The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope [1 ed.] 9781503633186, 9781503635302

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The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes

Stanford Studies in Jewish Mysticism Edited by Clémence Boulouque and Ariel Evan Mayse

THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAT H O S O F S U S A N TAU B E S Between Nihilism and Hope



Elliot R. Wolfson

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Sta n for d U n i v e r si ty Pr e ss Stanford, California © 2023 by Elliot R. Wolfson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wolfson, Elliot R., author. Title: The philosophical pathos of Susan Taubes : between nihilism and hope / Elliot R. Wolfson. Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish mysticism. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. | Series: Stanford studies in Jewish mysticism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022025976 (print) | LCCN 2022025977 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503633186 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503635302 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Taubes, Susan—Philosophy. | Jewish philosophy—20th century. | Religion—Philosophy. Classification: LCC PS3570.A88 Z96 2023 (print) | LCC PS3570.A88 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20221025 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025976 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025977 Cover design: Lindy Kasler Cover photo: Susan Taubes, Courtesy of Ethan Taubes

to the blessed memory of my mother zelda meisel wolfson february 11, 1923—march 1, 2014 whose critical sensibility and mathematical acuity helped carve the path i have walked in this world

The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech: there it petrifies and is henceforth dead but indestructible, like the petrified plants and animals of prehistory. As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere or at bottom serious. When it begins to exist for others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence. ­—Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

When one lives alone, one neither speaks too loud nor writes too loud, for one fears the hollow echo—the criticism of the nymph Echo. And all voices sound different in solitude! —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Dream has its own time. While one is dreaming one does not know this of course; that it will end. In dreaming one assumes it will go on indefinitely, as in living—a reasonable delusion based on life experience: life goes on indefinitely until one is dead. Only dreams end. And in this respect loves and plays and stories are like dreams: they end. Books were better than dreams or life. A book ended not like life, abruptly; not like a dream, with a clumsy struggle and sense of deception; but gracefully and knowingly, preparing you for the final period. Between life and dream there was not much difference really, however the two wrangled, struggled, played tricks on each other. A book was something really different. . . . You can be dreaming and not know it. You can be awake and wonder if it’s a dream and not believe it. But a book is simply and always a book—you can be sure of that. And with a book, whether you’re reading it or writing it, you are awake. —Susan Taubes, Divorcing

Contents

Introduction: Memory and Heeding the Murmuring of the Israelites  1 1. Ghosts of Judaism and the Serpent Devouring Its Own Tale  31 2. Zionism and the Sacramental Danger of Nationalism  101 3. Gnosis and the Covert Theology of Antitheology: Heidegger, Apocalypticism, and Gnosticism  128 4. Tragedy, Mystical Atheism, and the Apophaticism of Simone Weil  186 5. Facing the Faceless: Poetic Truth, Temporal Oblivion, and the Silence of Death  226 Notes  281 Bibliography  Index  479

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Introduction Memory and Heeding the Murmuring of the Israelites Pain is one of the keys to unlock man’s innermost being as well as the world. Whenever one approaches the points where man proves himself to be equal or superior to pain, one gains access to the sources of his power and the secret hidden behind his dominion. Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are! —Ernst Jünger, “On Pain”

But the more joyful the joy, the more pure the sadness slumbering within it. The deeper the sadness, the more summoning the joy resting within it. Sadness and joy play into each other. The play itself which attunes the two by letting the remote be near and the near be remote is pain. This is why both, highest joy and deepest sadness, are painful each in its way. —Martin Heidegger, “Words”

And the price the soul pays for its errors is always a spiritual price; their sin is their own punishment. —Susan Taubes, Letter to Jacob Taubes, September 29, 1950

Susan Taubes (née Judit Zsuzánna Feldmann) was born in Budapest in 1928 and died by her own hand on November 6, 1969, in East Hampton, New York.1 It is surely prudent to circumvent reductionism when assessing a person’s life, but much can be ascertained about Susan’s psychological profile and intellectual temperament by noting that her grandfather Mózes Feldmann (1860–1927) was the grand rabbi of Budapest, and her father Sándor Feldmann (1889–1972) was a leading Freudian psychoanalyst. Departing from the two disparate orthodoxies, Susan forged a way that nevertheless emerged from these patriarchal figures, a trail marked by both a relentless 1

Introduction  —  2

quest to recover the spiritual vitality of Judaism as practiced by her grandfather as well as a ruthless obsession to uncover the root by a radical thinking apposite to the orientation of her father. In 1939, Susan emigrated with her father to the United States, her mother eventually making her way at a later date. They went first to Pittsburgh, and then Susan moved with her father to Rochester, New York, while her mother settled in Manhattan.2 Susan’s letters to Jacob Taubes confirm that she shuffled back and forth between her parents, but she clearly had a preference to be with her father, and over time the relationship with her mother completely deteriorated.3 Thus, in her letter from November 5–6, 1950, Susan wrote that the situation with her mother had become “very unhealthy.” She goes on to describe her as “a dragon and a pitiful and neurotic dragon at that—so one could not become a ‘hero’ slaying her. I can’t get tangled up in old case histories, also if one ‘kills’ one should do it with a sharp knife, so I shall break relations with her altogether. . . . It is true, everything she touches turns to bad luck—and though I pity her I fear her too much to be able to be kind to her.”4 The continuation of the letter reveals the tensions between her parents to the point that her father not only refused to live with her mother but also forbade her from visiting Rochester. Susan reiterated the desire to cut relations with her mother entirely because she was deemed to be too dangerous.5 The magnitude of the discord and the distance between mother and daughter is fictionalized in the following exchange in Divorcing between Kamilla and Sophie Blind: “I don’t know why I’m sitting here,” Kamilla says, “We have nothing to do with each other, do we?” . . . “I called you because father asked me on the phone if I know how you are. I didn’t even know you were back in New York. You don’t write me. We haven’t been on speaking terms for years. I have accepted that I don’t have a daughter. . . . You are a stranger to me. I am a stranger to you.”6

In late 1948, Susan met Jacob Taubes in New York, and they were married on June 5, 1949, at a time when she was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College, majoring in philosophy.7 Her honors thesis, entitled “Myth and Logos in Heidegger’s Philosophy,” was written under the direction of Isabel Stearns.8 In the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin (Summer 1951), Susan was praised as “brilliant,” “mature,” “professional,” and her thesis was acclaimed as being

Introduction ­ —  3

on a par with the work of “an excellent Ph.D. candidate.”9 Upon graduating in 1951, she received the Bryn Mawr European Fellowship, which afforded her the opportunity to continue her studies at the Sorbonne. After spending some time in Paris, she joined Jacob in Jerusalem and took courses at the Hebrew University. Subsequently, Susan returned to the United States and pursued graduate study at Harvard University, serving as the Josiah Royce Fellow in Radcliffe College. To the best of my knowledge, Susan was the first woman to receive a doctorate in the history and philosophy of religion from that institution. The original topic for her doctoral dissertation was the mythical and theological elements in Heidegger’s philosophy, but this plan was never brought to fruition, and instead the topic of the thesis, supervised by Paul Tillich and completed in 1956, was “The Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil.”10 Susan and Jacob had a son Ethan and a daughter Tanaquil, born respectively in 1953 and 1957. In 1960, Susan began teaching at Columbia University, where she was also curator of the Bush Collection of Religion and Culture. During the 1960s, she was a member of the experimental Open Theater ensemble, and in addition, she edited African Myths and Tales and a book of Native American myths called The Storytelling Stone. She also advanced her own creative writing by publishing a dozen short stories, and she wrote two novels: Divorcing, which appeared on November 2, 1969, four days before her suicide by drowning in the Atlantic Ocean, and the novella A Lament for Julia, which has appeared in German translation, but the original English is still unpublished.11 It is noteworthy that on the day of the release of Divorcing, there was a scathing review by Hugh Kenner in the New York Times. Susan Sontag, the close companion of Susan Taubes about whom she wrote in her diary on July 21, 1972, that she was her double,12 was the one who identified her deceased body.13 Sontag was of the opinion that the proximate cause of her friend’s demise may have been the bad reviews of the book, and especially the one by Kenner, although it should be noted that a short time before her death, Susan had written in her diary that she would be drowning herself in about two weeks.14 Of late there has been increasing interest in Susan Taubes prompted by the publication of several works by the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, including translations into German of literary and philosophical works

Introduction  —  4

originally composed in English, under the guidance by Sigrid Weigel, as well as two volumes of correspondence with Jacob from the years 1950–1952, edited and annotated by Christina Pareigis. These volumes are a treasure trove of wide-ranging intellectual exchanges—Susan’s letters, in particular, read like pages from philosophical diaries, Denktagebücher, which display remarkable analytic perspicacity and critical sophistication. The epistolic give-and-take also provides the reader with access to some of the intricacies of their private relationship. Susan effusively communicated her unwavering love for Jacob on many occasions, a love that encompassed in her own words both logos and eros,15 or, as she put it elsewhere, a love that rests on trust that cannot be thwarted by either logos or eros.16 Understanding her commitment to Jacob in scriptural terms gave Susan a linguistic medium to express the intertwining of the erotic and the spiritual threads. The obvious choice of Song of Songs, for instance, is signaled out in Susan’s letter to Jacob, written on May 3, 1952, as the looking glass through which to imagine and to verbalize her fervent craving: Last night I put my nose into a bunch of lilies-of-the valley + the sudden whiff of fragrance made me sick with love and longing for you. I tried to remember passages from the Song of Songs; I couldn’t all the way; So I knocked on the door of my English neighbour Chippenfield + borrowed his Bible and read + thought of you.17

Noteworthy is the fact that the olfactory served as the catalyst for Susan to moor her sensual longing in scripture. The biblical verse enlivens the scent of the roses even as the scent of the roses enlivens the biblical verse. Hermeneutically, we can speak of a double mirroring, the textual mirror mirroring the tactile experience and the tactile experience mirroring the textual mirror. As Susan conveyed the matter of her yearning in the letter to Jacob, written at 1:30 in the morning on November 16, 1950, “I think of you and think over how we met and what happened to us and how the reading of the Hosea was prophetic not only in relation to our personal fates but in that we too are ceaselessly living the analogy of the covenant of marriage to the covenant of God + his people.”18 For his part, Jacob, too, thought of their relationship in biblical proportions, and thus he affirmed that his carnal desire for Susan intersected with the spiritual, as we see in the following outpouring of

Introduction ­ —  5

passion: “Love you my animal, my dear animal very very much. If I want to know or to express to my self what holy means I see you and I feel a deep trembling of joy and extasy in you.”19 The letters provide the reader with insight into Susan’s emotional loneliness when separated from Jacob,20 her ardent pining to be with him physically and psychically to the point of experiencing actual discomfort in their separation.21 Typical of the despair Susan felt is the following remark in the letter she wrote to Jacob on September 26, 1950, “I begin to feel like a sleep walker through the world—very efficient and quite dreamless but a sleep walker and in the gray hues of this sleep I can taste the blackness of death.”22 Repeating the motif of the deprivation of passing away to express her anguish of not being together with Jacob, Susan lamented to Jacob in the letter from October 28, 1950, that going to bed without him “is like going into the grave each night.”23 The letters also attest to Susan’s insecurity about Jacob’s willingness to reciprocate her abiding affection, leading her to ask after declaring her unconditional loyalty to him, “do you love me?”24 Additionally, the letters give voice to the intellectual respect that Susan harbored for Jacob as an original thinker, even extolling his “good genius” and referring to his “bold and beautiful daimon.”25 On October 21, 1950, she addressed Jacob as her “Bodhisattva,” which she glossed as the one “whose being is enlightenment.”26 Susan’s admiration of Jacob is idealized in the letter written on February 16–17, 1951, “Ah but it is sad without you. Everybody is soooo stupid—you are the only clever being I know—and everybody else bores me.”27 However, there is ample evidence that Susan was capable of being critical of Jacob. One of clearest examples is in the letter of March 6, 1952, where Susan offered her comments on Jacob’s essay “The Development of the Ontological Question in Recent German Philosophy,”28 to which she refers as “Q”: What you are driving at is important; the insight is creative and demonic, the language is still inadequate . . . even in the german. The source of the inadequacy is partly in the natural difficulty of penetrating a new abyss, but it is also due to a curious slavishness to the “historical evolution of the idea”. . . . Continuity cannot be denied, but you must establish it from your point and not from Husserl’s or Cohen. It is a problem to adopt, adapt, transform revolutionize the old language.

Introduction  —  6

Often you make it more difficult for yourself by playing with the old terminology. . . . Say what you mean and then refer to what is called x or y by another school. You have a tendency to develop your thought by playing around with titles. Take the harder way of articulating your own thought; these algebraic shortcuts are very questionable. There are the most dubious pretensions behind Heidegger’s thinking style and unless you are willing to go along the way of a clandestine Geistesgeschichtemystik I would advise you to learn rather from Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (who understood the fitting style if one doesn’t want to get entangled with history.)29

There is much in this passage that necessitates a more careful scrutiny, including the comparison of Jacob’s style to a surreptitious intellectual history of mysticism deducible from Heidegger as well,30 but for our immediate purposes it is sufficient to take note of the acuity of Susan’s critical interventions. Let me note finally that the letters also indicate that Susan was agonizingly aware of Jacob’s dark side, corroborated, for example, in the fact that she refers to him occasionally as the “devil boy” (Teufelsknabe).31 One might argue that affixing this title to Jacob is done in a teasing or an endearing manner, but it is evident that at times it is used to mark undesirable qualities that are deserving of admonishment. The complexity of her concomitant attraction to and repulsion from Jacob is exhibited glaringly in the conclusion of the letter from April 11, 1952, where Susan communicated her desire to embrace her husband but also to beat him.32 The thorny convolution of Susan’s emotions can be seen in the antiromantic ideal of love communicated in her letter of April 26, 1952, “I hate you lovingly. I send an angel to beat you in my name.”33 As is well known, the matrimonial difficulties were fictionalized in Divorcing, reissued in 2020 with an introduction by David Rieff, the son of Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff. Notably, the title suggests that the process of divorce is unending, and it is not a matter that can ever be finalized. The republication of this work has occasioned a number of journalistic reviews and, in some cases, a reassessment of the relationship as well as of the merit and relevance of Susan’s thought. Both of these topics have been greatly enhanced by Christina Pareigis’s intellectual biography of Susan, which appeared in November 2020.34 This monograph should be commended not

Introduction ­ —  7

only for the lucidity of expression but for the author’s meticulous scholarship and documentation based on published and archival material. My first serious engagement with Susan Taubes was reading the 1954 essay “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism.” Being struck by the profundity of her discursive skill, I proceeded to read more of her scholarly writings, and when I was invited to contribute to a volume on Jacob Taubes, I decided to compare and contrast their respective interpretations of Heidegger. The fruits of that labor can be found in the essay “Gnosis and the Covert Theology of Antitheology: Heidegger, Apocalypticism, and Gnosticism in Susan and Jacob Taubes,”35 a revised version of which appears in the third chapter of this book. Susan’s letters proved to be a major repository of philosophical reflections, and in particular they illustrate that her understanding of Heidegger, while in some cases indebted to exchanges with Jacob,36 far exceeded him in discernment and depth, even though she intermittently appropriated a misogynist defamation of her own worth by alleging that she is nothing—symbolized by the Greek omega (Ω)—but a conduit to transmit ideas she received from Jacob.37 I note, parenthetically, that there is a strong parallel between what I set out to accomplish in Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiē sis (2019) and the position taken by Susan Taubes. The significant difference is that I emphasized the Jewish mystical underpinning of some of the distinctive aspects of Heidegger’s thought, which likely reached him through secondary channels like Böhme and Schelling, and less the extent to which it is a hidden Christian tradition. It must be noted, however, that Susan did postulate that the surreptitious tradition originated as a Jewish heresy. If we assume that Christian esotericism was informed by Jewish gnosis with roots in Late Antiquity but most fully developed in medieval kabbalah, then it is important to lay claim to the Jewish wellspring of Heidegger’s esoteric and heretical Christian tradition. And this, in good Heideggerian fashion, should embolden us to give thought to what is unthought.38 Susan did comment in a few passing remarks on the affinity between Heidegger and Jewish esotericism and in one context even coined the phrase “Heidegerian Kabbala.”39 Be that as it may, the mutual interest in Heidegger drew me to Susan’s essay, and this became the catalyst to engage in working on a monograph with the hope of showing that she should be taken seriously as

