#jacob taubes

[edwordsmyth]

"In every political upheaval Marx glimpsed the summer lightning of impending catastrophe. He closely followed events in all countries at all times, seeking to determine their potency for the drama of world history—much along the lines of apocalypticism. At first, Marx believes himself to have recognized the crucial hour of world history in the year 1848. In 1852 Marx contributes the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon to the socio-economic history of salvation. In the din of the Parisian commune, Marx still believes he hears the end of the bourgeois, Christian world. The limping gait of the revolution in Europe does not cause him to doubt his prophecy, but it continuously deepens his rancor against man's actual unreasonableness and high-handedness. Marx draws further away and buries himself more deeply in order to discover the law, the path leading from the bourgeois, Christian world to the classless society. The “ultimate purpose” of his work is “to discover the special law of motion governing modern society.” Like the ancient apocalyptics, Marx believes that the stages of end history can “neither be left out nor decreed away,” but like them he tries “to shorten and ease the birth pangs.” The socioeconomic apocalypse is Capital, the revelation of the last things. The dull rumble of impending catastrophe is audible throughout the inventory of socioeconomic analyses, as the dramatic tension rises from chapter to chapter." -Jacob Taubes

[improvisedliturgy]

[T]he inner experience of redemption is going to be reinterpreted in light of an external catastrophe and a slap in the face. In the literature, people are quick to speak of 'pseudo-Messiahs.' I think this is absolute nonsense; it is not our place to say about history what is pseudo and what isn't. People have believed it; that's the problem we're dealing with, and we have to learn to understand it. […] This has nothing whatsoever to do with Greek, they didn't know any Greek, these were ghettoized Jews, Sephardic and Ashkenazi, among whom Greek and Greek philosophy were a nonissue. Rather the internal logic of events demanded a faith that is paradoxical, that is contradicted by the evidence. Paul comes and says: Here is the Messiah. People have got to know that he died on the cross. After all, word has gotten around. This is a death by defamation. Here is the Son of David hanging on the cross! Now try to think from the center in a Jewish way: expelled from the community he hangs here, accursed, and has to be taken down in the evening, lest the ground become impure. This is a total and monstrous inversion of the values of Roman and Jewish thought. […] This messianic concentration on the paradoxical has nothing to do with a stereotypical Greece, but with the inner logic of the messianic. Here something is demanded at such a high price to the human soul that all marks are nothing by comparison—to consider it for a moment from the perspective of religious psychology instead of theology. That is the point.

Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul

[improvisedliturgy]

I don't think theologically. I work with theological materials, but I think in terms of intellectual history, of actual history. I ask after the political potentials in the theological metaphors, just as Schmitt asks after the theological potentials of legal concepts…

Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul

[sammeldeineknochen]

Dem Kommenden aber dient man nicht, indem man das Gewesene verteufelt oder neu belebt, sondern allein dadurch, daß man ständhält im Nicht-Mehr und Noch-Nicht, im Nichts der Nacht, und sich eben damit offen hält für die ersten Zeichen des kommenden Tages.

Jacob Taubes: "Abendländische Eschatologie", S.257

[sammeldeineknochen]

Bacchantischer Taumel und einfache Ruhe, das Ineinander von Dionysos und Apoll bestimmt das Wesen der Wahrheit.

Jacob Taubes: "Abendländische Eschatologie", S.209

[sammeldeineknochen]

Die innere Möglichkeit der Dialektik ergibt sich aus dem Wesen der Freiheit. Freiheit ist nur, wenn sie auch Freiheit zur Negation ist.

Jacob Taubes: "Abendländische Eschatologie", S.26

[allyouknowisalie]

With each new apocalyptic wave, a new syntax is created, and the breakdown of meaning in language makes people from the old age appear deranged to those of the new, and vice versa…. The old man is a dead body to the new man, a has-been, as the Russians call the émigrés, while the new man is deranged in the eyes of the old. —Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology

Gnosticism in Modernity, or Why History Refuses to End | Hope Itself | Issues | The Hedgehog Review

[jewishbookworld]

Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes by Jerry Z. Muller

Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes by Jerry Z. Muller

The controversial Jewish thinker whose tortured path led him into the heart of twentieth-century intellectual life Scion of a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars, Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) was an intellectual impresario whose inner restlessness led him from prewar Vienna to Zurich, Israel, and Cold War Berlin. Regarded by some as a genius, by others as a charlatan, Taubes moved among…

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