Today the ways of death or halfdeath have an almost sure and easy stronghold on us. Here each goes his own way into the same darkness. And the ways of life where we walk together and that no man can build from and for himself alone are not yet built. Nor is it anywhere written that they must or will be built. We know only that the power of the mystery may be as strong or stronger, than the power of death.
Susan Taubes, Letter to Hugo Bergman, September 18, 1950
It has become just as clear that the violent disruption of Jewish tradition through persecution, expulsion, and annihilation in the Holocaust actuates new forms of recomposition and reconstruction. Looking for a way from the periphery back to the center, these movements found the kernel of Judaism in various forms: Rosenzweig found it in liturgical existentalism, Buber in the Chasidic movement, Scholem in the kabbalah, Taubes, with the help ofPaul, in a spiritualized Judaism. Taubes reconstructed Judaism not out of the sources of Jewish mysticism, but rather out of the Jewish/early-Christian apocalypticism that absorbed the explosive content of Gnosticism. After an encounter with Eric Voegelin, the latter was said to have remarked to a friend with every indication of horror: "Today I met a Gnostic in the flesh!" Taubes understood "Gnosticism" as a tradition of breaking with tradition, which sets on fire the cages of the world that are otherwise frozen in their immanence.
[..] Scholem had put forth, in two essays, the thesis that Jewish messianism amounts to an exit from history because it puts off the yearning for justice to the world to come and transforms the antagonistic force of critique and change into an attitude ofpassive expectation and hope. This is what Scholem regards as the price that Judaism has had to pay for messianism on a psycho-economic scale. The price of messianism is the retreat from history into the stand-by mode of hoping and waiting. History is for those whose time has come. That Taubes could not acquiesce without contestation to this thesis should be immediately clear. For him, messianism concentrates and forms antagonistic forces, instead of paralyzing them, and always transposed them into revolutionary action. Messianism provides a basis not for retreat, but rather for an entry into history and an exodus from the natural world of the cosmos and its political order integrated into it.
[…] Taubes holds that the process of interiorization is part of the logic of messianism as such, regardless of its religious identity. Every expectation for redemption turns inward if the redemption fails to appear on the social stage of history.
[…]
In the same way as the Krochmal essay, the early essay from 1953 on the "Difference Between Judaism and Christianity"? makes the concept of law central and gives it the status of a defining, fundamental category. Not strict monotheism, not the aniconic reverence of the divine, but the recognition of the law constitutes the deciding touchstone and determining force of Judaism. Whoever annuls the law abandons Judaism. But even the annulment of the law, that is, antinomianism, is an inner-Jewish phenomenon in the form of negation. Christianity is part of a series of other inner-Jewish phenomena of crisis, which the history of Judaism has never been in want of. This history obtains its vitality from the tension of self-negation. Mysticism, ecstasy', and interiority ("heart") are phenomena of an inner-Judaic countermovement against which rabbinical Judaism established itself. This rabbinical core of Jewish identity stands and falls with the law, with the construction of an external public realm of, representation, of legally defining and legally effective representation, and with the everyday sobriety of justice. This core, circumscribed with the concept of halacha, was in the course of history able to integrate the rationalistic philosophy of Maimonides as well as the wild mystic-mythological speculations of the Lurianic kabbalah, the magical ritualism of Jacob Halevi of Marvege, and the ecstatic prophecy of Abraham Abulafia because they did not destroy halacha, but strengthened it instead. By contrast, the antinomian movements, which wanted to annul the law, were condemned as heresies because they held that the messianic time had arrived and considered "belief" in the Messiah to be more salvific than observance of the law. As Christianity is only one among many inner-Judaic heresies, it is neither a problem nor a mysterium for Judaism. In Judaism there is no "Christian question."
[…] Taubes's preoccupation with Gnosticism arises out of two different impulses. First, Gnosticism interests him historically) as a manifestation ofthe (late) ancient history of religion, which, parallel to his understanding of Christianity, he regards as deriving from the inner crises and tensions ofJudaism. Second, however, and far beyond any historical interest, Gnosticism determines his own religious experience and philosophy; he sees in-Gnosticism a highly relevant theology, probably the only one that can cope with the death of God in the catastrophic events of the twentieth century.
[…] For Taubes, a clear line runs from prophecy to apocalypticism and from apocalypticism to Gnosticism. Apocalypticism is the answer to the case "when prophecy fails," and Gnosticism emerges "when apocalypse fails."
Aleida Assmann, Jan Assman and Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, Editor's introduction, Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture
It is above all those who have gone missing from the world who begin to define what the world is as a whole. To be able to specify the world in its basic features, one must have already experienced the possibility of negating it— or perhaps we should say, of losing it or distancing oneself from it. Whoever speaks of the world as a whole is returning to it out of the artificial nighttime of meditation, or rediscovering its obstinate appearance and endurance following the soul’s voyage to heaven. It is always still there—this balloon of beingness in general, this massif of sensual appearances, this ball of Being, which contains and is all things. Thus, the great world-predications of metaphysics, all the sublime fundamental sayings, all the sentences that start with “The world is all that . . .” or “All life is. . . ,” are accompanied by an imperceptible wave of the hand, a subtle mudra, a finger that points with highest delicacy and utmost gravity to the world, as if the speaker were facing it like a distance mountain range, a mysterious constellation, a fatal archive. In this gesture, ascesis becomes theory, contemplation becomes a speech act. Its grammatical traces are demonstrative pronouns in the absolute application: “this is,” tat, tode ti; “this world,” “this life,” “this body.” Which reminds us that metaphysics, even before it becomes narratological or eschatological, is primarily deictic, ostensive, demonstrative, indicating the block of the world and pointing up at its transcendence. The god of philosophers incarnates himself in the fingertip that points to the impossible whole named “world,” as if it were something present before us; at once fatal and imperceptible, this gesture evokes the panel painting of totality, comprising figure and ground in one. What the pointer knows is in any case the direction in which he has to point: that is what’s actually “there.” At that which is “there,” one may point: as at a “world-region,” a region called world. Raphael’s The School of Athens illustrated such a sublime finger pointer in the divine Plato, who, with the Timaeus in one hand, advances through the center of the hall; the thinker lifts his free hand toward the sky and points with his finger at all that is the case “up there.” His point is the uranic world, of which “our” world represents a clouded downward projection. Plato’s fingertip moves quasi-critically from below to above, from here to there—like the gesture of a man who was undoubtedly “there” himself at some time or another, albeit now he has rejoined us here below in the half-dark region of mortals—presumably to execute the office of transition assistance.
The Raphaelian reference represents a rather harmless case of ideaheavenly romanticism—a breath of metacosmic nostalgia envelops Plato’s gesture. Not so with the darker successors of this philosophical psychocosmonaut. The finger-pointing of many later gnostics—all the way up to Heidegger—distinguishes itself from that of the Raphaelian Plato through the radical risk taken by those who point to the world from the opposite direction. With demonstrative pronouns and thin fingers they point directly to our world, to “this” given and present world, as if they had pulled off the ecstatic stunt of completely dislocating themselves and remaining in “this world” only in appearance or errantly-provisionally. Classical examples of such ecstasies, pointing to the world with the finger, are offered by certain great aphorisms from the Gospel of John—in the first place the enabling word of the Christian age which read: “In the world (this world) you are anxious/fearful, but I have overcome the world (this world)”. From then on, the factual world is dismissed like a demonic past and distanced like the sum of all revocable errors. Also in Philo of Alexandria we find formulations like this, that according to our intelligible soul we are strangers in “this world,” who sojourn in it like migrants in a foreign city (peregrini) until they have fulfilled their measure of lifetime and wander back to their great Wherefrom. Such words displace the speaker and localize him in a zone that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus called the “border of the world.” From the border one can point to the land, the continent of being as if to a strange land, a distant continent. By pointing, the pointer actualizes his borderline nature. The metaphysician is not a patriot of being; he may have settled down quite well “here”—or as the Christians say “down here”; still he must admit that he, in Fichte’s formulation, “no longer has any heart at all for the transitory,” winged as he is by candidacy for citizenship beyond the border.
Peter Sloterdijk, Out of the World
Arendt’s banality of evil actually functioned as an overcoming of Gnosticism. Neiman also hinted at this: “Arendt thought that Gnosticism would be the most dangerous, attractive and widespread heresy of the future. She therefore sought descriptions of evil that resist the urge to give it satanic greatness, for such urges are both puerile and dangerous.” Arendt feared that a demonic/Gnostic interpretation of evil would be the easiest explanation for the horrors of the Second World War. Such demonization of the Nazi criminals, however, creates a radical political separation between “us and them,” and hence a Gnostic dualism between good and evil. Moreover, such an interpretation makes evil into an unfathomable abyss that eventually threatens to corrupt reality. If such grave evils are able to exist, the world in which they are contained is no longer reliable. In such an interpretation of evil, the evils of the Holocaust corrupt the very roots of reality. This would essentially imply the return of Gnosticism’s pessimistic cosmology. However, Arendt’s interpretation of evil as banal countered this relapse into Gnosticism, according to Neiman: “If the forces that produce evil have neither depth nor dimension, then Gnosticism is false.”
Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World
In Gershom Scholem’s work, the mystical heresy of Sabbatianism and its self-proclaimed messiah, Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676), were without doubt the most important examples of Jewish heresy. The study of Sabbatianism indeed occupied him throughout his career. In his renowned essay on Sabbatianism from 1936, “Redemption through Sin,” Scholem showed how Zevi and his followers “form an integral part of Jewish history and deserve to be studied objectively.” From a methodological perspective, this aim for objectivity and the attempt to avoid the normative perspective of orthodox Judaism obviously make sense in studying Jewish heresy. From a religious perspective, Scholem’s project was an extreme provocation, as Sabbatian heresy negated almost everything that Judaism has ever stood for. From the perspective of rabbinic Judaism, Sabbatai Zevi was indeed much more than a simple pseudo-Messiah. Although such pseudo-Messiahs are omnipresent in Jewish history, they have never seriously challenged the legitimacy of rabbinic Judaism as such. For different reasons, the Sabbatian messiah did.
After claiming to be the Jewish messiah and gathering an enormous following, Sabbatai Zevi incomprehensibly converted to Islam. This apostasy was probably the most decisive reason why Zevi posed such a serious threat to traditional Judaism. The Turkish sultan, who had captured the dissident Zevi, offered him a choice between death and conversion. Although death as a martyr would have been the more appropriate choice for a Jew, his conversion as such is not yet problematic. One would expect that Zevi’s apostasy had just proven to his followers that he had been a false Messiah all along, and that they had recognized his deception. Zevi’s followers did nothing of the kind. Instead of admitting that their inner messianic belief had been falsified by history, the Sabbatians paradoxically wanted to maintain their faith in this apostate Messiah. This paradox was for Scholem the crux of Sabbatian heresy: “ ‘Heretical’ Sabbatianism was born at the moment of Sabbatai Zevi’s totally unexpected conversion, when for the first time a contradiction appeared between the two levels of the drama of redemption, that of the subjective experience of the individual on the one hand, and that of the objective historical facts on the other. . . . ‘Heretical’ Sabbatianism was the result of the refusal of large sections of the Jewish people to submit to the sentence of history by admitting that their own personal experience had been false and untrustworthy.” The central concern for Sabbatian theology was the resolution of this paradox, which consisted in the tension between subjective experience and historical facts. The Sabbatians had to explain how Zevi could be both the Jewish messiah and Muslim at the same time. The question was how Zevi could abandon Judaism and transgress Jewish law without ceasing to be the Jewish messiah. In an attempt to justify their messianic belief against a seemingly obvious historical refutation, the Sabbatians claimed that Zevi’s conversion was an intrinsic part of his messianic vocation: “The apostasy of the messiah was itself a religious mystery of the most crucial importance!” In order to complete the process of redemption, the Messiah had to eradicate evil root and branch, but he could do so only by descending into the realm of evil itself. If Islam and the sultan represented the oppressive forces of evil most explicitly in Zevi’s time, his conversion to Islam would allow him to destroy evil from within.
Scholem argued that it is difficult to turn more radical consequences aside once this kind of reasoning is called upon. If the Messiah could transgress Jewish law and if this transgression intrinsically belonged to his mission, the validity of the law and even of traditional Judaism itself was fundamentally at risk. Radical Sabbatians considered themselves Jews by negating everything that traditional Judaism had stood for. On a more concrete level, these radicals started to believe that the sinful transgression of the law would ultimately bring salvation. If the legitimacy of the law were negated by the acts of the Messiah, a sinful rather than a moral life would lead to redemption. This attitude obviously led straight into antinomianism, anarchism, and even moral and religious nihilism. Not unlike Gnosticism, radical Sabbatianism entails a complete rejection of any immanent standard or law for morality. Everything this-worldly had to be rejected and opposed, even the law itself. In messianic times, what is good or evil can no longer be determined by the religious and moral standards of olden days.