Introduction  —  8

a thinker who has contributed not only generally to the study of philosophy and religion but particularly to Jewish philosophy in the period right after the dreadful upheaval of the Holocaust and the momentous establishment of the modern state of Israel. While others have contributed to a reassessment of Susan’s literary talents and theoretical acumen, I wish to make a case for the relevance of her writings to Jewish religious thought. To prevent misunderstanding, let me state unequivocally that my analysis is not prosopographic in nature as I am not interested in an exhaustive investigation of the biographical question of Susan’s Jewish upbringing. Furthermore, the attempt to reclaim the legacy of this extraordinary figure for the history of Judaism should not be construed parochially as a flaunting of ethnic pride. As will become abundantly clear in the ensuing chapters, Susan vehemently opposed such a narrowminded portrayal of Jewish religion and culture. The letters to Jacob and other writings, especially her novel Divorcing, demonstrate beyond question that she considered problematic the emphasis on Jewish particularity when specularized through an ethnocentric lens. Thus, from the specific example of the Passover seder, Susan extrapolated her more general discontent with the implicit ethnocentrism of the halakhah: That symbols and festivals are more permanent than ideology is also my conviction; but this is my war with Judaism. Must every gesture serve for the glorification of the jewish people and the condemnation of the others? The satisfaction obtained from heaping plagues of frogs, vermin etc. on others is hardly redeeming. Is it not from spite, misunderstanding and hatred that we want to be redeemed?40

Despite such unambiguous statements, it cannot be denied that her Jewishness persisted as an Archimedean point whence she was oriented—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say disoriented—in the world.41 The struggle to let go of her devotion to a religious-cultural heritage, which she could neither possess nor dispossess, is beautifully articulated in the following interchange on the nature of recollection cast in neurophysiological terms between Sophie and Kate in Divorcing: “Memory, we discover, is stored in a glutenous protein substance—mucopolysaccharides—a cell glue. Fuzz collects around the neurons. Now,

Introduction ­ —  9

in studying brain waves it turns out that there is a best fit pattern in which a wave closely resembles the one where the original information is stored. The waves are whispering together.” “So that’s what it is. The chorus of murmuring! Old Israelites in my cells.” “Correct, and its time they shut up. We’re going to dissolve that old glue. One whiff and you’ve got a clean slate.” . . . “Admit it, you can’t live without those murmuring Israelites. ‘May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem!’”42 “But of course, to part is painful, to part with an old rag, even a tumor. It’s part of human nature to love one’s tumor.”43

Judaism is the tumor that tormented Susan, but a torment that she nonetheless treasured. Her memory was saturated with the murmuring of the Israelites that could not be silenced all the days of her short-lived sojourn on this planet. Like the heroine of Divorcing, Susan was a refugee exiled from her native land, who was never able to find another home in the foreign country to which she relocated. The homeland she could discover was in exile,44 but in such a homeland, one finds one’s place only by being displaced. As she put in the letter to Jacob written on October 7, 1950, “But I am walking ‘the ways of the world’ walking through the connecting paths of nomads, wanderers, exiles.”45 Elaborating on this theme in the letter written the next day, Susan ruminated: And I begin to grow into my life of wandering + migration even as the peasant grows into the climates of the land, and even as the peasant after a while learns to love the hoe whereon he breaks his back, the lands of his sweat and the stubborn seasons—so the wanderer, the uprooted, learns to love the dusty routes, the trunks, the warehouses, freight trucks and ticket-booths, the packing and unpacking. One grows into a familiarity with all the strange faces of Fate—slowly a pattern lights through the daily toil and redeems the sweat, backache and anxiety. The moment comes when the exile also celebrates his fate.46

Revisiting the point in Divorcing, Susan wrote about Sophie, who “had been

Introduction  —  10

travelling all her life,” that her way to deal with things was to “pack and unpack and pack again.”47 Susan’s exaltation of itinerancy and uprootedness related to her Jewish pedigree and poetic disposition reminds one of the following lines from the “Poem of the End” by Marina Tsvetaeva: Still. We are. Outside town. Beyond it! Understand? Outside! That means we’ve passed the walls. Life is a place where it’s forbidden to live. Like the Hebrew quarter. And isn’t it more worthy to become an eternal Jew? Anyone not a reptile suffers the same pogrom. . . . Ghetto of the chosen. Beyond this Ditch. No mercy In this most Christian of worlds all poets are Jews.48

The dislocation from any physical location—to cross the divide and to be beyond the town limit—is a manner of demarcating life as a place in which no one can live, a condition typified by the Jewish ghetto but not limited to it, since anyone who is not reptilian experiences the anguish of an equivalent pogrom and is thus subject to the eternal misfortune of the wandering Jew. From the specific case of the dislodgment of the Jews, the Russian poet elicits a claim about the nomadic status of the human predicament. The ghetto of the chosen unquestionably signifies the alienation of the Jew, but the image is also rendered symbolically to delineate the existential forsakenness of humankind. The idiosyncratic constellation of Judaism serves as the speculum through which to appreciate the universalization of the particular in the particularization of the universal. Here it is useful to recall the words of Goethe, “The particular always underlies the universal; the universal must forever submit to the particular.”49 Expounding this maxim, Ernst Cassirer noted that the relation between the universal and the particular “is not one of logical subsumption but

Introduction ­ —  11

of ideal or ‘symbolic’ representation. The particular represents the universal, ‘not as a dream and shadow, but as a momentarily living manifestation of the inscrutable.’”50 The poetic genius is concerned with particular feelings of the inner life rather than with the general facts of the outer world at large.51 As opposed to allegory wherein the particular serves the universal, the symbolic language of the poet focuses on the concrete reality of the particular as a sign of its ineffable referent52 and thereby is the means to discern the universal.53 Along similar lines, Tsvetaeva maintained that the poet seeks the universal in the particular, and thus the poetic vocation is linked essentially to the Jew inasmuch as the latter is associated with a particularity that doggedly resists assimilation into a universality presumed to be allocated unreservedly to the human species. I would suggest, therefore, that the assertion by Tsvetaeva that in the Christian world, all poets are Jews, does not imply inversely that all Jews are poets. By proclaiming all poets to be Jews, Tsvetaeva is communicating that the poet, too, is inflicted with an incurable disquiet that leaves him or her feeling that life is the place where it is forbidden to live in a manner comparable to the intolerable conditions of the Jewish ghetto.54 From this we can deduce that no appeal to autochthony can authenticate claims to superiority with respect to the potentially toxic triangulation of peoplehood, land, and language. Homesickness, as Tsvetaeva recounts in another poem, is the only natural condition for the one who has no natural home. The disaffection from a native land and an indigenous language, and the fatigue that ensues from the consequent leveling out of any ethnocultural difference that might secure or stabilize the identity of one’s being in the world, signify the plight of the poet that warrants the stigma of being a Jew.55 Significantly, Paul Celan used Tsvetaeva’s line, written in the Cyrillic characters bсе поэты жиды (Vse poety zhidy), “All poets are Yids,” as an epigraph to “And with the Book from Tarussa,” included in the 1963 collection Memory Rose.56 While the czarist epithet zhid may have been derogatory, and thus was used ironically by Tsvetaeva and perhaps also by Celan,57 Jacques Derrida proffered that the statement denotes the “alleged universality of the Jewish witness.”58 The import of that universality is brought into sharper relief by considering the comments from Celan’s “Conversation in the Mountains,” written in August 1959, which Derrida juxtaposed to the aforementioned epithet:

Introduction  —  12

One evening when the sun, and not only that, had gone down, then there went walking, stepping out of his cottage went the Jew, the Jew and son of a Jew, and with him went his name, unspeakable . . . do you hear me, you hear me, I’m the one, I, I and the one that you hear, that you think you hear, I and the other one—so he walked, you could hear it, went walking one evening when something had gone down, went beneath the clouds, went in the shadow, his own and alien—because a Jew, you know, now what has he got that really belongs to him, that’s not borrowed, on loan and still owed—, so then he went and came, came down this road that’s beautiful . . . he, the Jew, came and he came.59

By delineating the name of the Jew as unpronounceable, der unaussprechliche, Celan may have been alluding rhetorically to the rabbinic tradition about the most sacred of divine names, the ineffable Tetragrammaton, a tradition expanded significantly in the esoteric-mystical lore of the kabbalah.60 That the name of the Jew cannot be spoken portends, moreover, that the noncompliance of the Jew impedes the possibility of permanent possession or stable attachment in the world. As Celan expressed the matter in the continuation of this prose text, “the Jew and Nature, that’s two very different things, as always, even today, even here.”61 The ontic restlessness—being askew in the natural terrain—is conveyed by the image of the Jew condemned to walk continuously. Perhaps reflected here is the well-worn antisemitic trope of the wandering Jew,62 but Celan undermined its negativity by arguing that it is precisely because of this dispossession—occupying the “homeland strangeness” (die Fremde der Heimat), as he put it in “Schibboleth”63—that the exclusive identity of the Jew is inclusive of the other, and hence the Jew is destined to enter the shadow of self that is concurrently his own and not his own.64 The poetic figure of Jewishness may indeed attest above all to marginalization and persecution,65 but this is precisely what bestows on the Jew the asset of embracing the alien out of an aboriginal alienation. Thus, explicating Celan’s view, Derrida noted, “The Jew is also the other, me and the other; I am Jewish in saying: the Jew is the other who has no essence, who has nothing of his own or whose own essence is to have none.”66 If the Jew possesses no innate properties and has no essence apart from the essence of having no essence,

Introduction ­ —  13

it follows that to be a Jew of necessity incorporates being other than the Jew by virtue of not being the being that one is. The alterity of Abraham—emblematic of the Jew—is an alterity not only determined by the depreciatory othering of the non-Israelite but by the scriptural demarcation ha-ivri, “the Hebrew” (Genesis 14:13),67 which, according to a midrashic explanation, is related to the description of Abraham as the immigrant who was brought to the land of Canaan from across the river, me-ever ha-nahar (Joshua 24:3) and who spoke the Hebrew language (mesiaḥ bi-leshon ivri).68 As one who unremittingly originates from another place and who converses in a foreign language, the Jew is always tainted as the self that is other in relation to the environment in which he or she is situated and is thus subject to persistent deterritorialization. Translated into the ethological-political terms of Deleuze and Guattari, the Jewish mode of being is illustrative of the nomadological plane of immanence assembled by the variable coefficients of the relative movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization linked together in the absolute deterritorialized territory, the territory beyond territorialization.69 In the subversion of the topological homeomorphism, one inevitably resides nowhere because one is coerced to reside everywhere. From the standpoint of this heterogeneity—the zone of fluctuation that is coextensive with reality70 —there is no difference whether one lives in the land of Israel or in the diaspora. In the former as in the latter, the individual is situated in medias res with the memory of the promise of a homeland not yet realized in the present, induced therefore to extend the lines of the past and the future into a polycentric circle of rhizomic repetition that has no beginning or end.71 Here it is germane to recall the comments in the draft notes of Celan’s The Meridian, the speech on poetics that he delivered before the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize in Darmstadt on October 22, 1960: One can become a Jew as one can become a human; one can jewify [verjuden] and I would like to add, from experience: most easily today in German . . . One can jewify; this is, admittedly, difficult and, why not admit this too?—even many a born Jew has failed to do so; that’s exactly why I believe it to be so commendable . . . Jewify: It is the becoming-other, to stand-toward\for\—the-other-and-his-secret— . . .

Introduction  —  14

Not by speaking of offense, but by remaining unshakably itself, the poem becomes offense—becomes the Jew of Literature—The poet is the Jew of Literature—One can jewify, though that happens rarely, yet does happen from time to time. I believe jewifying [Verjudung] to be recommendable—hooknosed-ness [Krummnasigkeit] purifies the soul. Jewification that to me seems to be a way to understanding poetry, and not only exoteric poetry.72

The process of Jewification, Verjudung, entails becoming-other (Anderswerden) and standing toward the other and his secret (Zum-anderen-und-dessen-Geheimnis-stehn). In virtue of the dialogical propensity of poetic language to direct its attention to the other, the poem is classified by Celan as a turning, Das Gedicht ist eine Umkehr,73 a point accentuated in the final version of the Meridian speech: The poem is solitary. It is solitary and underway [Das Gedicht ist einsam. Es ist einsam und unterwegs]74 . . . But doesn’t the poem therefore already at its inception stand in the encounter—in the mystery of the encounter [im Geheimnis der Begegnung]? The poem wants to head toward some other, it needs the other, it needs an opposite. It seeks it out, it bespeaks itself to it.75

Celan’s notes in preparation of the lecture attest that he connected the essential feature of the poem—the “desperate conversation” (verzweifeltes Gespräch) of someone seeking and addressing the other76—with the comportment of being Jewish. Thus, the Jew is identified as the poet of literature, and the Jewification, a term with unmistakable vituperative connotations, is hailed as the way to comprehend poetry: Verjudung, das scheint mir ein Weg zum Verständnis der Dichtung. Even the infamous racial image of the crooked nose is transposed by Celan into a somatic characteristic that purifies the soul. For the Jew to be identified as the poet par excellence, as I remarked above, does not denote that all Jews are poetically inclined, but rather that all poets share with the itinerant Jew the tribulation of being alienated in the world, and they are thus susceptible to the movement of the “self-forgotten I” (selbstvergessenen Ich) toward the uncanny and the strange (Unheimlichen und Fremden),77 the darkness of being adrift that endows one with the distance

Introduction ­ —  15

necessary to honor the uniqueness of the other.78 Aesthetically, poeticizing is a “stepping beyond what is human [ein Hinaustreten aus dem Menschlichen], a stepping into an uncanny realm [Unheimlichen Bereich] turned toward the human.”79 In this realm of the mysterious, where art seems to be at home (zuhause), the groundless poet is grounded. Commenting on this passage, Derrida remarked that the uncanniness of Unheimliche is “close to what creates the secret of poetry, that is, the secret of the encounter,” noting, moreover, that Geheimnis denotes “the intimate, the withheld, the withdrawn into retreat, the concealed interior of one’s home, of the house,” and hence the secret of the encounter “is at the innermost heart of that which is present and presence (Gegenwart und Präsenz) in the poem.”80 In contrast to Hölderlin’s idea of dwelling poetically, famously exploited by Heidegger, Celan’s poetry is a form of inhabiting a language “where one knows both that there is no home and that one cannot appropriate a language . . . . He was a migrant himself, and he marked in the thematics of his poetry the movement of crossing borders.”81 The relationship between the poet and the Jew that Derrida draws from Celan calls to mind the conclusion he educes from The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès: “And through a kind of silent displacement . . . the situation of the Jew becomes exemplary of the situation of the poet, the man of speech and of writing. The poet, in the very experience of his freedom, finds himself both bound to language and delivered from it by a speech whose master, nonetheless, he himself is.”82 The nexus between poet and Jew that bears even more affinity with Celan and Susan Taubes relates to the shared exilic and peripatetic state. Thus, commenting on Jabès’s description of Yukel, “you have always been ill at ease with yourself, you are never here, but elsewhere,” Derrida writes: The Poet and the Jew are not born here but elsewhere. They wander, separated from their true birth. Autochthons only of speech and writing, of Law. . . . Autochthons of the Book. . . . Poetic autonomy, comparable to none other, presupposes broken Tables. . . . Between the fragments of the broken Tables the poem grows and the right to speech takes root.83

To be anywhere is always to be elsewhere, such is the portion allotted to the poet and to the Jew. The only homeland of which either can speak is the

