 978-1468096361

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is
available from the Library of Congress.

Facing-page drawing by Heather Masciandaro.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: From Kabbalah to 1
Correlationism and Beyond
§1. Creation and Infinity 1
§2. Cognitio Dei Experimentalis 2
§3. Our Dear Friend Atheism 5

CHAPTER ONE: Critique of Philosophical 13
Theology
§4. The Critique of Onto-theo-logy 13
§5. The Levinasian Lure 18
§6. The Thought of Jean-Luc Marion: Being 31
Given (only to human consciousness)
§7. Contra the Process Theologians 42
§8. An Imperfect Logic: Charles 51
Hartshorne’s Panentheism

CHAPTER TWO: The Kabbalah of Being 59
§9. Badiou’s First Thesis: Being is Sets 59
§10. What is an Extensional Set? 63
§11. The Second Thesis: ‘The One is Not’ 66
§12. The Infinite Made Finite: The Meaning 70
of the Transfinite
§13. Creation from Numbers (Sets/Letters): 78
The Sefirot
§14. Creation from Letters (Sets/Names): 86
Sefer Yetzirah
§15. The God of Cantorianism 97
§16. The Ontological/Modal Proof of 106
Divine Insistence
§17. Divine Insistence 112
§18. Nothingness/The Void and its Mark: 116
The Holy Name of God
§19. Tzimtzum: Creation of Nothing to 141
Create from Nothing
§20. The Name and the Names 158

CHAPTER THREE: ‘From It to Bit’: 169
Informational Ontology
§21. All is Mathematizable 169
§22: The Holy Name as the Primordial Bit: 175
An Ontology of Information
§23. Against the Ontology of the Virtual 196
(For it as Epistemology)
§24. Information Inside-Out: Mind and 223
Matter
§25. Is Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind of 253
Science a Science of Kabbalistic
Creation?

CHAPTER FOUR: The Resurrection of the 267
Dead and the Event of the Name
§26. Free Will 267
§27. Critique and Application: Quentin 272
Meillassoux and the Contingency of
Creation
§28. The Resurrection of the Dead 288
§29. The Event of the Name 311

EPILOGUE 325
§30. ‘On that Day, God and God’s Name will 325
be One’
§31. The Name of Prayer 330

WORKS CITED 335
ABBREVIATIONS

AF After Finitude
B Bergsonism
BE Being and Event
BG Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness
BST Badiou: A Subject to Truth
CM The Creative Mind
DR Difference and Repetition
E Ecrits: A Selection
FF The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis
Guide Guide for the Perplexed
GWB God Without Being
HDW How Do We Recognize Structuralism?
LP The Logic of Perfection
KC Kabbalah of Creation: The Mysticism of Isaac Luria,
Founder of Modern Kabbalah
MM Matter and Memory
NKS A New Kind of Science
PR Process and Reality
SP Speech and Phenomena
SY Sefer Yetzirah
TB The Bahir
TDR The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God
TI Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority
TO The Trace of the Other
Zohar Zohar: Pritzker Edition, Volume 1