Discussing these radical consequences of Sabbatian heresy, Scholem now made his fascinating point: “And yet in spite of all this, one can hardly deny that a great deal that is authentically Jewish was embodied in these paradoxical individuals too.” Such a bold claim entailed a deconstruction of orthodox Judaism. Instead of rejecting the Sabbatian provocations against traditional Judaism as heretical, Scholem considered them to be a genuine expression of Jewish religiosity. He rendered the distinction between heresy and orthodoxy obsolete because the very concept of orthodoxy is based on the alleged authenticity of its religious message as opposed to the derivative nature of heresy. But Scholem’s deconstruction of orthodoxy was more than just a fundamental equivalence of heresy and orthodoxy. Indeed, he claimed that Sabbatianism’s anarchic, nihilistic, or antinomian impulses imply a purer form of Jewish messianism that he deemed completely absent in traditional Judaism. Ultimately, the dynamics of heresy and their disruptive powers do more justice to the nature of Jewish messianism than the orthodoxy of rabbinic Judaism. More is at stake here than a mere historiography of Jewish heresy. Scholem was using heresy to determine the normative identity of Judaism and, as the next section will show, its role in modern culture. Focusing on the heresies of Gnosticism and pantheism in Scholem’s work, Benjamin Lazier drew the same conclusion: “The program is clear: heresy in the service of Jewish self-assertion.”
If we look at the picture Scholem drew in his renowned essay “The Messianic Idea in Judaism,” messianism coincides to a large extent with the religious impulse of heresy itself, and in particular with that of Sabbatian heresy. By definition, heresy rejects the established religious norms and traditions. Messianism, too, wants to overcome the established system of values, as the coming of the Messiah will transform the moral and metaphysical constitution of the old world itself. Scholem therefore ascribed a strong anarchic force to messianism. In view of the new messianic realm of freedom, the old laws and constraints lose their validity, and even the legitimacy of lawfulness itself is undermined. Although this anarchism, which Scholem clearly recognized in Sabbatianism, is an essential force in Judaism, it is completely overlooked in the conservatism of rabbinic Judaism. In this regard, Scholem recognized an irresolvable tension in Judaism between messianic and conservative forces. The messianic anarchically breaks the old order, whereas the conservative systematically defends the legitimacy of the order of law (Halakhah) by projecting the messianic hope into a distant future. In this regard, Scholem radically criticized rabbinic Judaism’s negation of the essentially apocalyptic nature of messianism in favor of the coherence and stability of its creed: “From the point of view of Halakhah, to be sure, Judaism appears as a well-ordered house, and it is a profound truth that a well-ordered house is a dangerous thing. Something of messianic apocalypticism penetrates into this house; perhaps I can best describe it as a kind of anarchic breeze."
Scholem’s anarchism entailed an apocalyptic interpretation of Jewish messianism. In his view, messianism is neither an abstract hope for change in the distant future nor a gradual and immanent development, which is also characteristic of the secular idea of progress. The coming of the Messiah could both entail a restorative return to a primeval state of perfection and a utopian creation of something completely new, but the messianic shift itself always has to be sudden, catastrophic and without relation to previous history or to immanence: “Redemption is not the product of immanent developments such as we find in modern Western reinterpretations of Messianism since the enlightenment where, secularized as the belief in progress, Messianism still displayed unbroken and immense vigor. It is rather transcendence breaking in upon history, an intrusion in which history itself perishes, transformed in its ruin because it is struck by a beam of light shining into it from an outside source.” The messianic force introduces something completely foreign to immanence but can do so only by catastrophically destroying the immanent order of history and anarchically uprooting political lawfulness. This apocalyptic dualism implies the complete incommensurability of the before and after. In a way it relegates the ontological dualism between transcendence and immanence, which is characteristic of Gnosticism, to the sphere of history. The redemptive meeting point of two opposite poles—historical versus messianic, immanent versus transcendent—is therefore essentially paradoxical. This paradox is initially manifested in Apocalypticism’s catastrophic nature. In order to attain the positive of redemption, the negative of catastrophe is necessary, as redemption is not possible without the nihilistic, anarchic revolution against immanence. This catastrophe can take shape along the lines of the traditional apocalyptic imaginaries—war, famine, killing, natural disasters, and so on—but it can just as much become a conscious religious practice to enact the catastrophe in immoral and antinomian behavior—“in apostasy and the desecration of God’s name, in forgetting of the Torah and the upsetting of all moral order to the point of dissolving the laws of nature.” Scholem implicitly referred here to the paradoxes of Sabbatianism. The paradoxical nature of Sabbatian faith, even more so than its anarchic and antinomian forces, expressed the true nature of Jewish messianism. In a discussion of Scholem’s work on Sabbatianism, Jacob Taubes made this claim even more explicit: “The concentration on the paradoxical,” said Taubes, belongs to “the inner logic of the messianic.”
More fundamentally, the paradox of messianism consists in the necessary discrepancy between the messianic faith and the historical facts that always seem to contradict it. As was the case in Sabbatianism, every historical faith in a concrete messiah is confronted with the fact that reality actually remains unchanged after the coming of the messiah. Every messianic movement, by definition, leads to such untenably paradoxical situations in which the most absurd, dangerous, or nihilistic arguments are applied to resolve this tension. As the faith in concrete salvation, messianism seems untenable, but when reduced to a mere abstract hope in the future it always remains unfulfilled. This ambiguity is what Scholem called the price of messianism: “The messianic idea is not only consolation and hope. Every attempt to realize it tears open abysses which lead each of its manifestations ad absurdum. There is something grand about living in hope, but at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about it.” A genuinely Jewish life thus consists in this messianic tension: it cannot reject messianism, as rabbinic and liberal Judaism tended to do, but neither can it go all the way and expect a concrete historical moment as the messianic age. For Scholem, and even more so for Taubes, the latter option would have been the danger of Sabbatianism. The messianic is essentially a transhistorical force that breaks into history. Only from this transcendent perspective can the Messiah create something truly other and redemptive. If, however, the messianic lacks this transhistorical force, its revolution against world history is merely negative and will end up in nihilism. Already deviating significantly from Scholem’s point of view, Taubes concluded as follows: “If one is to enter irrevocably into history, it is imperative to beware of the illusion that redemption . . . happens on the stage of history. For every attempt to bring about redemption on the level of history without a transfiguration of the messianic idea leads straight into the abyss.”
In order to avoid these dangers, Taubes argued that the messianic idea must be interiorized. In his essay “The Price of Messianism,” which develops a direct critique of Scholem’s conception of messianism, Taubes recognized this transformation of messianism first and foremost in (early) Christianity, where salvation is no longer considered as a public, political, or historical force but rather as spiritual fulfillment. As we will see, Taubes considered it the great merit of Paul and his Gnostic successor Marcion to respond to the paradox of a crucified Messiah by interiorizing redemption. On this point, Taubes radically criticized Scholem’s position. For Scholem, Christianity and the Christian conception of an inner redemption had nothing to do with Jewish messianism whatsoever. On the very first page of “The Messianic Idea in Judaism,” he introduced a rigid distinction between Judaism and Christianity, which was based precisely on the interiorization of redemption: “Judaism, in all its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community. . . . In contrast, Christianity conceives redemption as an event in the spiritual and unseen realm, an event which is reflected in the soul, in the private world of each individual.” While the interiorization of redemption was for Scholem the dividing line between Jewish messianism and Christianity, and hence foreign to Judaism as such, the process of interiorization was for Taubes the true fulfillment of the logic of Jewish messianism. Early Christianity is therefore the prime example of Jewish messianism. Taubes argued that “redemption is bound to be conceived as an event in the spiritual realm, reflected in the human soul.” Radically criticizing Scholem’s distinction between Christian and Jewish redemption, he added that “interiorization is not a dividing line between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’; it signifies a crisis within Jewish eschatology [messianism].”
Just like Sabbatianism, early Christianity was faced with a crisis of its messianic faith, with the paradoxical failure of its Messiah. Christ had died on the cross, but the world had not changed, at least not in any political or apocalyptic sense. In spite of this ostensible failure, the early Christians paradoxically wanted to persevere in their messianic faith. Unlike Sabbatianism, Christianity solved this paradox by interiorizing redemption, according to Taubes. Salvation failed to take place publicly and historically, but it actually happened spiritually. Redemption has nothing to do with any change or action in the external world, but it is only by turning inward that we can discover a redemptive transcendence. If messianic redemption indeed presupposes an antinomian revolution against everything this-worldly, one cannot judge whether redemption has taken place on the basis of immanent and historical criteria. The immanent and historical sphere is by definition unredeemed, and the attempt to realize the messianic within history is a dangerous illusion for Taubes. In this regard, interiorization is the necessary outcome of messianism. In Christianity, the interiorization concretely took shape in Gnosticism’s conception of an inner mystical knowledge (gnosis) or in Paul’s emphasis on “faith” rather than on “works” (“For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law,” Romans 3:28). In Paul’s perspective, redemption could be achieved only through faith, rather than through a pious life in accordance with Jewish law. It is important to note that, for Taubes, this dynamic had nothing to do with the Lutheran sola fide but only with the inherently paradoxical nature of the messianic. The rejection of works was the outcome of the necessary interiorization of the messianic into the paradoxical faith in a crucified Messiah. Precisely because this messianic faith had been explicitly contradicted by historical facts, it transcended the works of the law: “Here something is demanded at such a high price to the human soul that all works are nothing by comparison.” The interiorization of the messianic into “faith” ultimately also safeguarded Christianity’s antinomianism from the nihilistic action within the external world that is characteristic of the “work” on redemption through sin. When confronted with a paradoxical crisis in messianic faith—the crucifixion of the Messiah in Christianity or his apostasy in Sabbatianism—interiorization is the only legitimate response. Any other response would lead to absurd and untenable aberrations.
In view of Taubes’s reflections on the interiorization of messianism, the substantial distinction between Judaism and (early) Christianity crumbles. For Taubes, Pauline Christianity was a genuine expression of Jewish messianism. Taubes thus unmasked the opposition between Judaism and Christianity as a theological construct—as a rhetorical invention of the church fathers or as a “hangover from the classic Jewish-Christian controversy of the Middle Ages.” From the historical perspective of early Christianity (before AD 70), it did not make sense for Taubes to differentiate between Judaism and Christianity. He claimed that “the word ‘Christian’ . . . doesn’t yet exist for Paul.” Taubes was actually deconstructing Scholem’s rigid distinction between Judaism and Christianity. The distinction, on which Scholem insisted, is ultimately just a theological construct that cannot be maintained in view of the consequences of Scholem’s own criticism of orthodoxy and his conception of messianism. If the distinction between Jewish heresy and orthodoxy became problematical for Scholem in the perspective of the messianic idea, so did the distinction between Judaism and Christianity for Taubes. Just like Scholem, Taubes was actually just “gathering the heretic back into the fold,” but he was not interested in an enigmatic Jewish mystic like Sabbatai Zevi, who is only a marginal figure from the point of view of world history. Rather, Taubes applied Scholem’s strategy to an infinitely more influential Jewish heretic—namely, the founder of Christianity, Paul of Tarsus. In spite of Taubes’s radical criticism of Scholem, he was actually just taking Scholem’s deconstruction of orthodoxy one logical step further. Taubes did not just deconstruct the traditional distinction between heresy and orthodoxy by claiming that heresy is a purer representation of Jewish religiosity; he radicalized Scholem’s project by applying it to the very distinction between Judaism and the Jewish heresy of Christianity.
For Taubes, Pauline Christianity represented the messianic idea in its purest and hence most paradoxical form: “Paul comes and says: here is the Messiah. People have got to know that he died on the cross. . . . This is a death by defamation. Here is the son of David hanging on the Cross! . . . This is a total and monstrous inversion of the values of Roman and Jewish thought.” In spite of all this, Taubes claimed that Paul is “more Jewish than any reform rabbi, or any liberal rabbi.” In other words, Paul was a Jew precisely in his rejection of Judaism. Taubes literally applied Scholem’s strategy for interpreting Sabbatai Zevi to Paul. All the elements of Scholem’s analysis of Zevi are present in Taubes’s reading of Paul: the heretic as the more genuine representative of the religious message, the antinomian rejection of Jewish tradition, and most importantly the inherently paradoxical nature of messianism. Taubes discovered the same paradoxes in Pauline Christianity as those Scholem had recognized in Sabbatianism but hesitated to apply to Christianity. Scholem did recognize the paradoxical nature of Christian messianism in the crucifixion of the Messiah, but immediately denounced it as far less radical than the paradoxes of Sabbatai Zevi’s apostasy: “What now took place in Sabbatianism was similar to what happened in Christianity at the time of the apostles, the chief difference being the shifting of the tragic moment in the Messiah’s destiny from his crucifixion to his apostasy, a change which rendered the paradox in question even more severe.” Taubes did not seem to be convinced by Scholem’s distinction between the death and apostasy, and applied the latter’s framework for analyzing Sabbatianism to Pauline Christianity.
Ultimately, everything that Taubes wrote about Paul is already present in Scholem, but Taubes faced up to the ultimate consequences of this line of thought. In his very first letter to Scholem, he already announced this project of reading Paul through Sabbatai Zevi, and immediately admitted Scholem’s profound influence: “It was through M. tr. [Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism] that I conceived of the problem of a comparison between Paulinian and Sabbatian theology.” Although Scholem already hinted at such a comparison in his chapter on Sabbatianism in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, he expressed his doubts about such a project in his reply to Taubes. For Scholem, the comparison between Paul and Zevi would not succeed without a sufficient historical background in Pauline Christianity and Sabbatianism, which Taubes clearly lacked: “A comparison between Paulinian and Sabbatian theology would be interesting and fruitful, if you can approach it from both sides."
