I am reading an amazing book Professor of the Apocalypse,about Jacob Taubes (1923-1987), a fictional character, uncataloguable, unclassifiable, iconoclast, heathen, heretical spirit, son of a rabbi, himself a rabbi and a philosopher, friend of Susan Sontag, Choran, close to Carl Schmitt, somewhere between the tragic enlightenment and self-destructive anti-enlightenment. He appeared a month ago at Princeton UP. An important work for understanding modern nihilism. Ioan Petru Culianu, an admirer of Hans Jonas, wrote in a volume coordinated by Taubes on the subject of Gnosticism. Agnes Heller met him. Historian Timothy Snyder’s recent address to and about Habermas suggests that there are times when Enlightenment liberalism must come out of its perpetually confused shell. Agnes and Habermas were friends. But she would agree with Timothy Snyder’s position. Schmitt (by no means my favorite, of course) proved the need to make a decision at crucial moments. He was right. Moral determinism is what inspired Churchill. You decide, because if you don’t decide, you disappear. Not only you, but humanity too.

Apocalyptic ecstasy, revolutionary eschatology, political theology, fundamental matrices — these are the basic concepts for understanding the metamorphoses of Jakob Taubes’s thought. Predominantly a verbal genius, he avoided crystallization of thought in the Prokustian rigidity of print. He was equally dominated by Eros and Thanatos, the instinct of life and death. In discussions with Herbert Marcuse (see the photo on the cover of Professor Müller’s book) and Emile Choran, with Habermas and Adorno, with Karl Schmitt and Susan Sontag, Taubes was always unpredictable, with a spontaneity that surprised the interlocutors. He was a seeker, a pilgrim, a dialectical metaphysician and a metaphysical dialectician.

His first wife, Susan Taubes, a Hungarian Jew by birth, committed suicide shortly after the publication of her autobiographical novel Divorce. The volume was recently reissued in the exceptional NYR Books series. She was accompanied on her last journey by her closest friend Susan Sontag and her son David Riff. Three decades ago, David reviewed my book Rethinking politics in Newsday. Taubes’ second wife was Margarita von Brentano, professor of philosophy at the Free University in Berlin, where Taubes taught for many years. Yakiv and Margarita, an extremely influential couple, ran a fund to help dissidents in Central Europe, including the Czech philosopher Karel Kosik, author The dialectic of the concreteand members of the Budapest School (Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feger, Mihai Vajda, György Markus). For Taubs, Marx was considered a philosopher of salvation. Here he met Ernst Bloch, the author of the trilogy Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Young Hegelians staged a revolution against theology. Post-Marxists such as Taubes, Agamben, Badiou, even Žižek, are champions of the theology of revolution. Ernst Bloch’s book about Thomas Münzer had a title Theologian of the revolution.

His cultural hero, the prototype of a radical vocation, was the apostle Paul. In a letter to Carl Schmitt, Taubes proposed a completely original reading of the Epistle to the Romans. 2. Impressed by Taubes’ dizzying logic, Schmitt urged him not to keep these thoughts to himself. This Faustian relationship between the so-called “last Jewish thinker of German philosophy” and the former legal philosopher of the Third Reich is fascinating. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro