Jacob Taubes offers a prime example of what it means to experiment with theological concepts in the sense described by Hegel. His political theology offers a detailed engagement with the histories of theology and philosophy, excavating the sites where concepts have been used and finding within those histories the materials for creative critique. Two key aspects of this political theology consolidate themes developed in my earlier discussions of the nature of the world and Hegel: the notion of working with theological materials and his definition of apocalypse. The first develops the narrow political theological method, as Taubes offers an apocalyptic critique that is immanent and desecularizing. The second expounds the consequences of thinking apocalyptically. Taubes is less convinced of the world’s fragility than Schmitt, but more convinced that signs of that fragility should be welcomed. Confronted with the creative potential of destruction, Taubes calls for a disinvestment from the world.
In order to explore Taubes’s political theological method and its implications for thinking the apocalypse, I will first outline Taubes’s understanding of the relationship between theology and philosophy. In the course of this discussion, the connections to my reading of Hegel in the previous chapter will become clear. This connection opens up an exploration of other Hegelian themes in Taubes’s work, including the relationship between the concept and nature, and the ways that Taubes draws out apocalyptic themes in Hegel. Having considered Taubes and this apocalyptic Hegel, I then turn to the nature of Taubes’s apocalypticism and the way that his political theology can be read against critiques of apocalyptic thinking. Taubes distrusts the hopes of this world and offers a thoroughgoing negation of everything as it is. This uncompromising negativity recalls anxieties about anti-liberal tendencies of apocalypticism. Exploring these tendencies in Taubes, alongside Hegel and Schmitt, begins to clarify why Taubes rejects hope in gradual progress or even messianic deliverance. It also illuminates the similarities and differences of his political theology and the work of Schmitt. Taubes defined his political theology against Schmitt’s conservative approach and Schmitt will frequently appear as a foil.1 Finally, I consider parallels between Taubes and transcendental materialist readings of Hegel. These similarities provide the grounds for reading Taubes through Malabou in the subsequent chapter.
Jacob Taubes was a German philosopher and scholar of religion.2 In addition to his sole monograph, Occidental Eschatology, he wrote a number of articles and essays, many of which were posthumously collected in the volume From Cult to Culture. He is perhaps most well-known for his posthumously published series of lectures, The Political Theology of Paul. In the introductory remarks to the German edition of From Cult to Culture, Assmann, Assmann and Hartwich place Taubes in a distinct line of twentieth-century German cultural criticism, fostered by the Jewish tradition, that draws on the works of Kant, Hegel and Marx. This tradition includes Benjamin, Marcuse, Adorno and Steiner (a tradition that could be expanded to include Bloch).3 What unites these figures is the development of a form of Jewish thought that is radical, secular and messianic.4
Taubes is part of this tradition, but not fully. Unlike the others, he is relatively unconcerned with aesthetics. While he does engage with surrealism, on the whole he remains focused on cult rather than culture.5 And while Taubes’s political theology is not sectarian, it is certainly not secular in any straightforward sense. Anson Rabinbach’s description of Bloch’s and Benjamin’s philosophies as ‘both secular and theological’ and representing ‘an intellectualist rejection of the existing order of things’, could equally apply to Taubes.6 Indeed, the troubling relationship between the secular and theological is one of Taubes’s central contributions to political theology.
As might be expected of a Jewish intellectual during this period, his thought is shaped by his experiences during the Second World War. One motivation for the reconfiguration of messianism was an attempt to resist growing Jewish accommodation to German culture, the looming Nazi threat and the aftermath of the War. These concerns are fundamental to Taubes’s political theology. He aims to uncover something repressed within his religious tradition, a radicalism lost as religion became a cultural form like any other, and he does so in a context where he is coming to grips with significant intellectual complicity with National Socialism. As he says in a 1952 letter to Armin Mohler, he cannot comprehend ‘that both C.S. [Carl Schmitt] and M.H. [Martin Heidegger] welcomed the National Socialist “revolution” and went along with it and it remains a problem for me that I cannot just dismiss by using catchwords such as vile, swinish . . . What was so “seductive” about National Socialism?’ (CS, 19–20).7 This dismay is an important motivation in Taubes’s desire to reignite an alternative, apocalyptic passion.
The preface to the English edition of From Cult to Culture notes that Taubes’s exploration of these issues is complicated by his tendency to address specific points in contemporaneous, ongoing debates. Despite the occasional nature of much of this work, clear themes emerge: a dissatisfaction with the world as it is, a complex evaluation of the legacy of modernity and a tension between the desire for the end of the world and a wish to avoid slipping into nihilism. These themes all appear in Occidental Eschatology. As seen in Chapter 2, Taubes connects Hegel to Joachim de Fiore, arguing that Hegelian philosophy is the modern expression of Gnostic and apocalyptic theological traditions: ‘[a]pocalypticism and Gnosis form the basis of Hegel’s logic, which is often discussed but seldom understood. The connection between apocalyptic ontology and Hegelian logic is neither artificial nor an afterthought’ (OE, 36).8 Taubes’s approach is a return to these theological concepts or, to use the Hegelian language developed in the previous chapter, a return to representations. This return is not an attempt to conserve a sacred tradition, but to redeploy these representations anew in an effort to offer a critique of the world.
As already noted, this redeployment of theological concepts means Taubes is neither theological nor secular, but offers a desecularizing political theology. In a 1954 essay on Karl Barth and dialectics, Taubes claims philosophy cannot ‘accept the self-interpretation of theology’, but ‘can try to understand the meaning of divine revelation’.9 Doing so allows theology to ‘serve as a concrete negation of a status quo that the dictatorship of common sense accepts as man’s permanent situation’.10 For Taubes, this concrete negation is theology’s central task:
Theological language is born out of the dualism between the ideal standard and the status quo of man’s situation. So long as this cleavage is not healed, there remains a legitimate task for theology. But the language of theology itself reflects the cleavage between the ideal and the ruling norms of man and society. In the moment that the ideal standards that theology has put as a judgment upon man and society are realized in the course of human history, the task of theology has been fulfilled . . . The development of theological language is, therefore, relevant for a philosophy that studies the stages of man’s self-realization.11
Not only does Taubes recognize theology’s task as concrete negation, he understands the need for the development of theological language and avoids advocating a retrieval of lost theological meanings or pure origins uncontaminated by the developments of modernity. While he describes Jewish and Gnostic apocalyptic thought as tainted by Hellenization, there is no simple process of recovery or return. In his comments on the ‘re-’ of the Reformation and Renaissance, as well as his comments on Kierkegaard’s recovery of the early church and Marx’s retrieval of the Greek polis, Taubes ‘transposes’ history into the future.
In the same essay on Barth’s theology, Taubes poses the question of the relationship between theology and philosophy and again puts forward a Hegelian position:
It is true that (as Barth once remarked) all philosophy has its origin in theology. It is, however, possible to turn around the relation between theology and philosophy. Dialectical theology can point to the development of history from theology to philosophy: theology is the origin. But an equally legitimate interpretation of this sequence might be given from the other side: philosophy is the end. If I emphasize the origin, then the later development takes the form of gradual alienation and eclipse of origin. If I emphasize the end, the process of development takes the form of gradual fulfilment. The scheme is the same in both interpretations. At no point does the premise of Barth’s pantheology contradict the scheme of Hegel’s dialectic.12
Taubes thus anticipates more recent pronouncements by Žižek and Gianni Vattimo that Christian theology births modernity.13 Whereas Barth presents this story in an Oedipal light, with philosophy forgetting its origins and returning to kill the father, the Taubesian interpretation sees the story as one of the passing of generations. It is not that philosophy has to return and kill the father, it is simply the case that as one generation is born another dies away.
