Messianic Illusions: Taubes,Bloch,Benjamin and the Necessity of Interiority

Introduction

Describing his methodology in the now famous 1987 lectures on the Apostle Paul in Heidelberg, German-Jewish philosopher of religion and rabbi Jacob Taubes remarked, “I don’t think theologically. I work with theological materials, but I think in terms of intellectual history, of actual history.” Relating this approach to the genealogical political theology of the infamous Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt with whom he enjoyed a paradoxical relationship in the postwar era, Taubes continues, “I ask after the political potentials in theological metaphors, just as Schmitt asks after the theological potential of legal concepts” (Taubes 2003/1993, 69/95-96). Indicative of Taubes’s mode of intellectual engagement, these statements no doubt betray the particularity of a style grounded in historical analysis which at the same time rejects historicist relativism. As Ole Jakob Løland (2020, 20) has insightfully shown in his recent monograph, Taubes sought to efface the distinction between philosophy and history in his readings of Paul. However, these elisions extended also to the division between the theological and the political. Persistently thinking from the borders of not only history and philosophy, theology and politics, but also more provocatively, Judaism and Christianity, Taubes set out to blur lines wherever he found them (Assman, Assman, and Hartwich 2010, xix-xx). This was no doubt symptomatic of his own transitory condition and at least also partially explains his fascination with the Apostle who likewise sought to malign distinctions between Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free.

The slippage between these various domains evinces itself throughout Taubes’s corpus, raising numerous questions and presenting a host of problems for his interlocutors and interpreters, yet its implications become particularly acute when one broaches those themes with which he was principally concerned: messianism, apocalypticism, Gnosticism. Already major topics of interest among several German-Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century (Styfhals 2019), Taubes saw himself continuing along a trajectory initiated by a prior generation of thinkers in the late-Wilhelmine and Weimar eras who likewise fused together the historical, philosophical, theological, and political in order to generate a secularized Marxist messianism based in Jewish tradition. Exemplary in this regard, of course, are Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. However, as Udi Greenberg (2008, 327) contends, seldom do thinkers such as Benjamin actually reference Jewish sources, calling into question the validity of an otherwise monolithic “Jewish messianic tradition” to which they often made recourse. By contrast, in keeping with the above lines from the lectures on Paul and departing from figures such as Bloch and Benjamin, Taubes sought to ground his own messianism in the history of what we may call “actually existing Jewish messianism,” a history nonetheless marred by sabotaged eschatons and failed messiahs. At the heart of Taubes’s thought, in fact, lies the very question of messianic failure itself, the crises that occur when sustained anticipation of the redeemed world confronts the traumatic shock of its non-arrival. It was this move toward the real history of Jewish messianism which accounted for the discrepancies between Taubes and his Weimar-era predecessors, but at the same time it was also this tendency to efface disciplinary boundaries which explains his specific readings of these thinkers as forerunners of his own intellectual project—readings which have been variously dismissed. Sigrid Weigel (2019, 195), for instance, has criticized Taubes for casting Benjamin “in Paul’s mask” in order to present him erroneously as a gnostic thinker. However, rather than interrogate the particulars of Bloch and Benjamin’s texts in order to gauge the relative accuracy of Taubes’s interpretations, this essay intends to grasp Taubes’s understanding of his relationship to Bloch and Benjamin on its own terms and in relation to the common experience of crisis that animates the messianisms of all three figures.

Taubes’s most formative experiences in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust occurred in a much different milieu than Bloch and Benjamin’s a generation earlier. It was this context, contoured as well by the fate of “actually existing socialism” in the twentieth century, that shaped his transfiguration of their Weimar-era messianisms. Reflecting back upon his work in the 1980’s, Taubes wrote regarding Bloch and Benjamin that he had “presented the apocalypse of the revolution, although free from the illusions of messianic Marxists like Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin” (Taubes 2013/1987, 12/20). What did Taubes mean by this? In what sense were Bloch and Benjamin caught up in messianic illusions, and why did he see the need to differentiate himself from them? Put differently, who were Bloch and Benjamin for Taubes? In this essay I advance the thesis that Taubes’s departure from the messianisms of Bloch and Benjamin has as much to do with the failures of revolutionary politics in his own lifetime as it does his understanding of the fundamental structure and real history of Jewish messianism itself. Turning to his noted dispute with Gershom Scholem over the nature and scope of the messianic idea, I highlight Taubes’s overemphasis on gnostic interiority in the face of crisis and failure, a critical point elucidating the distinctiveness of his work. I argue that only by understanding this component of Taubes’s thought can one truly appreciate his transformation of Weimar-era Marxist messianism. At the same time, I show that Taubes’s thought corresponds also to a period of deep disappointment, contending that the shape of his messianism cannot be traced without considering the extent to which he was likely impacted by the decline of the New Left, the Cold War, American imperialism, and the onset of neoliberalism. For Taubes, Bloch and Benjamin are among those who meditate upon messianic crisis although they remain under the spell of an open future despite the catastrophes of the twentieth-century, “messianic illusions” prohibiting them from fully activating a latent gnostic kernel detectible in their thought. This is a necessary motion for Taubes, inaugurating a fully inward turn at the limits of all hope.