Finally, Taubes also adopted Scholem’s reflections on antinomianism in his reading of Paul. Criticism of the law is indeed omnipresent in Paul’s writings, especially in his Letter to the Romans. Taubes, however, did not interpret the concept of law in a strictly Jewish way. He claimed that the Pauline concept of law not only designates religious law, but also refers to the metaphysical concept of lawfulness in Hellenistic philosophy and to the political concept of Roman law. This latter connotation in particular charged Paul’s theological writings with an intense political message. On this point, Taubes appealed to Carl Schmitt’s concept of political theology and subscribed to the inevitable intertwinement of theological and political motives in Paul’s thought. In this regard, Paul’s theological rejection of the law was actually a political rebellion against the legitimacy of the Roman Empire. This idea is an important leitmotif in Taubes’s posthumously published intellectual testament Die politische Theologie des Paulus (The Political Theology of Paul).
With regard to its content, Taubes’s political theology deviated from Schmitt’s project. While Schmitt wanted to legitimize political power by showing how it mirrors divine sovereignty, Taubes emphasized that Paul’s political theology uproots the foundations of Roman power, and for that matter of political legitimacy as such. In this regard, Taubes was a political theologian of the apocalyptic revolution, whereas he considered Schmitt to be an “apocalyptic prophet of counterrevolution.” Taubes summarized their difference as follows: “The jurist has to legitimate the world as it is. . . . Schmitt’s interest was in only one thing: that the party, that the chaos not rise to the top, that the state remain. That isn’t my worldview, that isn’t my experience. I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it all go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is.” In the same vein, Taubes read Paul as an apocalyptic prophet who is ultimately interested in the end of the world as the transcendent destruction of immanent lawfulness. Taubes’s and Paul’s apocalyptic perspective did not allow for any legitimate political order. Taubes’s position has often been called a “negative political theology.” Scholem’s interpretation of messianic anarchism also resurfaces here. Anarchism is indeed the conviction that political order is wrong as such. Consequently, messianism does not coincide with any gradual change within the immanent realm of politics; rather, it implies total revolution. Such a revolution aims at the anarchic and apocalyptic destruction of politics, but its antinomianism is just as much directed against metaphysical, moral, and religious law. For Taubes, only Pauline Christianity actually ventured such a complete revolution. It was therefore not just the only significant example of genuine messianism; it was also the single most important revolution in world history. Taubes adds: “It isn’t nomos but the one who was nailed to the cross by nomos who is the imperator! This is incredible, and compared to this all the little revolutionaries are nothing. This transvaluation turns Jewish-Roman-Hellenistic upper-class theology on its head.”
Up to this point, Taubes’s project entailed a dual deconstruction of orthodoxy. In line with Scholem, he first deconstructed the distinction between Jewish orthodoxy and heresy. Deviating from Scholem’s project, he then radicalized this criticism of the concept of orthodoxy to the very distinction between Judaism and Christianity. If Christianity is just a very successful Jewish heresy, the distinction between both can never be absolute. In the spirit of this dual deconstruction, Taubes introduced a third deconstruction that concerns the distinction between Judeo-Christian religion and secular modernity. Taubes not only believed that heretical messianism structured Judaism and Christianity but also maintained that its legacy continues in the entire tradition of Western modernity. Moreover, he was not only interested in uncovering the religious origins of modernity but also wanted to show how the history of the West is actually a manifestation of a single, albeit very dynamical, force—namely, messianic eschatology.
Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World
In his talk, Taubes developed a radical critique of Scholem’s rigid distinction between Christian and Jewish concepts of salvation. In his essay "Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism", Scholem had opposed the Jewish, messianic concept of public and historical redemption to the Christian concept of inner and spiritual redemption. Taubes argued that this distinction is artificial and negates the historical dynamism of messianism: rather than a mere abstract theological concept, messianism is a real historical force that can take very different forms when confronted with concrete historical contexts, hopes, and disappointments. One such essential transformation according to Taubes is the Christian interiorization of salvation. Contrary to Scholem, he considered interiorization as a perfectly legitimate form of messianism, even as the inevitable outcome of its historical logic. By showing how the Christian concept of inner salvation belongs to the messianic tradition, Taubes actually deconstructed Scholem’s rigid distinction between Christianity and Judaism.
[…] Taubes and Scholem clearly disagreed about the scope of messianism; for Scholem, messianism was an inner-Jewish phenomenon, whereas for Taubes it was a dynamic phenomenon that structures Judaism, Christianity, and secularism alike. They had, however, a surprisingly similar concept of the nature of messianism. Taubes, arguably, adopted Scholem’s interpretation of messianism as a subversive, paradoxical, anarchic, apocalyptic, and revolutionary phenomenon that is best understood from the perspective of heresy.
[…] A crucial theological presupposition of Taubes’s and Scholem’s thought was exactly this subversive fascination with the phenomenon of heresy and their discontent with both rabbinic and liberal Judaism. The rabbinic tradition is characterized by a strong emphasis on law and Torah, and could be called “orthodox” or traditional Judaism; liberal Judaism is characterized by an enlightened, rationalist approach to religion that aims at the assimilation of Judaism into modern Western culture. Both strands typically suppress Judaism’s messianic or revolutionary impulses. Scholem’s and Taubes’s research, by contrast, focused precisely on these messianic, mystic, and heretical phenomena that were negated by orthodox and modern Judaism. Instead of understanding these phenomena from the perspective of rabbinic orthodoxy as inauthentic and corrupted modes of Jewish religiosity, Scholem and Taubes wanted to study them for their own sake—Scholem from a historical perspective, Taubes from a more interdisciplinary and philosophical perspective. In this respect, they both considered heresy as an equally legitmate or even more legitimate expression of Judaism than traditional orthodoxy. Their common theologico-philosophical project can thus be called a deconstruction of orthodoxy—or, more precisely, a deconstruction of the classic dividing line between heresy and orthodoxy on which the legitimacy of established, orthodox religion is negatively grounded.
This shared background, however, does not negate the differences between Scholem and Taubes. On the contrary, their fundamental disagreements now become all the more obvious. Again, these differences do not so much concern the nature but the scope of their intellectual project. For Scholem, the deconstruction of orthodoxy remained within the boundaries of Judaism and concerned the distinction between Jewish heresy and orthodoxy, whereas Taubes applied his former teacher’s deconstructive project to the distinction between Judaism and Christianity, as well as to the distinction between religion and secularism. In Taubes’s perspective, the deconstruction of orthodoxy entailed a reflection on the secularization of heresy.
Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World
In September 1986, just before the discovery of his cancer, Taubes had lectured in Heidelberg […] His topic was “Reprieve from the Gallows: The Apocalyptic Experience of Time, Past and Present”. Taubes had been ruminating upon that theme since his doctoral dissertation […] As he now formulated it, the Western experience of time was marked by the apocalyptic notion that history was a “reprieve.” It was neither eternal, as the ancients had supposed, nor an eternal recurrence, as Nietzsche imagined. Rather, time was experienced as having “urgency.” Moreover, contra Nietzsche, there was no innocence to be recovered, for humans are all guilty debtors. “As debtors we have a limited time to repay our debts,” he added gnomically. “In the phrase ‘The Kingdom of God is near,’ ” he said, “what is of interest to me is not the question of what the Kingdom of God means, but the plausibility of the notion that it is near.” That is, Taubes interpreted Jesus’s statement to mean that we ought not to take current institutions too seriously, for sudden transformation is always possible. So too, it was not the theological substance of Paul (in which Taubes did not believe), but Paul’s emotional stance toward the world— colored by Gnosticism and apocalypticism— that Taubes valued. These themes inherent in Christianity, Taubes told his audience at a Salzburg symposium, are “mines,” capable of exploding existing institutions. He referred to Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, in which the apostle famously stated, “The time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they had none; those who weep, as if they weep not; those who are joyful, as if they were not; those who make a purchase, as if they had nothing. For the form of this world is passing away. I want you to be free of all concern.” Taubes glossed this as demanding “a loosening of one’s relations to the world.”
Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse
“I intend to examine the inner dynamics of the messianic idea in Judaism,” he began. “This entails reconsidering Gershom Scholem’s theses on messianism.”160 Taubes focused on Scholem’s 1959 essay, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” the lead essay in Scholem’s book of 1971, The Messianic Idea in Judaism. Taubes took aim, above all, at a distinction that Scholem had made in passing between the nature of messianism in Judaism and in Christianity. In Judaism, Scholem maintained, the coming of the messiah was conceived as an event that occurred in history and in public, transforming the world in some perceptible way. By contrast, after the failure of Jesus to return, Christianity maintained that redemption takes place in an inward transformation, within the soul of individuals.
Taubes argued that this distinction was too sharp, historically inaccurate, and “obfuscates the dynamics inherent in the messianic idea itself.”
“When prophecy fails” and the messiah fails to appear (or reappear), rather than disintegrating, a messianic community can preserve itself by turning inward and conceiving of redemption as an interior event in the human soul. For Taubes, this marked “a crisis within Jewish eschatology itself—in Pauline Christianity as well as in the Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth century.” Taubes’s main objection was to Scholem’s failure to treat the Pauline experience as paradigmatic of Jewish eschatology.
[…] Taubes then proceeded to make a number of disconnected but striking observations. When messianic movements survive after the failure of the initial expectations of redemption, it is not because of the intrinsic nature of the life of the messiah, but Because of the interpretation of events offered to the community of believers by the would-be messiah’s interpreters. That meant Paul of Tarsus in the case of Jesus, Nathan of Gaza in the case of Sabbatai Zevi. The life of Jesus and of Sabbatai Zevi both ended in “scandal”: crucifixion in the former case, conversion to Islam in the latter. In each case, it was the interpretation of this scandal that mattered.
In cryptic language, Taubes laid out another stimulating thesis about the two major messianic movements in the history of Judaism— Pauline Christianity and Sabbatianism. The first developed “just before rabbinic Judaism had begun to mold the fantasy and reality of the Jewish people,” that is, before the destruction of the Second Temple and the creation of rabbinic Judaism—which for Taubes was a spectacular work of creative imagination. Rabbinic Judaism had been consistently opposed to messianic movements, which was why purported messiahs came and went without leaving a trace, until the Sabbatian movement, which came “when rabbinic Judaism in its classical form began to disintegrate.”
Taubes offered a direct criticism of Scholem’s contention that there was “a ‘dialectical’ nexus between Sabbatian messianism and the rise of the Aufklärung [Jewish Enlightenment].” He agreed with Scholem that the experience of the expulsion from Spain led to the mythical kabbalistic response that Scholem had charted, ending in Sabbatianism. But, Taubes suggested, it also led to an alternative, rationalistic response, by the seventeenth- century offspring of Marranos such as Spinoza. These rationalists were the true precursors of the Jewish Enlightenment, Taubes argued, while the mythical, kabbalistic response had actually delayed the pro cess of Enlightenment, until the failed Sabbatian experience, by taking the mythic response to absurd conclusions, opened the door to Enlightenment.
Taubes then took issue with Scholem’s claim, in a famous essay on “The Neutralization of the Messianic Element in Early Hasidism,” that Hasidism, with its “unheard-of intensity and intimacy of religious life,” had had to “pay dearly for its success. It conquered the realm of inwardness but it abdicated in the realm of messianism,” thus robbing messianism of its “apocalyptic fire.” But, Taubes asked, since historically messianism had led to “absurd and catastrophic consequences” (he had the Sabbatian and Frankist episodes in mind), was it not desirable for Hasidism to have taken this turn inward?
Scholem had contended, “The magnitude of the messianic idea corresponds to the endless powerlessness in Jewish history during all the centuries of exile, when it was unprepared to come forward onto the plane of world history.” Taubes took issue with that notion. True, he asserted, rabbinic Judaism had set itself against all messianic movements, and sought an existence outside history, within the symbolic and legal community of halacha. But millenarian movements beyond Judaism had indeed influenced history, such as the Puritans who arrived in New England to create a New Zion, and laid the foundation of the United States of America.
Taubes ended by alluding to contemporary trends in Israel. Zionism marked a deliberate turn to history, an attempt by Jews to mold their own historical destiny. But to confuse that with messianism was to court disaster: “The very attempt to bring about redemption on the level of history without a transfiguration of the messianic idea leads straight into the abyss,” he asserted. The conflation of messianism with Zionism “has allowed wild apocalyptic fantasy to take over political reality in the state of Israel.” By setting the record straight, he concluded, the historian “can pose a problem and signal a danger in the pre sent spiritual and politic al situation of the Jewish people.”
Indeed, the closer one compares Scholem’s work to Taubes’s talk, the clearer it becomes that Scholem himself had made most of the points that Taubes offered in his critique.