Taubes presents a similar perspective on the relationship between theology and philosophy in a later essay on ‘The Dogmatic Myth of Gnosticism’. Here, he argues for the importance of an allegorical reading of myth. He cautions against a narrow understanding of allegorical readings of myth as simply a form of archaic exegesis. In a wider understanding, allegorical interpretation ‘becomes a vehicle for a new understanding of reality that is differentiated from archaic myth. Allegory is a form of translation. It translates mythic forms, names and the destinies of mythic narrative into concepts. In allegorical interpretation . . . the mythic template gains a new content.’14 Moving on to a later Greek, philosophical allegorical interpretation, he argues that this reading ‘acts not only as the rationalizing exegesis of archaic myth, but itself turns into the form of representation of a “new” myth’.15 Continuing the reproductive metaphor, the transformation of the mythic forms, names and destinies is the product of new couplings, diversifying the gene pool. Or more strongly, it is a mutation, the result of the mutual contamination of philosophy and theology.16
This emphasis on philosophical interpretations of theological concepts returns to what Agata Bielik-Robson describes as a ‘positive, theological evaluation of modernity’17:
Modernity, the age of enlightenment, man’s rational empowerment and emancipation, is thus to be defended against itself, against its inner dangers that threaten to overthrow the promise it gave at its onset. The theological definition of modernity, therefore, wholly depends on the right understanding of this precarious promise, which is always threatened to disappear in the course of modern history: the messianic promise of a universal liberation, that is, leaving all the Egypts of this world for good, with its hierarchies, glories of domination and self-renewing cycles of power.18
Rather than offering a theological rejection of modernity, as is the case of many of his contemporaries, Taubes offers a theological defence of modernity against its own worst tendencies. This defence of modernity requires the process of developing a new theological language, one which is ‘materialist, messianic, historical, emancipatory, focused on the finite life, immanentist and this-worldly’.19
It is not only Taubes’s Jewish contemporaries who develop theological rejections of modernity; his defence of modernity is one of the points of contrast between his and Schmitt’s political theologies. If Schmitt inquires about ‘the theological potentials of legal concepts’, Taubes looks for ‘the political potentials in the theological metaphors’ (PT, 69). While Schmitt views the secularization of theological concepts as a negative development, Taubes sees his version of political theology as necessary for the development of theological thought. There is a parallel here to Taubes’s discussion of Barth. Schmitt is like Barth in offering an understanding of the progression from religion to secular thought as a loss or corruption, whereas Taubes sees philosophy as a telos of theological thought. Put another way, Schmitt sees the separation of legal concepts from their theological origins as an abuse of theological ideas. Taubes’s political theology provides a constructive method of philosophical engagement with religious texts and history. He sees his work, not as philosophical theology, but as a working with ‘theological materials’ (PT, 69). Taubes argues it is advantageous to experiment more openly with theological materials and rejects Schmitt’s claim that theology provides the rules for such experimentation.
As already established, Taubes views religious language, and thus apocalypse, as representations, capable of development and novel usage. Like Hegel, Taubes does not view this development as secularization. While Taubes does not use Hegelian terminology, this development is an immanentization, a revisiting of religious representations from the perspective of the concept. In his view, any attempt at nostalgically employing archaic religious or mythic language is doomed to failure. ‘Insofar as the mythical discourse on the gods preserves itself as residues and remainders in the accounts of monotheistic religions of revelation, it retains the weight of a poetic metaphor only. Its power or legitimacy as a religious expression, however, has wasted away.’20 With the exceptions of Barth and Tillich, Taubes is of the opinion that theology is no longer practiced by the theologians. In his letter to Mohler, he criticizes the theologians of the day and advocates for a wider understanding of theology. ‘What is there today that is not “theology” (apart from theological claptrap)? Is Ernst Jünger less a “theologian” than Bultmann or Brunner? Kafka less so than Karl Barth?’ (CS, 22). In Taubes’s view, much of what passes for theology is precisely this poetic metaphor, trading platitudes for power and legitimacy.
Rather than remaining in this mode of theology, Taubes seeks to renew the development of religious language in order to address the cleavage between humanity as it is and as it could be. In this context, apocalypse is transferred from a chronological feature of revelation, to the revealed temporal and political logic that drives the work of Hegel, Kierkegaard and Marx. As Mike Grimshaw writes, a key question for Taubes is ‘how is political theology as a movement to be rethought, for within such a redefinition apocalypse becomes a type of judgment central to any political theology’.21 Taubes’s insight, in Grimshaw’s view, is that ‘in post/modernity theology, if not sectarian, is the self-reflexivity of modern thought that thinks the unthought of both secularity and “religion” ’.22 This unthought is that which unites secularism and religion in their opposition.
In more Hegelian terms, Taubes offers a model of theological reflection in which thought has returned from the concept. Understanding Taubes’s transformation of the relationship between secularism and religion through Hegel further clarifies Taubes’s political theological method. The Hegelian dialectic works by uncovering the unthought commonality that manifests itself as opposition. With regard to religion, this unthought consists in at least three themes. First, as seen in the Phenomenology of Spirit’s treatment of superstition and enlightenment, both reason and faith are concerned with pure thought, but in their simplistic forms understand this pure thought in opposition to their self-consciousness. In the initial stages of the analysis of the relationship between Enlightenment and superstition, Hegel argues,
[The absolute being of the believing consciousness] is pure thought, and pure thought posited within itself as an object or as essence; in the believing consciousness, this intrinsic being of thought acquires at the same time for consciousness that is for itself, the form – but only the empty form – of objectivity; it has the character of something presented to consciousness. To pure insight, however, since it is pure consciousness from the side of the self that is for itself, the “other” appears as something negative of self-consciousness. (PS, §552: 336/299)
This critique of faith, in the simplified form of superstition, is developed in the process of Enlightenment’s break from the myth of pure insight.
One part of this process is the differentiation in which intellectual insight confronts its own self as object; so long as it persists in this relationship it is alienated from itself. As pure insight it is devoid of all content; for nothing else can become its content because it is the self-consciousness of the category. But since in confronting the content, pure insight at first knows it only as a content and not yet as its own self, it does not recognize itself in it. (PS, §548: 333–4/404–5)
Both Enlightenment and superstition mistake their content for something external to self-consciousness, rather than their own self.
Second, there is the representational form of religion. Religion tends to lose sight of its form while secularity forgets the necessity of representations for the actualization of concepts. As Hegel explains the representational form of thought falls short of speculative thought, ‘it has the content, but without its necessity . . . Since this consciousness, even in its thinking, remains at the level of picture-thinking, absolute being is indeed revealed to it, but the moments of this being, on account of this [empirically] synthetic presentation, partly themselves fall asunder so that they are not related to one another through their own notion . . . relating itself to it only in an external manner’ (PS, §771: 465–6/560). The paragraphs following this one, demonstrate how this transition in form, from representation to concept, is accomplished through representational thinking.
Third, the truth of religion is often forgotten by religion itself. Put in a more Taubesian way, the truth of religion is no longer thought by religion in its predominant institutional or cultural forms. While Taubes does not make use of Hegelian language when describing his political theological method, his work enacts a transition from representation to concept by thinking the unthought of both religion and secularism from the perspective of a philosophy which experiments with religious materials.