The Heretic’s Return

As I have suggested, to grasp Taubes’s departure from the messianisms of Bloch and Benjamin, it is important to briefly gloss his understanding of the structure and experience of Jewish messianism by attending to its real history. To do so I briefly turn to Taubes’s 1979 essay “The Price of Messianism” before connecting it to his theory of gnostic interiority. While it is unnecessary to recount the full details of the drama looming in the background of the former text which themselves have received sufficient attention (Caygill 2009; Macho 2014; Styfhals 2018), some preliminary points are in order.

In October of 1951, Jacob Taubes was excommunicated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He had seemingly just arrived at the invitation of Gershom Scholem after finishing his dissertation in Switzerland followed by a short stint in America, but after an interpersonal and intellectual fallout with the eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, he was ostracized from academic life at the Hebrew University. From then on Taubes spent the rest of his career teaching in the United States before taking a position at the Freie Universität Berlin until his death in 1987. However, in 1981 he briefly returned to Jerusalem to give this last word in his thirty-year dispute with Scholem at the Eighth World Congress of Jewish Studies, though he was initially barred from giving the paper at Scholem’s behest. In the text Taubes problematized Scholem’s (1971b) neat bifurcation between Judaism as a religion of exteriority, whose messianism results in a redemption of the external world, and Christianity as a religion of interiority, whose messianism results in an inwardness divorced from the tumults of history, a criticism reiterated by Moshe Idel (1998, 240, 355). Instead, Taubes suggested that messianism as such results in the interiorization of hope when faced with eschatological crisis. Noticing striking similarities between Sabbateanism and Pauline Christianity which Scholem (1971a, 58-59) himself had acknowledged, Taubes effectively turned the historian’s evidence against his own theory, citing the fact that early Christianity was initially a heretical Jewish sect and should thus be indexed in the history of Jewish messianism. “Interiorization is not a dividing line between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’,” Taubes (2010d/2006a, 4/34) wrote, “it signifies a crisis within Jewish eschatology itself. How else can redemption be defined after the Messiah has failed to redeem the external world except by turning inward?”

Therefore, in the face of foundering expectations of impending eschatological events, messianic movements found it necessary to turn inward in order to rationalize their respective crises of faith, for example Paul’s delayed Parousia or Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam. “For consider the dialectics in the messianic experience of a group at the moment when prophecy of redemption fails. The ‘world’ does not disintegrate, but the hope of redemption crumbles” (Taubes 2010d/2006a, 4/34). Without this inward motion, the apparent contradictions of the situation would lead to absurdity (9/39), a fact Scholem (1971b, 35) again likewise observed. Indeed, it is clear that for the most part Scholem and Taubes were playing on the same field, but by different rules. This pertains, in the first place, to their relative understandings of the nature and scope of the messianic idea, upon which they were in agreement regarding the former but not the latter (Styfhals 2018, 183), and, in the second place, their scholarly approaches. Thomas Macho notes, “a more decisive role was played by the methodological and even literary differences between [Scholem’s] historico-anthropological approach to theology … and Taubes’s position as a philosopher of history” (Macho 2014, 40). Indeed, Scholem posits a division between Judaism and Christianity while at the same time advocating for a wholesale restraint of the messianic impulse (Scholem 1971b, 35), whereas Taubes seeks to rupture this distinction and embrace the revolutionary implications of messianism just short of careening over the abyss, an inevitability that interiorization helped keep at bay. However, implicated in Scholem’s theory is the detached disposition of a historian eager to keep his subject matter at arm’s length. By contrast, Taubes (2010d/2006a, 6/36-37) blurs the line between history and philosophy, theology and politics, suggesting that while for Scholem messianism may be “dangerous nonsense,” for him it “discloses a significant facet of human experience.” It is this messianic experience characterized by estrangement, contradiction, failure, and disappointment, combined with the maligning of disciplinary borders, that will allow Taubes to draw linkages between himself, Paul, Sabbatai Zevi, Bloch, and Benjamin.

When placed within the context of Taubes’s broader intellectual project then, specifically in view of the “red thread” of Gnosticism running throughout his corpus (Assman, Assman, and Hartwich 2010, xix), “The Price of Messianism” becomes much more than a wayward student’s critique of his mentor or a “deconstruction of orthodoxy” (Styfhals 2018, 184) either religious or academic. Rather, it serves as a pivotal moment in Taubes’s intellectual development, connecting his earlier work to the later lectures on Paul while also illuminating his readings of Bloch and Benjamin within his postwar context. As Joshua Robert Gold (2006, 151-152) suggested, “these remarks do not name Gnosticism as such, but the inwardness Taubes elsewhere attributes to gnostic thinking corresponds to the kind of interiorization that ‘The Price of Messianism’ names as a necessary counterpoint to uninhibited apocalyptic fervor.”

