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.

Michael Fishbane is the Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology and Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Introduction

Part I
1. Lamentation and Loss: The Poetics of Anguish
2. Making “Sense” of Things: Searching High and Low
3. Correlations and the Imaginal Between
4. The World, Numina, and the Challenge of Theology
5. The Inner Point: Spiritual Consciousness and Attentive Regard

Part II
6. Tears and Testimony: A Literary Meditation
7. Poetic Longing, Mysticism, and the Ontology of Language
8. “The Between”: Spaces of Meeting, Language, and the Abyss
9. Alone-Together: Contemplation and Community as Intersecting Values
10. Spiritual Hermeneutics and Appropriation: The Ḥasidic Sermon

Conclusion: Forms of Presence

Acknowledgments
Index