Taubes refers to the resulting perspective as a ‘transcendental eschatology’. This form of eschatology ‘requires that everything be grounded in subjectivity, making this the condition of the possibility of cognition, as self-knowledge, self-apocalypse’ (OE, 132). This eschatology is an internalization that resists depoliticization. ‘All apocalypses associated with history or natural occurrences, all sounding of trumpets and symbols of wrath, all global conflagrations and new parodies are only coup de theatre and parables; they are simply the orchestral arrangement for the one real apocalypse: the Apocalypse of Man’ (OE, 132). This passage captures the essential elements of Taubesian political theology – the immanentization of apocalyptic ideas accomplished by the treatment of religious ideas as representations.
Yet, this immanentization of apocalyptic ideas renders these ideas potentially unsuitable for their original ecclesial contexts. One of Taubes’s central contributions to political theology is his proposal of expanding the context of theology.
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 . . . Theology must remain incognito in the realm of the secular and work for the sanctification of the world.23
Theology, stripped of its customary ecclesial authority, must seek out new, ‘incognito’, activities. As Tina Beattie puts it, theology moves from the queen of the sciences to the court jester, disrupting the forms of hierarchical authority it once exercised.24 Religious thought, as representation, goes beyond religion.
Taubes finds this alternative activity in the exploration of the gap between what is and what should be. In doing so, he affirms Marx’s observation that the critique of religion is the basis of all criticism. The critique of religion is, as Taubes explains, ‘the model for a critique of profane existence’.25 This critique is the critique which religion provides. Yet this critique is self-incriminating. Theology’s complicity with that profane existence means that the critique provided by religion entails the critique of religion itself. This initial form of critique persists through the political, economical and technological. ‘Every level propagates its own illusory appearances, develops its own apologies, but also forges its own weapon of critique.’26 Taubes’s political theology is the process of transformation described by Marx in his comments on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: ‘the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.’27 From theology and religion to law and politics, the concepts of religion, understood in relation to philosophical truth, are still capable of articulating the ‘cleavage between the ideal and the ruling norms of man and society’.28 Political theology does not attempt to explain the political through theological concepts, as in Schmitt. Taubes uses religion not to ‘transform the worldly question of industrial society into a theological one; rather, we transform the theological into the worldly’.29
This political theology is not wholly Hegelian, however. He follows Marx in questioning the relationship between idea and actuality.
Individual sections of the Phenomenology contain the critical elements for entire realms, like religion, the state, and bourgeois life, but admittedly in an alienated form. For the real process of history is only depicted as the phenomenon of the process, which comes about through self-consciousness . . . Hegel’s dialectic is a dialectic of the idea, not of actuality. What Hegel burns in the dialectical fire of the idea is not actual religion, the actual state, actual society and nature, but religion itself as already an object of knowledge, as theology and dogma. It is not the state and society which undergo sublation, but jurisprudence and political science; it is not nature which is sublated in its objectivity, but the natural sciences. (OE, 179)
While he is correct to highlight that Hegel is primarily concerned with the concept, he overstates the gap between concept and actuality. Taubes does not offer a fully developed reading of Hegel’s wider philosophy, but reading his criticism in the light of that larger context closes the distance between Taubes and Hegel.
This point about the gap between the actual and ideal is also important because it returns to issues fundamental to the ontology of the world developed in the first chapter. There, I argued that Haslanger’s social constructivism and Tuana’s interactionist ontology could be read in terms of Hegel’s notion of spirit. That reading is enabled by transcendental materialist interpretations of Hegel and those interpretations are concerned with precisely this division. If the world is constituted by the interaction of the natural, human-made, social and biological, then ideas can never be merely ideal. Working through Taubes’s critique is thus not an attempt to defend Hegel from Taubes but a way of developing a reading of Hegel that brings the two closer together while beginning to draw in the transcendental materialism I am using to account for the world and that will inform the next chapter’s discussion of Malabou.
Taubes’s critique focuses on the division between idea and actuality, ideal religion and religion as it actually is found in the world. First, Hegel would object to the notion of actual religion, society and nature as objects completely divorced from the process of conceptualization. Taubes’s claim is a familiar one: Hegel deals only with ideas, not material, lived reality. It is true, in a sense, that the Philosophy of Right is concerned with political science rather than actual politics. What would sublation mean in politics if not a sublation that involves ideas about politics? If Marx attempts to sublate philosophy into a material politics, this move is itself comprehensible from the perspective of a Hegelian philosophy which insists on the actualization of the absolute. In a sense, this understanding makes Hegel the more realistic of the two. Marx sublates philosophy into material reality as part of a process in achieving final resolution. For Hegel, the absolute contains a persistent negativity between thought and reality as immediately given. Thought is always perturbed and reanimated by the other of thought. The absolute does not denote the end of that negativity, but its comprehension.30
Second, in the concluding sentence, Taubes claims that it is natural science that is sublated, not nature itself. Again, for Hegel, this statement assumes too great a division between nature and natural science. Abstract reflection on nature includes the material sublation of nature in humanity’s creation of its own freedom. The relationship between the abstract and concrete is one of the key themes of transcendental materialism. As Adrian Johnston argues,
Hegel’s emphasis on the need to think substance also as subject reciprocally entails the complementary obligation to conceptualize subject as substance. This reciprocity reflects his post-Spinozist (in both senses of the qualifier ‘post-’) immanentism in which transcendent(al) subjectivity nonetheless remains immanent to substance in a dialectical-speculative relationship of an ‘identity of identity and difference’. Thinking subject as substance, which is a move central to transcendental materialism, involves treating subjectivity and various phenomena tied up with it as ‘real abstractions’ . . . As real qua non-illusory, such abstractions are causally efficacious and, hence, far from epiphenomenal. In Hegelian phrasing, the thought of the concrete apart from the abstract is itself the height of abstraction.31
As Johnston explains elsewhere, nature gives birth to a process of denaturalization.32 Human subjectivity is nature thinking itself.
It is thus possible to accept Taubes’s point that political science is not politics as such, but it is a mistake to posit them as completely distinct. The relationship between material and abstract reflection is, as Johnston points out, the identity of identity and difference. This claim is essential to Hegel’s definition of philosophy in the Encyclopaedia Logic: ‘philosophy should be quite clear about the fact that its content is nothing other than the basic import that is originally produced and produces itself in the domain of the living spirit, the content that is made into the world, the outer and inner world of consciousness; in other words, the content of philosophy is actuality’ (E1, §6: 29/47). He goes on to explain that the first interaction between consciousness and actuality is experience. Those attentive to experience quickly realize the difference between this transience and the actuality underlying those appearances. The following paragraph is even more explicit: ‘right from the start, our meditative thinking did not confine itself to its merely abstract mode . . . but threw itself at the same time upon the material of the world of appearance’ (E1, §7: 30/49).
Taubes’s clear distinction between idea and actuality is also rejected in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Here, Hegel critiques both the simple immediacy of the preconceptual as failing to understand the becoming that characterizes actuality. Reason, he insists, must be understood as a purposive activity generated by the immediacy of experience and moving towards the concept.