Already in Occidental Eschatology—Taubes’s (2009/1947, 34/34) doctoral dissertation tracing the history of apocalyptic thought from ancient Israel to Hegel and Marx—Gnosticism features as “a new form of thinking [that] … has been preserved into the present and taken up and further developed.” For Taubes (3/3), the philosophy of history arises only according to an eschatological consciousness marked by time as “the life of the inner realm.” It is this inner orientation toward the end that gives birth to apocalypticism as a negating counterprinciple to the external world through an encounter with a hidden beyond, resulting in a constant tension between the two realms resolvable only by a final redemptive event. In this sense, the nihilism of apocalypticism has strong affinities with the futurity of messianism but also the alienness of Gnosticism, and, following his general tendency, from Occidental Eschatology onward Taubes obscures virtually all differences between them. Thus, rather than confine Gnosticism to the epoch of late-antiquity or adhere to a precise definition, Taubes locates it in a transhistorical register as a more generalizable habit of thought predicated upon exile, homelessness, estrangement, and alienation combined with a belief in a redemption from without. This idiosyncratic, syncretistic formulation allows him to triangulate the same phenomenon across widely disparate historical periods and texts. Common to each is an interior cognizance or secret knowledge (gnosis) of this counterprinciple placing “the being of the world in question,” thereby engendering a politically radical subjectivity: “the gospel of the God who is distant, unknown, and even non-existent, as proclaimed by Gnosticism, can be the universally stirring slogan for nihilistic, revolutionary longing” (10/10).

As I have mentioned, Taubes was only one among many German intellectuals seeking to trace the effects of Gnosticism both past and present, and, while he largely follows the definition of Gnosticism set forward by Hans Jonas in his seminal 1934 text Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist, he differs from his contemporaries to varying degrees. Firstly, by regarding Gnosticism as a transhistorical tendency traceable in multiple historical periods, Taubes considers it to be a much broader phenomenon than figures such as Jonas or Hans Blumenberg would have it, yet in agreement with thinkers such as Eric Voegelin, he attempts to tease out its contemporary relevance. Secondly, Taubes sharply departs from all of them in his affirmative appraisal of Gnosticism, seeking to take up its mantle in the name of an apocalyptic, nihilistic, revolutionary politics. Taubes’s fascination with Gnosticism itself bordered on being obsessive, leading him to somewhat forcibly convene what Willem Styfhals (2019, 3) has termed the “Gnosticism debates” in order to parse the various positions of those such as Jonas, Blumenberg, Voegelin, or Marquard, all of whom attempted to think with Gnosticism in order to understand modernity as godless and disenchanted. Yet Taubes’s interest also concerned the controversy over German Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack’s 1921 text Marcion: Gospel of the Alien God, which had become associated with Nazism on account of its Marcionite supersessionism and Harnack’s call to omit the Hebrew Bible from the canon. Again, effacing the distinction between history and philosophy, Taubes both engaged and evaded these disputes by refusing to limit the scope of Gnosticism to a either a temporal or geographical origin. It represented neither the “acute Hellenization of Christianity” nor a leftover relic from a pre-Christian Near East.

In Pauline Ugliness, Løland (2020, 20) argues for a distinction between an early, more optimistic Taubes and a later, pessimistic Taubes of which Occidental Eschatology and “The Price of Messianism” are apiece. Whereas in his dissertation Taubes considers Gnosticism and interiority grounds for a genealogy of apocalyptic, revolutionary thought, in the 1979 essay these concepts become associated with crisis and failure. This is a dynamic adequately understood only by placing each configuration in relation to Taubes’s own situation within the trajectory of the twentieth century. While various aspects of “The Price of Messianism” have been explicated regarding Jewish historiography (Caygill 2009) or Scholem and the broader landscape of German-Jewish intellectual history (Macho 2014; Styfhals 2018), less explored have been the links between the messianic dynamics Taubes’s describes and his own politics. As I will suggest, Taubes’s analyses of messianism, apocalypticism, and Gnosticism are inseparable from his own context and, in turn, illuminate his readings of Bloch and Benjamin as forerunners of his own intellectual project. Perhaps overidentifying with the heretical figures of Paul and Sabbatai Zevi, Taubes sought to efface both academic and religious borders from the vantage point of the gnostic radical, carrying with him this peculiar biography to the works of the Weimar-era messianists.

Concrete Futurity: Reading Bloch

Describing fin de siècle German-Jewry, Anson Rabinbach highlights the emergence of a “new Jewish sensibility” shortly before the First World War characterized as “apocalyptic, catastrophic, utopian, and pessimistic” (Rabinbach 1985, 82). Marked by the birth of a new messianic outlook on history, philosophy, religion and politics, this sensibility arose in the context of rapid industrialization, bureaucratization, and secularization all falling under the rubric of Weberian disenchantment. Seeking an alternative to the instrumental reason of capitalism, the dogmatism of Soviet Communism, and a burgeoning Zionism, Bloch, Benjamin, and others associated with the Frankfurt School turned not only to Judaism but the broader fields of comparative religion, philosophy of language, aesthetics, and esotericism in addition to Marxism. This resulted in an “anarchic breeze [blowing] fresh air into the house that Stalin built” by countering its “cold sea” with a “warm stream” (123). However, though this current had its origins in the Wilhelmine era, it was the experience of the war that led to its intensification. “What is still missing in the writings of Bloch and Benjamin before August 1914 is the radical and apocalyptic aspect of modern Messianism. In this regard the war obliged them” (103). This shift accounted for their more mature musings upon violence, technology, and the state in the Weimar period, writings which began to disentangle the ideals of utopia and revolution from either a teleologically-oriented progressivism, political participation, or party affiliation. Although relative to Benjamin’s melancholy, Bloch did maintain a more overtly optimistic outlook. This apocalyptic gesture is palpable. It is my claim in the following pages that Taubes appeals to, emulates, and ultimately seeks to go beyond this dynamic in order to articulate his own messianic interiority and render intelligible his own sense of failure and crisis in the postwar era.

