#jacob taubes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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