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Primacies
Experience, Expression, and the Jewish Imagination
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
A powerful exploration of how literature expresses and transforms our earliest preverbal experiences.
Primacies begins with the assertion that our earliest preverbal experiences are accompanied by a primary language—a universal expression of tears, cries, and laughter offered long before we learn our distinctive, ordinary languages. For Michael Fishbane, these “primacies” release the raw feelings of our existential condition and catalyze our most powerful literary expressions of sorrow, joy, and fulfillment.
In this book, Fishbane explores how ancient, medieval, and modern literature and poetry express and transform these primal sensations. Building on his theological project begun in Sacred Attunement and Fragile Finitude, Fishbane offers here a radically new lived hermeneutics that seeks to do nothing less than redefine the relationship between experience and language.
Primacies begins with the assertion that our earliest preverbal experiences are accompanied by a primary language—a universal expression of tears, cries, and laughter offered long before we learn our distinctive, ordinary languages. For Michael Fishbane, these “primacies” release the raw feelings of our existential condition and catalyze our most powerful literary expressions of sorrow, joy, and fulfillment.
In this book, Fishbane explores how ancient, medieval, and modern literature and poetry express and transform these primal sensations. Building on his theological project begun in Sacred Attunement and Fragile Finitude, Fishbane offers here a radically new lived hermeneutics that seeks to do nothing less than redefine the relationship between experience and language.
Reviews
“At the threshold of speech, Fishbane traces the primacies of experience—those silent stirrings that give rise to expression before words appear. Through a luminous engagement with diverse Jewish literary genres, he explores how the Jewish imagination is rooted in these preverbal depths. In an age of linguistic saturation and spiritual distraction, this book offers a contemplative return to the spaces between feeling and form, self and language—an invitation to dwell with the mysteries that underlie expression and animate our encounters with the world, texts, others, and ourselves.”
— Elie Holzer, Bar-Ilan University“Fishbane’s Primacies is an extraordinary meditation on how meaning emerges through a dynamic encounter with primordial elements—at once foundational and abyssal. Interweaving philosophy, hermeneutics, and a masterful curation and interpretation of Jewish sources from antiquity to the present, Fishbane offers profound insights into cultural renewal and human creativity. With poetic clarity, he guides readers through the perpetual human task of forging sense amid life’s depths and upheavals, revealing vital pathways for individual and communal regeneration.”
— Omer Michaelis, Tel Aviv UniversityTopics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Introduction
1 - Part I
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1. Lamentation and Loss: The Poetics of Anguish
11 -
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2. Making "Sense" of Things : Searching High and Low
34 -
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3. Correlations and the Imaginal Between
58 -
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4. The World, Numina, and the Challenge of Theology
82 -
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5. The Inner Point: Spiritual Consciousness and Attentive Regard
109 - Part II
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6. Tears and Testimony : A Literary Meditation
135 -
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7. Poetic Longing, Mysticism, and the Ontology of Language
156 -
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8. "The Between": Spaces of Meeting, Language, and the Abyss
178 -
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9. Alone-Together: Contemplation and Community as Intersecting Values
194 -
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10. Spiritual Hermeneutics and Appropriation: The Ḥasidic Sermon
218 -
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Conclusion: Forms of Presence
244 -
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Acknowledgments
249 -
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Index
251
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
August 20, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9780226842127
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9780226842127
Keywords for this book
primary emotions; primary experience; literary phenomenology; Jewish literature; Jewish theology; cultural pedagogy; testimony; lament; Hasidic homily; religious hermeneutics
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