Taubes’s first written engagement with Bloch appears in Occidental Eschatology, where he cites extensively from Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution published in 1921. Within the narrative arc of the text, the controversial Anabaptist revolutionary appears as the last medieval messianist and the first modern one, standing at the threshold of the externalization of Joachim of Fiore’s ecclesia spiritualis and the attempted realization of his eschatological doctrine of the third age in a Kingdom of God come on earth (Taubes 2009/1947, 86/86). Contrary to Luther, who remains a figure of mere ecclesial reform, Müntzer instead strives for a wholesale revolution of society (118/118), initiating a new secularizing rhythm breaking through the Medieval cycle of life: “the spiritualization of the world is at the same time a secularization of the spirit; the materialization of the spirit means losing it to the world” (106/106). Within the frame of Occidental Eschatology, this signals the externalization of gnostic interiority, the stage at which the outer world must be remade in its image. Connecting Müntzer’s theology to the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Marx, Taubes locates the emergence of modern subjectivity, the ego divorcing itself from worldly powers and institutions (110/110). As if anticipating Marx’s critique of Feuerbach, “Müntzer’s critique of Christendom is aimed simultaneously, and in equal measure, at its religious and worldly nature” (118/118).

It is this rejection of the world that constitutes Müntzer’s greatest achievement, meriting him a place in Taubes’s eschatological genealogy, yet it is also this same fact which for Taubes signals Müntzer’s Gnosticism, as well as Bloch’s own. Indeed, it is “by virtue of his own affinity” that Bloch “grasps what is essential about Müntzer” (106). However, Hans-Jürgen Goertz (2001, 154) notes that “Müntzer was more a mystic than an apocalyptic,” indicating a deviation from Bloch’s text on the part of Taubes. Keeping in mind Taubes’s conflation of apocalypticism and Gnosticism, it is striking that the latter appears only a handful of times in Bloch’s (1921, 151, 172, 219) text mainly as a contextual descriptor. Nonetheless, like many of his other works, Bloch’s Gnosticism in Thomas Münzer is thematically implied in terms of a negation of nature rather than explicitly stated (Boldyrev 2014, 63). On this account, Taubes’s placement of Müntzer in his gnostic-eschatological history according to Bloch’s interpretation is fair; however, his identification of an “affinity” between the Anabaptist revolutionary and the German-Jewish philosopher foreshadows his reading of the latter.

While Bloch’s 1921 work The Spirit of Utopia is not cited in Occidental Eschatology, it is hard not to see obvious parallels, especially given the accusations that Taubes already covertly plagiarized colleagues such as Jonas and Karl Löwith in the work (Styfhals 2019, 78). In particular, Taubes’s (2009/1947, 26/26, 29/29, 40/40) attempted recuperation of Marcion begins in his dissertation in a way that seems to elaborate on Bloch’s (2000, 194, 216) own passing remarks not only on Marcion, but Joachim and Basilides. As we have seen, Taubes also conflates apocalypticism, messianism, and Gnosticism, but in much the same way as Bloch did almost three decades prior. Moreover, as if polemicizing against Harnack’s Marcionite “metaphysical antisemitism,” Taubes will echo Bloch in connecting the alien God of Gnosticism to the Hebrew Bible, a position Bloch maintained well into the postwar period. “Marcion comes to us not only from Paul, he comes equally from Moses; the true, or alien, god dawns in the God of Exodus, between Egypt and Canaan” (Bloch 1986, 1270). For Bloch (2000, 229) Gnosticism serves to underscore the inadequacy of the present counterposed with a messianic futurity characterized by the inbreaking of an utterly foreign, acosmic redemption: “for this world is an error, and void; in the face of absolute truth it has only the right to be destroyed.” In particular, the concept of gnosis serves as an analogue for the Marxian critique of political economy (Boldyrev 2014, 94), a notion similar to the way Taubes imagines gnostic interiority to transfigure in the modern period. Yet when one turns to Taubes’s later texts a divergence between himself and Bloch becomes visible.