The exaltation of a supposed nature over a misconceived thinking, and especially the rejection of external teleology, has brought the form of purpose in general into discredit. Still, in the sense in which Aristotle, too, defines nature as purposive activity, purpose is what is immediate and at rest, the unmoved which is also self-moving, and as such is subject. Its power to move, taken abstractly, is being-for-self or pure negativity. The result is the same as the beginning, only because the beginning is the purpose; in other words, the actual is the same as its notion only because the immediate, as purpose, contains the self or pure actuality within itself. The realized purpose, or the existent actuality, is movement and unfolded becoming. (PS, §22: 12/26)
Finally, this relationship is also found in Hegel’s definition of nature. ‘Nature has presented itself as the idea in the form of otherness. Since therefore the idea is the negative of itself, or is external to itself, nature is not merely external in relation to this idea’ (E2, §247: 13/237). Arguing that Hegel is wrong to speak of nature when he really means natural science is to misunderstand the relationship between the two. Taubes’s objection to Hegel is understandable, arising as it does from a Marxist tradition of critiquing Hegel’s idealism but nonetheless errs in neglecting the Hegelian understanding of the relationship between substance and subject.33
Rather than following Taubes in offering these points as critiques of Hegel, one should read Taubes as drawing out the latent principles within Hegel’s philosophy. ‘The explosive material is already latent in the principle of Hegel. Even though in the Hegelian system the power of the state coincides with the divinations of religion and the principles of philosophy, as he reconciles actuality with spirit, the state with religious conscience, and religious conscience with philosophy’ (OE, 164). Taubes is not a Hegelian in the sense that he seeks to replicate and clarify Hegel’s texts. He is a Hegelian in his creative redeployment of Hegel’s philosophy.
The extent of this Hegelianism is clear at the conclusion of Occidental Eschatology. He ends with a criticism of all philosophies of return. Kierkegaard, in Taubes’s reading, aims to recover early Christianity, while Marx seeks to recover something of the Greek polis. Hegel, though, sees his philosophy as the fulfilment lying at the end of the development of Western history. ‘Hegel’s fulfilment, however, is a reconciliation of destruction’ (OE, 192). Hegel stands at the apex of modern thought, destroying modernity for modernity’s sake. For Taubes, Hegel writes in a moment of revelation and annihilation at the tipping point between the modern and what will follow.
This epoch, in which the threshold of Western history is crossed, regards itself primarily as the no-longer [Nicht-Mehr] of the past and the not-yet [Noch-Nicht] of what is to come. To all weak spirits longing for shelter and security, this age appears wanting. For the coming age is not served by demonizing or giving new life to what-has-been [das Gewesene], but by remaining steadfast in the no-longer and the not-yet, in the nothingness of the night, and thus remaining open to the first signs of the coming day. (OE, 193)
Taubes thus offers an argument for uncovering a persistent, latent element that lies within modernity – a willingness to destroy the world as it is in the name of that which it could be. This alternation between affirmation of modernity and call for the destruction of the world presents a persistent tension in Taubes’s thought. His embracing of destruction is a clear articulation of a Hegelian apocalyptic political theology, but his focus on ‘the nothingness of the night’ perpetually comes up against his commitment to modernity as he seeks to navigate between history and apocalypse, progress and providence.34 He calls for the destruction of the modern world in the name of the values of modernity.
In the light of this tension, Bielik-Robson argues that one should emphasize Taubes’s more eschatological or messianic tendencies rather than accepting his ‘self-professed apocalypticism’.35 Contrary to this position, I claim that it is important to retain the apocalyptic elements of Taubes’s philosophy. While agreeing with Bielik-Robson that this tension is problematically unresolved in Taubes’s work, it is possible to read texts such as Occidental Eschatology as willing the destruction of the world, if world is understood as the material and social relations that I outlined in the first chapter. Evaluating Taubes’s apocalypticism requires inquiring further into the nature of that apocalypticism. As already noted, one of the key critiques of apocalypticism has been the notion of an external, divine force breaking into history. Throughout this chapter I have argued that Taubes offers an immanent political theology, opening up the possibility of an apocalypticism without transcendence. It is now time to see if Taubes can fulfil that promise.
At the start of Occidental Eschatology, Taubes defines apocalypse as ‘in the literal and figurative sense, revelation’ (OE, 4). Revelation, in turn, is ‘the subject of history; history is the predicate of revelation’ (OE, 7). Seeing this revelation as both concealment and unveiling, Taubes defines the ‘apocalyptic principle’ as entailing ‘a form-destroying and forming power. Depending on the situation and the task, only one of the two components emerges, but neither can be absent’ (OE, 10). In his lectures on Paul, he explores the consequences of the apocalyptic disposition, claiming that he has ‘no spiritual investment in the world as it is’ (PT, 103). As Bielik-Robson indicates, this final phrase is crucial. Either one emphasizes ‘the world’ or one focuses on ‘as it is’:
If we follow the first apocalyptic possibility, history will only emerge as a passive waiting for an event which will finally lead us out of the world into the original divine Nothingness. But if we follow the latter, history will have a chance to emerge as a process that can finally lead us from the world-as-it-is, that is: naturalised, hierarchised, spatialised, and ideologically stabilised in the cyclical succession of powers.36
Bielik-Robson echoes Svenungsson’s concerns that apocalypticism entails a break with history rather than an intrahistorical process.37 For Bielik-Robson, one must choose between apocalypse as revelation and apocalypse as annihilation.38 The former can take place within history. It can function as an ‘operative antinomianism’, a ‘traumatising negation’ that stops short of ‘apocalyptic annihilation’.39 Whether Taubes’s political theology calls for end of the world or its salvation hinges on this question of history.
What creates history in Taubes’s account is neither an annihilating shock awaited by the apocalypticists, nor the inherent norm inscribed into some impersonal ‘laws of history’, but the antinomian tension, which always presses against the grain, against ‘nature’, against any progressive normativity. History, therefore, is never a progress, it is rather a disruptive staccato of breaks, awakenings and traumas that never simply evaporate without trace but always leave a disquieting mark that, despite all the ‘natural’ obstacles, initiates messianic transformation of the world.40
If Bielik-Robson is correct, then Taubes is not describing an apocalyptic annihilation, but a negativity that haunts the world. Yet, this reading of Taubes can also be reconfigured within an apocalyptic framework rooted in the conviction that the world cannot be redeemed.41 In this case, apocalypticism is not so much the end of history, but the end of our history. If apocalypse is simultaneous revelation and annihilation, what is revealed are the gaps and fissures which are the sites of a destructive potential. While there may be general problems with apocalyptic political theology, it is important to reflect on Taubes’s distinctive immanent, material and finite approach. Thinking apocalyptically from this perspective allows new forms of apocalypticism rather than the rejection of apocalyptic political theology altogether. Apocalypse is no longer something awaited, but an active, negative presence. This negativity is not orientated at messianic transformation – for such transformations are transformations of the violent and inescapable world – but a transformation that passes through annihilation. Apocalypticism is not about replacing what is now with something better. It is about ‘opposing the totality of this world with a new totality that comprehensively founds anew in the way that it negates . . . namely, in terms of basic foundations’ (OE, 9).42
This basic foundation, the nature of the world as violent and inescapable, is the revelation that accompanies annihilation. It is only in realizing the horror of the world that one can truly desire its end and only in so desiring that elusive and violent end, see the world in its vicious persistence. Read this way, there is no longer a division between revelation and annihilation in Taubes’s apocalypticism. Bielik-Robson places the ‘moment of revelation’ outside of history; revelation is its initiating otherness. It ‘cannot be reconciled with the “natural” course of events . . . messianic belief can be impressed upon human beings only through a violent event called revelation’.43 This outsideness is a way of describing the otherness of revelation. It is the truth of the world that is inexpressible in the terms of that world. Rather than discussing this otherness in terms of externality, risking the reintroduction of transcendence, this otherness can still be described as immanent to the world. It is, as Bull argues in his Hegelian reading of apocalypticism, that which the world rejects and the positions constituted by the slow, invisible (to many) forms of violence that do not happen in the world, but are the world. Revelation forces one to see the unseen – the exclusions that are constitutive of the world as such.