Scholem’s account of Sabbatai Zevi, published in 1957, was in part an examination of Sabbatianism as exemplifying dangers inherent in Zionism. In the preface to the Eng lish translation of the book, published in 1973, he characterized the Sabbatian movement as “a movement which shook the House of Israel to its very foundations and has revealed not only the vitality of the Jewish people but also the deep, dangerous, and destructive dialectics inherent in the messianic idea.” The essay on “The Messianic Idea in Judaism,” first published in 1959, concluded with another such warning. Especially after the rise of Gush Emunim, Scholem referred frequently in public statements to the dangers that messianism posed to the Zionist proj ect itself.165
The Pauline experience was never near the center of Scholem’s interest as it was for Taubes. But Scholem did indeed refer to it in discussing the history of Jewish messianism, writing, “I naturally would not deny that Paulinism represents a genuine crisis of tradition within Jewish messianism that is analogous to” Sabbatianism. For Scholem, however, this quickly led to “the early Church’s exceedingly rapid break from Judaism.” He referred to the “far-reaching dialectical and downright antinomian justification” that Paul had developed, “whereby Christ could be proclaimed the ‘End of the Law’ (Romans 10:4),” where “for the first time the crisis of the tradition is explained out of the inner dynamic of the redemption itself.” He devoted many pages of his book on Sabbatai Zevi to the history of Christian chiliastic movements influenced by Jewish messianism— including the Puritans later mentioned by Taubes—before concluding, “The millenarian movements sufficiently illustrate the revolutionary possibilities inherent in precisely those forms of messianism which the church had always suspected of being influenced by Jewish conceptions. These revolutionary tendencies expressed themselves in Christian history at least as much as in Judaism.” Scholem returned to that theme in his 1959 essay “ Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.”
In short, what Taubes offered as a critique of Scholem’s theses on messianism was in many res pects either a restatement of Scholem’s own themes or a variation on them. That would not stop later scholars from devoting studies to the purported contrast between their views.170
Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse
While the project never came to fruition, its themes were prominent in a course, The History of Heresy, that Taubes taught at Harvard in the autumn of 1954. The opening lecture of the course, “The Gnostic Idea of Man,” was transcribed and published in a student journal, Cambridge Review. There, Taubes laid out the notion of a community of those alienated from the powers that be. “In the Gnostic perspective the natural order of things was demonized and satanized, and the powers and principalities of the world, the archontes became the representation of evil. . . . A new basis for community arose in the Gnostic frame, a new intimacy appeared: men are brothers, because they are all alien to the world. . . . The Gnostic attitude with its image of man and mankind permeated Christianity. Paul’s image of man is meaningful only through the general tenets of the Gnostic myth of the fall of the original Man.”
[In the same period] Taubes argued that democracy flourished not in the orthodox tradition of Christian religions but among the mystical heretics and sectarians of the Middle Ages who renounced the Roman Catholic system of hierarchy, attacked the feudal order of medieval society, and tried to penetrate the entire population with the “egalitarian” message of the Gospel. The heretical sects stressed the equality of church members and insisted that elders
and preachers should be elected by the local congregations. The “religious democracies” which came to birth in England in the seventeenth century felt themselves “blessed communities” in the sense that each individual was ennobled through his fellowship with kindred minds, and this same spirit carried over to some degree into the political democracies which grew out of the religious congregations. The democratic principle of church organization which the Anabaptists were the first to put into practice and which came to the fore again in the sects of the English Commonwealth became in the course of time the basic principle of English and American democracy.
These egalitarian movements, Taubes argued, had their roots in Judaism and Christianity:
The principle of congregational association among men in the religious and political realms has a venerable tradition of its own: it is foreshadowed in the message of the Hebrew prophets and in the theology of Paul which prepared the way for a universal “catholic” church recognizing no barrier between Jew and Greek, slave and master. . . . Paul established the religious equality of men “in Christ” but defended the status quo of political in equality in the frame of the Roman Empire. . . . The entire problem of Christian history turns around the fulfillment of the Christian idea of man in the temporal realm. . . . It is a cardinal point of all medieval and modern Free Spirits that the Christian image of man can only be realized and materialized by abandoning the theistic frame of reference— the idea of divine sovereignty, the concept of a divine “Kingship”—this led to the philosophers and ideologists of the French and American revolutions who tried to establish the heavenly city on earth.
[…] In 1957, an English historian, Norman Cohn, published The Pursuit of the Millennium, an influential study of the tradition of revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism as it developed in Western Europe, stretching back to the Bible but focused on the eleventh to sixteenth centuries, and including a detailed study of the heresy of the “ Free Spirit.” The book was a sober history, learned and entirely lacking in the radical pathos characteristic of Taubes’s Abendländische Eschatologie or his history of heresy project. Cohn suggested that these religious movements “can be seen in retrospect to bear a startling resemblance to the great totalitarian movements of our own day.” But Cohn, unlike Taubes, characterized these movements as embracing “phantasies” of revolutionary eschatology. In short, what for Taubes were harbingers of modern radicalism were, for Cohn, precursors of modern totalitarianism.
[…] For Taubes, Gnosticism represented the revolutionary potential of religion, which lived on beyond its confessional expressions.
Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse
Theology, Taubes posited, arises out of religious crisis, when the “mythical” symbols in canonical texts that express a human encounter with the divine lose their plausibility in their original form. “The hour of theology is come when a mythical configuration breaks down and its symbols that are congealed into a canon come into conflict with a new stage of man’s consciousness. When the symbols coined to express man’s encounter with the divine at a unique moment of history no longer coincide with his experience, theology tries to interpret the original symbols in order to integrate them within the context of the new situation: what was pre sent in the myth is then only ‘re-presented’ in the theological interpretation.” Yet the result of this reinterpretation is paradoxical. For on the one hand, the original symbols are preserved by being reinterpreted. But on the other hand, the reinterpretation means that the original symbols are understood in a new way, befitting the changed stage of consciousness. Then, as culture and consciousness change again, the existing interpretation is once again experienced as inadequate, creating a demand for a new theological reinterpretation of the original symbols of the faith. When theology is no longer able to provide an interpretation that is experienced as plausible, the symbols lose their hold and die. That, according to Taubes, was what was happening to Christianity.
[…] The role of theology in Christianity, Taubes noted, went back to the New Testament itself. That was because the gap between the original symbols and the historical reality manifested themselves almost immediately. The eschatological expectations of the first Christians—of the end of history with Christ’s imminent return— were unfulfilled. Thus, “the Christian community was thrown into history against her expectations and against her w ill, and the hiatus between the eschatological symbols of faith and man’s continuing existence in history is as old as the history of the Christian church.” The function of Christian theology from then on remained the reinterpretation of the eschatological symbols (such as Christ’s incarnation and man’s salvation at the end of days) in light of changing historical circumstances. In the process of transforming “an adventistic sect” (that is, a small group of people awaiting the imminent coming of the Messiah and the end of days) into a universal church, Christianity had had to come to terms with the world, to become “secularized.” As Taubes formulated the point elsewhere, “Jacob Burckhardt once remarked that all relation to external reality breaks down if you take certain passages of the New Testament in dead earnest; in these, a spirit is reflected that considers the world to be a strange and alien place. Church and theology have done their best, however, to mitigate and obscure this original Christian experience of total alienation from the world; in nineteen centuries they have transformed anoriginally ‘nihilistic’ impulse into positive ‘social’ or ‘political’ action.” That led to a perennial conflict between the canonical texts of the faith (the New Testament) and subsequent theological commentary on it, a “conflict between the eschatological symbols and the brute fact of a continuing history.” The main way in which that tension was eased was through the use of allegorical interpretation, the insistence that the Biblical text ought to be understood in a nonliteral way.
But that allegorical tradition of interpretation, Taubes maintained, was no longer viable, for a variety of reasons.
The first was that modern critical scholarship on the Old and New Testaments, which sought to discover the actual history of the texts, was at odds with traditional theological interpretation of the Bible (exegesis). “Does not historical interpretation qua method imply a criticism of all theological exegesis? Whereas theological exegesis must ‘transfer’— this is the original meaning of translation— the original symbols by the method of allegorical interpretation into a given situation, the historical analysis interprets the text, the canonic symbols, in their original historical context.” Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), the great liberal Protestant historian of Christianity, resolved this dilemma by interpreting “the essence of Christianity” as the religion of Jesus, while “discarding all Christological doctrine as dead weight.” Nietzsche resolved it by concluding that the triumph of historical research had as its implicit premise “the death of the Christian God. Historical research, Nietzsche observed, works only as a post mortem, dissecting the body for the sake of anatomical study and writing an obituary.”
Taubes recognized Karl Barth’s strategy in the famous second edition of Barth’s commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans […] as an attempt to circumvent the historical understanding of the Biblical text in favor a direct recovery of its eschatological ele ments, which seemed resonant in light of the sense of crisis during and after the First World War. Barth’s “dialectical theology,” Taubes wrote, describes a world so totally bereft of God that it “strangely coincided in its diagnosis with the atheistic interpretation of man’s actual situation.” But Taubes judged Barth’s attempt “a dubious enterprise, combining revolutionary insight into the meaning of the original symbols with an anachronistic exegesis” that smuggled in some typical stereotypes of Protestant orthodoxy. (Taubes probably had in mind Barth’s critique of “Pharisees”—a Protestant trope used to stigmatize Catholicism.) Barth’s attempt to circumvent historical consciousness was doomed to failure. Taubes criticized Barth’s dialectical theology for trying to avoid historical understanding by a naive return to Biblical sources: “Such innocence is illusory and cannot be regained by will or wish.”
Taubes agreed with Paul Tillich, the German Protestant radical theologian then teaching at Union Theological Seminary, that all fundamentalist and orthodox theology was no longer plausible. “For the first generation of Christian believers the coming of the Messiah was a reality and not an ontological problem. Many generations did not stumble over the concreteness of central symbols like Father, Lord, or King of Heaven. . . . T hey could use these symbols naïvely and did not need to develop an allegorical or dialectical interpretation. Anyone who, after two thousand years of Christian history, thinks he can ignore the hiatus of time is the victim of an illusion.”
In the essay “Dialectic and Analogy,” Taubes explored another barrier to the creation of an adequate con temporary Christian theology. He argued that for most of its history, Christian theology was based on a hierarchical vision of the cosmos, with the earth at its center. In this conception, heaven was really “above,” and earthly institutions reflected their heavenly counterparts. Thus in the Middle Ages, “the principle of analogy expresses the basic correspondence between below and above, heaven and earth, the natural and the supernatural.” All of that broke down with the Copernican revolution, which revealed that the earth was not in fact at the center of the cosmos, and that it circled the sun. Man was therefore no longer at the center of the cosmos. While the Catholic Church tried to minimize the importance of this discovery, “the Copernican revolution shattered all hierarchical structure, the heavenly as well as the earthly . . . above and below became mere ‘metaphors’ and not rooted in the external order of the cosmos.” Taubes argued that the attempt of modern Catholic thinkers to revive the analogical theology of Thomas Aquinas while abandoning his cosmology was misconceived. That, he thought, was futile—there was no going back.16 In addition, the decline of monarchy as the dominant form of politics and the rise of democracy left much of the imagery of the traditional liturgy disconnected from con temporary consciousness.
As a result, theistic religion was “forced to retreat to the domain of man’s ‘inwardness.’ ” One theological response was to emphasize “dialectic”— the relationship between a distant God and the individual believer, and to stress the individual’s inward spirituality. Theology turns from cosmology to “anthropology,” focusing on the nature of man and his needs. With ever more to say about man and ever less to say about God, the varieties of “dialectical theology”—whether those of Barth or Tillich— testified to “the eclipse of the divine in our present situation.” Among Western intellectuals, in the de cade since the Second World War, Marxism had been overshadowed by existentialism. The significance of Tillich’s recent writings, Taubes recognized, was in reminding secularists of the religious roots of the characteristic concerns of existentialism—“ dread, anxiety, courage, being and non- being.”
Taubes suggested that between them, historical consciousness, post- Copernican science, and political democracy had destroyed the traditional techniques of theology. As Christian theologians like Barth gave up on the idea of history as progress and abandoned providentialist accounts that see evidence of God in history in favor of dialectical accounts that stress the gap between God and man, they approached a Gnostic conception of the world as bereft of God, and set the stage for an atheistic theology. “Perhaps the time has come,” he speculated in “On the Nature of the Theological Method,” “when theology must learn to live without the support of canon and classical authorities and stand in a world without authority.” Instead, he suggested, “Theology must remain incognito in the realm of the secular and work incognito for the sanctification of the world.” Taubes seems to have borrowed this notion of theology needing to disguise itself in order to attain contemporary influence from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” a source he would return to time and again in later years.
Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse
Two of the themes of Paul’s letters seem to have had a deep resonance for Jacob. The first was the inevitability of sin and need for divine compassion (Erbarmen) and grace (Gnade). The concept of divine compassion is both Jewish and Christian, but the theme of the inevitability of sin is a decidedly Pauline one. For Judaism, sin is due to a misdirection of the will, and repentance (tshuvah) is the re orientation of the will in the proper direction—a process that ultimately affirms man’s w ill. For Paul, the will is bound to be sinful, while repentance is only possible through surrender or abnegation of the will. Taubes found this latter view more congenial, since it accorded with his sense that his will was beyond his control.
