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. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0, or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. 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 modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. We specialize in neo-traditional and non-conventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms. This is a space for the imp-orphans of thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds. 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