Introduction  —  16

Torah, and thus indigeneity, strictly speaking, is textual and not topographical.84 Even so, Derrida marks a decisive difference between the two interpretations of interpretation: Judaic heteronomy, which is typologized in the figure of the rabbi, gives way to poetic autonomy; whereas the former pivots around allegiance to the law and thus coincides with the “horizon of the original text,” the latter presupposes the shattering of the tablets of the law and thus coincides with the “necessity of commentary,” a form of “exiled speech.” Insofar as the poem grows like a weed between the shards of the broken tablets, the poet is branded an outlaw, that is, the one positioned outside the law by remaining inside the law, the one exercising the sovereignty to be chained to the very law from which one is unchained.85 In this autonomous state, the poet is dislodged from the ancestral fatherland. Comparably, Celan’s poems bear the timebound traces of the harrowing migration foisted upon Jewish populations by the scourge of Hitlerism, but they morph for him into a timeless philosophical insight regarding the nature of language as that which sets into motion gestures of appropriation precisely because its very essence is not to let itself be appropriated. Derrida acknowledges explicitly that his interrogating the legitimacy of linguistic nationalism can be ascribed suitably to Celan,86 the poet who exemplifies the commitment to linguistic differentiation dissociated from the temptation of nationalism and the political power of patriotism, an appeal to the singularity of the signifying body of language that eludes all possession and any claim of belonging.87 The universal exemplarity anchored in the apophatic particularity of the other88 is verified by the fact that the statement cited above from the draft notes of the Meridian address, “One can become a Jew” (Man kann zum Juden werden), is immediately glossed with the words “as one can become a human” (wie man zum Menschen werden kann).89 This apposition conveys that the specificity of being a Jew is intricately linked to the constitution of being human more generally, and therefore one is Jewish to the extent that one is not exclusively Jewish. Vivian Liska perspicaciously commented that Celan’s passage articulates the “paradox of exemplarity” insofar as it invokes a particular—“the Jew”—to describe a universally accessible condition of “becoming other”. . . . In bringing into play the word “verjuden,” Celan both speaks of and performs a transformation: he invokes a vo-

Introduction ­ —  17

cabulary of exclusion and discrimination and simultaneously turns this historically loaded, negative term—a term indicating an abject contamination by the Jew and “his spirit”—into an affirmative metaphor for transformation, for “becoming other.”90

Liska has rightly noted that Celan provocatively inverted the antisemitic insult: Verjuden denotes the potential to affirm the other—which is the essence of poiēsis wrought through the renunciation of self that facilitates becoming other—and not the degradation of othering the other to the point of annihilation. Moreover, “Celan’s use of ‘verjuden’ performs an ingenious crossing of the universal and the particular: one—anyone—can ‘become other’. . . . At the same time, however, the metaphor’s vehicle, the verb verjuden, retains in its resonance the singularity of its idiomatic use at a specific moment in German-Jewish history.”91 The universal possibility of being human can only be enacted through the concrete individuation demonized by Nazi ideology as the venomous other that needs to be eradicated. I propose that the paradox of exemplarity so described can be applied to the claim of Susan Taubes that the lack of an autochthonous nature enables the Jew to personify the universal through the channel of the particular. The repudiation of a reified self is what fosters the possibility of becoming the other; conversely, the Jew embodies the wisdom that to become the other is what it means to be a self. Alternatively expressed, the Jew attests figurally to the fact that the general must always be measured from the standpoint of a particularity that withstands collapsing the difference between self and other in the othering of the self as the self of the other. The marker of being Jewish, consequently, is not primarily religious, cultural, or political, but it is rather the ethical directive to uphold the dignity of the other based on a keen sensitivity to one’s own destiny of being other in this world.92 Pareigis aptly remarked that Susan had “a special interest in the topic of estrangement, feeling estranged from any kind of belonging. Belonging to a nation, belonging even to a language. Belonging to other people, to a group, to a religion.”93 In Divorcing, Susan elicited the following insight from the description of the wicked son in the Passover Haggadah, mentioned together with the wise son, the son who does not how to ask, and the simple son: “this cunning people predicts the deviant at every table, as if from the beginning; this too

Introduction  —  18

was a part of the Passover ceremony: the child who didn’t see the point of it, a Jewish child, because, as the saying goes, being a bad Jew didn’t make you any less of a Jew.”94 Insofar as wickedness is understood as the removal of oneself from the collective narrative, the suitable punishment would have been to preclude the possibility of being liberated from Egypt, which is indeed the explicit language of the advice offered in the traditional text, “You should blunt his teeth and say to him, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went out of Egypt’ (Exodus 13:8), ‘for me’ and not ‘for him.’ Had he been there he would not have been redeemed.” Susan’s heterodoxical exegesis turns the verdict on its head: not being redeemed is not only not a reprimand, it is the more perfect form of redemption, to be redeemed from the need to be redeemed. The recalcitrant child, accordingly, has a place at the table because the one who rejects the story is an integral part of the story. Belonging by not belonging fittingly describes Susan’s path as a Jew fighting to free herself from the double bind of becoming more Jewish by being less Jewish, to paraphrase Derrida’s paradox of the identity of non-self-identity.95 To cite one of the various Derridean formulations of this sentiment, I still feel, at once, at the same time, as less jewish and more jewish than the Jew [comme moins juif et plus juif que le Juif], as scarcely Jewish and as superlatively Jewish as possible, more than Jew [plus que Juif], exemplarily Jew, but also hyperbolically Jew.96

Or, as Derrida put it elsewhere, And how does a Jew of whom I know only too well, and from so close, that he will never have been sure of being together with himself in general, a Jew who dares not stop at the hypothesis that this dissociation from self renders him at once as less Jewish and as most Jewish [d’autant moins juif et d’autant mieux juif]—how could such a split or divided Jew have received this remark?97

The dissociation from self that casts the Jew as concomitantly less Jewish and most Jewish is predicated on the percipience that the otherness of the Jew perforce comprises its own other, the universal that transcends the particular in which it is contained, the cut of circumcision that is the mark of différance, the grammatological disruption of the logocentrism of Western philosophy.98

Introduction ­ —  19

For Derrida, the Jew elucidates the monolingual paradox that speaking one’s own language necessitates the possibility of speaking a language that is not one’s own.99 Expressed in an eschatological register, Jewish ethnicity imbibes the abstract messianicity that transcends Jewishness insofar as the quest for peace or justice that it transports in its waiting without awaiting does not belong to the determinate revelation of this or any other Abrahamic religion, but it is rather a general structure of experience that alone allows the hope, beyond all “messianisms,” of a universalizable culture of singularities, a culture in which the abstract possibility of the impossible translation could nevertheless be announced. This justice inscribes itself in advance in the promise, in the act of faith or in the appeal to faith that inhabits every act of language and every address to the other.100

We can confidently apply to Susan the insistence of Derrida that this universalizable culture of singularities is what permits one to hypothesize a rational and universal discourse on the subject of religion. Moreover, she would have concurred that the principle of exemplarity personified in the figure of the Jew implies that the “more jewish the Jew [plus le Juif est juif], the more he would represent the universality of human responsibility for man, and the more he would have to respond to it, to answer for it.”101 Dana Hollander cogently summarized the ethico-political concern of Derrida’s works articulating a philosophical nationality: The writings highlight the paradoxes of exemplarism—that national affirmations are neither simply particularistic, since they take place in the name of universal-philosophical values, nor simply universalist, since they make their claims in the names of cultural particulars. In thus calling into question monolithic conceptions of identity, Derrida’s works challenge philosophy, as an exemplary universalist discourse, to continually renew itself and perpetually open itself to what lies outside and beyond its culturally specific heritages. His writings thus lead beyond the paradox that the more we assert a particular identity such as Europeanness or Jewishness, the more we are forced to do so in the name of the universal values and aims that this identity represents, and, consequently, the more we must deny its very particularity.102

Introduction  —  2 0

Derrida’s position can be profitably compared with the claim embraced by Emmanuel Levinas in his criticism of Simone Weil that Jewish ethnocentrism is the condition that safeguards the viability of a genuine alterity, since the notion of an “absolutely universal,” the tenet applied to the divine that grounds the respect for and obligation of a human being toward the other, “can be served only through the particularity of each people, a particularity named enrootedness.”103 To understand the Levinasian position we would do well to recall that in his critique of Heidegger’s notion of comprehension as the openness to being, he duly noted that “to comprehend the particular being is already to place oneself beyond the particular. To comprehend is to be related to the particular that only exists through knowledge, which is always knowledge of the universal.”104 The corrective to this quandary is to validate the universal on the basis of the particular, to particularize the universal rather than to universalize the particular, which in Levinas’s terms— indebted, as he readily acknowledged, to the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption105—means to ground the universality of reason in the ethical duty that ensues from opening the face to the face of one’s neighbor, the epiphany of the other that occasions the discourse that compels entering into discourse.106 Philosophically, this is the veritable meaning of enrootedness as well as the biblical concept of Israel’s chosenness: It is because the universality of the Divine exists only in the form in which it is fulfilled in the relations between men, and because it must be fulfilment and expansion, that the category of a privileged civilization exists in the economy of Creation. This civilization is defined in terms not of prerogatives, but of responsibilities. . . . If being chosen takes on a national appearance, it is because only in this form can a civilization be constituted, be maintained, be transmitted, and endure.107

Levinas placed the burden of bearing the encumbrance of this universal particularism at the heart of Israel’s messianic mission.108 As the consummate stranger, the Jew is the figural token of the alterity that comports the nature of human subjectivity; that is, the Jew stands as witness to the fact that we are similar by virtue of our unassailable dissimilarity, that what is essential to our being is the refusal to allow ourselves to be tamed or domesticated by a theme, that proximity to the absolute exteriority of the other is achieved

Introduction ­ —  21

through relationship with a singular interiority that is always in excess of the mediation of principle or ideality,109 the element in consciousness that is not posited by consciousness,110 the difference that is non-indifference.111 The position I have extracted from Derrida and Levinas—mindful, of course, that there are irresoluble disparities between them—underscores the existential impasse from which Susan could not flee: her only way to remain Jewish was to abandon Judaism. The blurring of the line separating the universal and the particular implied in this conserving the tradition through forsaking the tradition reverberates with Susan’s remark to Jacob, “If it is true that this relation to the Arché defines the jew—or if it is true as your Father says that to be a jew and to be a ‘man’ are the same (not some ‘universal’ man but the daemonic man) then, that is something worthwhile to dwell on.”112 Inasmuch as the Jewish problem is indexical of the human problem—not as a universal that effaces the particular by absorbing the other and assimilating it as part of the same, but rather as a universal that is constantly configured by the unassimilability of the particular, which is represented here by the image of the beard113—her inability to find a home in this world as a Jew is tragically indicative of the migratory status of the human being more generally, the “utter forlornness” of the self “experiencing the full wonder and terror of existence.”114 With regard to this matter, we can delimit a crucial point of conflict between Susan and Weil. The latter’s position on the universal and the particular is addressed in the following passage from Susan’s dissertation: Her critique of the Church culminates in the contention that the Church is catholic by right and not in fact. A genuinely catholic religion, she claims, would embrace the entirety of man’s spiritual tradition and would open its doors to all who desire to partake of its sacraments apart from adhesion to particular dogmas. Her critique of particularism thus involves on the one hand the relation between ritual and dogma, and on the other, the definition of the one, all embracing, true faith.115

According to Weil, to the extent that the subordination of a sacred act to social or ideological conditions violates its mystery, the particularism of any sacrament obfuscates its universalism. The conventional form of a given ceremonial rite, therefore, is immaterial and the choice to perform that rite is

Introduction  —  2 2

arbitrary, but it should not appear as arbitrary or as a matter of choice because this would vindicate the traditional belief that particular sacramental forms are instigated by someone inspired by God or by God himself. Challenging the logic of this argument, Susan wrote, even in a religion where tradition enables the worshipper to overcome the tension between the universal and the particular in the sacramental act, the ideological character of the faith and the political character of adhesion to the faith, introduces a disturbing and illicit element of choice. Then the individual who desires sanctification comes up against the choice of joining one or another group and accepting its platforms.116

The element of choice points to the fact that the materialization of the universal must be mediated by the immediacy of the particular. As noted above, we find a similar criticism of Weil offered by Levinas in his notion of enrootedness; that is, in her condemnation of the parochialism of Judaism and the celebration of the catholicism of Christianity, she has ignored the prophetic teaching—exemplified by Malachi, the most nationalist of the prophets—that the absolute universality of the God of Israel can be realized only through the particularity of each nation on its own terms, and hence we must say that “God is both universal and yet not universal. His universality is not accomplished so long as it is recognized only by thought and is not fulfilled by the acts of men.”117 Following this path of envisaging the universal through the prism of the particular, Susan’s focus on the specificity of Judaism did not curtail her ostensibly voracious appetite to learn about diverse religious and spiritual cultures. Indeed, it appears that her interest in the esoteric was driven precisely by the belief in a common mystical and mythical truth. As she wrote to Jacob on October 29, 1950: I am reading wonderful things from China . . . and India very near to all that you told me about Kaballa and gnosis. It seems the esoteric knowledge is one, and only the exoteric is many. Mythos, Mystery, Mystikos move in related realms of gnosis and opposed to it is either the one science of death, Nihilism, and the “many sciences” a-gnosticism.118

The core of esoteric gnosis is singular, the exoteric enfleshment of that gnosis in different traditions is multifarious. Moreover, there is a homology between

Introduction ­ —  23

mysticism and nihilism insofar as the latter also exhibits a unified theme and thus can be considered the one science of death. What Judaism has to offer to this discussion is the obstinate reminder that the unifying factor emerges from and must revert to the particular. At the deeper level, this can be expanded phenomenologically into the broader tenet that the perceptual horizon is such that in every act of perception we see an intended object from a circumscribed number of aspects but never in its wholeness; the noetic intentionality that shapes our consciousness cannot grasp the horizonal structure in its totality because there is no totality to grasp beyond the cointended noemata that allow the brain to presume the existence of a discrete sense datum. The presentation of the concrete phenomenon depends, therefore, on the intentional surplus of the nonperceptual that is visible in its invisibility at the fringe of the perceptual.119 This counter-intuitive intuition was anticipated by Nietzsche’s conjecture in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future that deception is a necessary component to the acts of reading and perceiving: Just as little as today’s reader takes in all the individual words (or especially syllables) on a page . . . just as little do we see a tree precisely and completely, with respect to leaves, branches, colors, and shape. We find it so much easier to imagine an approximate tree instead. . . . What all this amounts to is: we are, from the bottom up and across the ages, used to lying. Or, to put the point more virtuously, more hypocritically, and, in short, more pleasantly: people are much more artistic than they think.120

Nietzsche’s pinpointing the criterion of deceit as an indispensable constituent of our hermeneutical condition anticipated the phenomenological insight that the ungiven is the ground of all that is given and its epistemological corollary that there is no veracity but through duplicity. As he put it in the essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” when we speak of objects such as trees, colors, snow, and flowers, we think we have knowledge of the things themselves, but what we have are metaphors of those things that do not correspond to the original entities.121 All our truths, then, are inherently metaphorical, “illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions.”122 Expressed in the mathematical terms that have been pivotal for the exertion

Introduction  —  2 4

on the part of kabbalists to contemplate the emergence of difference from within the originary nondifferentiated indifference of Ein Sof, truth is the infinite that is unobtainable except through its condensation into the infinitesimal point within which measure is affixed to the immeasurable, but to ascribe any measure to the immeasurable is to falsify its nature as what cannot be measured. Disregarding this fundamental stipulation results in the failure to apprehend that the diversity of the rich tapestry of life is a masking of the univocity of being in the plurivocality of beings. As Susan expressed the matter in the letter to Jacob, written on April 9, 1952: “One ‘saint’ is like another. Therefore there is one mysticism. (In die Nacht sind alle Kühe schwarz).”123 The final statement that “in the night all cows are black” is an allusion to Hegel’s comment in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit to mark the lack of differentiation in the monotony and abstract universality of the absolute—apparently an allusion to Schelling—wherein everything is presumed to be the same.124 Susan’s utilization of this remark is meant to underscore the monochromatic nature of the unity professed by mysticism. The vivacity of the mystical should hinge rather on the concretization of the saintly in the commensurability of incommensurate traditions. The view I ascribe to Susan has been endorsed by any number of historians of religion, philosophers, and theologians, but it is most pertinent to cite a passage from Tillich, Susan’s Doktorvater, as I mentioned above: The personalism of biblical religion must be seen against the background of universal religion, representing it and, at the same time, denying it in a unique way. In the I-thou structure of the religious encounter the personalism of the Bible is like the personalism of any other religion. But it is different from the personalism of any other religion in its creation of an idea of personal relationship which is exclusive and complete.125

Needless to say, the details of Tillich’s argument are not pursued by Susan. I have quoted this passage, however, because Tillich hits the central nerve that has animated the religious spirit of Judaism for centuries, a spirit that is substantiated in Susan’s understanding as well. The emphasis on the personal experience of God, expressed in Buberian terms as the encounter of the I and the Thou, as opposed to a taxonomy of an a-personal being, can be