In this regard, Taubes’s political theology is an example of the twentieth-century Jewish messianism described by Rabinbach, characterized by a utopian vision ‘of a future which is the fulfilment of all that which can be hoped for in the condition of exile but cannot be realized within it. Redemption appears either as the end of history or as an event within history, never as an event produced by history.’44 Revelation is something that happens to history rather than is produced by it. As he describes it, the apocalyptic ‘element involves a quantum leap from present to future, from exile to freedom. This leap necessarily brings with it the complete destruction and negation of the old order. Messianism is thus bound up with both violence and catastrophe.’45 The language again suggests a break or fissure within history, addressed from within history, but which is a simultaneously annihilating and founding rather than producing. ‘Freedom may occur in history, but it is not brought about by historical forces or individual acts.’46 There is thus an immanent notion of freedom, but the actualization of this freedom is traumatic.
In both Rabinbach’s and Bielik-Robson’s reading of Taubes’s political theology, two themes emerge. First, in keeping with the earlier discussion of Hegel’s implicit political theology, apocalypticism and messianism are not religious concepts that can be merely translated into secular forms of progress and development. They are ways of thinking the end of the world that trouble philosophy. As representations, they think philosophical truth, but from a perspective other to that philosophical thought. Second, while Taubes is able to offer an immanent apocalypticism that avoids relying on transcendent intervention, the complex relationship between revelation and annihilation continues to trouble those who wish to still preserve some continuity with the world. They reject ‘the possibility of an optimistic and evolutionary conception of history, of progress, without of course foreclosing the possibility of freedom’.47 The limitations of this freedom depend on the nature of the world.
This discussion of nature, freedom, history and progress makes clear an essential divide that returns to the opening discussion of the nature of the world and apocalypse. On the one hand, there are liberal, progressive or messianic political theologies that posit a significant degree of autonomy or freedom within the world, but reject critiques of the world as such. The condition of possibility for freedom is the acceptance of the world. To turn away from the world, to disinvest, is to abandon the possibility of changing the world. On the other hand, Taubes’s political theology and the version of apocalypticism I am developing here, reverse this relationship. The materially embedded social relations that constitute the world operate as enormous constraints. The possibilities of a better world always remain possibilities of a world that is itself unjust. For this apocalypticism, the condition of possibility for freedom is disinvestment from the world.
Taubes is not the only one to philosophically discuss theology in these terms. As noted in the introduction to this section, there is a strong link to a broader German political theological tradition. Of this tradition, Bloch is closer to Taubes than most, even though Taubes describes Bloch as ‘wishy-washy’ (PT, 74) and as producing a ‘utopia picture-book’ (PT, 71). Notwithstanding these objections, there remain key points where Bloch supports Taubes’s position as well as pushing his more apocalyptic tendencies. In doing so, he tends to maintain greater focus on the concrete aspects of human existence. So, while Taubes might be more concerned with issues of political theological method and philosophical questions, Bloch gives more attention to philosophical and theological understandings of oppression and liberation.
There are three key points at which Bloch can supplement Taubes. First, Bloch offers a similar spatial schematization of political theology. Taubes describes the ‘work’ of apocalypse as moving in one of two directions. Either it moves from above, revealing ‘the central point of God and the world’ or ‘the centre is revealed from below’ (OE, 7). For Bloch, theology is an activity that can be practised from On-high or From-below. Describing the institutional forms of Christianity, he writes that ‘the religion of the On high had to be kept for the people: the old myth of lordship from on-high which, in Christianity, sanctioned, or at least explained, the unjust distribution of this world’s goods with the just distribution of those of the next’ (AC, 8). Bloch’s criticism of the On-high demonstrates his awareness of the ambiguity of religion.48 Though theology from On-high often comes from ‘the church’, Bloch is quick to remind his readers that this church is not the Bible (AC, 9). The Biblical text provides the undoing of the authority of the institutions which hitherto have appealed to the text in the justification of their actions. The Bible is the source of ‘master-ideologies’ (p. 12) as well as ‘the counter-blow against the oppressor’ (p. 13). In order for the Bible to serve its liberating function, it must be read carefully. The reader must engage in the ‘detective work of biblical criticism’ which demands that one ‘identify and save the Bible’s choked and buried “plebeian element” ’ (AC, 62). This recalls the ambiguity of the Marxist ‘critique of religion’ – rather than Bloch urging a critique of the Bible he encourages ‘criticism through the Bible’ (AC, 70).49 Such investigative work reveals the dual nature of the Biblical text, ‘a Scripture for the people and a Scripture against the people’ (AC, 70) or, a Bible From-below and a Bible from On-high.
Second, Bloch offers a similar opposition to the world. Speaking of the apocalyptic repetition of Exodus themes, Bloch notes that Israelite Messianism contains a strong antithesis to the world (AC, 101). This divestment from the world, to use Taubes’s phrase, is presented with a greater Marxist inflection in Bloch than in Taubes. Indeed, Taubes sometimes seems passive in his view of apocalyptic political theology. Though Taubes can envision the end of the world, the result is to ‘let it go down’ (PT, 103). He wonders, with Paul, if ‘we should still be rising up against something that is going down anyway?’ (PT, 40). Bloch is more active, advocating a ‘practical chiliasm’ in line with earlier movements such as Müntzer’s. Yet, for both, there is a conviction that there is a gap between the world and another which is possible. As Bloch writes, ‘there is always an exodus from this world, an exodus from the particular status quo. And there is always a hope, which is connected with rebellion – a hope founded in the concrete given possibilities for new being. As a handhold in the future, a process which, though by no means achieved, is yet by no means in vain’ (AC, 107). Apocalyptic thought is thus opposed to the world as it is, in the name of the world that might be.
A theory of religion based on wish ipso facto passes over into another, Utopian dimension, which does not cease to exist in the subject even when the illusion of an hypostasized Beyond is shattered. Indeed the subject, aware of itself now, and powerful, gains in stature from it, till it stands above nature itself. The idealism reflected in the now pulverized Other-world is revealed as the fruit of purely human powers of transcending which, far from going beyond nature, operate within it. (AC, 195)
Here, Bloch expresses the Hegelian understanding of nature articulated above. Spirit is not the abolition of nature, but the transcending arch of freedom which emerges from its material ground.
This apocalyptic focus is also central to Bloch’s understanding of a Jesus who preaches that ‘there will be no time for tranquil observation: the Kingdom will break through suddenly, in a single all-transforming bound’ (AC, 118). He opposes any attempt to suggest that this kingdom is an internal one in the hearts of believers (AC, 117) or that the world as it is now will continue in some form. ‘This world must pass away before the next.’ (AC, 119). Bloch, attuned to the ambiguity of ‘this world’, specifies that
Whenever the words ‘this world’ and ‘the other world’ appear . . . ‘This world’ means the same as ‘the present aeon’; ‘the other world’ means the same as ‘the better aeon’ . . . What is meant is eschatological tension, not some sort of geographical separation from a fixed This-world here and a fixed Beyond there. The only real thing now about this world is its submergence in the next. (AC, 119)
Further, the coming of Christ as Messiah is a ‘new eschatological Exodus, overthrowing all things from their beginning to their end: the Exodus into God as man’ (AC, 123). The repetition of exodus marks not only an apocalyptic break within history – it is an apocalyptic event within the concept of God.