In his 1984 essay “The Iron Cage and the Exodus From It, or the Dispute over Marcion, Then and Now,” falling between “The Price of Messianism” and the lectures on Paul, Taubes more explicitly states the influence of Bloch’s theory of Gnosticism on his own. Describing the history of Gnosticism as a “palimpsest” for elucidating the contemporary intellectual climate, Taubes (2010c/1996a,137/175) surveys the theories of those involved in the “Gnosticism debates,” stating that he does not intend to make a foray into them. Instead, suggesting Weber’s concept of the “iron cage” as a “Gnostic hieroglyph” indicative of the condition of the early twentieth century, Taubes (139/174) attempts to clarify what is at stake concerning the relation between Gnosticism and modernity by turning to the intellectual debates over Marcion’s legacy. It is at this point that he praises Bloch as “the first to refer to Marcion in intellectual-historical perspective” in The Spirit of Utopia, highlighting Marcion’s “modernity” in terms of an eschatological view consisting not of a restoration of the past but a realization of the utterly new. This is what Harnack terms “a glorious foreignness” which is “opened up and turns into home” and Bloch—“elaborating on Harnack,” according to Taubes (140/176)—describes as “this something [that] shines into childhood for everyone, yet no one has ever been there: home.” Further, Taubes (142/177) cites Bloch (1918, 330) as stating that by conceptualizing God historically Marcion “stands closer to messianic intellectuality” despite the “metaphysical antisemitism” of his gospel of alien divinity. While these lines may seem unremarkable, they indicate something: Taubes understood Bloch’s messianism, following his interpretation of Marcion, to be predicated on pure futurity and unremitting externalization. Indeed, in Bloch it is the external world that must conform to the internal one, or rather inwardness externalizes itself by revolutionizing society, something Taubes picks up on in his reading of Bloch’s Müntzer and the “affinity” they share. In this sense the messianic dynamic becomes unidirectional both in terms of history and the subject’s relation to the world, since there is neither a motion in which the subject turns inward again, forsaking the world, nor a return to a pure, paradisical past. In this sense, Taubes’s theory of interiorization represents a departure from Bloch since, in light of the failure of the outward to become like the inward, the subject pivots back toward an interior state in order to contend with the ensuing contradiction. That is, Taubes’s reading of Bloch evinces his awareness that despite the catastrophes of the twentieth-century, Bloch remains outwardly oriented to the future, whereas Taubes grapples with its foreclosure by turning inward. Where Taubes’s messianism aborts, Bloch’s forges ahead unabated.

Additionally, Taubes (2010c/1996a, 142/177) goes on in “The Iron Cage” to compare Bloch with Martin Buber, asserting that both retain a “concrete messianism.” This is a trope Taubes (2013/1987, 46/63) will elsewhere repeat when comparing Bloch with Schmitt’s political theology and indeed calls to mind Marx’s distinction between the concrete and the abstract. Yet while Taubes obviously sides with Bloch concerning Marcion’s supersessionism, he notes that in Buber’s condemnation of the second century Christian heretic, he makes a notable connection concerning the curious simultaneity of the advent of Marcionism and the Bar Kochba rebellion. Following the siege of Bethar in 135, a “crisis of concrete messianism” ensues, creating a void that Marcionism, with its Gospel of inwardness, seeks to fill by “sacrific[ing] history” (Taubes 2010c/1996a, 143/178). Here again, as in early Christianity and Sabbateanism, interiorization occurs in response to crisis for Taubes. Immanent to Taubes’s reflections in the paper though, it seems that Bloch overlooked this aspect, remaining a concrete messianist oriented toward the future externalization of interiority. Indeed, while he may have insight into Marcion’s eschatology, Bloch misses the broader historical context of Marcionite interiority that Buber recognizes, a point Taubes seizes upon for his own purposes.

In sum, while “revolutionary gnosis” runs throughout the whole of Bloch’s corpus as a driving engine of utopian thought, variously enlisting Marcion as one moment in a much broader account, Taubes hones in on particular facets and verges in a different direction, departing from the Weimar thinker’s concrete futurity. Moreover, as Ivan Boldyrev (2014, 96) notes, Bloch seeks to transcend gnostic myth in order to make the leap into history, whereas Taubes makes no such distinction at least overtly, simply appropriating gnostic world-denial and alienness for his own brand of messianism. Because of this leap, for Bloch the future remains open, whereas for Taubes it is foreclosed. It is this point that, for Micha Brumlik, comprises Taubes’s most egregious misappropriation of Bloch, Benjamin, and the entire tradition of the Frankfurt School. Brumlik (2001, 481) argues that, while thinkers such as Bloch and Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno remain committed to a “forward-looking story” that, in accordance with at least dominant trends in Judaism and Christianity, “does not condemn the world and history according to their essence despite all calamities,” Taubes instead “willingly and knowingly submits to a Gnostic perspective” predicated upon a corrupt cosmos and a shattered future (Brumlik 2001, 474). While Brumlik is certainly correct in many respects, within the Frankfurt School itself there is notable heterogeneity. As a peripheral figure, while Bloch does draw heavily and explicitly upon Gnosticism, Brumlik is right that he too entertains the open futurity of a “forward-looking story.” On the other hand, Bloch seems to exhibit the world-denying quality of Gnosticism, suggesting that Taubes’s interpretation may be closer to the mark. This is not the case with Benjamin.

World-Political Nihilism: (Mis)reading Benjamin

Taubes’s reading of Benjamin is fraught with controversy, in part due to the already tense conditions under which it took place. It is clear from his 1986 essay “Walter Benjamin—A Modern Marcionite?” that Taubes’s interpretation emerges in direct relation to his dispute with Scholem, even four years after the scholar’s death. For some commentators, this fact seemingly explains Taubes’s idiosyncratic reading (Hartung 2001, 426), while for others it is his ambivalent intellectual affiliation with Schmitt (Løland 2020, 95). For others, Taubes’s reading is simply wrong on textual grounds (Weigel 2019) or morally reprehensible given the larger post-Holocaust context (Brumlik 2001). While I certainly concede these points, I maintain that the matter deserves more scrutiny in order to understand Taubes’s interpretation immanent to itself. Even so, still less attention has been paid to the role of Bloch in Taubes’s reading, which I argue provides much of its impetus.

