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Kenotic Overflow and Temporal Transcendence Angelic Embodiment and the Alterity of Time in Abraham Abulafia E L L I O T R . W O L F S O N Tempus Discretum and the Eternal Return of What Has Never Been In a number of previously published studies, I have explored the phenomenon of time in kabbalistic literature from various perspectives.1 Needless to say, the permutations of this theme that may be gleaned from this variegated corpus are complex and multifaceted. Without denying that any attempt to represent the kabbalah as monolithic is prone to criticism, it seems to me nonetheless legitimate from the perspective of both the kabbalists ’ own hermeneutical practices and contemporary theoretical models to offer generalizations that are based on a plethora of specific textual sources. With regard to the notion of time, I am prepared to say in a general way that the intricate symbolic world of kabbalists defies the commonly held distinction between linear and circular time. I have, accordingly , dubbed the kabbalistic perspective by the paradoxical expressions ‘‘linear circularity’’ and ‘‘circular linearity,’’ expressions that are meant to convey the dual deportment of time as an extending line that rotates like a sphere or as a rotating sphere that extends like a line. Rendered in an even more appropriate geometric figure, we can speak of time as a swerve in which line and circle meet in the sameness of their difference. The convergence of line and circle can be thought from the vantage point of the confluence of the three modes of time in the moment: the present is determined by the past of the future that is yet to come as what 113 has already been, and by the future of the past that has already been what is yet to come. The pattern implied in these words suggests that past and future are to be viewed not as the starting point and finishing point of a closed circuit, but rather as termini of a path that is eternally bent, to paraphrase Nietzsche’s memorable locution, a path discerned anew from and in each and every moment, recurrently breaking through the cycle, beginning and end constantly refashioned by the intentional acts of retention and protention, tracks that crisscross eidetically in the midpoint of the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere .2 Alternatively expressed, kabbalists delineate time as the eternal overflow of a tempus discretum, the duration of the interruptive present in which past may be anticipated as future that has not yet come to pass, and future remembered as past that has not yet taken place. The texture of temporality can be understood better if one bears in mind that the perspective I am attributing to kabbalists may be considered an explication of a well-attested tradition that the Tetragrammaton, ostensibly beyond signification, signifies the compresence of past, present, and future, or, in the widespread Hebrew locution, hayah howeh we-yihyeh, ‘‘he was, he is, and he will be.’’3 The intent of this interpretative gloss is that within the immutable divine nature, the three modes of time are indistinguishable: he was before the time of creation, he is during the time of creation, and he will be after the time of creation, an apprehension that flies in the face of an experience of time predicated on a clear demarcation of past, present, and future.4 How does one account for all three tenses coexisting at the same temporal interval? Can we even speak meaningfully of an interval if a being is past, present, and future all at once? Contemplation of this seemingly imponderable idea helped foster the kabbalists’ notion of a time-that-is-not-time, a timeless time that ensues from the intersection of all three tenses in the moment, an equiprimordiality of past, present, and future that mimics the eternality of the divine ipseity,5 a time-out-of-time that, at all times, is comported temporally in the hereand -now by the recollected projection of the beginning discerned from the projected recollection of the end. In this conception, the tension that may arise from the doubleness of time as stretched and punctiform, to borrow the locution of Edith Wyschogrod,6 finds a resolution insofar as what is experienced phenomenologically as temporal continuity in reaching backward through memory and extending forward through anticipation is constructed hermeneutically in the moment that cuts the timeline by looping pastness, presentness, and futurity...

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