A ``distant'' (as opposed to ``close'') reading of the Hebrew Bible via a largely unfocused use of gender and other modern and postmodern analytical categories. Eilberg-Schwartz (The Savage in Judaism, not reviewed) speculates on the sociopsychological, theological, and literary implications for male monotheists of the Bible's apparently male God. Despite its provocative title, God's Phallus really is about the absence—which the author sometimes refers to as the ``veiling''—of male genitalia and other physiological characteristics in the biblical imagery of God. Eilberg-Schwartz nevertheless repeatedly overinterprets biblical and postbiblical texts so as to read into them a ``homoeroticism that was always latent in Israelite theology.'' He does so using a bouillabaisse of Freudian, Lacanian, feminist, gay, and other critical perspectives. He postulates a homosexual tension between God and men, but what the meaning is of this tension being ``latent'' (in the Freudian sense) the author never makes clear, often allowing his considerable gift for interpretive pyrotechnics to overwhelm a more considered approach to how the first monotheists actually thought about God and their religious texts. In addition, he focuses almost exclusively on the psychosexual aspects of the divine-human male relationship, too rarely acknowledging the larger emotional and religious context that includes feelings of awe, fear, dependence, and estrangement. Eilberg-Schwartz can be dismayingly literalist, seeing the ancient rabbis' and others' allegories on, and often fanciful interpretations of, biblical texts as having practical implications for male Jews when in fact they were often speculative explorations. Despite a few fine passages, e.g., a comparison of how genital injuries may have affected the lives of Jacob and Moses, Eilberg-Schwartz has produced an exasperating work. This is an object lesson in what can happen when a versatile scholar draws on the tools of critical theory too much and reflects on the actual texts—and their authors' premodern contexts—too little.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8070-1224-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
For Ligotti fans and fellow pessimists, here’s affirmation that “their only respite is in the balm of bleakness.”
A writer of supernatural horror stories illuminates the darkest horror of all in this nonfiction affirmation of negativity.
An award-winning cult favorite, Ligotti (The Spectral Link, 2014, etc.) doesn’t write horror simply to scare readers. On the basis of this unsettling tract—which draws from philosophy, metaphysics, neuroscience, literature, and literary criticism—his horror fiction proceeds from a deep belief that existence itself is a horror show and that procreation is at best an illusion and at worst a crime against humanity. The author’s viewpoint is uncompromisingly bleak; he finds seemingly kindred spirits such as Nietzsche to be a little too sunny. “Existence,” writes Ligotti, “is a condition with no redeeming qualities.” He understands that most philosophers and readers will disagree with him and that his position that life has no meaning is impossible to prove, just as anyone claiming to have discovered the meaning of life is suspect. Yet he sticks to his guns throughout. Life is suffering, and “human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist.” And the sooner human beings cease to exist, the better. But why does he write this, and what is the “conspiracy” of the title? It all stems from the self-knowledge that we do our best not to acknowledge: the fact that we alone of all living creatures know that we are going to die. As with Eve’s apple or the snake in the Garden of Eden, “human existence [is] a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness—parent of all horrors.” In other words, we act as if we lack “the knowledge of a race of beings that is only passing through this shoddy cosmos.” Originally published in 2010, this reissue includes a new preface.
For Ligotti fans and fellow pessimists, here’s affirmation that “their only respite is in the balm of bleakness.”Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-313314-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Though full of pauses, second glances, and head-scratches, this is a very welcome primer in logical thinking.
Logic helps people build bridges to understanding. But what if people don’t want those bridges? Aha, says this entertaining guide: There’s a meta-problem for you….
In our current landscape of the postfactual, the loudest bellower is king. Enter Cheng (Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, 2017, etc.), the scientist in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago—now there’s a good idea—and possessor of a formidable, mathematically inclined mind. Though the author aims to teach math, science, and formal logic as she progresses, she really means to help readers construct better arguments, which may turn out to be a world-saving proposition. There is a built-in advantage to using logic, she writes, in that it provides a framework for discovering what is true, and “one of the main reasons to have a clear framework for accessing truth is to be able to agree about things.” The notion of agreement will come into play late in the book, when Cheng analyzes the best kinds of arguments, which allow us to understand another person’s point of view. Until that point, there are theorems, axioms, and proofs to go through, for mathematically based logic hinges on such things as the union of sets (the place where two circles meet in a Venn diagram) and the proper application of analogy to any particular problem. The author isn’t exactly playful, but she pitches a few paradoxes as she moves along—one of them being the fact that, since logic doesn’t actually correspond to what we know as the real world, we have to “forget the pesky details that prevent things from behaving logically.” In other words, we have to think abstractly, which poses plenty of other challenges.
Though full of pauses, second glances, and head-scratches, this is a very welcome primer in logical thinking.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5416-7248-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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