Introduction ­ —  25

translated into the idiom of resisting the universal (ontology) that effaces the particular (existence). Insightfully, Tillich uses the personalism of the God of ancient Israel—the key ingredient that affected the evolution of monotheism in the variegated histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—to buttress the seemingly paradoxical point that biblical religion denies the universal religion that it represents. When the matter is carefully mulled over, however, it is clear that there is no paradox at all because the unconditional character of God makes the relation to him personal, and therefore particularistic, and yet, the criterion of unconditionality is precisely what all theistic religions share, and therefore it may be regarded as the ground of the universalistic.126 In the final analysis, the universal is engendered by the particular whose inimitability cannot be subsumed by the generality of the universal. Susan’s disagreement with Weil turns on this very point. Weil had argued that by appropriating for itself a social vocation, the Church may be compared to Clytemnestra, the “usurpating and adulterous bride.” Susan countered that the adultery of the Church consists not in its social character but in the fact that “it excludes so many from its community,” and hence “it has not fulfilled its promise of a universal community where ideological, political and class divisions have been overcome.”127 Inasmuch as the particularism of Christianity is linked by Weil to the social body of the Church, it follows that the ideal Church is disembodied, and thus any instantiation of religious rites in a culturally embodied ethnos is in defiance of the universalism that can be attained only in a spiritual sphere. Moving away from the “social incarnation” of Catholicism leads Weil to affirm a universal gnosis that embraces “all the systems of religion, mysticism and philosophy,”128 which in turn demands the denial of “a plurality of irreducible and equally valid religious alternatives; the choice lies between the true and the false religion, between Christianity and idolatry. But if Christianity is to be identified with the true religion it must embrace all truth.”129 The contradiction of the Catholic position is imparted succinctly in Susan’s comment: if the Christian faith is the true religion, then it must embrace all truth, even the truth of other faiths that consider it to be false. At first glance, the conclusion stated by Susan is the logical inference of the baptismal formula preserved in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ there is an obliteration of ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender difference—neither Jew

Introduction  —  2 6

nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. However, as I have argued elsewhere,130 the pledge that we are all one in Jesus is an inclusivity that excludes its own exclusivity; that is, the capacity for alterity discounts those who might not desire to be integrated into the body of Christ. Support for this interpretation may be gleaned from the verse that immediately succeeds the liturgical pronouncement, “And if you are of Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (3:29). The universal— to be of Christ—is the fulfilment of the singular—the covenantal promise to Abraham’s seed. Contrary to Alain Badiou, who proposed that prodding Paul’s reasoning is the syllogism, “if it is true that every truth erupts as singular, its singularity is immediately universalizable,” and thus universalizable singularity necessarily breaks with identitarian singularity,131 I would contend that Paul does not escape the dilemma that lies at the heart of Jewish messianism whereby the universal is rooted in and reinforced by the particular. It may be the case, as Paul argued, that a consequence of the fact that Christ is the telos of the law (Romans 10:4) is that the latter is supplanted by faith, and hence there is no longer a rationalization for the distinction between Jew and Greek, since the same Lord is Lord of all (Romans 10:12), but the overcoming of the binary is the fulfilment of the specific vow bestowed on the people of Israel. I thus concur with Jacob Taubes’s assertion that Paul “clambers out of the consensus Greek-Jewish-Hellenistic mission-theology . . . Paul is a fanatic! Paul is a zealot, a Jewish zealot . . . So it’s a universalism, but one that signifies the election of Israel.”132 The Pharisaic radicalism of Paul fully anticipated that the body politic of Israel would be transfigured in light of the apocalyptic expectation of salvation. Undoubtedly, this conception of Paul the diasporic Jew served as a model for Jacob himself: Judaism represents the universal particularism of a particular universalism, that is, a universal constituted by the particular that is constituted by the universal. Ensnared in a comparable web, Susan maintained that the universal is enrooted in the particular that is inclusive of its exclusivity insofar as the exclusion of the other is the mode by which the other is included as the one that is excluded. The inclusive exclusivity is transformed into an exclusive inclusivity such that the inclusion of the other is a marker of its exclusion, and consequently, the barriers between religions are broken down only to the extent that they are fortified. Indeed, Susan went so far as to say that the source of

Introduction ­ —  27

the present evils—including the barbarity of Hitler133—should be traced not to the God of the Old Testament but rather to the attempted universalization of the ancient Israelite religion whose essential virtue lies in its particularity and concreteness. The Christian preoccupation—epitomized in the Pauline effort to challenge the law in order to form an “international religion” that made “the world a little jewish + the jews a little less jewish”134—to make the personal God of Judaism into the religion of the world was doomed to fail because the universality of faith cannot be disentangled from the unity of the tangible experience of the individual.135 The view upheld by Susan, in opposition to Weil, to emphasize what is particular, unique, and precious in the individuality of human existence136 resonates with the paradox that has shaped the Jewish mentalité through the centuries and especially as it pertains to its messianic mission: Israel’s election is justified by an exclusiveness inclusive of its own others, but the inclusiveness of this exclusiveness is contingent on the exclusiveness of its inclusiveness. Hence, the inclusion of the excluded in the claim to exclusivity only renders the inclusivity more exclusive. In the space of this aggregated specificity, the individual illumines the general and the general illumines the individual in a reciprocity wherein the bifurcation of self and other is surpassed by a logic that retrieves the middle excluded by the logic of the excluded middle. Recounting a conversation with Éric Weil in a letter to Jacob written on February 8, 1952, Susan related that reacting to his conviction that the dichotomy between reason and violence, the philosopher and the politician, cannot be surmounted, she suggested that poetry is neither one nor the other and thus occupies a space in between what he regarded as polar opposites. Objecting to Weil’s response that “the poet’s world is personal not universal,” Susan argued that “there is a universality of the personal, i.e. a world of discourse forming the creative relations between man and man.”137 The classification of poetry as the aesthetic form that most pristinely incarnates the “universality of the personal” should not be understood in Hegelian terms as the dialectical sublation of the antinomy that preserves and maintains what is sublated. There is no point of synthesis whereby the universal is particularized and the particular universalized. On the contrary, the determinacy of the general is delimited by the indeterminacy of the personal to the extent that the indeterminacy of the personal is delimited by the determinacy of the

Introduction  —  2 8

general. For Susan, in a manner akin to the view of Celan discussed above, the poetic utterance lingers precisely in the metaxy between the homely and the unhomely, the indiscriminate nothing that manifests the discriminate something and the discriminate something that occludes the indiscriminate nothing. Being is the nonbeing by being the nonbeing it is not being. The methodology deployed in this book, consistent with what I have cultivated in the study of mystical and philosophical literature over the course of many decades, will reflect this conceptual point marked as the universality of the personal. Although this monograph was not conceived or written narrowly for a handful of specialists, it nevertheless embodies the hermeneutical belief that the universal is only attainable through scrutiny of the particular, and hence the larger philosophical and theological concerns will be examined from copious citation of sources and close textual analysis. To offer abstractions without concrete anchoring in the text is anathema to Susan’s approach and therefore seems ideationally inappropriate as the proper stratagem to study her thinking. In the various comments that Susan made on this topic, I have found support for the view that by digging deep into the ground of one particular tradition, one finds the way to its ungrounding, as that tradition invariably opens the door to other traditions. The prospect of comparative analysis, therefore, is not vindicated by presupposing the existence of a uniform truth manifest in each of the specific traditions in the sameness of their difference, but rather by unearthing a divergent truth from the space of dialogue between traditions where sameness and difference appear in the difference of their sameness. Analogously, just as the poetic is described as the median situated between the universal and the personal, so the cultic ritual of secular existence, which Susan imagined would replace religious ritual, is to be conjured from this perspective, and thus it is compared to a “limbo between the sacramental and the nihilistic worlds.” Those who pass their lives in this limbo “taste neither pure light nor pure darkness.”138 Since the limbo is “open to both ways,” it follows that to dwell therein—which is the common lot of humanity—is to be positioned betwixt heaven and hell, and thus one has only “a glimmering of the sacramental and the nothing.” Enlightenment, on this score, consists of the “illumination of total darkness.”139 What is implied by this language? Does the illumination of darkness imply that the darkness

Introduction ­ —  2 9

is dispelled by light, or does it mean that the light is illumined by darkness? I am inclined to the second option whence we can infer that the darkness reveals the light by making apparent the tautological truth that “what is necessary is necessary.”140 When one apprehends from this tautology that “finally nothing is necessary,” one is further led to the nihilistic conclusion that “nothing is worthwhile,” and hence “what is necessary becomes nothing.” Nihilism and faith converge in the diverging point of the sameness of their difference: in conformity with, but pushing against, the avowal that nothing is necessary because it is necessary that there is nothing, the sacrament “creates its own necessity,” and “those who are not caught and won by the light remain darkness in the dark, shadow in the shadow of the Limbo.”141 Susan’s focus on the liminal state of limbo, tellingly demarcated as the shadow of the shadow and not as the shadow of the light, corresponds to her embrace of the existential-ontic provision of being at home as an irrevocable condition of homelessness, a sensibility that explains her passionate interest in Heidegger and Weil.142 Whatever the differences between these two seminal thinkers, and of course they are considerable, in Susan’s mind, they both averred a gnostic estrangement from the world that serves as the basis for a more authentic way of being in the world, passing through history as an innate state of expatriation to get beyond history, suffering the void of the infinite nothingness whose luminosity is the specter of nonbeing at the core of all being. The desire to abscond from life by one’s own volition might be reckoned insane, but it is logical if “homelessness, insecurity and fear” are declaimed as the strongest bonds that tie people together.143 This book is an endeavor to plumb the depths of this stark pessimism, the abyss that molded Susan’s mytheological thinking,144 the poetic mandate to perceive the shadow not as the absence of light but rather as its hidden incandescence. As Susan instructed Jacob in a letter written on December 15–16, 1950, in the almost total darkness of the present, “we must be able to learn to see in the night.”145 To see in the night requires that one see the night, that is, to fathom the unfathomable as the epistemic condition of what is fathomable, to sense the sensation of limit at the limit of sensation.146 The ensuing exposition seeks to facilitate this nocturnal seeing, to envision the darkness as one would envision the light.

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1 Ghosts of Judaism and the Serpent Devouring Its Own Tale Religion is the temple of fear and there is always the danger that the temple becomes more important than what it houses, and our attention is focused on the columns and statues which can simply cover the emptiness, instead of both disclosing and covering it as they ought. —Susan Taubes, Letter to Jacob Taubes, March 4, 1952

In your lines the sacred has long lain in travail of birth. —Jacob Taubes, Letter to Susan Taubes, March 11, 1952

I better say in advance that surely there is a thirst in man that all the waters of the world cannot quench; a divine thirst—a thirst not so much for truth or God as from the true + the divine. Man drinks at a source that makes him thirst. —Susan Taubes, Letter to Jacob Taubes, April 21, 1952

In the epistolic exchange between Jacob and Susan, we read recurrently of the point of contention between his commitment to the rituals of a Torahbased Judaism and her inability to do so, what Christina Pareigis has aptly branded the “religious war in the house of Taubes” (Religionskrieg im Hause Taubes).1 Evocatively, in a letter to Hugo Bergmann from March 25, 1952, Jacob related that his marital conflicts revolved around the axis of “Jewish existence” ( jüdischen Existenz) as a religious-spiritual problem,2 and had he 31

Ghosts of Judaism  —  32

spared his wife these quarrels, their experience of being together as a couple would have been a more consolidated unity.3 That the issue of how to embody a meaningful Jewish existence threatened the couple from early on is demonstrated in an undated and unfinished letter to Jacob presumed to have been written by Susan in Rochester shortly after their wedding in June 1949.4 The beginning of the letter strikes an ominous tone: “Darling—I am very sad without you and troubled about many things and my meditations this evening lead me to feel very hopeless about there ever growing an understanding between us. And as to prayer I can only pray to an unknown light to save me from the nightmare of what men call religion.”5 After she acknowledged that she went to an Orthodox service and then to a Reform temple, Susan assessed her spiritual difficulty with adapting to the strictures of halakhah: It is clear to me that I must follow the voice that speaks in my soul and not to deceive myself by any talmudic or jesuitical rationalization that I can attach and commit myself to any mass belief and tradition. It simply is not true—what I believe and what the laws and scriptures and traditions uphold are two different things they are of different dimension and I am not at the moment concerned with how to discipline the masses or how to keep priests and rabbis employed and although there is nothing I desire more than to worship in community and not in loneliness I will suffer my loneliness rather than to give myself to hypocrasy [sic] and falsehood. I don’t think you have the right to force me to repeat and repeat the same process of decision. I am tired of being deceived in the same thing again and again. Because I love you and because we must build our lives together I want to see truth where you see truth and I strain many times in myself to open myself to it and every time I find that it is deception. I cannot go on in this endless repetition I want to build my own altar. It is awful, it is perhaps the most frightening thing not to be able to worship and live in the tradition of any people—it is truly death—but we must live this awfulness and not make sentiment or political compromises. This is my belief at least, and the few people I know of both semitic and non-semitic strain believe this. And I can no more keep to the laws of the Bible and the exile traditions than I can cross myself or take the sacrament because I would

Ghosts of Judaism ­ —  33

perjure myself and my honesty and my nakedness is all I possess. . . . I would be deeply hurt if you expect that because you are good to me I must compromise my beliefs and to please you go along with the ritual. This would be very cheap.6

That Susan wrote these words so close to the wedding is assuredly indicative of the high degree of anxiety she felt about disappointing Jacob but equally of her worry of not being loyal to herself. Susan acknowledged that out of her love for Jacob she sought to see the truth as he did but each time she tried to comply with his truth, beholden by the desire to build a life and a family according to the regulations of the Torah, she found deception. Her own beliefs were diametrically opposed to the laws of scripture and the exilic traditions, which I assume refers to the rabbinic halakhah, and even though she longed to worship in community, she preferred to live in the disconsolate state of loneliness rather than to succumb to hypocrisy and falsehood. To observe biblical laws and rabbinic norms would have been as fraudulent to Susan as enacting the Christian gestures of crossing oneself or taking the sacraments. To preserve her naked honesty and to build her own altar, she would opt to endure isolation instead of perjuring herself by following a path that did not reflect her genuine beliefs. As she passionately writes in the continuation of the undelivered letter: There is only one sin and that is to destroy the image of God. Belief does not matter—ultimately where we have ceased to be children faith is not a spiritual matter. We would like human beings to wear the image of God in their lives, in their being, their acts and their handywork. Calendar days for rest and atonement and being holy are simply a caricature of how a man ought to live. The law of the Torah may make life more simple, it saves us from searching all the time to distinguish between the holy and the unholy by an arbitrary rule; and it is easier to fast one day a year than to abstain from swinishness every day of the year and to judge our actions every moment of our lives; and it is more simply to dedicate one day of the week to rest quietude than strive for quietude and dignity every day of the week; but I cannot live by this kind of logic and I cannot participate in the traditions of a people who live by it. And this is the last time I want to dwell on this thing.7

Ghosts of Judaism  —  3 4

In spite of the utility of the laws of the Torah, the distinctions implied thereby between the virtuous and the depraved are capricious. For Susan, habitual deference to the antiquated laws amounts to a defilement of the image of God, and that alone is the sole transgression. She accused Jacob of being “unjust” by not making clear that their marriage was to be based on her acquiescence to his need to observe halakhic injunctions. While admitting that she was “simply terrified” of this prospect, she forcefully protested that he could not threaten her with love or coerce her to live a life that she deemed duplicitous.8 In the letter written on December 15–16, 1950, Susan once again expressed to Jacob her profound disaffection from the Judaism he wished to sanction: “Tradition” is not something I chose to accept or to reject as the duchess might chose to accept the dish of caviar offered to her or not. Sometimes the dish is not offered at all, sometimes a man goes searching for food and cannot find it. And despite all the contemporary talk of man’s limitless freedom I do not believe man can produce a tradition from nowhere anymore than he can produce a loaf of bread. Man is free to die of starvation or to go out and search and with the help of God bring flour and salt and yeast together and bake the loaf . . . And that is why the thought of the God who gathers the people from the strange roads, who leads them out of captivity and brings them to their home, is far deeper and far less “naïve” than the thought of the dead man resurrected in Christ . . . And I who write this and know this, I am yet a forlorn being on the strange road. I have been reading through Exodus tonight and also Leviticus and as I read, the soul that shall touch any unclean thing . . . that soul shall be cut off from his people . . . I am in terror for a moment, but only for a moment, because for one who is already cut off from his people this can be no threat, the dead cannot be threatened or terrified by anything. Only the living are at stake, and the question is how much life we have yet in us, what have we yet to lose.9

