This monograph is not a conference volume per publisher.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-299) and index.

Front Matter -- Copyright page -- Dedication -- Prefatory Note: Bibliography, Footnotes, Principal Texts, Translations, and Transliterations -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Poetic Mythology for a Broken World -- Demonic Writing: the Rhetoric and Ontology of Ambivalence -- A Divided Cosmos -- The Formation of Self and Other through Abjection and Crystallization -- Impersonating the Self, Collapsing into the Abyss: the Convergence of Horror and Redemption -- Conclusion: the Divine/Dunghill, or, the Self Is the Other -- Back Matter -- Bibliography -- Index.

Nathaniel Berman’s Divine and Demonic in the Poetic Mythology of the Zohar: The “Other Side” of Kabbalah offers a new approach to the central work of Jewish mysticism, the Sefer Ha-Zohar (“Book of Radiance”). Berman explicates the literary techniques through which the Zohar constructs a mythology of intricately related divine and demonic personae . Drawing on classical and modern rhetorical paradigms, as well as psychoanalytical theories of the formation of subjectivity, Berman reinterprets the meaning of the Zohar’s divine and demonic personae, exploring their shared origins and their ongoing antagonisms and intimacies. Finally, he shows how the Zoharic portrayal of the demonic, the “Other Side,” contributes to reflecting on alterity of all kinds.