The second concerned the Law. For Paul, the Law (halacha) was in itself a source of sin or at least of the consciousness of sin, for the existence of a prohibition evokes the sinful passion to violate it. The very existence of the Law tempts one to break it.99 But, thanks to God’s grace, man is set free of the Law— a message that Taubes found tempting.
In a letter to Margarete Susman written shortly before he left Switzerland, Jacob described his aspiration to do for Paul what Heidegger had done for Kierkegaard. “What Heidegger managed to do for Kierkegaard, namely to anchor Kierkegaard’s categories universally in an ontology, to unchain those concepts from Kierkegaard’s specific context— that is what I have in mind in regard to the apostle: just as the apostle unchained the content of Judaism into Christianity, so I want to unchain this Christian content into something universal, to make Paul’s categories universal by anchoring them in an ontology. Paul himself has shown how to do this, the way of un-chaining.” At this point in his life, Taubes thought that the essential content of Paul was to show that the way to God was through a recognition of the powerlessness of God in this world, his weakness, his seeming withdrawal from the world, his “nothingness” (Nichts). For the next four decades, Taubes would return time and again to this quest to take his interpretation of Paul’s insights and translate them from a Christian context to a more universal theology.
[…] The course started with Paul as articulating a messianic, antinomian view of history, which, Taubes claimed, freed man from the mythical forces ascribed to the cosmos and robbed the earthly powers of divine legitimacy (an interpretation he would repeat three de cades later in his Political Theology of Paul).
Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse
The oppression of the early Christian communities by the Roman emperors leads to a recrudescence of Jewish apocalyptic motifs, as expressed in the twentieth chapter of the Book of Revelations, which, Taubes notes, became “the Magna Carta of chiliasm.” But from the second Christian century on, a transformation occurs, as the ever-awaited Parousia fails to occur, and what was once a scattering of Christian communities becomes a Church. Beginning with the Church Father Origen and reaching its culmination in Augustine, eschatology is turned inward. It is no longer an expectation of the imminent transformation of the external, historical world; instead it becomes an internal drama of the soul, of ascent from body to spirit. With the adoption of Christianity as the religion of the Empire under Constantine, eschatological hope is further domesticated in Christian theology. The Kingdom of God, once expected to mark a transformation of the external world, comes to be identified by Augustine with the Church itself, which exerts its influence on the city of man, thus accepting the reali ty of secular politics. The revolutionary power of the apocalyptic ideal is sapped.
But it reemerges in a new and influential form, Taubes contends, in the twelfth- century monk Joachim of Fiore. Joachim offered a novel interpretation of history that endowed the pre sent and future with radically new meaning. He distinguished three historical eras. The first, the Age of the Father, corresponded to the Old Testament; the second, the Age of the Son, began with the New Testament. But now, Joachim proclaimed, a new age was at hand, the Age of the Holy Spirit, in which the institutional Church would be superseded by a new spiritual church (ecclesia spiritualis). According to Taubes, Joachim marks the beginning of the modern age. Here Taubes drew upon the work of Balthasar and perhaps (without noting it) on Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times, which had called attention to the central role of Joachim’s form of historical messianism.
To orthodox Catholic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, Joachim and his followers, the Joachimites, seemed incomprehensible, Taubes writes. This, Taubes observes, demonstrates a recurrent pattern in the history of occidental eschatology: each new wave of apocalypticism bursts apart the settled order, its norms and expectations. The newly interpreted ideal of the Kingdom of God then serves to erode and delegitimate the current order, and leads to an apocalyptic moment that seeks to realize that ideal on earth. “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. . . . T o the new men, the old man is a corpse, a has- been, as the [Bolshevik] Russians call the emigrés, while in the eyes of the old men, the new men are deranged.”
Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse
Borrowing extensively from the work of Hans Jonas [in Occidental Eschatology], Taubes explores Gnosticism. “The world stands in opposition to God, and God in opposition to the world. God is an unknown stranger to this world,” Taubes writes, summarizing Jonas’s argument. According to Taubes, the sustained alienation expressed in Gnosticism is closely related to apocalypticism, the expectation that the current world— fallen, dark, and evil— will give way to a new world of goodness and light. Apocalypticism typically has a passive attitude toward the world, of waiting for the right time to arrive. “Marx too sees in history higher powers at work that cannot be influenced by the individual, clothed in the mythological garb of his age as ‘forces of production,’ ” Taubes notes. Taubes characterizes Gnostic and apocalyptic thought as based on a dialectical technique that emphasizes “the power of the negative,” a critical mode of thought that remained subterranean in medieval Aristotelian and Scholastic thought, only to reemerge with Hegel and Marx.
Taubes sees reflections of this Gnostic sensibility in the Apostle Paul, a historical personage who played a minor role in Occidental Eschatology, but who would loom ever larger in Taubes’s subsequent development. Taubes notes that “for Paul, just as in Gnostic literature, demonic powers are ‘the rulers of this world’ and the ‘Prince of this world’ is Satan.”
This view of Paul as either a Gnostic, as influenced by Gnosticism, or as a proto-Gnostic was a recurrent theme of interwar scholarship on Gnosticism.
Then Taubes turned to the history of apocalypticism. Its origins in the West were traced to the apocalyptic chapters of the Book of Daniel, which, drawing upon modern critical scholarship of the Bible, Taubes attributed to the Maccabean period of the second century BC. Then, again making use of critical Biblical scholarship, he contends that Jesus must be understood contextually, as part of a larger messianic wave in Israel, which itself was part of an apocalyptic wave in the broader Aramaic-Syrian world of his time. Jesus’s message of a world turned upside down, in which the last were to be first, presented a challenge to the Roman Empire.
Taubes portrays Christianity as an offshoot of Judaism that responded to the growth of individualism and self-consciousness in late antiquity and to the spiritual emptiness of the Roman Empire, with a new promise of community and otherworldly salvation. For the community created by Paul, Christ is a sort of anti- Caesar, the ultimate abnegation of the ethos of Rome. […] The founder of Christianity is not Jesus—who, together with his small group of Jewish followers expected the imminent coming of the messiah, the Son of Man—but Paul, who makes not the life and teachings of Jesus, but the death of Jesus into the center of the new faith. While the original circle around Jesus awaits his immanent return (Parousia), Paul preaches that as a result of Christ’s sacrifice, the new era has already dawned, and the old world is passing away. He thus marks a point of transition between apocalyptic expectations of the end of the world, and a new Gnostic knowledge of the transformative turn of history, the kairos. It is Paul who takes a Jewish messianic figure, Jesus, and interprets his death as of universal import.
Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse
The second theme [in Taubes's Occidental Eschatology], which comprises the greater part of the volume, treats the history of apocalypticism and of Gnosticism. Both share the belief that the existing order (or existing world) is evil and corrupt. Apocalyptics search for signs that the existing order is coming to an end, and they engage in action to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. Gnostics convey knowledge (gnosis) about the fallenness of the world, and they claim to know of an alternative, more perfect order. Both are antinomian, that is, antipathetic to the law. But apocalypticism is more active and oriented to external transformation, while Gnostics are more inclined to the transformation of the self through their purported special knowledge. The book seeks to convey both the history of these recurrent propensities, and what Taubes calls “the revolutionary pathos of apocalypticism and Gnosis.” That revolutionary pathos runs through much of the book— and through Taubes’s subsequent work as well. Apocalyptic movements inevitably fail, at least by their own standards. But, Taubes asserts, they serve as the motor force of history, transforming old orders into new ones. Their failure leads to a new round of Gnosticism, which serves as a subterranean stream of discontent until the next round of apocalyptic enthusiasm and redemptive action
Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse
The relevance of Jonas’s exploration of Gnosticism to Jewish history was demonstrated by his friend Gershom Scholem in his seminal essay of 1937, “Mitzvah habaah ba’averah” (later translated as “Redemption through Sin”), about the seventeenth-century Jewish false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi (the English spelling varies), and his eighteenth- century successor, Jacob Frank. Under pressure from the Ottoman authorities, Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam, while Frank ultimately converted to Catholicism in Poland. In each case, their followers developed intricate theological rationales to explain the unanticipated fate of their messiah. And they engaged in deliberately transgressive behavior, on the grounds that the coming of the messiah liberated his followers from the yoke of the law, and that the world could only be redeemed from evil by exhausting the evil within it through acts of sacrilege. Following Jonas’s lead, Scholem pointed out the connection between their sense of spiritual election and nihilism:
To the pneumatic, the spiritual universe which he inhabits is of an entirely different order from the world of ordinary flesh and blood, whose opinion of the new laws he has chosen to live by is therefore irrelevant; insofar as he is above sin . . . he may do as the spirit dictates without needing to take into account the moral standards of the society around him. Indeed he is, if anything, duty-bound to violate and subvert this “ordinary” morality in the name of the higher principles that have been revealed to him.
[…]
Several of Scholem’s writings are of par tic u lar importance for his relationship with Jacob Taubes. We have already noted his pathbreaking article on “Redemption through Sin” published in the Hebrew journal, Knesset, in 1937, which explored the ideas and influence of the seventeenth- century putative Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, and a century later, of Jacob Frank, who once again proclaimed himself the redeemer before becoming an apostate by converting to Christianity, together with his followers. Frank developed a theology that proclaimed the need to violate Jewish law and to descend to the depths of sin inorder to liberate the divine sparks from a fallen world, and he and his followers engaged in libertine practices.
The Sabbatian and Frankist movements had echoed across generations. But by the twentieth century, they were largely forgotten by most Jews, and regarded by historians of the Wissenschaft des Judentums as an aberration and an embarrassment. Scholem’s approach was entirely different. For him, Sabbatianism was central to understanding Jewish history. It represented undercurrents of vitality and resistance to the unredeemed world of the Exile, and Zionism made it possible to sympathetically unpack its real significance.109 Scholem insisted that
we owe much to the experience of Zionism for enabling us to detect in Sabbatianism’s throes those gropings toward a healthier national existence which must have seemed an undiluted nightmare to the peaceable Jewish bourgeois of the nineteenth century. . . . The desire for total liberation which played so tragic a role in the development of Sabbatian nihilism was by no means a purely self-destructive force; on the contrary, beneath the surface of lawlessness, antinomianism, and catastrophic negation, powerful constructive impulses were at work. . . . [For] this nihilism, in turn, helped pave the way for the Haskalah [Jewish Enlightenment] and the reform movement of the nineteenth century, once its original religious impulse was exhausted.
Scholem drew a fleeting parallel between Sabbatianism and early Christianity. In each case, the putative messiah had met a scandalous fate: crucifixion in the case of Jesus, apostasy in the case of Sabbatai Zevi. He also pointed to the revival of Gnostic motifs among the more radical Sabbatians, and the belief that the proper response to an evil world was to destroy it from within through descending into the abyss of impurity. For Scholem, the libidinal antinomianism of the Frankists recalled the Gnostic pneumatics that Jonas had explored. And he thought that the pattern of inspired heresy eroding the inner core of orthodox religion and leading to revolutionary developments was by no means confined to Judaism. In a theme that Jacob Taubes seized upon, Scholem noted that within Christianity, the conflict between ecstatic, pneumatic spiritualists in the Middle Ages led to internal conflicts, and “the spiritualist sects which it produced went on to play important roles in the development of new social and religious institutions, often giving birth, albeit in religious guise, to the most revolutionary ideas.
Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse
A seminal influence on Taubes’s doctoral dissertation was a book published in 1934 by Hans Jonas, Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late Antiquity (Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist). Jonas too had been a student of Martin Heidegger, and brought certain Heideggerian modes of analysis to bear in his work on Gnosticism. The term had a curious history and a variety of meanings (which, again, made it grist for endless debate). “Gnosis” is Greek for “knowledge,” and denoted some secret or esoteric knowledge about the world. Gnosticism turned the traditional Jewish notion of a providential creation on its head. The world as most of us know it, the Gnostics insisted, is indeed a creation: but it is a world of evil created by an evil deity. The possibility of a better world was open to those who recognized the current one as saturated with evil. In the Christian tradition, Gnosticism was regarded as a heresy, dating back to the second century. Indeed, it was regarded as so heretical that its literary works were destroyed, so that much that was known about Gnosticism could be gleaned only from the attacks on it by Christian theologians, such as Irenaeus’s Against Heresies (c. 180). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was an explosion of scholarship on Gnosticism. Scholars disagreed as to whether it arose in the Greek world or in Persia, nor did they agree on the extent to which parts of the Christian Gospels reflected Gnostic influences.
Jonas argued that Gnosticism arose in a number of societies around the ancient Mediterranean at about the same time, and that it did so because those societies faced a common experience that made Gnostic myths and doctrines so appealing. His main innovation was to present what he called a phenomenological account of Gnosticism, that is, an account that sought to recover the feelings, perceptions, and fundamental attitude toward the world (Daseinshaltung) of the adherents of Gnostic doctrines. Not only did Jonas try to recapture Gnosticism using Heideggerian categories, his description of the Gnostic attitude bore a striking resemblance to elements of Heidegger’s own view of the world, as expressed in his book Being and Time. Since, for the Gnostics, the world was evil and the creation of an evil deity, their fundamental experience (Urerlebnis or Grunderlebnis) was of being aliens in the world, of loneliness, anxiety, of not understanding the world and not being understood by it. The Gnostic also felt that without proper awareness, he could fall prey to forgetting his essential alienness, becoming assimilated into the world of evil, and alienated from his real origins, which lay in a better, transcendent realm. The first step toward real wisdom, the Gnostics believed, was to recognize one’s own alienness, which was a sign of superiority. That went together with a longing (Heimweh) for a higher, transcendent world.
