Am experiencing, at the moment almost complete blogger's blog, in this case a sub-set of writir's block. So, have resorted, a la BBC, to screening repeats.
The commodity known as ‘Madonna’ is apparently immersed in the Kabbalah. Shrewd choice: One bypasses Judaism proper and goes straight to its secret doctrine, its disavowed ghosts, and all that is cryptic and encoded. As an obscenely rich celebrity a mere religion is not enough, one requires the spiritual equivalent of an exclusive designer item. One thinks that secrecy and encryption are automatically signs of spiritual distinction – hallmarks, as it were of spiritual gold. Just as one goes to the gym to work on one’s body, one can also employ a Kabbalist to work on the spirit.
“Kabbalah was popular among Christian intellectuals during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, who reinterpreted its doctrines to fit into their Christian dogma. For example, one such source (the Kabbalah Denudata, commonly available in new age bookstores) states that the Ten Sefirot have something to do with the Christian Trinity because they are sometimes divided up into groups of three, despite the fact that the Sefirot are divided up into many groups of varying numbers, that these groupings overlap, that the grouping he refers to is not comprised of a father, son and spirit, but of a male, a female and neutral, and so forth. Others have wrenched kabbalistic symbolism out of context for use in tarot card readings and other forms of divination and magic that were never a part of the original Jewish teachings.”
Source: http://www.jewfaq.org/kabbalah.htm
In 1888 S. L. McGregor Mathers published THE KABALLAH UNVEILED, his English translation of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata. A number of intellectuals and petit-bourgeois cranks were drawn to the Kabbalah partly because it promised access to a ‘higher’ form of spiritual authority when, typically, routes to more worldly authority were blocked. The Kabbalah offered a kind of symbolic mandate which elevated one through the ceiling of the social hierachy to a vantage point above it.
This is not exactly the case with Madonna. Firstly, one might say 'Kabbalah' occupies the same place in her imagination as does ‘Tibet’ in that of other celebs, except that the signifier ‘Tibet’ is already taken and one has to therefore distinguish oneself from it. Why such celebrities require their ‘Tibet’ is another question. It is partly predicated upon the mistaken belief that the ‘aura’ conferred on them largely by modern techniques of reproduction* (and of course by the celebrity’s hyper-inflated exchange value) must have some spiritual equivalent, or rather is co-substantial with spiritual aura. It is a kind of category error, yes, but one of course endemic to capitalism itself.
*there is a sense in which what Benjamin called mechanical reproduction actually confers 'aura' (of a phoney sort) as opposed to draining it from the object. ie, the object only becomes an 'original' (with that cache we grant to 'originals') by force of its reproductions. But we look at the picture (or whatever) as though this 'being the original' were part of its very texture. Saying, in front of the Mona Lisa 'I can't believe i'm finally infront of the original' is really not that different from the movie fan who finally gets to see his idol in the flesh. And by then, the flesh, the actual canvas, seem unbelievable, unreal.
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