Third, despite the title Atheism in Christianity, Bloch is not arguing for atheism in any normal sense of the term. Rather, he proposes a form of desecularizing political theology. The questions posed by religion, such as the problem of evil, determinism or ultimate meaning, remain important questions for atheism. It must respond to these issues if it ‘is not just the unhistorical unrealistic folly of optimism, or of equally unhistorical nihilism, with man as a laughable begetter of illusion . . . and with the alien specter of death all around us, and that gorgon of cosmic inhumanity which can never contain any shred of concern for man’ (AC, 107). He presents a path between the continuation of religious belief as it has hitherto been experienced and an absolute rejection of all things religious. In a similar way to Taubes’s critique of modernity for modernity’s sake, or the critique of rabbinic Judaism for Judaism’s sake, Bloch could be said to engage in the critique of theism for religion’s sake. Joining Taubes in offering a theology which is ‘materialist, messianic, historical, emancipatory, focused on the finite life, immanentist and this-worldly’,50 Bloch offers a vision of a new heaven and new earth in which the ‘Christ-impulse’ can ‘live even when God is dead’ (AC, 167). If ‘[a]theism-with-concrete-Utopia is at one and the same time the annihilation of religion and the realization of its heretical hope’ (AC, 225), then ‘with-concrete-Utopia’ sufficiently modifies the term atheism so that it avoids slipping into the virulently anti-religious rhetoric associated with New Atheism and other contemporary rejections of religion.
Bloch and Taubes are far from being in total agreement, however. Most notable is their divergent views of Paul. For Taubes, Paul represents a transvaluation of values, the establishment of a new covenant-community and the vehicle of an apocalyptic message. For Bloch, Paul twists the Hebrew Scriptures in order to explain that Christ is the Messiah because of the cross, rather than in spite of it (AC, 156–9). This understanding of Jesus’s death gives rise to the
patience of the Cross – so praiseworthy an attitude in the oppressed, so comfortable for the oppressors; a sanction, too, for the unconditional and absolute obedience to authority, as coming from God. Every theology of hope which might have placed itself in the front rank of change opted instead for conformity when it accepted these ideas – an acceptance whose convenient passivity broke the fine edge of Jesus’ own hope. (AC, 161)
This harsh rhetoric does not prevent Bloch from acknowledging that Paul played a crucial role in the development of Christianity; Bloch simply places much more emphasis on Jesus, whose message he believes was obfuscated by the preaching of Paul. Christ is the usurper, the one who disrupts the On-high and rejects any association of divinity with mastery or lordship. Bloch also develops his philosophy in a more explicitly Marxist direction. While Taubes refers to Marx in his essays and at the conclusion of Occidental Eschatology, it would be inaccurate to describe Taubes as a Marxist. Bloch on the other hand, not only identified his philosophy as Marxist, he was active in Communist circles.51 Perhaps due to these involvements, Bloch’s apocalypticism is manifested in a more active and overtly political fashion.
Even with these differences, Taubes’s Hegelian tendencies, used to develop an apocalyptic political theology, are further enhanced by occasional Blochian supplementation. Both their work arises out of a conviction that the rational critique of false consciousness had not succeeded in impeding fascism. They both argue for a recommencement of utopian myth-making in order to create an imaginary capable of resisting the world. They engage in this myth-making, or myth-retelling, by developing philosophies that employ theological concepts in the development of immanentist and materialist political theologies. Or, put in more Hegelian language, they both return to representations to think the world and its end.
Taubes and Bloch think the end of the world, but they think this end in different ways. Taubes is more sceptical than Bloch about the sources of hope that can be found in the world. For Taubes, the source of hope in the world is its end. To understand how Taubes’s apocalypticism goes further than Bloch’s utopianism, it is useful to return to the comparison of Taubes and Schmitt. The latter two share a suspicion of the limits of politics (recalling the distinction between politics and the political discussed in the first chapter). This suspicion emerges in their critiques of liberalism. They both recognize a need for the political beyond politics, but their opposing views of the nature of the political is what distinguishes Taubes’s anarchic apocalypticism from Schmitt’s authoritarian conservatism. Considering the differences in their forms of anti-liberalism will thus clarify the nature of Taubes’s apocalypticism as well as further elaborate the connections to Hegel’s philosophy.
The first difference is the competing directions of their political theologies. As already noted, Taubes describes two forms of apocalypticism, operating from different directions. One reveals ‘the central point of God and the world’ from above, while for the other ‘the centre is revealed from below’ (OE, 7). Corresponding to these two movements of apocalypse are two political theologies. As Taubes says in a 1986 lecture, ‘Carl Schmitt thinks apocalyptically, but from above, from the powers that be; I think from the bottom up’ (CS, 13). For Schmitt, political theology is about containing a destructive force. This containment from above returns to the earlier discussion of the katechon. Taubes defines the katechon as the ‘retainer [der Aufhalter] that holds down the chaos that pushes up from below’ (PT, 103). Taubes, when he fully embraces the apocalyptic spirit, welcomes this chaos. Grimshaw suggests that perhaps this insight is precisely what liberal Christianity has sought to cover up – its apocalyptic core. Schmitt’s exception becomes ‘the sign in the secular society of liberal modernity of the apocalyptic power that exists, that is referenced by both exception and miracle, that reminds us that what we believe to be the case, the norm, is in fact only fragile and transitory’.52 For both, this anti-liberalism focuses on the potential of an apocalypse, though Schmitt is concerned with constraining this potential while Taubes aims to unleash it.53 Taubes’s anti-liberalism comes about in his critique of modernity, but in the name of a fuller version of the modern project. Schmitt’s anti-liberalism attempts to contain forces of social disruption that Taubes sees as necessary for the realization of this alternative modernity.
It is important to note that anti-liberalism does not necessarily imply a rejection of the accomplishments of liberalism. The critique of liberalism is similar to Marx’s critique of capitalism. The Communist Manifesto includes a list of the great achievements of capitalism: ‘machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground’.54 Similarly it is possible to make a list of the achievement of liberalism: the articulation of equal rights (even if the implementation lags behind) or the universal declaration of human rights. Hegelian anti-liberalism is not a rejection of these advancements but a rejection of the naturalization of liberalism. As Taubes says in a 1986 address,
I really would like to be liberal; don’t you think that I would like it? But the world is not so made that one can be liberal. For that is at the cost of others; the question is who pays the cost, and the third and fourth worlds, the fifth and sixth worlds that are approaching, they will not be liberal at all, but brutal demands will be made there. The question is, how does one deal with them, when one starts to deal with them? If you work only at this liberal level of democracy, you just don’t see what happens in history. (CS, 38)
In Grimshaw’s commentary on Taubes’s correspondence with Schmitt, he argues that, for Taubes,
liberalism involves, in the end, a denial of the cost others suffer by our being liberal. That is, liberalism is not a neutral state of affairs, nor a neutral society, but a claim that is inherently oppositional and judgmental, with associated decision and implementations, and such decisions are primarily focused on the benefits to the victors in what is seen as the inevitable march of human progress. Taubes’s point is that liberal democracy fails to see what happens in history, which is a history of brutality. In short, liberals have too high a view of humanity and human nature, views that a realistic encounter with and examination of human history would quickly overturn.55
Taubes rejects liberalism in the name of a greater form of liberation. Not only does this anti-liberalism have Hegelian antecedents, but Taubes’s relationship with Schmitt plays out a tension internal to Hegel’s own work.
