Elliot Robert

2011 · ref. 199916 — New York: Zone Books 2011. Hardcover. Good DJ and boards have light edgewear/scuffing/smudging; DJ has a remanant of a sticker at the rear; textblock edges are scuffed/smudged; interior is clean; binding is solid. Light green illustrated DJ with blue purple and white lettering; black cloth boards with gilt lettering; 566 pp. "Wolfson utilizes psychoanalysis phenomenology literary theory and neuroscience to elucidate the oneiric phenomenon in a vast array of biblical rabbinic philosophical and kabbalistic texts. No one morphology of the dream phenomenon is either sufficient or comprehensive. Rather Wolfson proposes a linguistic archaeology of the dream a philosophically inflected excavation of a psychological phenomenon that celebrates the contingent and ambiguous as signifiers of truth conceived as proportionate to but not prescribed by nature. As such the dream is classified as the immanentizing transcendence under the sign of the imaginary. Through close readings Wolfson interprets the mythologic of dreams. He discovers therein how and in what form dreams uniquely display the concurrence of purportedly contradictory and incongruent images. To heed the cadence of the dream is therefore to appropriate a calculus of the noncalculable and to embrace the paradox of fictional truth whose authenticity can be gauged only from the standpoint of its artificiality. Through Wolfson's artful lucid and erudite readings the dream is shown to be an imaginal excessiveness at once foreseeable but unprecedented the semblance of the simulacrum wherein truth does not oppose deception wherein the appearance of truthfulness is impossible to determine independently of the truthfulness of appearance."-- Publisher description. Zone Books hardcover books