In an apparent criticism of contemporary existentialism, Susan rejected the idea that limitless freedom is conferred upon the human being when it comes to fabricating tradition. Against such an unbounded autonomy, Susan emphasized that tradition cannot be produced out of nowhere any more than a loaf of bread can be baked without the proper ingredients.10 Tradition is not something Susan

Ghosts of Judaism ­ —  35

wished to choose or to reject, as if it were a dish of caviar, and yet, her alienation from Judaism was so extreme that the myth of God leading the people out of captivity and bringing them home—a myth that she acknowledged is deeper and more sophisticated than the Christological dogma of the resurrection—did not invigorate her because she remained forlorn in the foreignness of the road she had to traverse. Even the Levitical punishment of excision (karet) from the community was not intimidating, since she was already cut off from the people of Israel. Just as the dead cannot be terrorized with the threat of death, so the one who has been expurgated cannot be intimidated with the portent of expurgation. On occasion, Susan showed sensitivity to Jacob’s need to live an orthopraxis life despite her visceral rejection of such a way of being in the world. In an imaginary sketch written by Susan in “Notes for the Return,” an early draft of material that eventually was incorporated into Divorcing, Jacob and Susan are portrayed respectively as Ezra and Esther. Responding to the question why he would kiss the Torah in the synagogue, Ezra states, “To please my family. And because that’s not a relic but the law.” Esther counters, “But you don’t believe in the law—you don’t observe it.” To which Ezra replies, “You’re as bad as my family . . . . You would like me to have a clear cut position. Fit into some category, orthodox, conservative, reform, zionist, assimilated, or convert to the ruling religion. It’s not so simple.”11 The fictional dialogue describes succinctly the dilemma that Jacob’s relationship to the halakhic tradition posed for Susan: on the one hand, out of loyalty to his family he wished to keep the law, but, on the other hand, he did not really believe in or observe the law. Telling in this regard is Susan’s encouragement in the letter to Jacob from October 30, 1950: “Work on your Being and Nothing. But do not forget God. And if the only way you can remember is by letting your beard grow to your knees and muttering words swaying back an[d] forth it is yet better than forgetting completely; for that is death.”12 To be without any appreciation of living in the presence of divinity is akin to death, and thus it is better for Jacob to feign being Orthodox—letting his beard grow and performing the traditional movements of prayer—than to forget completely about God. Notwithstanding periodic concessions such as this one, the overall sense one gets from the letters is that the rift between Jacob and Susan regarding the value of fulfilling the ceremonial laws became insuperable. Consider her candid words in the letter written on October 5, 1950:

Ghosts of Judaism  —  36

We must yet think Jacob how we shall manage our lives, and think boldly my dear, no longer in the old language of our parents either yours or mine, for their world has crumbled—but find a language adequate to the chaos in which we live where the distinction of “dignity” between a “professor” and a bus driver has become sheerly romantic; and look with clear eyes into the job itself, what is more dignified to make a kindergarten affair of the Logos or simply to go and wipe little children’s noses.13

The following rumination in Susan’s letter to Jacob written sometime in May 1952 from Paris renders transparent the ideological gap that separated them: You meditate on the death of God; I on the death of tragedy. Both of us are in some sense concerned with the law, the sacred law and finally law as such, criminal law. You were nurtured on the law. I was born outside of the law; I grew up in opposition to the law, with no roots in family, a people or a state, standing outside of my fate as a Hungarian jewish immigrant etc. And out of my anarchic situation I see the necessity of the law, and know that the “free” life is limbo. But a pragmatic acceptance of law is only a subterfuge within the limbo; it shall not save us. And thus we are condemned to live the contradiction between our being + our convictions. Doesn’t it end in banality? Is love spared? Or even death? The devil is having his day. At any rate the soul is his + only the flesh remains innocent.14

Susan began by noting a crucial difference between Jacob and herself: he meditated on the death of God and she on the death of tragedy. The import of this disparity is made clear in the discussion about the law in the continuation of the letter. Both were concerned with the law, whether religious or civil, but from contrasting standpoints reflecting their respective upbringings. Whereas Jacob was reared within the confines of the law, Susan was groomed from childhood to be the consummate outlaw—the one not only outside the law but in opposition to it. Moreover, as a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, she likened herself to a nomad who has no roots in the social structures of family, peoplehood, or nation. Yet, even in this peripatetic state, she perceived the necessity of the law and apprehended that a free life is comparable to

Ghosts of Judaism ­ —  37

hovering in limbo. Pragmatically, there is an acceptance of the law, but this is merely a stratagem to navigate the life in limbo, a ploy that has no salvific benefit. The death of tragedy—as opposed to the Nietzschean predicament of the death of God—is such that we are destined to live in the contradiction between being and conviction. Neither love nor death is spared from the prevailing facileness of this friction, which is consigned to the devil. However, inverting the theological perspective that condemns the corporeal and glorifies the spiritual, the demonic is said to take possession of the soul as the flesh perseveres in its innocence.15

Unveiling the Veil of Illusion: God as the Fullness of the Void The starkness of Susan’s alienation from any form of tradition is corroborated in the aforementioned aside that the only prayer available to her was to be addressed not to the personal God of monotheism but to an unknown light with the aim of rescuing her from the nightmare of religion. The light to which Susan referred may correspond to what she called in the letter of October 30, 1950, the presence with “ontological-nihilistic meaning,” that is, the being that is nothing, the “spatio-temporal-causal context of objectivity,” a “sheer presence” that is not a scientific object but rather the mythic subject that can be referred to as God, spirit, or the daemon. Lest one confuse the object that cannot be objectified with the invisible reality à la the Kantian noumenon, Susan insisted that the latter “is no daemon, no ‘holy’ no ‘mystery’ but simply the fore of the phenomenal. And so, there is no difference between presence and absence, being or nothing: fullness = void. And as I wrote before, I think the only difference is God.”16 Prima facie, the formulation appears to be contradictory. On the one hand, Susan denied that there is any difference between presence and absence, being and nothing, fullness and void, and yet, on the other hand, she avowed that the only difference is God. How can difference be ascribed to the one of whom it is said that there is no difference? To make sense of this inconsistency, we must assume that the divine is not to be envisioned as an entity but rather as the differential façade of the phenomenal—redolent of the Deleuzian fold17—that distinguishes and in so doing identifies opposites in the opposition of their identity, the caesura that ruptures and thereby reinforces the convergence of the divergence in the divergence of the convergence.

Ghosts of Judaism  —  38

An interesting enunciation of Susan’s incapacity to conform to the theistic portrait of God is found in the following letter to Jacob: About the identity of Nirvana-Samsara I have a “formal” objection: how is error, failure, “illusion” possible where all possibility of distinction is obliterated? If the two are identical how can a man think that they are different? The problem is time and death and the lyric poets were the first to know this. It is the taste of nothingness of the moment that is and shall never be again, that turns man’s stomach. A mystic like S. Weil says that when the soul is void god enters it. But god is not something other than the void; god is the void, god tastes like nothing in the mouth of mortals. But is it necessary then to speak of god? I think it is rather an abuse of the word.18

Perceptively, Susan raises a philosophical problem with the identification of nirvāṇ a and saṃ sāra according to the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition: if liberation from the karmic cycle and the cycle itself are identical, then all distinctions are abolished, and allegedly there would be no difference between emancipation and bondage.19 One could argue that this criticism fails to comprehend the full scope of the dialetheic paradox20 that the awakening of mind brings about the realization that liberation consists of being liberated from the need to be liberated. Perhaps unwittingly, in the objection that Susan raised about “the identity of Nirvana-Samsara,” she stumbled upon one of the profoundest truths proffered by masters of Buddhist lore. The insubstantiality of the soteriological goal of the Mahāyāna path is well summarized by Jan Westerhoff: The illusionism propounded by the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras is comprehensive. We are here not faced with a view of the world that relegates our everyday surroundings to the status of mere appearance in order to underline the truly real status of some religiously transcendent world. Rather, the entire round of existence including all being, all dharmas, various degrees of realized practitioners, the Buddha, and even nirvāṇa are considered illusory in nature. Even the process of leading beings to liberation is compared to a magician dissolving a previously created illusion. Just as we would not want to say that the magi-

Ghosts of Judaism ­ —  39

cian made an elephant vanish, because there was no elephant present in the first place, in the same way, the Perfection of Wisdom texts argue, there are no beings that are led to liberation. . . . Instead of arguing that the salvific efficacy of specific meditative states and experiences shows that they correspond to the way the world works at the most fundamental level, their very efficacy is sufficient to argue why they, rather than other non-standard phenomenological states, should be cultivated, independent of any claims to ultimate truth. We should therefore be aware that the “ontologization” of meditative phenomenology happens in Buddhist thought, and that it can explain a great deal about the development of Indian Buddhist philosophy, but that Buddhist philosophers themselves (certainly the Mādhyamikas amongst them) finally move beyond it when spelling out the theory of the emptiness of emptiness. . . . If there is no distinction between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa at the ultimate level, there is nothing the bodhisattva needs to escape from in order to obtain liberation.21

The unveiling of the veil of illusion initiated by the Buddha comprehends the dissolution of illusion itself; that is, in the absence of reality apperceived as the reality of absence, there is naught but the illusion of illusion. Epistemologically, one is released from the shackle of illusion when one discerns the illusory nature of being released from the shackle of illusion by attaining the right view concerning the interconnectedness of all things, commonly referred to as the doctrine of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), which begets the awareness that intrinsic reality is the lack of intrinsic reality. In the disillusion of the illusion, the illusion is dissipated by the temporal elucidation that in the present the past can become what it has always been and the future can cease to be what it has never been.22 The Buddhist wisdom is captured concisely in the counsel “If one seeks enlightenment, there is no enlightenment . . . . If one sees enlightenment as something with form, that distances one from enlightenment.”23 This accords with Nietzsche’s statement that redemption encompasses being redeemed from those greater than all the redeemers.24 As it happens, in the poem “Post Apocalypse,” Susan articulated this very gnosis and thereby displayed her philosophical kinship with Buddhist teaching:

Ghosts of Judaism  —  40

The truth we know is a terrible truth, nothing follows from it Said the wise men of the flat plain. It is like a huge crack in the sky whence no waters flow nor lightning strikes. And it does not matter how many know the truth it shall not save them They shall simply know that it is of no matter to be saved.25

The truth, which is marked as terrible, is inconsequential, and thus it is compared to a crack in the sky from which no waters flow and no lightning strikes. Even for those who know the truth, it has no power to save them apart from fostering the awareness that it does not matter if one is or is not saved. In the language of the continuation of the poem, “After the spell has been broken how shall we not break / every other thing?”26 To heal the brokenness, the brokenness must be broken, but to break the brokenness invariably augments the brokenness that is to be broken and consequently precludes its being healed. To paraphrase Heidegger’s thought-poem “Austrag,” the secret of healing is in the return of difference;27 that is, the reiteration of the novel makes the individual whole by apportioning the expropriated partitioned as the repetition of the altogether otherwise.28 Wholeness, on this score, is configured by rupturing—and not by rectifying—the disintegration of the whole. The totality to which I have referred is not to be construed as a unified one constituted by aggregating the sundry segments that purportedly emerge from the diversification of an originary ground. On the contrary, there is no whole of which to speak but the whole that is continuously amalgamated through the potentially boundless differentiation of the nondifferentiated multifurcation of the propagating indifference, the abyssal nothing at the hub of the wheel of being. The endless multiplicity, in other words, is constitutive of the incomposite homogeneity of the infinite finitude of the divine manifest in the morphological heterogeneity of the finite infinitude of the cosmos.29 Insofar as brokenness is innate to, and not derivative from, the continuous coming to be of this multitudinous oneness, the brokenness cannot be broken without repudiating the very brokenness that is the unbroken nothingness

Ghosts of Judaism ­ —  41

of being. In the letter to Jacob written on April 4, 1952, Susan broached the issue in a discussion of the social power of religion to transmute the fissure of existence without abrogating it: If as you say “inwardness” needs no philosophy—nor, for that matter religion—then all genuine “spiritual” problems must find their formulation in the mundane, social sphere. If there is something to be healed, the brokenness is within the world. To ask for the eradication of brokenness as such is to wish the annihilation of the world.30

If it is the case that brokenness is inherent to the nature of worldhood, then to seek the removal of brokenness would be equivalent to abolishing the world. Correspondingly, not to see the brokenness is the greatest sign of being broken, a double concealment wherein the concealment itself is concealed.31 To heal the splintered relations within the world, therefore, it is necessary to “acknowledge the reality of these relations (instead of fleeing into the imaginary) + then drawing from the tree of life, science, art, wisdom, cultivate + transform them.”32 The existential state of being in the world may be compared to exile, but, for Susan, the traditional trope is demythologized inasmuch as the ontic gist of deportation is not dependent on a homeland from which one has been expelled. The life of exile is an exile from life wherein there is a “continuous estrangement” such that one becomes a stranger in one’s own home and never feels at home in strangeness. It is a life living as illegal in the disquiet of the in-between. It is a loss without return but also without arrival insofar as the natural identity with the self is broken and the identity with the other can never become natural. . . . A person in exile is never here nor there, being always here and there, in the presence of the no longer and of the not yet.33

Notwithstanding the disorientation in space and the bewilderment in time, the psychological principle still holds that one cannot search for what is lost but in the place of loss, and thus only in the darkness devoid of light can the light be found.34 In the continuation of the letter to Jacob, Susan turned to the theological

Ghosts of Judaism  —  4 2

and the anthropological implications of the topic of might, explicitly mentioning the Nietzschean idea of the will to power: God is with the mighty (or there would be no failure, no tragedy, nothing to seek or shun—Christianity just reverses the + and—signs in the formula—God is with the “poor”—so we must strain ourselves to become poor!) But who is mighty? + what is might? Every being has its “place”—the locus of its maximal power. The locus of might is different for different beings + the many locii [sic] are interrelated in an order; if the order is “right” the individuals are in their right place power is creative, neither wasted nor hoarded. But the “Wille zur Macht” can only end in madness unless it is concretely bound to one’s place in the social order—or to the vision of a new order. There is always the task of reorganizing one’s self internally but this is part of the ritual of life (like sleep) and one should make as little noise about it as possible. All talk about inwardness is suspicious.35

Beholden to Nietzsche’s transvaluation of moral values through their devaluation, Susan expressed reservation about the category of the inward set in opposition to the externality of ritual. Influenced by the Romantic idea that the artist’s creation of a new order mandates the destruction of the old, and especially the application of this view to Nietzsche’s Übermensch,36 Susan noted, “The powers of creation, of life are also the powers of destruction; every transformation passes through chaos. Creation whether the solar system or the jewish people at Sinai—creation is always violent.” Moreover, if we are to deem religion a “living force,” and not the “transcendental temperature of a philosophy professor’s soul,” then it must concentrate on “the forces that link humanity to the sources of creation,” and since the latter is an act of violence, it follows that religion, too, must be violent, “either the (sterile) violence of bigotry, fanaticism (e.g. inquisition jewish orthodoxy today) or the violence of cultic discipline + cultic orgy—of which traces are still preserved in both ‘higher’ (decadent) religions, Catholicism, judaism.”37 The perspective taken by Susan on the role of the chaotic in the creative process accords with Jacob’s comment to her in the letter dated January 11, 1951: “You were blessed with great gifts of beauty and spirit and most of all: you were granted that all your gifts are ‘rooted’ in the holy order and in the holy