Gnosticism, Jonas wrote, was a revolutionary doctrine: not in the sense that it intended to overthrow the existing order of society and replace it with another, but in the sense of a wholesale devaluation of the world as it is, and its replacement by a counterworld, through an alternative interpretation of reality. God—the real God, not the gods embraced by society—is defined negatively, as entirely beyond this world, as an unknown God from whom redemption will come. The result, Jonas wrote, is a sort of “cosmic nihilism” (kosmische Nihilismus), and allegiance to a deity who is a “Nothing” (Nichts), and a way of life that paradoxically derives its meaning through negation. According to that interpretation, those possessed with a consciousness of the true spirit (pneuma) were able to break free of existing society and its norms. That resulted, at least in the first instance, in moral anarchism and libertinism, before possibly leading to new forms of self-d enial (asceticism), or of religious community. Based on a purportedly higher knowledge, Gnosticism led to a disdain for the world and its “wisdom.” The pneumatics, in their own eyes at least, formed a privileged aristocracy, a new h uman type free of the obligations and standards of existing society. Indeed, the unrestrained use of this freedom was a positive injunction, leading to a sanctification of sacrilege. The pneumatic, as Jonas characterized him, glories in demonstrating his distinction from the rest of society through his actions. Libertinism, in its deliberate flouting of social conventions, is regarded as a sort of declaration of war against the world as it exists.
Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse
During the decade between 1954 and 1964 Blanchot gradually replaces the lead vocalists in his theory of the récit. It is no longer the animal or the past that sing the récit’s destructively beautiful songs. What now opens a narrative void and depersonalizes the self is another human being. Although the score of the récit’s song remains the same, that is, blank, with the different singer the emptiness takes on a different quality. Indicative of Blanchot’s increasing interest in politics and ethics throughout the 1950s […] the récit’s emptiness becomes endowed with the ability to expose the self-enclosedness of the character, the writer, and the reader to the absolute otherness of the Other (other characters and other human beings). Blanchot turns away from the récit as a literary instrument of a self-involved kind of self-destruction and redefines it, similarly to Barthes’s notion of writing degree zero, as a privileged literary codification of intersubjectivity.
What is there to say, then, in a narrative that aspires to be faithful to the true vocation of literature, as Blanchot defines it? It is certainly not that there is nothing to be said. Words have to be spoken, but words that are slow and exhausted. For Blanchot, slowness and exhaustion are the necessary ingredients of a genuine narrative, writing, and conversation. Narratives must be strenuous, taxing, and in a certain sense even “impossible.” Similarly, dialogues, both in literature and in real life, as Blanchot points out in an essay on Marguerite Duras, “The Pain of Dialogue” (1956), must be difficult if they are to be real dialogues: “slow, but uninterrupted, never stopping for fear of not having enough time: one must speak now or never; but still without haste, patient and on the defensive, calm too, […] and deprived, to a painful degree, of the ease of chatter [facilité du bavardage].” What is genuinely dialogic is not the chatter of the novel. Turning Bakhtin upside down, Blanchot suggests that rather than the novel, with its polyphony and intricate plots, the minimalist, slow, and exhausted récit is dialogic, because it gives the other person a more important role than the self rather than an equal one. Against the disappearance of the other in the complexity and density of novelistic narration, the récit offers a figuration of the contentless present in which the immutable singularity of the other person comes to the fore. Slow, exhausted, and minimal story clears the space, so to speak, for the other
[…] But there is a price to be paid for Blanchot’s promotion of the genre of récit. The price is nothing less than erasure of history. If the uniqueness of the récit as a mode of writing and form of storytelling is the narrative purging of the story with the vision of literary exhaustion, slowness, and emptiness, the récit’s blanchissement de l’histoire is a bleaching and purging of both story and history. The transaction at stake is similar to that proposed by Barthes in Writing Degree Zero: a literary exposure of intersubjectivity and essential human togetherness in exchange for the erasure of descriptive and historical detail. […]
It seems as if Blanchot’s theory of the récit could not be more disconnected from history and with what lies outside the text. As the following chapter will show, however, Blanchot was painfully aware of the fact that the dehistoricizing tendency of bleaching the story and history in the récit is a delicate enterprise. When he nevertheless deemed it worth undertaking, it was because he believed that the récit’s silencing of historical detail, as a counterweight to the novelistic histoire toute humaine, holds the prospect of a more humane kind of both story and history. Unlike the novel, the récit is not attached to the narrative role of symbolically representing the monadic type of individuality. The notion of the récit […] is a historically, socially, politically, and ethically conditioned response to the novelistic representation of the self as separated from others. […] Blanchot theorizes the récit as a mode of writing that recovers the preindividual, and thus essentially interpersonal, experience of sharing language.
Daniel Just, Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France
The last essay in the series, “Translated From…,” is an allusion to Joë Bousquet’s book Translated from Silence (1941), though the focus is mostly on the issue of stylistic monotony in the American novel. Blanchot interprets the monotonous style of American novelists, such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, although it is the first one who gets by far most attention, as a literary device that, yet again, makes silence exist through words. Finally, however, he offers an illustration of what this writing looks like. (Similarly to Barthes, who in Writing Degree Zero made only cursory illustrations of his notion of neutral writing, Blanchot is evasive when it comes to demonstrating with concrete examples how the récit looks.) Blanchot finds the uniqueness of the American novel in its technique of inhibiting the transmission of meaning by estranging the language it uses. American novelists defamiliarize words, disrupt the transparency of language, and introduce sentences in which both words and the things to which they refer become difficult to identify. In their style of short sentences and slow rhythm of narrating, these works create a prose in which both the narrator and the reader cease to be the focal points of language, and in which the austerity of expressions and the slow tempo of their delivery weaken the role of characters as agents of action. In the fierce sobriety and simplicity of American novels, readers encounter “an ensemble of words or events that we understand and grasp, no doubt, perfectly but that, in their very familiarity, give us the feeling of our ignorance, as if we were discovering that the simplest words and the most natural things could suddenly become unknown”. Literary language in these stories, by emaciating the character, the narrator, as well as the reader, renounces its function as a tool for communicating meaning and becomes utterly impersonal.
What is striking about “Translated From…” is that Blanchot, suddenly and without any explanation, ascribes to the genre of the novel all the attributes that he normally associates with the genre of the récit. The “thin” and “quiet dialogues”, the language that does not draw attention to itself but to “the obstinately silent voice [la voix obstinément silencieuse]”, and interior monologues that “keep the silent nature of words [gardent le caractère muet de paroles]” – these descriptions of American novels are the same oxymoronic expressions that in “The Song of the Sirens” and “Idle Speech” serve to differentiate the récit from the novel. In “Translated From…,” the novel gets all the qualities that are elsewhere given to the récit. Or, more accurately, it is not the novel as such that gets them, but its American version and, even more narrowly, its Hemingwayan strain. Blanchot presents Hemingway’s lethargic and impersonal language as non-novelistic, and his novels as narratives that remain faithful to the mystery of language and literature in the same way as the récit. Referring to “French novels” as the opposite of the impersonality and innerlessness of Hemingway’s novels, Blanchot denovelizes American novels and postulates the French novel as a synecdoche for the genre of the novel as such, a condensation of the novel’s most characteristic traits.
Despite the fact that Blanchot’s conclusions about writers as different as Mallarmé and Hemingway sound oddly alike, the essays from 1946 announce a recurrent theme in Blanchot’s critical and fictional writings: a type of story that exposes and preserves the abyssal nature of language, its unavoidable indeterminateness, and permanent parabasis. Blanchot insists that silence and emptiness cannot be separated from language because they appear only in language and as language. Similarly, language cannot be separated from silence and emptiness, because silence and emptiness are the irrevocable origins of language. It is only when literature lays bare the constitutive role of silence in language that it can speak – and when, as “The Paradox of Aytré” avows, it “speaks best”. Already in these early essays, language that aspires to be truly literary is endowed with attributes of slowness and exhaustion. Only slow and exhausted language can embrace both the emptiness of the word and the absence of the thing, which define literature. Literature, Blanchot suggests, is a way of getting closer to the fundamental void language opens. If literature complies with this vocation and with what constitutes its essence, it has to display the signifier’s emptiness as a positive element and the content as a negative element of the text. The purer the difference between the positivity of the signifier’s emptiness and the negativity of the content’s reality, as Blanchot proposes in “Literature One More Time” (1963), the more the text is a work of literature
Daniel Just, Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France
Before literary silence became an issue of genres in “The Song of the Sirens,” it was a subject of a series of articles from 1946 in which Blanchot discussed a very diverse set of writers: Mallarmé, Hemingway, Saroyan, Lautréamont, Henry Miller, Jean Paulhan, and Joë Bousquet. With Blanchot’s typically uniform conclusions about writers with very different styles, themes, and characters, these articles propose that all these authors strive to give silence a literary form by translating it into words. This conclusion is perhaps the least contentious in “The Myth of Mallarmé.” Blanchot’s argument suggests that Mallarmé’s poetry does not merely talk in the absence of things, as if words tried to represent absent objects; Mallarmé’s words try to express, not things, but their absence. They eliminate objects and speak in their absence. Instead of merely killing the object to which the word refers – this happens in any language, not just literary – Mallarmé exposes the emptiness of the word itself. He shows not only that once there is a word, the object is lost, but also that the word never was a plenitude capable of compensating for the eliminated object in the first place. While praising Mallarmé’s insight into the workings of language, Blanchot nevertheless finds his solution problematic. For the same reason as Barthes, who in Writing Degree Zero complained about Mallarmé’s reduction of literature to Object, Blanchot finds Mallarmé’s replacement of things with their “vibratory disappearance [disparition vibratoire]” flawed because it makes words “the material emblem of a silence that, to let itself be represented, must become a thing”. For Blanchot, literary narratives, rather than poems, can deal with the paradoxical nature of literary language revealed by Mallarmé. Mallarmé’s relevance is in diagnosis, not in effective treatment.
In “The Paradox of Aytré,” published a few months after “The Myth of Mallarmé,” Blanchot reiterates that Mallarmé, “just as he gives poetry a language of extreme physical density, sees himself finally tempted to attain silence by a simple material emblem”. Mallarmé’s architecture of typographical blanks and odd punctuation is ultimately inadequate for what it pursues because it gives in to the temptation to offer a consummation to the paradox of language. “The Paradox of Aytré” insists that the paradox of language must be preserved unresolved. If a text aspires to be a work of literature, it has to avoid both the strategy of incorporating silence as an expressive means of language and the strategy of creating a material figuration for silence. What literature has to do is to perpetuate the recognition that it “has nothing to say [n’a rien à dire]”. Similarly to “Idle Speech,” language and silence, speaking and having nothing to communicate, are already here presented not only as non-contradictory endeavors, but as inseparable companions. As William Saroyan’s dictum, “do not write with words, write without words, write with silence,” which opens “The Paradox of Aytré” suggests, for Blanchot writing and silence are an indivisible couple, and literary narratives a place where the emptiness of both the word and the object is disclosed – but without turning into a thing, which is exactly what happens in Mallarmé’s poetry.
With regard to the question of how writing with silence functions as a mode of narration, “Mystery in Literature” continues where “The Paradox of Aytré” ends. Characteristically, Blanchot phrases his topic as a dilemma: “if we honor the mystery in literature from afar, calling it secret and ineffable, it makes itself an object of disgust, something perfectly vulgar,” and “if we approach it to explain it, we encounter only that which conceals itself [ce qui se dérobe]”. Even though unrepresentable, the mystery – and this, it has to be pointed out, is what separates Blanchot’s conception of literature from mysticism – exists only in language. As mystery does not exist apart from speech, the notion of mystery is, strictly speaking, an empty word that stands for the paradox of language as it materializes itself in literature. Not only is the concept of mystery unthinkable apart from language and silence, but both language and silence cannot be considered one without the other, nor without the concept of mystery. Silence is the inner contradiction and the outer boundary of language, as well as a point where language speaks the best. If literature has an obligation to reveal the paradoxical nature of language, rather than conceal it, the notion of mystery is nothing more than a word for how literary language works. Blanchot calls the language that reveals the mystery a “silent language [langage silencieux]”, an “impersonal speech [parole impersonnelle]” and “a language that speaks itself on its own [langage qui se parle tout seul]”. Although this line of reasoning is still similar to the abstract and metaphorical language of “The Song of the Sirens,” Blanchot makes a more overt argument here that literature does not articulate anything that precedes it and that would be expressed only post factum. The conception of literature in “Mystery in Literature” offers something more extreme than mystical irrationality. As literature is expressive of nothing but silence and emptiness of both the word and the thing only because of the paradoxical nature of language, this conception asks literature not to express the ineffable, but, as Leo Bersani explains, “not to express it.” Pierre Klossowski adds that what Blanchot demands from literature is not to represent nothing, but to endure it and “maintain itself in it."