There are at least two ways in which Hegel demonstrates an anti-liberal tendency. First, the most direct critique of liberalism comes in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. As Karin de Boer argues, while Hegel sees the achievement of individual freedom as an essential goal, his primary focus is ‘the structures that allow a modern state to establish itself as a rational whole’.56 True freedom is something attained by the community of spirit, not something that functions at the level of the individual. As Hegel writes, ‘society is not dispersed into atomic individuals, collected to perform only a single and temporary act, and kept together for a moment and no longer. On the contrary, it makes the appointment as a society, articulated into associations, communities and corporations, which although constituted already for other purposes, acquire in this way a connection with politics’ (PR, §308: 294/476).57 De Boer makes this point specifically in opposition to those who read Hegel as emphasizing individual freedom and uses Robert Pippin as one of her examples. As Pippin explains in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, he sees the rational exchange of reasons as a central theme of Hegel’s philosophy. Freedom, for Hegel, ‘consists in being in a certain reflective and deliberative relation to oneself (which he describes as being able to give my inclinations and incentives a “rational form”), which itself is possible, so it is argued, only if one is also already in certain (ultimately institutional, norm-governed) relations to others, if one is a participant in certain practices’.58 Pippin works from this starting point to the conclusion that Hegel’s ‘suspicions about moral individualism, an ethics of conscience, etc., should not obscure the fact that he also wants to defend, in his own way, the supreme importance of an individual’s free, reflective life, however much he regards it as a necessarily collective achievement’.59 It is this passage that triggers de Boer’s concern, for in her reading the state is not the means by which individuals achieve their own rational goals, but an expression of the rational whole to which ‘the ultimate interests of citizens ought to coincide’.60 The first anti-liberal tendency within Hegel’s philosophy is thus found in this relationship between the individual and society. The needs of society as a whole are primary.
Second, and somewhat at tension with the first, is the anti-liberalism that is continued in Taubes and Bloch. While Bloch in particular shows the same concern for the formation of a community of shared will, both Taubes and Bloch are more suspicious of institutions than traditional Hegelianism would allow. If de Boer’s focus on anti-liberal elements of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right leads to a stronger role for the state, this alternative anti-liberalism seeks new forms of the social whole. Both objections to liberalism are rooted in a rejection of individualism as the basis of society but differ in that one is more accepting of the presently existing social whole than the other. For Taubes, there is an anti-politics to apocalypticism (remembering that anti-politics can be ultra-political). This anti-politics differentiates apocalypticism from utopia as ‘utopia belongs to essentially politicized man and merges from the political spirit. The state is the vessel for the fulfilment of this concept of humanity . . . Even the ideal of utopia needs to take its bearings from the real state’ (OE, 135). Taubes contrasts that utopianism with an anarchic chiliasm that is dissimilar to the form of politics continued even in the most concrete forms of utopianism. Though the coming kingdom may be associated with a place (such as Jerusalem) at a fundamental level it is ‘not being inaugurated, but it is coming. It is not found in any location, but it is happening [es ereignet sich]. It is not being discovered, but it is expected’ (OE, 136).
While Bloch does not develop as clear an anti-politics as Taubes, Atheism in Christianity’s invectives against theology from On-high are not only aimed at ecclesial authorities; they also target the collusion between those authorities and the state. He describes Job as one of the heroes of the Bible, for he realized that ‘piety was not to be confused with conformity to law and order’ (AC, 19). This conformity with the law as manifested by the state is problematic because it involves submission to that which is imposed from On-high. Much of Bloch’s critique of institutional religion is rooted in Christianity’s abandonment of its liberating message as religion from below. ‘There was always opium there for the people – in the end it tainted their whole faith. If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against everything it stood for’ (AC, 47). Bloch is led to the Hegelian conclusion that whatever form of social organization emerges in his concrete utopia, it must not contain the alienation of a state that is defined in contradiction to its people.
Thus, though Bloch is critically contrasting his concrete utopianism with other forms of utopian thinking and is firmly opposed to the world as it is, Taubes’s apocalypticism goes further. Bloch still finds hope in the world, while Taubes performs the more difficult balancing act of a materialist eschatology that wavers between hope and nihilism.61 Such an apocalypticism is not rooted in the hope for the resolution of problems within the world but in a desire for the end of the antagonisms that are the world. As Frank B. Wilderson III argues, the only end to such antagonisms is the destruction of one side, which read in a Hegelian vein, means the destruction of both – one through the other.
While Taubes offers an apocalyptic condemnation of the world that goes further than Bloch or Hegel, there is still this tension between hope and nihilism. At times, Taubes makes his lack of investment in the world seem easy. Recalling the discussion of Cohn and Hegel, though, it is important to bear in mind the rarity of truly apocalyptic energy. Apocalyptic challenges to social order do not begin, even under substantial oppression, until elements within a community are convinced that they have no future from the perspective of that order. Only then do the fractures within that order begin to appear. As noted in that earlier discussion, it is for this reason that Hegel remains worried about the Rabble. The Rabble refuses or is unable to adapt to the political limitations of particular community. ‘Poverty in itself does not turn people into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against, society, against the government, etc’ (PR, §244z: 221/389). As Brooks argues in his reading of the Rabble, an essential component of being a member of a society is the conviction that problems are best resolved within the limits of a political system.62 Within liberalism, for example, there is no resolution between individual freedom and equality. Managing that tension is liberalism. To refuse either side completely is to abandon liberalism. Engaging in this refusal, when combined with economic, social and political alienation, generates the position of the Rabble.
Hegel does not have a solution to the threat of the Rabble. He considers charity, holds out the possibility of economic mobility and even suggests colonialism might be a temporary solution (PR, §245–6: 221–2/390–1). For Hegel, the problem is that the system of production and ownership which he accepts as given – that is capitalism – necessarily produces the Rabble. This position is based on the rushed conclusion that ‘despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough, i.e. its own resources are insufficient, to check excessive poverty and the creation of penurious rabble’ (PR, §245: 222/390).
Even if Taubes sometimes makes apocalypticism look a little too easy, both his and Schmitt’s political theologies are attune to, if not grounded on, the possibility of collapse represented by the Rabble. It could all go down. The difference is the direction from which they think that possibility. Taubes does not discuss the exception in the same way as Schmitt, but they both are concerned with the moment of the suspension of the normal. For Schmitt, the normal is suspended in the name of the normal. It is an act of preservation. For Taubes, it initiates the end. It carries on the theological legacy of Paul who ‘fundamentally negates law as a force of political order. With this, legitimacy is denied to all sovereigns of this world, be they imperatorial or theocratic.’63 It is an act of disinvestment. For Schmitt, it is a political act carried out by the sovereign in the name of the law. For Taubes, it is the existential ‘apocalypse of man’ expressed in the theological language that marks the cleavage between the world as it is and the world as it should. It happens rather than is directly enacted.