Ghosts of Judaism ­ —  43

chaos and so you are a deeply essential creature. I wish you to grow into both dimensions, into the holy order and into the holy chaos deeper and deeper.”38 The particular gifts that Jacob imputed to Susan are cast in terms of the broader philosophical principle that spiritual profundity consists of order and chaos. Rather than viewing these as polar opposites, they are presented as two aspects of holiness. Thus, in the continuation, Jacob remarked that “the one who thinks the highest / loves what is most alive” (Wer das Höchste denkt / liebt das Lebendigste), a paraphrase of a line from the ode “Socrates and Alcibiades” by Hölderlin, “Who the deepest has thought loves what is most alive” (Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste).39 Glossing the poetic adage, Jacob added that the highest mode of thinking—or in Hölderlin’s language, the most profound thought40 —involves discerning that high and low are inseparable, that the descent is an ascent and the ascent a descent. Interpreting the dictum, attributed to Heraclitus by Hippolytus, that “the way up and the way down are one and the same” (ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή)41 in a manner that resonates with the Heideggerian distinction between identity (Identität) or identicalness (Gleichheit) and sameness (Selbigkeit), the former effacing difference and the latter preserving it,42 Jacob wrote, “On the path that leads through nothingness, the holy-open public mystery, up and down are not ‘identical’ [das ‘Gleiche’] but the same [das Selbe]; it is the path of the self.”43 The path of the self passes through nothingness—the holiness of the open mystery—wherein opposites are no longer distinguishable, not because they are dialectically sublated in the identity of their nonidentity but because they are dialetheically preserved in the similarity of their dissimilarity. In Occidental Eschatology, Jacob availed himself of the idea of the coincidence of opposites to describe the texture of the apocalyptic epoch that is simultaneously the no-longer of the past and the not-yet of the future: It is as legacy and task, as no-longer and not-yet, that the opposition between high [Oben] and lower realm [Unten], the rift [Riss] between inside and outside as the outline [Grundriss] of being, is passed on to the new generation at the end of the Western aeon. But what is needed to seal this fragmentation is the coincidentia oppositorum. For the opposites coincide before and in God, who is beyond what is higher and beneath what is lower, descending and ascending, so that he brings all

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to fulfillment. God encompasses both the inside and outside; he is the inner spirit of each thing because he is everything.44

To live a holy life, to be creative spiritually, depends on being able to perceive reality from the divine viewpoint wherein there is no opposition between opposites because opposites are congruent in the incongruence of their congruence. Susan offered a similar view of human spirituality and the capacity to dwell creatively in the face of the holy. Perspicaciously, Susan argued as well that we cannot ascertain the issue of enlightenment unless we consider its relationship to the matters of time and death, a juxtaposition exemplified phenomenally in the experience of the nothingness of the moment, impervious to repetition except as the recurrence of what cannot recur. Hence, what has already been spoken about this nothingness remains always yet to be spoken in the now that is the return of the same in which sameness is the replication of difference.45 The contemplation of nothingness so understood led Susan to criticize Simone Weil’s contention that God enters the soul that negates itself and thereby becomes a void. More appropriately, one should speak of the divine as the void, that is, the emptiness of the nucleus that is empty of emptiness, the nihil that is not the privation of an ontological plentitude, the negative relative to a positive, but rather the no-thingness, the absence of some potentially present presence that is presently absent, the absence that presents itself as nonpresent, the absence that can never be present except as the absence of any possible presence, the chiasm of being that resists the reification of nothing as something or of something as nothing.46 In light of this apophasis of the apophatic, it is not only unnecessary to speak of God—either theistically or atheistically—but it is a misuse of the word. Susan’s utilization of theological language, accordingly, must be understood atheologically as a way to name the unnameable in its unnameability.

Sacramental Service and Overcoming Theolatry Other letters give us a clearer view of Susan’s insistence that she simply was not capable of conforming in rote fashion to halakhic life without the possibility of cultivating an authentic experience of the nonpresence of the divine presence. Thus, several months after their wedding, Susan wrote to Jacob in a letter from October 10, 1950:

Ghosts of Judaism ­ —  45

My dear, I am very well; and the emptyness [sic] of your absence is even if partially filled up by great memories and great anticipations—so that in this personal dimension I live like a good jew in sheer “historicity”. But the anticipation must be based on a living object. And if the God is dead . . . But in the end the “absence” can only be a transitory stage. Absence is only like death—the almost vanishing space of the present filled with the shadows of past and future; but it is not death itself.47

Being physically separated from Jacob, Susan tried to fill the emptiness by living like a good jew in sheer historicity.48 It is plausible that the latter expression denotes devotion to the tradition. Calculating time linearly, the expectation of what will be in the future is dependent on the reminiscence of what was in the past, but the fullness of religious experience requires a living object in the present just as love cannot be sustained only by recollection and anticipation but necessitates taking hold concretely of the erotic exuberance of the moment at hand. I suspect that Susan alluded to this point as well in her comment that the eternity of the jew as I understand it is far more archaic than the eternity of history. The blood + race ideologies of neo-pagan movements as well as the Christian “charity” are but strained imitations of a deep Eros that is grounded exclusively neither in cult nor in eschatological ethics, neither wholly in the earth nor wholly in heaven; it is the divine word of the “it is good” the goodness of the creation transmitted to our human organs, echoed in the fulfillment of the role in which we are created.49

Reclaiming this more primitive sense of mythologic fervor—that is, an ardor entrenched in and nourished by a logos bound to and not in opposition to mythos—underlies Susan’s inflexible warning to Jacob, “Neither the ghetto type nor the nationalist type can be our ideals, the seat of passion, spiritual and physical must be rebuilt on new-archaic foundations.”50 In the absence of the absence that is the divine presence—the archē that defines the Jew not as some universal man but as the daemonic man in all of his cultural, ethnic, and religious specificity51—there would be no impetus to arouse the yearnings of love, but this twofold absence cannot exhibit the finality commonly

Ghosts of Judaism  —  46

associated with death; the latter is marked rather as a transitory stage, the vanishing space of the present besieged with shadows of the anticipated past commingling with shadows of the recollected future. The specific attitude toward Jewish history is reflective of Susan’s more general ambivalence about the asset of extolling historical consciousness: And the past, should one hate the past, so much; and especially now when history is so old and the threads worn thin and rotted so that the cloth crumbles away a breath. Is not history the cloth that covers our soul as fragile as the wing of some fantastic insect, and the transmission of the word most precarious? And shall we admit that a man’s life depends on a crust of bread and the clemency of the seasons and not admit that his life depends on hearing or not hearing or mis-hearing a word? And not hearing, not having been present at the event centuries ago; or hearing, being cursed or blessed with that memory. And is my personal memory less frail less accidental or more firm than the memory transmitted through strange lips? Or should a man sit like the slave Epictetus scorning all transitory and accidental things? Ah, but he has not a rock whereon to sit.52

The allure of history—conceived sequentially—has the peril of leading one to fixate on events that tenuously endure in memory of days gone by but provide no permanent refuge to triumph over the transitoriness of time. The upshot of the calamities of the two world wars may have been to shift from preoccupation with fulfilling a clearly defined destiny to becoming a people who are looking into a future where whatever stood firm shall be shaken, and the weights that steadied the earth fly up and whom the violent face of the future may have purified; because we know we shall be put to test. What the mid-nineteenth century had to fear[,] the putrescence, the dying of the soul in the comfort of an overstuffed armchair, we need not fear; the kind god sends his avenging angel and sends us fire to wash ourselves in fire.53

Contrary to a well-established opinion, Susan maintained that the abiding nature of Judaism is not to be assessed from its historical legacy but rather from the more primitive affirmation of the intrinsic merit of the present based

Ghosts of Judaism ­ —  47

on the scriptural refrain that creation is good. Interpreted anthropologically, this exhortation is allotted to the human body as opposed to the theistic interpretation that attributes benevolence to the divine volition, a rendering that runs the risk of incurring a theolatrous reaction. In the letter from October 13, 1950, Susan turned again to this topic, albeit from a slightly different vantage point: Soon it is Sabbath. And a solitary ritual is as absurd as one man playing a football match all by himself. And I understand now that you needed me for your service and ask your forgiveness for not understanding. And yet we must turn away from society as it is today and turn to the deepest, archaic layers of the human soul, which like the germ-seeds of procreation are preserved and hidden in the individual, and not in society.54

Reflecting on the awkwardness, and perhaps even the futility, of performing a ritual when one is alone, Susan again expressed the disagreement between herself and Jacob, And I understand now that you needed me for your service. I assume this means that she understood that he needed her to fulfill the instrumental role of observing the rituals as part of her dedication to their relationship.55 It is possible, however, that “service” may also be a euphemism for sexual intercourse, a suggestion strengthened by this use of the term in other contexts. Consider, for instance, Susan’s quip in the letter to Jacob from December 29, 1950: How I would come to you now in silence and service and give myself to all the awful ones, the gods of whom one cannot ask questions and give answers, with whom one makes no conditions, and if there is a covenant it is secret and it is on their terms . . . . I am a poor prisoner without you, ah let the days go fast very fast and I come to you and kiss your feet and all your holy places.56

It is clear that in relation to Jacob, as the aforecited text attests, the term “service” did at times denote the secret covenant of a sacramental sexual act carried out before the gods. I will return below to the importance of secrecy in Susan’s postulation of an eroticized spiritual praxis that is counter to religious ritual. What is vital to accentuate at this juncture is that the physical

Ghosts of Judaism  —  48

separation from Jacob afforded Susan the opportunity to make the larger point that it is necessary to turn away from society in favor of reclaiming the deepest and oldest layers of the individual soul. Susan’s consternation about ritual observance is expressed quite dramatically in the letter to Jacob written on October 28, 1950: And Thursday nights I have my usual Sabbath nightmares. Last time, just before I went to sleep I saw an H-Bomb dropped into N.Y. harbor and the ocean roared up in horrible flood of radio-active water and I could not escape. Then I dreamt the whole world was suddenly thrown in total darkness for days and weeks and I was locked in a room and could not move and could not even remember my father’s address. We are poor beings living in the valley of death.57

Sabbath nightmares—a rather macabre turn of phrase to apply to a day associated with repose and peace! The horror that Susan felt before the coming of Sabbath, I assume, is related to her angst about not being able to observe the multiple halakhic obligations associated with that day. Shockingly, that dread is expressed in Susan’s vision—purposely not marked as a dream—of the hydrogen bomb being dropped into the New York harbor, resulting in the capsizing of the ocean and the ensuing flood of toxic water from which she cannot escape. The vision no doubt imparts the discomfort of being trapped by the looming danger of the arrival of Sabbath. The terror is amplified by Susan’s dream that the world has been thrown into total darkness, and she has been confined to a room without mobility as her memory shows signs of deterioration. The concluding sentence is a starkly pessimistic and nihilistic pronouncement on the human condition that does not offer even a smidgen of hope for redemption: we are poor beings living in the valley of death. One of the most brazen articulations of the spiritual inspiration that Susan was seeking against the backdrop of the desolateness of contemporary Judaism may be culled from the letter she wrote to Jacob on November 5–6, 1950, after having seen the Yiddish films Der Golem (1920) and Der Dibuk (1937): I am full of tears thinking what we have lost—not only in the “enlightenment”–in liberal judaism but in the orthodoxy which in the end is on the same level with the liberalism, only its negative. Protestant, Puritan

Ghosts of Judaism ­ —  49

influence has really ruined us. I wrote a letter to Father today saying I agree with him that one must go in the way of “jewishness”—only we must understand our situation: we are so deeply broken that no coercive measures on the part of men, orthodox, liberal or zionist can save the jewish people. Unless God himself heals us we shall perish, and all our “piousness” is of no account unless the God helps—and we do not know if we are worthy of it. We know God only in his Absence, that is, we see that there is no “solution” without the living God. But one cannot live on this absence. The living God as a “hypothesis” is a contradiction.58

Susan accepts her father’s belief that it is imperative for Jews living in the wake of the Shoah to pursue their Jewishness, but she laments that the situation is so broken that none of the major affiliations—Reform, Orthodox, or Zionism—is adequate to save the Jewish people. From the current malady of Jewish institutions, she generalizes that salvation depends not on the piety or worthiness of the Jews but only on divine intervention, words that evoke the statement of Heidegger’s notorious Der Spiegel interview, published on May 31, 1976, but conducted on September 23, 1966, by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff: Only a god can still save us [Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten]. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness [eine Bereitschaft vorzubereiten], through thinking and poetry [Denken und Dichten], for the appearance [Erscheinung] of the god or for the absence [Abwesenheit] of the god during the decline [Untergang]; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths [verrecken], but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.59

Notably, the possibility for deliverance is tied to the preparation of readiness for keeping oneself open equally to either the arrival (Ankunft) or the nonappearance (Ausbleiben) of the god. But the experience of this absence, Heidegger goes on to say, is “not nothing” (nicht nichts), but rather “a liberation of human beings” (eine Befreiung des Menschen) from “the fallenness of beings” (die Verfallenheit an das Seiende) in the language of Being and Time.60 From Susan’s perspective, initially we know god only in absence, a view also affirmed by Weil, albeit from a theistic register,61 and thus she wrote

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in the letter to Jacob from December 23, 1950, “And it is through the encounter with the nothing that the ‘fanatical’ faiths are driven to formulate themselves. But the ‘church’ is not only a shelter but also a chastisement.”62 There are multiple ways to decode what the nature of this reprimand might be, but I would suggest that Susan was advocating that it is incumbent on the post-Holocaust generation to advance from the bleakness of apophatic negation—an inescapable aftermath of the havoc that Nazism inflicted on the institutional structures of the fanatical faiths of Judaism and Christianity—to the sanguinity of kataphatic affirmation, to experience again the holiness that shines from the mystery of the eventfulness of grace in each present moment and not to be submerged in the remembrance of the past or in the expectancy of the future.63 The spiritual quest is to retrieve the experience of facing the divine stripped of theological overdetermination. In consonance with Heidegger’s further observation in the previously mentioned interview,64 Susan would have agreed that we can only assume the willingness to prepare for the anticipation of this god through thinking and poetizing—two modes of bringing the disclosure of being into language— but we cannot realize that expectation by either of these paths. Moreover, Susan’s atheological idea of the divine corresponds to Heidegger’s use of the term “god” to denote not the personal deity of the monotheistic traditions but rather the concrete manifestation of being as the nonconceptual and nonrepresentational formation of the holy.65 As she wrote to Jacob on February 10–11, 1951, “if we permit logos to be the judge over religion—the divine relation—it must in the end eliminate the ‘religious’ ‘phantastic’ elements and set itself up as the ultimate. ‘Christ’ or ‘Israel’ are in the end irrelevant to the dialectic of trinity and unity.”66 Admittedly, the daemonic presence of the holy cannot be delineated taxonomically as theistic, pantheistic, or panentheistic, but to assume that it is merely hypothetical leads conceptually to a position that is contradictory. In the note on antinomies of theological discourse included towards the end of her dissertation, Susan expanded the point by noting that religious symbols “do not represent the holy, as signs represent objects or objective relations, they incarnate the holy or a communion with the holy. Since the holy is non-objective it exists truly and effectively—and not merely either as a ‘model’ or as a ‘copy’—in its specific incarnation.”67 The encounter with the sacred can be expressed in liturgical or mythopoeic language, cultic

Ghosts of Judaism ­ —  51

dance, song, and other ritual enactments, but to map these forms of response into a coherent theological system of objective relations is a matter of profane discourse regulated by the premises of rational presuppositions.68 Even the living God of biblical religion is “the product of profound rationalization.”69 Religious symbolism is thus marked by the paradoxical tension between the holy as holy and the holy as named occasioned by the objectification of the transobjective sphere. The symbol translates the nonobjective into the objective, the neutralization of the numinous, the domestication of the uncanny.70

Abandoning the Personal God and the Universalization of the Particular In the months after their marriage, Susan and Jacob were engaged ardently in exchanges about the nature of Jewish rituals, and these motivated her to keep trying to perform them— even though in due course the question of the violation of the law and his inability to assent to her promotion of ritual observance unencumbered by halakhic interdictions contributed to the physical and emotional distance between them.71 That Susan occasionally experienced some joy in staging ceremonial rites—especially those related to the Sabbath—is attested, for instance, in the letter to Jacob from December 29, 1950: What you have written about the ritual is deeply true and I remembered it tonight as I prepared for the Sabbath. It is a joy to make ready the candles, the bread and the grapes to come home to feel in the simplest things that it is “good”—and more one should not say. “Innumerable are our ways and our dwellings uncertain. He drinks of divinity whose lip is made of clay” (Perse)72 and is not clay a good thing and may we not in tasting the bread and the fruit and tasting the goodness remember the day of creation just in this bread and in this fruit? Our dwellings are uncertain and so before the altar of clay we are and are not “at home”, we perform and we do not perform.73