Daniel Just, Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France
Ever since the idea of salvation rose to power in certain traditions, a radical world-critical spark smolders in the world-consciousness of high-cultural peoples. Wherever salvation is taken to be possible and desirable, the thought that all the signs of nature can and must be reversed gains power. The distinction between death and life grows shaky, for this greatest of all subversions teaches that a true death is preferable to a false life. Along with the demand for salvation, the possibility of negating the world enters the world as well—recall that we are dealing here with a holy negation, one that attempts to repel itself from the deception of profane existence. Now the spirit is dizzy in view of the reversibility of all signs—the suspicion that the world as a whole in its status quo is altogether wrong and or upside-down condenses in doctrines of otherworldly true paradises. The redemption-seeking spirit sets out to invalidate “this world” like a false premise. Whoever plays with the fire of salvation is never far from the fantastic temptation to turn his back on the worldedifice and leave it to its ruin—apocalypticism even goes so far as to preach its destruction and, if only it were possible, to set it on fire by one’s own hand.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, it is obvious to remark that with the break-in of the Christian and gnostic ideas of liberation, the spirits of primal negation were awakened in the Western psyche. Even if the official Christian piety toward creation toiled over efforts to shelter the goodness of the world from the goodness of its architect against the insurrection of negativity, the awakened primary masochistic and sadistic world-critical forces would never be put to sleep again. The smooth fit of subjects into benevolent totalities is disturbed once and for all. The soul discovers itself as the discordant factor—as the other in everything and opposite to everything. The greatest psychologists have always had to make concessions to the suggestive wisdoms of dualism. From the gnostic-Manichaean nuclear fission of the Godhead to the Freudian theory of the death drive, the Western tradition has not lacked attempts to metaphysically or meta-psychologically substantialize the great negation of world, body and self.
In our context, what matters is to show that the gnostic movements of late antiquity—combined with tendencies of anachoretic psychology and negative theology—represent the first flareup of a nirvanological impulse on Western soil. Gnostic acosmism—the doctrine of the soul’s unbelonging to the world of matter and to the celestial demons—was an effort of the late antique psyche to self-therapeutically detach itself from the powers of “this” grotesque and malignant “world”; it was an attempt, however precarious, to render the pneumata or spirit-souls homeless in the given, in order to open for them a prospect of innermost healing through heavenly self-reintegration. The soul, which now understand itself only as a stray here, passing through and returning home, enjoys from the moment of anamnesis and conversion [Kehre] the certainty that its postexistence will resemble its pre-existence: both signify immersion in a sphere flooded with light and rapture. From the point of view of the phenomenology of religion, a certain affinity between gnosticism and Buddhism is evident.23 If the gnostic insight deregisters the subject from the cosmos to repatriate it in an original worldlessness, consequently in a being-in-God, this is an unmistakable equivalent of the Buddhist’s transition into houselessness. Both are gestures of an ontological resettlement, which is supposed to lead to a kind of world-flight or world-weaning. With the help of the great ascetic negation, the sufferingproducing mechanism, the world-addiction, is healed and the greed for worldly power is mitigated. By loosening its world-attachment, the subject holding itself and things as possessions finds its way back into contact with the truths of nomadic life: world-traversing beings travel best with light luggage.
Peter Sloterdijk, Out of This World
If the human decides to go into the desert, he elevates his life into the state of metaphysical alertness—awakeness is everything. The metaphor of keeping oneself alert for the lord translates for these extremists of orthodoxy into an unprecedented battle against sleep, which is for the most part reduced to a few hours and in many cases only sitting, even hanging attached to ropes in vertical position. The saints spark themselves up like living eternal lights who illuminate the desert nights with their awakeness; thus, they correspond to the fixed stars, [98] whose light radiates from yonder into the black space of creation. John of Moschus, the poetic eulogist of anchoritism, saw in the people of solitary prayer out there a blooming “spiritual meadow,” and when that meadow laughed, as accords with the rules of rhetoric, its laugh already bore witness to the glamour of the overworld. In contrast, in the literal desert, over centuries people wept more than ever before or after in the history of humanity. Without the gift of tears, hardly one of these athletes could have been capable of elevation into the higher grades of dyadic unity. Tears were at all times held in the highest regard as means and signs of purification by the world-escapists. Together with persistent prayer, that inner monologue of the dyadic monad, tears were incomparably well suited to liquidate the world-blockage and to flush away the separating layers between “God” and soul. If prayers and tears have become identical, nothing is left of the subject but a supplication to be allowed to abandon itself; the supplication makes to its god the unspeakable confession that it wants to be nothing but a part of him; even the anchorite’s desperation belongs to God; in his final weakness the desperate one encounters non-being before the beloved. Then the anchorite wants to not be his own anymore, and above all to have no will of his own and no world of his own. For the sake of becoming unworldly [Entweltlichung], the monks forbid themselves laughter; many spent their whole lives naked, like animals in ecstasy; others abandoned the use of shoes, some even the use of first-person possessive pronouns. John of Cassian said about the undergarments of the Egyptian monks: “The cutoff sleeves [99] should remind them that they are cut off from all deeds and works of this world. The linen garments say to them that they are dead to all life on earth.”11
How far the concern for the destruction of all worldliness reached among the holy solitaries reveals itself above all in the mythlike episodes of anachoretic literature, which, from the fourth century onward, submerges the whole Near East in a climate of desert fanaticism. In the life of the Syrian Symeon the Younger, from the seventh century, it is reported that, after receiving baptism as a two-year-old, the future saint fell into a trance, during which he recited for seven days: “I have a father and I have none; I have a mother and I have none”—a recitation that revealed an early appointee in the full bloom of holy asociality; whoever is able to reject having a father and mother on this earth at this tender age is sheltered from the very beginning against the dangers of getting stuck in naïve world-partiality. Thus, no wonder if this family-critical child prodigy goes into the mountains at age seven, sitting on top of a prayer pillar while losing his baby teeth. Here everything that could lead to the development of an individual worldliness is deactivated in the earliest stage of psychic development; world-flight goes directly into an early precaution against all tendencies toward positive world-inhabitation [Welteinhausung]. One could say that world-flight itself means the whole world to such individuals.
[…] Without the God-intoxicated men in the desert, the religiously ambivalent masses on the cusp between the heathen and the Christian worlds could hardly have grasped what it means, as a human being, to strive for the correspondence between the spiritual and the absolute One. Although it may seem inappropriate that the anachoretic face à face with God could become a spectacle, even the mere external appearance of the immersed offers to the pilgrims, the patients, the spiritual tourists, a “proof of the spirit and the power.” The preconceptions of the observers meet with the ecstasies of the athletes at the worldless vanishing point which creates space for many kinds of absence from all that is the case.
As the scene of the great secession and as the laboratory of dyadicmonadic transformations, the desert was the cityless city, the worldless world; through the continuous influx of those unfit for worldly service, the seemingly most inhuman of all places became an utopian asylum; in it, the acosmopolitans of all nations united in the most subversive group. In the no-man’s-land that promised nothing and everything, the First Acosmic International was constituted. Cloister communism developed itself in the desert into a consummated fact—and into a specter haunting the excluded secular society. Thenceforth desert is just another word for the worldshadow in which people meet insofar as they neither interpret the world nor change it but rather wish to omit it.
Peter Sloterdijk, Out of This World
In the west, the young Augustine supports these world-critical movements with his severe paring back of Christian epistemic interests to the pair God and soul, inwardly turned to each other:
REASON
So what do you want to know?
AUGUSTINE
All that I pray for.
REASON
Please sum it up shortly.
AUGUSTINE
To know God and the soul: that is my wish.
REASON
Nothing more?
AUGUSTINE
No, nothing but that.
One must always return to this famous dialogue, which Augustine wrote in the winter of 386/387, shortly before his baptism in Milan—even if only for its unexploited possibilities of cosmoclastic development. Expressed laconically and conclusively, the pious interest of the Christian philosopher is, from the ground up, to prevent the world from stepping in between God and the soul. This provides the ontological formula for the motif of worldflight.
Peter Sloterdijk, Out of This World
The desert principle gains strength at the moment when Christianity has ceased to be a religion of resistance; only after the end of martyrdom does the psychagogic and psychopolitical potential of monotheistic humanforming techniques unfold in its full seriousness. The inequality between the One God and the lonely soul is subverted through lifelong asceticism, finally producing the saint [88] who stands before all eyes as an equation and parable of the impossible. Thus the desert becomes a metaphorical institution. The first Christian icons are not painted on tablets but carved from reluctant human flesh through transfiguring self-mortification. Therefore, these athletes of divine mimesis, warriors of the One, soul workers and iconsculptures in their sleepless enclosures, belong to the exertion-history of the western subject—even if modern workers have trouble admitting to themselves their at least indirect descent from these emaciated anti-producers.
[…] Whoever goes into the desert seeks out the worldly location that is uniquely suited to the minimization of the world. The desert is the option of acquiescing only to the world’s unavoidable remainder; the least evil place in the evil world is that which is most hostile to life. The desert forms only a translucent film of being holding the souls back from immediate disappearance into the ultimate ground [Grund]; it is the real almost-not-being that demands no interest for itself but stands open like an empty cosmic therapy-room for the staging [Inszenierungen] of the soul. It is the pure projection-space in which the experience of self and God, including what foils and interrupts it, can be brought to emergence.
[…] Where nothing grows, spurious Becoming is also deprived of its foundation. [96] In its place, the desert offers itself as a stage for exclusive adventures into fusion [Verschmelzungsabenteuer]; these lead, if one believes the aretalogies or glorious speeches concerning the stars of the desert, through sufferings and euphorias to an ever-higher grade of purity, to an ever more empty and sublime form of drunken soberness. If it is the virtuosity of the saints to challenge the desert, then it is the virtuosity of the desert to be amply gruesome in order to induce or elicit or call forth a salutary desperation; wherever she gives her best, there the desert becomes the bad-enough mother.9 By giving nothing more than barrenness, scantness, she gives the sovereign emptiness. The desert is hostile and strenuous enough to agitate individuals to a permanent commitment to the extension of the struggle for divinization; it is raw and inhumane enough to exterminate all tenderness for fleeting things. As a zone on the margins of the inhabitable world, it can house the paradoxical movements that want no other status than that of disappearance.
Peter Sloterdijk, Out of This World
Perhaps the time has come when theology must learn to live without the support of canon and classical authorities and stand in the world without authority. Without authority, however, theology can only teach by an indirect method. Theology is indeed in a strange position because it has to prove its purity by immersing itself in all the layers of human existence and cannot claim for itself a special realm. In losing itself in the forms of the world, theology would not betray its destiny. […] Theology must remain incognito in the realm of the secular and work incognito for the sanctification of the world. Theology should not strive for the vainglory to present a sacred science "separated" from the sciences by special doctrines or dogmas, but rather it should serve in "lowliness of mind" the secular knowledge and life. Would theology miss its point if instead of insisting on a separating circle, it would make itself of no special reputation and take upon itself the form of incognito? In such a fashion, theology would become more likely to present the relation between the divine and the human in our time.
Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture
Although this all sounds very speculative, the course of action that derives from a Gnosticism conceived dialectically is simple: “Try to be as contrary as possible!” In this regard, the Gnostic did not stop short at mere passive resignation and escapism; he also turned this negativity into an active principle of subversion, revolt, and antinomianism. On this point, Gnostic dualism’s passive nihilism turned dialectically into an active nihilism. This nihilistic revolt could then take many different shapes, going from religious apostasy to immoral behavior and sexual transgression. This kind of revolt was also paradigmatic for Scholem’s concept of redemption through sin, developed in his discussion of the Jewish heresy of Sabbatianism.
The only course of action that could be derived from a Gnostic or Sabbatian rejection of the world was a negative one. Since nothing positive could be achieved in this world, the only option was saying no to it. In Scholem’s view, Sabbatians refused to go along with immanence by living this world in the opposite direction. If the messianic and the transcendent are in every respect opposite to history and immanence, the only meaningful comportment to this world is to invert every current moral, political, historical, and religious standard.
In the case of radical Sabbatianism, this took shape in an active nihilism that implied first and foremost an inversion of the religious norms of traditional Judaism: “Through a revolution of values, what was formerly sacred has now become profane and what was formerly profane has become sacred. . . . The violation of the Torah is now its true fulfillment.”
The example of Gnostic revolt shows very clearly how the way someone thinks about transcendence and salvation influences the way he behaves in the immanent world and makes sense of profane history, even if his concept of transcendence entails a radical rejection of immanence and history. This is the dialectic of religious nihilism.
After lamenting God’s absence, he concluded in the penultimate line of the poem: “Oh, we must live all the same” (Ach wir müssen dennoch leben).19 When the pursuit of another world ultimately proves futile, we realize that we still have to lead our lives in this unredeemed world.