In the most comprehensive treatment of the issue to date, Weigel perceives two separate lines of discourse in Taubes’s study of Benjamin: one stretching from his 1966 paper “Notes on Surrealism” to the aforementioned 1986 essay, and the other extending from Taubes’s discovery of Benjamin’s 1930 letter expressing affinities with Schmitt to the lectures on Paul. Within this trajectory, Taubes’s Benjamin “undergoes several metamorphoses, first appearing in the mask of the ‘most modern theological Marxism,’ then as a theorist of messianism, then as an author of political theology, and finally as a modern Marcionite” (Weigel 2019, 195). Tracing a genealogy of Taubes’s texts referencing Benjamin, Weigel proves Taubes’s utter misreading of Benjamin on textual grounds. In particular, Taubes makes Benjamin out as a “partisan of surrealism” in order to draw correlations between surrealist art and Gnosticism, fueling his own project, before also depicting a cozy relation between theology and Marxism in Benjamin, all of which in reality exist “in a tension-filled relation” for the Weimar-era thinker (201). Next, Weigel turns to Taubes’s 1969 conference paper “Culture and Ideology,” explicating Benjamin’s analysis of capitalist culture and phantasmagoria in The Arcades Project. However, when Weigel (202) arrives at the 1986 essay depicting Benjamin finally as a fully blown Marcionite, she limits her analysis by stating that “only a single page of Taubes’s ten-page essay actually refers to Benjamin,” which is simply not the case. Casually noting its relation to Bloch’s arguments regarding theocracy and Taubes’s dispute with Scholem, she pivots to Benjamin’s prized letter lauding Schmitt as a kindred spirit, which Taubes uses in order to argue for a Schmittian and then Pauline Benjamin motivated by questions of political theology (204-205). Here I suggest that while Weigel’s analysis no doubt achieves the task of judging the illegitimacy of Taubes’s misinterpretations, it does not attempt to understand Taubes himself. While she is right that Taubes misreads Benjamin “by positioning [him] as his predecessor while at the same time reading him through the lens of his own work” (208), it must be asked why this was the case, and to what end.

Beginning with the surrealism essay it is clear that Taubes brings Benjamin into conformity with the apocalyptic, messianic, gnostic dynamics of crisis, failure, and interiority that I have traced. Taubes (2010b/1996c, 110/146) evokes Benjamin’s (1986, 312-313) “Theologico-Political Fragment”: “Politics, however, whose method is called nihilism, although it can destroy the old world, cannot build a new one, other than in the poetic imagination, and therefore must embark on the journey into interiority.” Although Taubes no doubt obscures the meaning of Benjamin’s texts on surrealism as Weigel makes apparent, in these lines he also clearly gestures toward that same tension outlined in Occidental Eschatology between the inner and outer realms while also presaging the theory of messianism he will outline in “The Price of Messianism” several years later. Yet in the dissertation the turn inward in the face of crisis is absent, a fact owing to the more optimistic outlook exhibited in the work and perhaps a more uncritical appropriation of Bloch. Here for the first time Taubes signals a more pessimistic view, marked by an unbridgeable gap between the subject’s interior state and a decaying, corrupt world. Thus, Taubes already understands Benjamin as a figure whose thought is animated by failure. This same point also applies to “Culture and Ideology,” in which Taubes (2010a/1996b, 249-250/284) states Benjamin’s intention in The Arcades Project to “describe the phantasmagoria of capitalistic culture on a whole.” Picking up on Benjamin’s (2002, 25, 83-85, 97, 544) use of the infernal and the Chthonic to depict commodity society and the Parisian metropolis, Taubes (2010a/1996b, 262/298) interjects his own themes of alienation and estrangement by taking this “abject phantasmagoria of hell” as an analogue for his own gnostic acosmism. This suggests that from the start Taubes attempted to read Benjamin through the prism of his own historico-philosophical aporias related to his conflation of apocalypticism, messianism, and Gnosticism. Benjamin was, like Bloch, a figure who grappled with messianic failure and entertained a Gnostic division between the inward and outward. It is this point, and not only the letter to Schmitt or the dispute with Scholem, that will allow Taubes to place Benjamin “in Paul’s mask.”