Utilizing the verse of Saint-John Perse, Susan affirmed the biblical-rabbinic understanding of the Sabbath ritual as a means to remember the day of creation by partaking of the produce of the earth, the bread and the fruit. The act of commemoration is a homecoming, a return to agrarian roots, but, as the poet points out, our dwellings remain nevertheless uncertain. With

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respect to the body—the altar of clay—we are and are not at home on this planet, and, consequently, the abstruseness generated by the enmity between the familiar and the strange characteristic of a homeland in which one is not at home extends to the ritual that we perform and do not perform. The mercurial nature of the human condition is such that it can be expressed only as an upending of the law of noncontradiction whereby a proposition is true insofar as it is not true and, conversely, the same proposition is not true insofar as it is true. By this dialetheic logic, it is valid to profess that we are home to the extent that we are homeless and that we carry out the ritual to the extent that we refrain from doing so. In the letter written the next day, Susan cast the matter in terms of religious ritual in general, masking the tragic confrontation with the dreadfulness of life: How does the gnostic man face his deeds? What is his ethos? I think of ethos now in the sense of ethos as the tragic in life, and whereof the knowledge is not the knowledge of “virtue” but of an awful thing, a curse, a burden, that only man knows. And not at all in the sense of the ten commandments; these like most of the conceptions of the “higher” religions serve just to cover the awfulness: the tables of the law give me a secure place: if only I dwell therein I shall not meet with the “awfulness”—as if we could fathom its how, where, what and why and escape from it! (But is not the “awfulness” whose ways cannot be fathomed god himself? And that is why the covenant is ultimately authentic because the awful one makes it with man to protect man from his awfulness.) The law is conditional: If I disobey then I am punished, I must die, or I am cast out from my people—all objective external categories, that cannot interest an “existential” or “gnostic” man. But in tragedy the punishment is within the soul, it is the inner breakdown of the soul, the casting out of the soul from its source.74

The ethos of the gnostic man is characterized as embarking on the tragic in life inasmuch as the revelatory knowledge proceeds from and bolsters the awareness of the curse of the burden that one must bear. In an interesting twist, Susan argued that compliance to law—typified by the Ten Commandments—shields one from confronting the awfulness of tragedy. Along these

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lines, the authenticity of the scriptural covenant is determined by the fact that it protects one from this misery.75 However, the advantage of law also signifies its disadvantage: law is conditional and therefore reward and punishment are regulated by external criteria—disobedience is met with the fate of death or being cut off from the people of Israel—whereas gnosis is unconditional and therefore the punishment relates to the internal collapse of the soul. The effectiveness of ritual is to be assessed from the criterion if it enhances our tangible being in this world and not by the erection of some otherworldly edifice. As Susan commented to Jacob in a letter from January 20, 1951: “I went home afterwards feeling very poor and sad and unclean and lit my Sabbath candle and prayed with you—that we should live and think rooted in creation in the essentials of human existence and not built Babel-towers in the vacuum.”76 A year later, in a letter written on February 11, 1952, Susan weighed in on Jacob’s position concerning the theopolitical implications of the law. She began by stating that she did not care about Paul, Jesus, the nomos, Jews, or Christians. The histories of Judaism and Christianity were of interest to her intellectually, but as living religions they were not decisive in guiding her demeanor in the present. She insisted, moreover, that she arrived at the door of “last things”—that is, at matters of ultimate magnitude—without going through “the ways of judeo-christianity.” Pushing against Jacob, she questioned if we are in the same situation as Paul with respect to the divine law and ritual observance, asking with a touch of cynicism if the problem of the law is not more serious than “how to make ‘shabes’,” that is, how to keep the Sabbath.77 Even though she wrote that she refused to discuss the matter further, she continued in the letter: If the law is a theological problem, you better stop thinking and wait till the silence of god is broken. The nomos, like the logos is in each man or it is not at all; and insofar as it is wanting in each man, it is wanting in general. . . . If man is essentially a brute and a sinner, then he needs a tyrannical law over him, but that’s hardly worth the trouble. . . . Why prefer the constructed terrorism of the state to the natural terror in which the members of the wolf-clan live. If self-preservation is the only criterion, man better give up trying to be “human”. The law is not in itself demonic: it becomes so when it is absolutized and fanati-

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cally preserved in a situation in which it is inadequate. The commandments were given out of compassion for man not as a “yoke”.78

The view of the nomos that we may extract from this passage goes against the Hobbesian idea that law is primarily an instrument of a sovereign state to curb the brute nature of humanity and to defend peace and security for all its citizens. Such a perspective absolutizes and thereby demonizes the law. Drawing from the particular case of the Jewish tradition to illumine the more general philosophical point regarding the inherent presence of the nomos in every human being, Susan argued that the commandments were given as a form of compassion and not as a yoke to terrorize people. It is not entirely clear what this means, but it is feasible to suggest that she is offering a justification to explain the need to distance herself from the system of recompence endemic to halakhic praxis as a suitable form of expressing her Jewish identity. Our modern nostalgia for the myths and the rites of sacred societies leads us “to interpret primitive ritual as a way of initiation into the eternal rhythms of nature,” but it is possible that “the willfulness of the ritual is man’s first effort to emerge out of nature to create an artificial order not of things but of meanings, an order in which actions are not simply what they are ‘naturally’ but are transformed into signification.”79 Primitive man was thus less realistic and sensible than the animal as he lived “in a world of pure signification and convention with no respect for nature.” The scriptural myth of Paradise recalls the state of “innocence” and “perfection,” the “pure presence without purpose,” a state that Susan identified as nature or animality. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from this nonteleological mode of being bespeaks the rejection of nature for the sake of paradise whereby man’s existence is polarized in the two spheres of the sacred and the profane. The loss of innocence is an indictment of nature. Thus we find at the root of all forms of human eroticism whether in sexuality, art or religion an element of disgust with nature which is not the state of paradise.80

To some extent the ritual performance of myth prompts the reconciliation of the alienated human being with the natural source of life, a retrieval of an eroticism reflective of the holiness that precedes the severance into holy

Ghosts of Judaism ­ —  55

and unholy. The creation of a sacramental order affords us the “luxury of considering everything that is relevant to us, food, shelter clothing, our own bodies as ‘symbols’. ‘The Sabbath was created for man and not man for the sabbath’: the ‘real’ being is more fundamental than the symbol.”81 Susan invoked the maxim attributed to Jesus in Mark 2:27—the Sabbath is meant to serve the needs of the human being rather than the human being serving the needs of the Sabbath82—to substantiate her view that the somatic reality of our being is more real than the symbolic valence accorded the somatic through religious ritual. As scholars have noted, the saying of Jesus parallels a tradition ascribed to the second-century sage Simeon ben Menasya that the Sabbath has been given to the people of Israel and not the people of Israel to the Sabbath.83 From the respective dicta of Jesus and this rabbinic authority, we can deduce that the grounding of the law is to be sought in the conservation of life that oversteps and thereby overruns the constraints of the law. Returning to this topic in the letter from March 24, 1952, Susan wrote: About the law, as you know, I just don’t understand; I don’t see the problem. I can only understand a divine law as a “taboo” within a sacred frame, and within a sacred frame I don’t see the one personal God who is the source of the jewish law. For Paul I haven’t the least respect; a successful charlatan.84

In even sharper language, Susan criticized Paul and the juvenile nature of the law implied in his teaching in the letter to Jacob written on April 21, 1952: The “world” is not summed up by “Roman values” + “Jewish Law”— Paul (I mean all Pauls) was too engrossed in masturbating to see the wonder of the phallus. The world of the “law” is also an infantile world. It is for the child that every object is associated with a “may + may not”. The adult comes directly in contact with things. (Or why does the jewish man remain a “baby”—helpless in practical dealing with objects?—) To understand “Jewish law” + “Roman values” by “world” is perhaps the beginning of the sickness.85

When viewed from within the larger framework of the sacred, the law appears to be nothing but a taboo, and the possibility of a transcendental source in the personal God of the monotheistic belief is nullified. Paul is castigated

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as a charlatan because his antinomianism is inescapably bound to the nomos he sought to subvert. To be consumed by denigration of the law is compared to fixation on self-gratification that prevents one from appreciating the true power of the phallus. In a letter to Jacob written on January 25, 1952, Susan objected to the generalization about Judaism made by both Simone Weil and Albert Camus, a generalization she considered untrue, unjust, and dangerous, especially in light of the fact that the people representative of the erroneously conceived doctrine still exist historically. The methodological argumentation prompting the shared generalization “proceeds by identifying ideas with peoples and finds it necessary to label concepts as ‘jewish’, ‘christian’, ‘greek’, a propagandist logic which we have learned from Paul. Such generalizations are less conductive to a consideration of the truth than to the fevered condemnation or glorification of peoples.” The attack on the Jewish bible is “based on the original paulinic opposition of the Old and the New in all its manifold variations. Camus and S. Weil would be right if they would trace the spiritual crisis to the notions of the O.T. which, it must be added, were created in the split between Judaism and Christianity.”86 Returning to this criticism in a letter to Camus written on February 2, 1952, in which she responded to his intermittent comments about Judaism in The Rebel, published in 1951,87 Susan remarked that a just appraisal of the Old Testament must at the same time be an appraisal of Pauline theology, since the portrayal of God assailed by Camus is indebted to Paul’s faulty representation of a religious universalism divorced from the ethnic-cultural instantiation of the particular.88 As Susan elaborated: A critique of the “Old Testament” if it is to be just, cannot fail to mention and to emphasize, that the “Jehova” in question, the absolute tyrant who must inspire absolute revolt, is not the god whom the jewish people invented or worshipped. It is not the son’s image of the father, but the image of the stranger, who not having grown up with him saw only his forbidding and terrible aspect. . . . The “Jehova” whom the stranger or the estranged Jew sees as a harsh god whose law is oppression, is the same god who pleads with his people to live according to justice and not to submit themselves to the oppression of monarchy.89

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The criticism of the biblical portrait of Jehova as a tyrant dictating an exacting law and encouraging political insurgency90 is misleading insofar as that same Jehova is a compassionate god who urges his people to live justly and to resist subservience to the oppression of the monarchy. Scriptural faith is based on the direct interaction with God, but when that is in decline, it is inevitable that “god must become abstract, inaccessible,” and consequently one resorts to “theological dialectics.” Jewish theology is a contradiction that has poisoned the soul of the occident, and thus it would be better “to abandon the idea of a personal god, to accept the tragedy of the destruction of one’s world of faith than to try to patch-up the situation by introducing the idea of mediation.”91 Contrary to the position espoused by Camus and Weil, Susan theorized that the root of the present evils should not be tracked simply to the God of the Old Testament, but rather it lies in the attempted universalization of a religion whose essential virtue is its primitively, particularity and concreteness; the source of the evils is the attempt of making a personal god the religion of the world. The attempt had to fail because the peoples of the world were not brought— and probably cannot be brought—to a unity of experience of a concrete, personal god.92

The perspicacity of this remark is worthy of accentuation: the destiny of the ancient Israelite people—the model for Judaism through the ages—is tied not to the eternality of some universal ideal as evolved in Christianity but to the finitude of the uniqueness of its historical facticity, a fate that is distinctive and hence not amenable to being shared. The identity of peoplehood, accordingly, is constructed on the basis of the singular and not the collective, and it is from that standpoint that we must assess the empowerment of the God of Israel and the providential role played in that destiny. Susan acknowledged that like Camus she did not share the monotheistic belief in a personal god. She insisted nonetheless that this notion—the “authentic experience of a people”—is critical to understanding biblical and postbiblical forms of Jewish religiosity, and it is “the dogmatization of this idea into a world religion, whereby those to whom the experience of a personal god is simply alien, are forced to assume any variety of distorted attitudes in relation to him.” When

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this point is understood properly, then it is possible to reject a personal god without demonization.93

Breathing the Holy: Hypernomian Excess of the Nomos Susan’s individual struggle with the traditional idea of a personal god, who commands the law, leads her to be more sympathetic to Jesus than to Paul because, in her mind, the former was an anarchist challenging the priestly conception of an external deity and emphasizing in its place the kingdom of God that is in one’s heart, whereas the latter’s argument for overcoming the law was still bound to the nomian constrictions of Pharisaic Judaism, and therefore he is judged to be an impostor, a conman pretending to offer a way beyond the law that remains beholden to the law. This appears to be the meaning of Susan’s observations in the letter from April 4, 1952: I hate Christianity; the jew by retreating into his jewishness continues the farce and plays her game. As long as there is a christian world the jew is not innocent in his religion. And the Torah on our doors is a curse upon our children like in the time of the Pharao [sic]. The “sacrifice” is not to God but to the Moloch. Only in simplicity is there blessedness but today simplicity is self-deception we must be scheming and conspiring, we must be complicated—not in theological dialectics— but in revolutionary action. I am just a stupid woman, I can’t make a revolution; but we must at least plant the seeds.94

Submission to the law—referred to as the Jew retreating into his Jewishness— perpetuates the farce of Christianity. By putting the primary emphasis on nomian observance, the Orthodox Jew continues to play the game by capitulating to the Christian classification of Judaism as a religion of legalistic exteriority lacking spiritual interiority.95 Thus, the prescriptions of the Torah are described as a curse like in the time of Pharaoh, giving rise to sacrifices being offered to Moloch rather than to the God of Israel. Trespassing the law demands not discarding the law but surpassing it through revolutionary action. Bracketing the regrettable and demonstrably inappropriate denunciation of herself as a stupid woman,96 we must ask what is meant by revolutionary action? Was Susan’s intent even remotely to induce a political act of insurrection? While this suggestion cannot be ruled out as untenable, I would

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submit that, given that she sometimes expressed her aversion to politics and to involvement with the masses,97 it may be more plausible to suggest that her objective was consonant with the hypernomian axiom of obeying the law by defying the law, overcoming the nomos by undergoing the nomos. To get beyond the path, one must perpetually follow the path, for the path includes within itself and anticipates all possible deviations from the path.98 Sovereignty in relation to the law, therefore, not only does not consist of a final undermining of the law, but it entails the arrogation of what has been undermined as itself a revival of the law. Here it is germane to recall the conversation with her father recounted by Susan in a letter to Jacob from October 14, 1950: “Father is in the kitchen eating salami with bread + butter, and when I asked him, why—since he is so ‘archaic’—he ‘seethes the kid in its mother’s milk’,99 he answered ‘because that is even more archaic’!”100 The barefaced insubordination flaunted by Sanford Feldmann’s eating milk and meat together is labeled as being even more archaic than the verse that served as the scriptural basis of the Jewish dietary laws of kashrut. The outwardly impious act illumines the principle that infringement of the commandment grounds its implementation. An articulation of the hypernomianism—in arresting language that calls to mind the paradoxical theology of the heterodoxical Sabbatian messianism101—is found in Susan’s letter to Jacob written on February 10, 1951: I understand more and more your thoughts of being-nothing, of silence and word, κόσμος, λόγος, θεός and feel that they are thought in participation—and contemplation of the breathing of the Holy. It is true, and we must know it, that we “rape” the virgin being by thinking it, by piercing it with the needle of the question. And yet without the rape there could be no union. And it is not the way of things that the womb of the virgin should remain sealed. What is harmful—and this has been the harm of “philosophy” [—] is to ask and answer the question without knowing, without performing the sacrament of rape; pretending that both question and answer are “in the order of nature”—that among his other activities—eating, copulating, building, man also “reasons”. But actually no human action can be thought to be safely contained in the order of Nature. And does not the emphasis on the

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“mere” in “mere nature” betray the old distinction of things into the holy and the profane which, while it presupposes, it “opposes” with the single “profane” reality. For however we work it, any attempt to kill the distinction in reality must reduce reality to the profane; that is, a world without this division must be profane or if it is holy we ought to be beyond “questions” as well as beyond desires, “wants” (how well the language reflects the identity of “wanting”—to be lacking, absent and “wanting”—to desire) and beyond all the “natural” categories of the pragmatist. So, philosophy commutes wearily between the two regions of the divided world (only reflections of the original division) baffled by a duality whose origin it cannot—“refuses” to conceive—treating therefore the original mystery as a problem—trying to “reconcile” the duality.102

