Destroying angels: Messianic rhetoric in Benjamin, Scholem, psychoanalysis and science fiction

This dissertation uncovers the covertly analogical rhetorical structures of Jewish merkabah--mystical theories of creation, Walter Benjamin's theological historical materialism, psychoanalytic theories of creativity, and New Wave science fiction and "cyberpunk." The texts I examine are all characterized by a speculative esoterism that foregrounds the trope of paradox, of the "stormy" and indeterminate origin and that insists on a rigorous injunction against images through the ethical trope of the "face-to-face." The dissertation's theoretical grounding is circumscribed by the thought of Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem (and his appropriation of kabbalistic esoterism), Harold Bloom (and his appropriation of Scholem and Freud), the psychoanalysts D. W. Winnicott, Marion Milner and Wilfred Bion, SF theorists Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, Scott Bukatman, the radically "stormy" and "gender-troubling" thought of Judith Butler, the apocalypticism of Derrida, and the strong, ethically grounding framework of Emmanuel Levinas.;Binding the three parts--Jewish Messianism and Theories of Language, Psychoanalytic Theories of Creativity, The Rhetoric of Science Fiction--together is their common use of irony and paradox as a rigorous critical tool. The messianic rhetoric that the dissertation attempts to uncover (while messianism simultaneously makes revelation impossible) is presented as an "alternate epistemology" (as regards the "dialectic of enlightenment"), a "transitional area" lying outside of hierarchy and thus also outside of the "oppressor/oppressed" dialectic, and is, in this sense "positive." The psychoanalytic chapter, for example, deals mostly with the realm in between the subject and his/her other, a fluid space in which creation of the subject and of the world occur simultaneously and which is the murky origin of both ideology and ideological transformation.;My concentration falls on such "transitional areas" as source for an "alternate epistemology" and on their ethical implications. Reading Benjamin's work in terms of Relation as I do and bringing texts from such disparate fields into an oscillating constellation of relationships on a variety of different discourses sheds new light on these texts while also presenting a case for interdisciplinarity.