In other words, Scholem attempted to reaffirm immanence, as he could not stop short at a univocal and paralyzing negation. Nonetheless, he could no longer naïvely reaffirm the intrinsic meaning of the cosmos; he could not deny that meaning is not immediately given. In a true dialectical sense, Scholem therefore pursued an affirmation of the world that was mediated by its initial negation. This is the dialectical negation of the negation. Benjamin Lazier also understood Scholem’s project along these lines: “The Gnostics of late antiquity had divorced God from the world the better to escape it. . . . Scholem also spoke of an abyss between God and the world, but . . . to save the relative autonomy of the world (a version of it) from God, and thereby to affirm it. Dualism—not so much; dialectic—yes.”
What was at stake for Scholem was the affirmation of this world in view of its fundamental nihilism and meaninglessness. In that sense, he attributed value to life in this world in a way that ran counter to its immanent logic. He proposed a way to live history against its grain and to make sense of the world as a manifestation of divine nothingness.
Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World
This connection between religion and nihilism was for Scholem reflected most intensely in the writings of Franz Kafka: “For, like no one else before, he expressed the limit between religion and nihilism.” He argued that Kafka bore witness to the modern experience of a meaningless world where God is completely absent and where revelation and salvation are unrealizable. Kafka’s nihilistic experience, paradigmatic for modernity in general, was not the atheistic realization that there is nothing beyond this world; it was ultimately a religious experience of divine nothingness: “This is the experience of modern man, surpassingly well depicted in all its desolation by Kafka, for whom nothing has remained of God but the void, in Kafka’s sense, to be sure, the void of God.” This divine nothingness is manifested first and foremost in the meaninglessness of revelation. Again, this modern meaninglessness does not mark the end of religion but uncovers the true nihilistic nature of revelation itself.
For Scholem, the significance of God’s revelation is by definition inexhaustible, infinite, and as such incomprehensible and meaningless to human understanding. God’s word is overdetermined and gains its concrete meaning only in its mediation by tradition and interpretation. Although God’s word is essentially void of meaning, this meaninglessness is initially masked by religious traditions—in Scholem’s case, the rabbinic tradition— that establish certain interpretations of revelation as absolute. However, when religious traditions start to lose their authority in secular modernity the “nothingness of revelation” (das Nichts der Offenbarung) becomes apparent.
Kafka’s writings represented this condition where the crumbling legitimacy of Jewish law and tradition problematized revelation. The concept of the law was absolutely central in his stories and novels but always appeared as fundamentally inaccessible and incomprehensible. According to Scholem’s interpretation of Kafka, revelation therefore does take place in Kafka’s universe and in the modern world but is absolutely void of meaning.
Similarly, the law absolutely determines Kafka’s main character K., but it is impossible for him to know its meaning or its lawgiver. In a letter to his friend Walter Benjamin, Scholem characterized this as “a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance.” This empty and meaningless revelation reveals literally nothing, but is a manifestation of divine nothingness.
More than that, secularism paradoxically appears as a fully religious phenomenon. Modernity, in this respect, is neither opposed to religion nor is it the result of religious transformations; rather, it is religion. Modernity is just another episode, probably even the most interesting, in the long history of religious evolutions.
What was ultimately at stake in Scholem’s fascination with Gnosticism was therefore not just the possibility of a modern religiosity but a precept for modernity as such. If the modern worldview is characterized by an absolute absence of the divine and accordingly by a nihilistic conception of the world as devoid of any meaning, the crucial question is what our comportment with this world is. In other words, how do we make sense of the world and our lives if meaning is no longer given?
Someone who rejects the immanent world as meaningless in favor of an exclusive focus on transcendence still has to live in this world. A mere passive resignation might be speculatively attractive, but it is practically impossible. However hard the Gnostic hoped for salvation, he still lived in an unredeemed world and inevitably had to decide how exactly he wanted to do this in a meaningful way that squared with his Gnostic convictions. Paradoxically, even the most extreme negation of the world requires us to take a position within this world. In spite of its exclusive emphasis on transcendence, the Gnostic speculations necessarily had implications for the way one had to live in the immanent world. In other words, the dual schema of rejection and escape requires a third move: a return to immanence. This return can obviously not involve a simple acceptance of the profane, but it will be a dialectical return mediated by the initial rejection.
Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World
In a letter to Vita Sackville-West (16 March 1926), Woolf wrote:
As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief ) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it: But no doubt I shall think differently next year.
Woolf ’s assertion that rhythm is style and ‘a very simple matter’ is thus immediately countered by a claim for its complexity. If her ideas are placed in the context of her correspondence with Sackville-West, it becomes clear that she was responding to the latter’s view that ‘style and surface-texture’ should receive greater attention from critics and that the perfection of Woolf ’s ‘style’ (rivalled, Sackville-West suggested, only by that of Max Beerbohm) came, enviably, at no cost ‘of thought or trouble’. Woolf ’s response was that while ‘style’ might indeed be a ‘simple matter’ the question of ‘rhythm’ (on which the choice of words was dependent) was in fact ‘profound’, going ‘far deeper than words’ and, by implication, than ‘surface-texture’ (Sackville-West’s phrase), and entailing much creative effort in the ‘recapture’ of the rhythmic movement and the ‘exact shapes’ of consciousness. The imaginative process, she indicates, was a plunge (the word she uses at the opening of Mrs Dalloway), while her watery-depth metaphors were a foretaste of The Waves, written, as Woolf observed to the musician and composer Ethel Smyth, ‘to a rhythm and not to a plot’: ‘And thus though the rhythmical is more natural to me than the narrative, it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction and I am casting about all the time for some rope to throw to the reader.’ The rhythm of the waves, taking up the earlier image of ‘the wave in the mind’, sounds throughout the interludes that punctuate The Waves, as Woolf finds images to represent the passage of time, and of light, from dawn to darkness and, in the final pages of the novel, to dawn again: ‘Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.’ The motif became central to the construction of the novel’s unity and Woolf ’s desire to represent simultaneity rather than sequence (as in her intention for the final section of To the Lighthouse to represent two things happening at the same time): ‘The Waves is I think resolving itself … into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in & out, in the rhythm of the waves.’
[In a footnote:] In a further letter to Smyth, Woolf wrote of the disturbances of listening to Wagner on the radio: ‘His rhythm destroys my rhythm; yes, thats [sic] a true observation. All writing is nothing but putting words on the backs of rhythm. If they fall off the rhythm one’s done … Thank God, Wagner has stopped murmuring among the forest leaves, and I’m my own mistress again’; ibid., vol. 4, 303–5 (7 April 1931).
Laura Marcus, Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern
An essay focused on Hölderlin and originally published as ‘The Turning’ (1955) is the last to be included in the appendix to The Space of Literature. The essay is in part a response to Beda Allemann’s reading of the turning or reversal undertaken by Hölderlin between earlier commentaries on Empedocles and Hyperion – in which Hölderlin expresses the desire for reconciliation with the divine which is formulated as the desire to unite with the fiery element, to pass into another world, the desire for immediacy, for death – and later writing where the task of the poet is one of mediation between mortals and the gods. Here Blanchot references ‘As When on a Holiday’ as a well-known example thanks to Heidegger’s commentary, which itself became known in France thanks to his 1946 review ‘The “Sacred” Speech of Hölderlin’. This turning is deemed necessary for the poet to save himself from the dangerous experience of fire which threatens to consume him; Blanchot notes that it has also been interpreted by critics as a glorification of the earthly fatherland and as a patriotic return to the duties of this world. Blanchot challenges the interpretation of the turning offered by Allemann – and Heidegger, although he is not named – by focusing on a reversal which is never ‘one easy metamorphosis’ (SL 276).
Allemann understands the idea of reversal in Hölderlin as a response to the experience of fire which threatened to consume the poet at the time he was writing Hyperion and Empedocles. Blanchot writes that Hölderlin denounces this experience as not only dangerous but, more significantly, false, ‘insofar at least as it claims to be immediate communication with the immediate’. Blanchot cites Hölderlin’s commentary on a fragment by Pindar on the law, where Hölderlin writes that both the gods and man must distinguish between worlds to maintain celestial pureness (the gods) and the opposition of contraries that alone allows knowledge (man) (SL 273). The immediate is impossible for both men and gods alike, and the poet is not intermediary between these two worlds but the one tasked with safeguarding this absence; Blanchot reminds us that when Hölderlin writes of ‘the categorical reversal’, he is commenting on his translation of the tragedy of Oedipus, who was condemned to live apart from both gods and men and to maintain the empty place opened up by this double infidelity (SL 272). In the absence of the gods our relationship to them is not purely negative, and this is what makes it terrible; it has been replaced by a relation with what is higher than the gods – the ‘Sacred’, the law, or what Hölderlin names ‘the Most High’ – and it is this relation without relation that threatens to tear and disorientate us (SL 275).
The reversal is an indication of the impossibility of the mediation of the immediate at the edge of this abyss; it is man’s heart that must become ‘the intimacy where the echo of the empty deep becomes. language, but not through one easy metamorphosis’ (SL 275–6). Blanchot cites the hymn Germania as an example of the richer conception of inspiration which results from the reversal understood not as singular and redemptive but as repeated and reversed: with Allemann, he notes that the focus of earlier hymns (when the poet felt the necessity of not giving himself over to the experience of the fire) becomes appeased power in Germania; Allemann argues that this is because Hölderlin has accomplished the reversal and opened that pure region of mediation between sky and earth; but Blanchot sees the poet as turned aside from both heavens and earth as the one tasked with maintaining this rupture. The closing lines of the essay cite Hölderlin at a time when ‘madness had completely obscured [his] mind’:
And when we read these words gleaming with madness: ‘Would I like to be a comet? Yes. For they have the speed of birds, they flourish in fire and are as children in purity’, we sense how the desire to be united with the fire, with the day, may have been realised for the poet in the purity guaranteed by his exceptional integrity. And we are not surprised by this metamorphosis which, with the silent speed of a bird’s flight, bears him henceforth through the sky, flower of light, star that burns but unfurls innocently into a flower. (SL 276)
Hölderlin suggests that the turn to the divine, the immediate, the Open, is achievable; perhaps his madness is evidence of this indifference. Blanchot’s rewriting of this quotation in the lines that follow, however, does not bear witness to the incineration of this comet but to its light, which at once destroys and unveils. Figurative language becomes more literal in this rewriting as the comet transforms into blossoming flower, signalling not reconciliation between the human and the gods but multiple metamorphoses which result from this endless confrontation with the void.
Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot
The final sentence of the fragment quoted here does not appear in the first French edition of The Writing of the Disaster dated 18 September 1980.
[…] Through a sort of wayward proliferation, an uncontrollable dissemination that escapes the system, the cancerous cell works outside the law of the programme and destroys all idea of a programme. The cancerous cell is perhaps a Foucauldian resistance to the biopolitical forces that regulate and manage our lives – Foucault writes in the first volume of The History of Sexuality that suicide was once a crime, because the right to death was the power possessed by the sovereign over his people, but now it is a unique and individual act of resistance against forms of administering life – but Blanchot goes further: cancer is mortal malfunctioning, not simply death at work. The significance of this difference is clarified in the cancerous proliferation of the fragment: the irony of this death is that it eludes the subject. Blanchot would suggest that Foucault’s account of suicidal resistance is reliant on the will of a subject (we saw earlier that Blanchot understands romantic irony as an expression of poetic subjectivity); this cancerous proliferation is a different sort of incomprehensible and infinitely reflexive irony that exceeds. and contests subjectivity.
Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot
The apocalypse always disappoints; it is that ambiguous and excessive event that does not reveal the truth of the end because it encounters death as the insurmountable impossibility that we are incapable of dominating or wanting: man is not some sort of ‘supreme hero of the negative’ or ‘final Hamlet’ (F 106). Our understanding, which takes us to the limits of comprehension, helps us to see that we will never know this universal death and that our ending will never be of any significance (F 107). Blanchot exposes the difference between the future treated as an object by totalising scientific knowledge and the future as what cannot be negated, as what remains unknowable and uncertain. The latter is why the apocalypse always disappoints: apocalyptic foretelling exposes us to the banality of an end that will never have any meaning for us as subjects.
[…] [A]ll modes of technique expose the human to a turning because all relate us to the unknowable and expose us to a profound powerlessness.
[…] Noted at the start of this chapter was Derrida’s analysis which claimed that any attempt to shed light on the apocalypse leads only. to a brighter apocalyptic tone; Derrida suggests that by listening to the multiplicity of apocalyptic tones, by recognising that there is more than one tone, we allow the possibility that the other tone, or the tone of the other, might be heard. Towards the end of ‘The Apocalypse is Disappointing’, Blanchot is doing just this when he argues that Jaspers ‘[dismisses] the abstract shadow of this apocalypse as if it were an irritating fly and [perseveres] with the habits of a tradition and a language in which one sees nothing to change’ (F 108). The essay concludes by stressing that the choice between all or nothing, between transformation or destruction, is not the one and only truth of our situation. We should note this fly out of the corner of our eye; we should risk a surreptitious glance in its direction.
[…] the limits of history, world and culture are contested by an impersonal force which the human cannot master: the neuter as a sort of disobedient techne continuing where other modes of technique have left off.
Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot
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