In the course of this chapter I have offered an overview of Taubes’s political theology. In so doing, I have shown how Taubes continues key Hegelian themes, contrasted Taubes’s political theology with Schmitt’s, but also shown that they each offer their own version of an anti-liberal political theology. In the next chapter I will continue developing Taubes’s political theology through an engagement with Malabou. In order to provide context for that engagement, it is important to understand Malabou’s relationship to transcendental materialism and how the transcendental materialist reading of Hegel relates to the reading of Taubes and Hegel I have been offering thus far.
Transcendental materialism is most strongly associated with the work of Adrian Johnston, who uses the term to name Žižek’s distinctive reading of German Idealism, Marxism and psychoanalysis.64 He not only uses this term to interpret Žižek but goes on to develop his own version of a transcendental materialist philosophy. In so doing, Johnston has collaborated with Malabou and the two share many of the basic philosophical positions: non-reductive materialism, creative rereadings of German Idealism and an appreciation for the growing body of literature connecting biology, neuroscience and psychoanalysis.65 In the first chapter, I claimed that transcendental materialism is one approach to thinking the nature of the world, bringing a Hegelian perspective to the same conceptual issues identified by Tuana and Haslanger. In the following chapter, Malabou’s rejection of transcendence and her materialist understanding of trauma will be key to further exploring apocalypticism.
There are three specific themes in Taubes that connect to transcendental materialist readings of Hegel. First, Taubes repeatedly refers to the importance of grounding political theology in material reality. He cautions against ‘crass-materialism’, which is circumvented through a Hegelian mediation of materialism and idealism. Hegel himself does not perform this mediation, but Hegel’s philosophy is part of the transcendence of self-alienation that allows this mediation to occur. Citing Marx’s view of communism as ‘the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being’ Taubes adds that ‘Communist naturalism or humanism is different from both idealism and materialism; at the same time it is the truth that binds them together’ (OE, 182). Noting the Hegelian language, he quotes the Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, in which Marx further claims communism as ‘the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.’66
This binding together of idealism and materialism is mirrored in Johnston’s definition of transcendental materialism. This philosophy claims that
[t]he break induced by the more-than-material subject splitting off from its material origins is irreparable, opening up an impossible-to-close gap, a nondialecticizable parallax split. The transcendental materialist theory of the subject is materialist insofar as it asserts that the Ideal of subjective thought arises from the Real of objective being, although it is also simultaneously transcendental insofar as it maintains that this thus-generated Ideal subjectivity thereafter achieves independence from the ground of its material sources and thereby starts to function as a set of possibility conditions for forms of reality irreducible to explanatory discourses allied to traditional versions of materialism.67
Johnston develops this materialism further than Taubes, but the emphasis on achieving independence from the material origins of the subject is another way of articulating spirit’s relation to nature.68 The possibility of a freedom arising from material reality, maintaining a dialectical relationship to that material reality, but without recourse to any form of transcendent being, is a concern of both Taubes’s and Bloch’s apocalyptic political theology. Whatever the representations of God and apocalypse mean for Taubes, they are materially manifested. To repeat Bielik-Robson’s description, Taubes’s political theology is ‘materialist, messianic, historical, emancipatory, focused on the finite life, immanentist and this-worldly’.69
Second, and on a related note, Taubes claims that Hegel’s ontology moves from the metaphysical to the transcendental: ‘They do not take nature as a norm but the production of man: history. Human creativity is placed above nature.’70 Johnston does not state his position in opposition to nature but celebrates a similar production of the transcendental from its material basis. This point recalls the above discussion of Taubes’s understanding of nature and freedom.
Finally, Taubes wants to preserve a kind of incompleteness to Hegel’s philosophy. Taubes’s understanding that ‘Hegel, like Joachim, conceives of the course of world history as a progression and, consequently, as a constant negation of any system that currently exists’ (OE, 166) parallels Johnston’s observation that ‘the reconciliation achieved by absolute knowing amounts to the acceptance of an insurmountable incompleteness, an irresolvable driving tension that cannot finally be put to rest through one last Aufhebung’.71 Hegel’s philosophy is complete in its grasping of its inherent incompleteness. Hegel’s system is comprehension of the logical and therefore necessary nature of the material being which gives rise to the reasoning subject. The closed nature of Hegel’s thought refers to the systematic conceptualization of the shape of this restless spirit.
That this comprehension is still a form of closure is necessary to an adequate understanding of Hegel’s project. If there is only a persistent failure and reconstitution, then thought is trapped in the position of the unhappy consciousness. It is not enough for philosophy to be dialectical; dialectics must lead the subject to self-consciousness. Hegel, summarizing the sections leading up to religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit, makes this point: ‘Then there was the self-consciousness that reached its final “shape” in the Unhappy Consciousness, that was only the pain of the Spirit that wrestled, but without success, to reach out into objectivity. The unity of the individual self-consciousness and its changeless essence, to which the former attains, remains therefore, a beyond for self-consciousness’ (PS, §673: 410/495). Religion is the next step in realizing the unity of the subject with that beyond, first as a unity with an other, then as a unity with an other that is also the subject. The distinctive form of alienation experienced by self-consciousness engaged in religious thought is a necessary stage for the development of philosophical thought.72
While Johnston is generally resistant to theological appropriations of philosophy,73 Taubes’s political theology, with a God that ‘comes into being through history, through antithesis and negation, through corruptio, through suffering and formlessness’ (OE, 101), provides a compatible theological reading of Hegel’s philosophy. For Taubes, political theology must be done in a new philosophical framework, with categories that ‘are transcendental and not metaphysical’.74 In this regard, Johnston’s position is the reversal of Göschel’s. If Göschel asks Hegel if it would not be better to root philosophical concepts more directly in biblical imagery, Johnston suggests that this imagery is too risky. Political theology, following the legacy of Taubes and Bloch, echoes Hegel’s reply to Göschel – absolute knowing instills the confidence necessary to return to representations. Taubes’s turn to theology is thus the opposite of Schmitt’s. As Boer argues, faced with the opposition of politics and theology, the answer is not to abandon theology. Rather, ‘we take the move from theology to politics all the way, push it through to its dialectical extreme. And, in doing so, we would end with theology: not a going back to theology as Schmitt argued, but a theology beyond the initial opposition, one that is the next step, thoroughly politicised and materialised.’75 Taubes experiments rather than returns.
This chapter has worked through the basic elements of Taubes’s political theology with particular focus on both the role of Hegelian ideas and the contrast between Taubes and Schmitt. Taubes’s apocalyptic political theology emerges as a critique of modernity for modernity’s sake – a willingness to let loose apocalyptic fervour on a society which he felt did not live out the ideal of modern freedom. Navigating the tension of both affirming the modern world and calling for its destruction, I then supplemented Taubes’s political theology through comparing and contrasting his work with Bloch’s own treatment of eschatological themes. Reading Bloch alongside Taubes, it becomes clear that the latter pushes past the hope of concrete utopianism to a more difficult position. This political theology requires a delicate balance between hope and nihilism, revelation and annihilation. This discussion also shows the extent to which Taubes exemplifies the Hegelian practice of returning to representation and using theological concepts to think the world at the edge of the limits of philosophy.
Taubes thus advances the attempt to address the remaining questions that trouble apocalyptic views of the world. Both Taubes and Bloch offer a reading of apocalypticism that rejects transcendence in favour of an immanent and materialist account. There is a possibility of newness, even a newness that is not a possibility of this world, but that possibility is not external. Yet questions still remain. First, why does apocalypticism insist on the connection between this immanent novelty and violence or trauma? Second, what does it mean to live apocalyptically? To answer these questions, I now turn to Malabou.