Abstract
This chapter traces Taubes’s covenantal apocalypticism from Occidental Eschatology to The Political Theology of Paul—the two books which beginning readers of Taubes should focus upon. Taubes’s writings present and enact the memory of apocalypticism as the memory of the covenant. The historic figures he deals with in his works—St. Paul, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, Barth, and Schmitt—are the enemy brothers in the struggle with whom Taubes finds a way to live in the presence of God.
Revolutionary humanity is an existence in the state of leaping [im Sprung], a fractured [zer-sprungene] existence longing for unity.
Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology (176)
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- 1.
Jacob Neusner, Transformations in Ancient Judaism (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004), 103–116.
- 2.
For a discussion of the Taubes-Schmitt relationship, see Bruce Rosenstock, “Palintropos Harmoniê: Jacob Taubes and Carl Schmitt ‘im Liebenden Streit,’” New German Critique 41.1 (2014): 55–92.
- 3.
Jacob Taubes uses the term “messianic futurologism” to contrast with what he believes is Walter Benjamin’s “messianic actualism”; see Taubes (2016).
Works Cited
Taubes, Jacob. 2004. The Political Theology of Paul. Trans. D. Hollander. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2009. Occidental Eschatology. Trans. D. Ratmoko. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2016. Seminar Notes on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. In Walter Benjamin and Theology, ed. C. Dickinson, 179–216. New York: Fordham University Press.
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Rosenstock, B. (2018). Jacob Taubes. In: Rodkey, C., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_23
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