As Weigel (2019, 193) notes, Taubes likely came into contact with Benjamin’s writings during his curtailed stay at the Hebrew University under Scholem’s tutelage, suggesting that from the start his readings of Benjamin were associated with his strained relationship with his former mentor. Turning to the whole of “Walter Benjamin,” however, we can see Taubes attempting to actually place his interpretation in relation to Bloch’s philosophy as a means of gaining the upper hand over Scholem. Taubes sets up the problem of theocracy, regarding it as a looming risk for the State of Israel and associating Scholem with a certain naivety concerning its possibility. However, he claims that Bloch, by virtue of his atheistic compromise with Christianity and his Marcionism, is able to distance himself from the potential for theocracy in history (Taubes 2016/2006b, 165/53). Relegating it to a matter of inwardness, it is never realized in accordance with Bloch’s non-teleological utopianism but also his Gnosticism, mandating that theocracy must be totally separated from the corrupt cosmos as a religious, and thus not a political, idea. Taubes (2016/2006b, 166/55) takes the opportunity to repeat his views on Bloch’s use of Marcion—with the exception that this time “metaphysical antisemitism” constitutes “part of the bargain.” From here he connects Bloch to Benjamin, assuming a basic congruence between the two thinkers based curiously not on Benjamin’s (1986, 312) praise for the treatment of theocracy in The Spirit of Utopia as its “cardinal merit,” but simply upon the fact that Benjamin penned a review of it at all (Taubes 2016/2006b, 166/55). At this point Bloch’s influence upon Benjamin is elevated over Scholem’s in order to instantiate Taubes’s gnostic interpretation of Benjamin, despite acknowledging Benjamin’s review has been lost. Reasoning from its absence, Taubes (2016/2006b, 167/56) takes license to place Benjamin “in the second theoretical camp of the modern Marcionites” along with Bloch, a point which dovetails conveniently with the arguments in “The Price of Messianism,” which Taubes proceeds to rehash. Benjamin, by tarrying with Marcionite interiority, becomes at best a Gnostic and at worst a Christian. Indeed, “as a mystical Marxist” Benjamin “bears traits of which one hardly would have dreamt in cases such as Marxism and Jewish messianism” (175/64). What these overlooked aspects of the essay reveal is the intimate relation Taubes had spun between Bloch and Benjamin, suggesting that while Taubes no doubt constructed his Pauline Benjamin in opposition to Schmitt and in order to undermine Scholem, it was Bloch who actually provided the constructive material. Yet it is in the lectures on Paul that Benjamin takes a central role, eclipsing Bloch in importance.

The crux of Taubes’s interpretation in The Political Theology of Paul regarding Benjamin concerns Romans 8 and 13, texts which have their “closest parallel” in the “Theologico-Political Fragment.” A “compressed text,” the fragment is labelled “polemical through and through” against not only nomos—the arch enemy of Taubes and his Paul—but “the whole created being” (Taubes 2003/1993, 74/102). As Benjamin (1986, 313) famously writes in his description of the messianic intensity, “nature is messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.” Earlier in his reading of Romans, Taubes suggests that nature is an “eschatological category” to be superseded. “Creation has no role in the New Testament. … There’s only one thing there: Redemption” (Taubes 2003/1993, 60/83). These are lines that also mirror Taubes’s (2016/2006c, 184-185/69) notes on Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” almost three years earlier where he describes Benjamin’s theology purely in terms of messianism and redemption, calling into question whether it is Benjamin being read through Paul or vice versa. Indeed, it is this consignment of the created order to corruptness and utter debasement that reveals the Gnostic threads latent in the text. “Benjamin—this is the astonishing parallel—has a Pauline notion of creation; he sees the labor pains of creation, the futility of creation,” Taubes claims. “All of this is of course to be found in Romans 8: the groaning of the creature. Open this text and read it out loud, and then read Benjamin: You’re going to be amazed. Romans 8:18. That’s what Benjamin is talking about. That is the idea of creation as decay, since it is without hope” (Taubes 2003/1993, 72/101).

It is Taubes’s attribution of the Gnostic notion of a corrupt cosmos to Benjamin that has drawn the ire of commentators such as Weigel and Brumlik, who both regard this move as obscuring the Weimar thinker’s fidelity to Jewish tradition. “For Benjamin, Creation is the world of Genesis, a site before the emergence of history, but not the inadequate world for which Gnosticism blames the demiurge, the creating God of the Hebrew Bible” (Weigel 208). On textual grounds, Weigel cites Benjamin’s 1933 essay “Experience and Poverty” as well as his essay on Kafka in which he rejects Gnosticism outright, even describing Kafka’s writings in terms of a “struggle against gnosis” (Weigel 203-204; Benjamin 1999a 732; Benjamin 1999b, 798). Further, as I have noted, Brumlik (2001, 483) sees this motion as entirely uncharacteristic of the Frankfurt School as such, which remained committed to “the idea of ​​a reconciliation between man and man, between man and nature.” As if alluding to the last thesis of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Brumlik suggests a basic congruence between this “forward-looking story” of Benjamin’s text and the basic meaning of Jewishness itself (483). Indeed, for in affirming the Jewish anticipation of a “strait gate through which the messiah might enter” Benjamin (1968, 264) no doubt maintains an open futurity in the face of calamity and even his own death.

Nonetheless, in the Heidelberg lectures Taubes pushes the point further, suggesting that Benjamin’s gnostic denigration of the created world results in the world-political nihilism of the fragment, a position also correlated with Romans 13. It is this point, I argue, that more specifically accounts for Taubes’s own inner affinity with both Paul and Benjamin. Taubes states, “I contend that this concept of nihilism, as developed here by Benjamin, is the guiding thread of the hōs mē in Corinthians and Romans.” “The world decays, the morphē of this world has passed. Here, the relationship to the world is, as the young Benjamin understands it, world politics as nihilism” (Taubes 2003/1993, 72/100). However, in these remarks, as elsewhere, Taubes does not explicitly associate Benjamin with the precise process or movement of interiorization. This implies that, for Taubes, Benjamin simply grasps the paradoxical, gnostic nature of Paul’s politics in which, caught in the eschatological interval between the Christ event and the final coming of the Kingdom of God, an inner knowledge of redemption is set in tension with an external world still dominated by evil, sin, and oppression. As we have seen, this is the very same dynamic Taubes confronts from Occidental Eschatology to “The Price of Messianism.” However, here it is the painful, disappointing experience of this seemingly irresolvable disjunction between a promised redemption and the brutal fact of its non-arrival which, like Paul in the first century, Benjamin understood in the Weimar period. This is made clear from Taubes’s passing, yet telling, biographical note.

