IN THE IMAGE: VIRTUAL RELIGION AND PHILOSPHIUCAL TALMUD
Zachary Braiterman
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Explainer:
In the Image is a contemporary Jewish philosophy of cinema and bodies, place and space and god, icons and nature and social nexuses –reconstructed in the image and crystalized in the virtual as drawn from pictures of Babylonian Talmud
DEFINITION: Aesthetics is the organization of sensation in perception and the reorganization of sensation in the imagination.
DEFINITION: An image is a physical or mental thing “before” me which refers to thing or presence that is not actually present and before me. Image , especially pronounced in memory and phantasy. (Perception and imagination are distinct but inseparable. The imagination determines perception just as much as what we perceive via the senses determines the imagination.)
DEFINITION: Virtual is a crystalized form that underscores something basic about the imagination as such. The virtual is real, but not actual. Loaded with potential and an excess of mental structure (composed of bits and bytes). The virtual is the this and not-that of things that are compossible or simultaneous to each other. Mirrors and mirroring images are exemplary. The virtual is the aspaklaria or speculum in rabbinic thought, Rashi, and Maimonides, a lens or looking glass for the imaging of God and things.
THESIS: Religion isa network composed of conjoined (distinct, but not separate) physical and mental/spiritual features or entities. Durkheim: Rites ad reps. The reflect soc, i.e. the actual social world and social structure. But they take on a life of their own vis avi society. Religio enters into individual and collective imaginary. Peirce: icons, indexes, symbols: its own thing, refer to a thing not itself, lifts off from reference to shape world in its own image.
THESIS: Virtual Religion: A lot like a video game or VR, religionisanimated by the virtual, i.e. real, not actual. Religion carries real effects in actual world, but virtual and weird for all that.
THESIS If all religion/culture is virtual, i.e. stamped by the virtual, Judaism itself is even more so because its social base or actuality in the Diaspora is more precarious. Talmud is even more so, as an mental/intellectual project of world creation. Talmud is a looking glass, a techne for seeing, as it were, an imaginal world. In the Bavli, halakhic and spiritual entities are parsed into pieces and lose their substantive hold in the world. The discourse is virtually real, not actual; reflecting this and/or that, a potential compossibility of opposites. The virtual character of religion/Judaism/Talmud explains its animation: enchanting, tense, and even catastrophic meetings of religion and actual world.
WHY French thought? This is a modern book the locus of which is not English (empirical), not German (relational), not American (pragmatic) (or maybe a little bit). The French philosophical tradition is focused on mind (Descartes, yes, Descartes) and mirrors, glass, representations, objects. In the visual and poetic arts, France is the place of impressionism, symbolism, orphism, postimpressionism, and surrealism.
Aesthetics of the Babylonian Talmud? Compare, in contrast to Talmud, the realist style in the Bible; or Maimonides who could also be compared to a realist, which is to say that there is a real world and there is practical halakha. For their part, the Babylonian rabbis are surrealist or virtualists. At the heart of their project is pure Torah or talmud Torah, and the holy way of life, or sanctification set in and apart from the actual world. In the mirror image, the Torah from Heaven is not in the hands of Heaven; Torah is an elixir of life (sam hayyim) and a drug of death (sam mavet) or, in Greek, a pharmakon.
