On Jacob Taubes – Eugene R. Sheppard in TLS in 2023:

‘Jacob Taubes (1923–87) is now best known for The Political Theology of Paul, posthumously published in German in 1993. His portrayal of the apostle Paul as a radical Jew inspired a number of scholars, from Daniel Boyarin to Giorgio Agamben, to reassess this first-century religious figure, regarding him as the key to modern political transformation. In his lifetime, however, Taubes only published one full book, his doctoral dissertation Abendländische Eschatologie(1947; Occidental Eschatology, 2009). How, then, did he attain such influence? Much of Taubes’s life and legacy developed through encounters with a remarkable set of thinkers and scholars. Born in 1923, he came of age in Switzerland a generation after the German interwar thinkers who figure throughout his postwar oeuvre: Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Gershom Scholem, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. Astounding stories of how Taubes appeared on the scene at crucial junctures in people’s lives have circulated for decades: his disarming charisma; his brilliant insight into the most arcane and difficult works of religion and philosophy; his roles as mentor, teacher and collaborator in storied seminars; and his publications, which demonstrate an astonishing interdisciplinary breadth of interests and erudition. Yet there are just as many stories, if not more, that convey his dishonesty, cruelty, recklessness, unreliability and obsessiveness.’

(…)

‘The tragic fate of his wife, the thinker and writer Susan Taubes (née Feldmann), who drowned herself in 1969, was the conclusion of one such relationship (see facing page). Their correspondence in their early years (between 1950 and 1952) reveals Jacob as intellectual mentor to the ambitious and vibrant young bride. He was attempting to build an academic career while Susan was pursuing postgraduate study; her work took a back seat, despite her writing a doctoral thesis at Harvard on “the absent God” in the work of Simone Weil. They both held teaching positions at Columbia during the early 1960s, but Jacob transitioned to a career at the Freie Universität Berlin as their marriage unravelled. While they both had affairs, Jacob’s appetite for seduction knew no bounds. In the autumn of 1969 Susan had just published her novel Divorcing (which was republished in 2020 by NYRB Classics, and which Muller takes to be a thinly veiled autobiographical portrait of her tumultuous relationship with Jacob) when she threw herself into the ocean off Long Island.’

(…)

‘Was Taubes a creative genius or a charlatan? The figure who emerges from such episodes inhabited several seemingly incompatible worlds. Many saw him as a virtuoso who with little or no preparation could stun his audience by exhibiting mastery of a specialized topic: upon being handed a philosophical or theological tome, for instance, he would review it for a few minutes before rendering a synopsis of the book’s main thesis, complete with a systematic critique of the work. While some saw this as merely a cheap parlour trick, the ability to capture the essence of a work so effortlessly surely impresses, even if it does not ripen into more rigorous expression. Muller’s biography leaves readers with the impression that Taubes’s thought amounted to a series of ideologically motivated, intuitive provocations, a synthesis of half-borrowed and recycled ideas.’

(…)

‘Taubes’s antinomian Jewish character – he saw purported fault lines between the secular and the sacred as illusory and pernicious – found expression in his famous set of lectures on the apostle Paul, delivered in 1986. Taubes’s Paul is a radical Jew who agitated against Pharisaic and early rabbinic conceptions of law and authority, defining himself in dialectical “relation to the law he rejects”. Harnessing that antinomian impulse, he spread his teaching to non-Jewish subjects of the Roman Empire. Paul had long been of interest to Taubes, and Muller even unearths his father Zwi Taubes’s earlier scholarly interest in the apostle. For Taubes fils, Paul’s revolutionary push was expressed in terms of the Jewish subjugation under Roman imperial authority. As Taubes humorously asserted, Paul’s notoriously difficult Greek is understandable only if you can read Yiddish.’

(…)

‘Taubes’s brand of self-conscious, theologically infused Marxism is evident in how he lived as a Jew in postwar West Germany. Among the most striking images offered here is one taken in 1986. At a gathering of friends in Berlinhe is seen wearing a striped ritual garment made out of woven wool (a tallit katan). The caption under the picture tells us that “the tallit katan” is “typically worn under the shirt, but here [it appears] on full display”. Muller is surely correct in diagnosing Taubes’s propensity towards exhibitionism – he took pathological delight in transgressing norms and mores, whether they were dietary laws or sartorial customs – but I would suggest another plausible interpretation: Taubes wanted to defy expectations of how a Jew in Berlin should appear. When wearing the garb on the outside, many Jews want to remind themselves to live piously. In the more complicated case of Taubes, however, he seems to out on the symbol of pious observance while rebelling against it. He had contempt for the bourgeois, assimilationist ethos adopted by German Jewish orthodoxy, wherein one had to downplay or hide alien markers of religious identification in public, outside the synagogue or home. His fashion taste exemplifies a determined resistance against conventions and norms of the world as given – a world that for him, as for his Paul, must be seen as incapable of gradual redemptive transformation.’

Read the article here.

‘A series of ideologically motivated, intuitive provocations, a synthesis of half-borrowed and recycled ideas,’ that doesn’t sound very much appealing.

Bug apparently skilled thinkers and philosophers couldn’t see through it, even though Gershom Scholem locked himself up during a dinner party to avoid his former friend.

The main question is: how to live in a world incapable of gradual redemptive transformation without becoming a cynic or a seasoned nihilist.

The other option seems to be: developing an appetite for seduction that knows no bounds.