Near the close of his reading of the “Theologico-Political Fragment,” Taubes suggests that Benjamin’s messianism is “shaken by experiences” similar to those of Paul: “Of course I don’t want to say that it is identical with Paul in a strictly exegetical sense. I want to say: this is said out of the same experience, and there are certain hints in the text that confirm this. These are experiences that shake Paul through and through and that shake Benjamin through and through after 1918, after the war” (Taubes 2003/1993, 74/103). In this sense, Taubes appears to identify Benjamin’s postwar situation with the Pauline experience of failure, an interpretation that locates Benjamin’s thought within the real history of actually existing Jewish messianism to which Taubes remains devoted. Indeed, obscuring the line between history and philosophy, Taubes reads Benjamin in the same way that he reads Paul, as one moment in a larger history of the messianic logic playing itself out. Yet because Taubes nowhere explicitly identifies Benjamin with the precise turn inward in the face of catastrophe by simply suggesting that he too grapples with its conditions of possibility and at least entertains the existence of a gnostic interiority, I suggest that Taubes does in fact recognize Benjamin’s fidelity to a “forward-looking story” in contrast to Paul or the Sabbatians. It is this open futurity that Taubes regards as illusory, despite his deep identification with Benjamin’s messianism.

Conclusion

In March 1977 Taubes wrote, relating the nature of his connection to the Frankfurt School in a letter to Jürgen Habermas, “You as the legitimate child, I as the illegitimate son” (Muller 2013). As if confessing an intentional act of infidelity to its intellectual agenda, Taubes implicates his own philosophy as a kind of heterodox bastardization. Indeed, Taubes styled himself from the start as a heretical figure, a Nietzschean provocateur engaged in revolutionary thinking from the borders. As I have aimed to show, this was no less the case when it came to the messianisms of Bloch and Benjamin. While Taubes aimed to take up Bloch’s gnostic tendency or Benjamin’s melancholy through a series of highly productive (mis)readings, he ultimately departed from the “forward-looking story” of the Frankfurt School by embarking on a journey of interiorization in the face of crisis and failure, a fact he readily acknowledged. Why was this the case?

To the chagrin of many of his colleagues, Taubes accepted an academic post at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1961 to become the first full professor of Jewish studies in Germany not even two decades after the fall of Nazism. Yet the realities of antisemitism and the Holocaust were no doubt fresh in his mind, perhaps even motivating his politics as well as his philosophy. As Willem Styfhals (2019, 91) has pointed out, even in the aftermath of the Third Reich, and “[u]nlike any of his contemporaries, Taubes strangely upheld the notion of a redemptive Apocalypse.” Indeed, the horrors of the twentieth century served as “the ultimate confirmation of the Gnostic-apocalyptic worldview,” in which the world “as it is” must be finally abolished (255). Electrified by the emergent and non-dogmatic leftism of the late 1960’s, Taubes and his second wife Margarita Brentano became prominent supporters of the New Left among faculty and students, even bringing Herbert Marcuse back to Berlin from the United States and packing the faculty with other left-leaning intellectuals. In a 1971 correspondence Taubes went so far as to refer to the Berlin student movement in terms of a “cultural revolution from below” (Treml 2012, 464). During these years Taubes’s incendiary personality and idiosyncratic disposition guarded against rigid political codification, while his dynamic teaching style had a radicalizing effect by connecting the main tenets of revolutionary thought to the history of religion. However, after a period of time, Taubes became deeply disillusioned with the so-called “Leninization” of those with whom he had become associated, a fact that adversely affected his marriage and contributed to a series of mental health crises (Muller 2013). Yet some of Taubes’s frustrations were merely symptomatic of larger postwar trends. Indeed, by the 1980’s, Soviet Communism had entered decline as the October Revolution culminated in corruption, dogmatism, and repression. These years also saw increasingly sinister interventions in the affairs of Leftist movements and governments by the United States, particularly in Latin America. Thus the 1980’s marked the onset of neoliberal austerity and a massive shift in global politics to the right.

Given these factors, it is no wonder that Taubes approached the messianic dynamic in the manner that he did. Indeed, looking to the Weimar-era messianisms of the Frankfurt School, tinged as they were with the apocalyptic, it is apparent that Taubes over time became dissatisfied with the “messianic illusions” of their “forward-looking story.” It was this fact, combined with a proclivity toward the heretical and the marginal, that drove his departure into the realms of pessimism and interiority, predicated as well upon his reading of the history of actually existing Jewish messianism. Indeed, from this history he theorized broadly in order to trace a larger trend in accordance with his own messianic experience. Taubes should thus be seen as a figure of crisis and failure in many respects, prompting one to consider again the shape that messianism can take in its encounter with catastrophe. Though indefensible on many counts, his reading of Benjamin, as well as Bloch, remains instructive by enacting a confrontation with a recurring experience—that of dashed hopes. In our own day, as we too contemplate the redeemed world amidst climate collapse, global pandemic, vast inequality, and resurgent fascism, we would do well to weigh the messianic dynamic carefully.