Significantly, Susan compared Jacob’s speculation on the language of being and the silence of nothing to the contemplation of the breathing of the holy. What is intended by this locution? Although not stated explicitly, we can infer from other comments of Susan that the holy is the semiotic cipher indexical of the third term that precedes the dualism that stereotypically confounds the worldview of philosophers, the mystery of beingness beyond the binary of being and nonbeing,103 the event that exceeds the boundaries of our thinking and the parameters of our language. In Irigarayan terms, we can speak of this breath as the lacerating appropriation of the air that opens the plentitude in which all things are presumed to be joined together in an immediacy that is closed in the circle of confinement. The holy, on this account, can be depicted figuratively as the female “who remains neither intact and safe in herself nor a gaping opening whence all proceeds and from which the relations of each to each derive their mediation. Indefinitely open and closed, she unfurls this strange world where outside and inside unite in a light embrace.”104 The unspeakableness of the holy can be spoken of as the measure of the hypernomian directive, the limit of the limitless that eradicates the normative distinction between good and evil. As Susan put it in a letter to Jacob written on January 9, 1951: Be not despaired good child. One must take upon one’s self the burden

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of one’s “humanity” and yet not take it too seriously. We are—but in the deeper sense we are not actors playing before the hidden One;— who shall judge our playing. Man must trust himself to the holy—trust to it without coercing it to his reason or will, without ideas and dialogue, just trust beyond any certainty of “good” or “evil”.105

I surmise that the expression breathing of the holy signifies this act of entrusting oneself to the holy without compelling it to one’s reason or will, a mode of experiencing the sacred unrestricted by the logical protocols of philosophy in its effort to pierce the virgin nature of being with the needle of inquiry, an exploit rendered figuratively as rape. As abhorrent as this image sounds, sexual violence is necessary because the virginal womb is not meant to remain sealed, a rationale offered to justify the startling claim that there would be no union without the reprehensible mutilation of the woman. Astonishingly, Susan maintained that it is not the vile deed as such that is harmful but rather the philosophical interrogation of being without the knowledge that ensues from performing the sacrament of rape. What are we to make of this expression? How can an act so repugnant be classified as sacrosanct? The key to answering this question is in Susan’s utilization of the image of acting before God. Paradoxically, human beings both are and are not actors playing this role. It is likely that Susan’s own interest in theater informed her deployment of the thespian image, but it is also the case that it is widely attested in philosophical literature.106 Still, the critical question is how are we to comprehend this assertion? How can a person concurrently act and not act? In some measure, all acting entails that the actor acts without the pretense of acting, but it seems that Susan was expressing something beyond this truism. The meaning of her remark can be garnered from her letter to Jacob written on April 12, 1952, in which she commented on the statement of Jacob in a letter to her from April 6: “But we will turn to aesthetics. ‘Play’ cannot avoid the last holy ‘seriousness.’ It is all just preparation for the sacred that grows in the shadows.”107 It is safe to assume that Susan concurred with Jacob’s provocative observation that, based on the assumption that play is the formative element of human behavior, we can infer that everything is merely preparation for the sacred that grows in the shadows. Curiously, Jacob’s demarcation of aesthetic play as the last holy seriousness (letzten heiligen

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Ernst) reminded Susan of Georges Bataille’s critique of the leitmotif of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, published in 1938,108 that play is the formative and defining element of human culture, “Jouons-nous ou sommes nous sérieux,” “Are we playing or are we serious?”109 Reframing the argument in Jacob’s language, Susan proffered that play takes place at the zero point of the “last sacred seriousness,” but when the latter is “repelled by its own sterility” and tries to be “active” in the world, the outcome is “fanaticism, militant church, militant atheism.” Susan added that the expression letzten heiligen Ernst is evocative of the tone of Heidegger’s phrase “we will do” (wollen wir uns) in the infamous rectoral address delivered in 1933.110 But what does it mean that the last sacred seriousness is a form of playfulness? As Susan explained: The point is that there is no one point on which man can fix his eyes + then march blind to everything else. The light is scattered, the eye must be discursive, it must survey, gather up. . . . The seriousness of a child, a man at work, an artist, an athlete, a man sunk in meditation, the seriousness of all that which a man does with love, without pretensions, without anything further in view (the painter for this painting)—is of a different sort than the holy seriousness which subjects everything to a fixed point which is “the” meaning and value of everything.111

Unlike the holy seriousness that is totalizing in determining the meaning of everything, the sacred seriousness of childlike play—manifest in numerous domains including work, art, athletics, and meditation—is diffuse and multivocal and may even include ignoble behavior such as rape. In A Lament for Julia, Susan expressed this point in the voice of the narrator describing the liaison with Julia, referred to as her protégé (Schützling),112 although doppelgänger seems to be the more fitting term: “The forbiddenness of our relationship only strengthened the scent of sacredness. I had to remain secret, not out of shame, but out of caution. As with many a rare jewel, too daring to display to the desirous eyes of the world, I preferred concealment.”113 The furtiveness of the erotic relationship is explained by the principle that inviolability is commensurate to illegitimacy. Even more pertinent is a second passage from that novella wherein the narrator speaks of the dogma that Julia would marry as a virgin bride and adds that “more than one heresy” was

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aroused “by the very sanctity that surrounded her virginity.” Consequently, Julia’s defloration (Entjungferung) would not come about through her husband. The breaking of the seal (das Brechen jenes Siegels) called for a brutal and unlawful act of violence on the part of someone who would exhibit no remorse or contrition for carrying out such a repulsive infringement. The reader is told, moreover, that Julia seemed to like the idea of being raped, an assertion supported by the recounting of her being sexually molested by a band of gypsies.114 To some extent, the nexus of the sexual, sacred, and secretive in the view tendered by Susan resembles Bataille’s idea of the erotic encroaching upon the realm of the excessive, even to the point of death, the “negation that carries us to the farthest bounds of possibility,”115 the libidinal investment that bridges the antagonism between the hallowed and the transgressive, the holy and the profane, the self-diminution of prohibition and the self-aggrandizement of dissipation. The taboo is thus fully discovered by “a furtive and at first partial exploration of the forbidden territory. . . . We are admitted to the knowledge of a pleasure in which the notion of pleasure is mingled with mystery, suggestive of the taboo that fashions the pleasure at the same time as it condemns it.”116 The freedom of the taboo is experienced paradoxically in the hegemony of the proscription: The frequency—and the regularity—of transgressions do not affect the intangible stability of the prohibition since they are its expected complement—just as the diastolic movement completes a systolic one, or just as explosion follows upon compression. The compression is not subservient to the explosion, far from it; it gives it increased force. . . . Often the transgression of a taboo is no less subject to rules than the taboo itself. 117

A similar pattern regarding the interweaving of the interruption of the violence of death and the eruption of the violence of sensual pleasure118—concentrated fetishistically in the castrated female body119—seems to be implied in Susan’s assertion that there is no union without rape; the degradation of the latter makes possible the veneration of the former. Intriguingly, we can shed light on what Susan was trying to communicate by turning to the Jewish mystical tradition, and specifically, by juxtaposing

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her words to the assertion of the renowned eighteenth-century Italian kabbalist Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto that sexual assault against Jewish women can serve as a catalyst to incite the messianic rectification. In the treatise Qin’at ha-Shem Ṣeva’ot (Zeal of the Lord of Hosts), Luzzatto discussed this potentially subversive conception as it relates to the lascivious escapades of Esther with Ahasuerus, on the one hand, and of Yael and Sisera, on the other hand. It lies beyond the concerns of this chapter to delve into the assorted rabbinic explanations of the reputed impropriety of these two women, which served as the basis for Luzzatto’s kabbalistic amplification. Suffice it to say that Esther was not to be blamed for having intercourse with a gentile because she was considered the passive object of Ahasuerus’s advances, an idea conveyed by the metaphorical application to her of the image of the naturally tilled soil (qarqa olam),120 whereas the scriptural account of Yael’s seduction of Sisera is translated into the latter’s sevenfold rape of the former derived eisegetically from Judges 5:27.121 The relevant passage in Luzzatto follows an excursus on the motif of the three ways in which the soul—in emulation of the divine presence (Shekhinah)—is garbed in the demonic shells (qelippot), which concludes with the talmudic dictum transmitted in the name of Naḥman ben Isaac, “Greater is transgression for its own sake than a precept that is not for its own sake” (gedolah aveirah lishmah mi-miṣwah shelo lishmah). The statement is challenged by R. Judah on the basis of the teaching of Rav that a person should always be occupied with the Torah and the commandments even for an ulterior motive because in the end this will lead to studying the Torah and fulfilling the commandments for their own sake. The theoretical challenge occasions a textual emendation to the original teaching so that it reads “Great is transgression for its own sake as a precept that is not for its own sake” (gedolah aveirah lishmah ke-miṣwah she-lo lishmah). The modification of the anonymous redactor is supported by the verse “Most blessed of women be Yael, wife of Ḥever the Kenite, most blessed of women in tents” (Judges 5:24), the women in tents interpreted as a reference to Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.122 With this in mind, we can turn to Luzzatto’s explication: Know that this secret is a temporary emergency [hora’at sha‘ah]. And I will explain this matter to you well. For there is a distinction between

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the act of Esther and the act of Yael, for the act of Esther was by means of coercion [ones] and the act of Yael was a transgression for its own sake [aveirah lishmah]. And, in truth, these matters are the mysteries of the king, concerning which whose heart will be involved in revealing them? Were it not for the fact that we must remove this obstacle from the midst of our nation for it is great, my heart would not have accommodated me to emit from my mouth the basic words [reish millin] about this matter, and all the more so to expand my language as I am doing now.123

It is reasonable to speculate that the pressing emergency propelling Luzzatto to elaborate on this sensitive matter was the misuse of the theme of engaging in inadmissible sexual acts in Sabbatian thought.124 Thus, as a preface to his clarification of the sin of Yael, Luzzatto writes that this is a secret too sublime to deliberate or to discuss, and had the hour not made it necessary, he would have avoided it like a burning fire. However, he will contemplate it in order to comprehend it clearly so that he will not err like the fools who stray from God, as it says “For the paths of the Lord are straight; the righteous can walk on them, while sinners stumble on them” (Hosea 14:10).125 Notwithstanding this attempt to separate his view from that of the fools who have abandoned the way of righteousness, one must ask if Luzzatto’s own interpretation of errant sensual actions done for the sake of heaven is substantially different from the view promulgated by the Sabbatians.126 To be sure, one essential difference, as Luzzatto himself emphasized, is that aveirah lishmah has the status of hora’at sha‘ah, that is, a temporary change, and not a permanent annulment of the law, which would be equivalent to altering the order of creation and rebelling against the Torah.127 For Luzzatto, the theme of the divine presence or the souls being arrayed in the shells of the demonic realm is an appropriation of the aforesaid talmudic motif of the iniquitous act accomplished for the sake of God and the related idea of the pious ritual that is fulfilled by means of transgression (miṣwah ha-ba’ah ba-aveirah).128 In conformity with the exploitation of these ideas by the Sabbatians, Luzzatto maintained that the violence perpetrated against women is converted from passive docility to active agency. To be more precise, Luzzatto distinguished the situation of Esther from that

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of Yael. The mystical significance of the former’s act is explained in terms of the motif of the Shekhinah being given over to the malevolent other side (siṭra aḥara). Ahasuerus thought he could dominate Esther sexually, but he actually cohabited with the demoness (sheidah) that Mordecai conjured from the squalor (zohamah) of Esther. Just as the Shekhinah escaped the clutches of the forces of impurity, so Esther ran away from Ahasuerus, cleansed herself through ablution, and sat in the bosom of Mordecai, a figurative allusion to the cohabitation that occurs above when the feminine presence has absconded from the venom of the shells. By contrast, Yael was the wife of Ḥever the Kenite, and since he was from the secret of Cain, who issued from the power of the pollution of the serpent, she was forced to have intercourse with Sisera rather than being replaced by a demoness as in the case of Esther. Through this conjugal union, the serpentine power impregnated Yael with all the sacred sparks from the secret of knowledge (da‘at) that were within it, and as a result the other side received its portion and thus it did not take hold of the side of holiness, and the supernal unity above was aroused.129 What is indispensable for our analysis is that Luzzatto adopted a subversive logic that transposes the lecherous aggression against women into a positive theurgic deed that assists in bringing about the redemption.130 The obsequiousness of the victim is rehabilitated as a willful act of refusal. From the deviant behavior of women, therefore, we learn the messianic truth that the blemish (pegam) itself is part of the repair (tiqqun). Luzzatto elaborated this point in his discussion of the nature of the sin of Yael, the biblical paradigm for the emancipating potential of the woman’s recalcitrance: Know that the beginning of the corruption was with the intercourse of the serpent and Eve, for he cast the pollution into her.131 And on account of this she descended afterwards into the shells. . . . Thus, it is not possible to rectify this blemish except in the matter as it is written “and the women were violated” (Zechariah 14:2). And the matter is that ultimately this issue must be below, so that the sinner will bear his iniquity, and the blemish departs from its root, for above the serpent is in pursuit constantly on account of this, and when he is given a portion below in Israel who transgress, then the indictment above is resolved. How great is the suffering for the holy women, the women of Israel,

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that they have to endure this evil matter. And see that the beginning of the corruption is “They have ravished women in Zion” (Lamentations 5:12), and thus the termination of the purification will be “and the women were violated.” But know that even this suffering is not to be found except at the end of everything when the rectification is about to be completed, for then it says “she frolics for the final day” (Proverbs 31:25), for already the power is great, and this action does not create a blemish above, on the contrary, it rectifies. . . . And the secret of all this matter is that it is necessary to give to the other side the portion that is appropriate to it. However, for there to be a rectification, this must be done below and not above.132

In my opinion, the overly positive evaluation of the feminine elicited from this theme in Luzzatto is unwarranted, since the empowerment of women in withstanding sexual maltreatment is still to be gauged from within a phallomorphic axiology.133 The consensuality that Luzzatto ascribed to the female is in accord with a familiar androcentric trope that equates femininity with sacrificial meekness such that the passivity of women is viewed as the most efficient medium for divine agency.134 We could even introduce here an element of masochism on the part of the female who assumes an abject position that demands surrendering to and in the process fortifying the dominant masculine powers of figuration.135 The blemish began when the serpent inseminated Eve, and the final rectification is to be attained when certain women below engage in untoward sexual relations. The suffering that women endure through being besmirched is explained kabbalistically as giving the demonic its due so that the residue of good in the impure beings will be released and restored to the holy, which in turn arouses the supernal unity.136 That the rectification through illegitimate sexual conduct can be undertaken by women and not men is, in the proverbial sense, a left-handed compliment. The seductive prowess of women endows them with the capacity to appease the force of the other side; Jewish men must be guarded against this dishonorable undertaking because of their higher spiritual status that precludes them from accomplishing any repair by descending into the demonic and participating in forbidden forms of erotic intimacy. Let us heed the summation offered by Luzzatto:

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All that we have said is not possible except in women, for they are naturally tilled soil, and in them is found this matter that we have mentioned, but not with men, for illicit sexual relations [arayot] is not a rectification for them at all. For the righteous man has to be vigilant with respect to the foreskin, and he must turn astray and not become defiled.137

To refer to women as tilled soil is flagrantly misogynistic even if in this context it is used to mark the vitality of the feminine and not her manipulability; what appears to be an act of savagery enacted against Jewish women is sanctioned as the stimulus that expediates the redemption. In the final analysis, therefore, the motif of sexual aggression sustains rather than overturns the hegemonic patriarchy. I propose that something akin to the kabbalistic dynamic of subversion outlined by Luzzatto is conspicuous in Susan’s reference to the sacrament of rape. It goes without saying that the messianic ramifications of the subversive logic are not relevant to Susan, but her view is in accord with the hypernomian assumption that waywardness is the supreme expression of reverence.138 The clue to understand her bold and patently bizarre language lies in her comment that one pretends that both question and answer are in the order of nature when, in fact, no human action can be thought to be contained therein.139 To think of “mere nature” is to reify the cleft between the holy and the profane. In the agony of trying to mediate between eros and logos, philosophy is incapable of apprehending the original mystery whence the ostensibly irreconcilable division ensues. In Heideggerian terms apposite to her mode of thinking, Susan argued that philosophy begins with error and fallenness, the “forgetting of the truth of being,” and thus it participates “in the rape of ἀλήθεια.” The participation in the “holy origin” of this primal rape does not come under history, art, philosophy, or any teleological category. Furthermore, to identify the holy as nothing and the profane as being is to surrender to the definiteness of the bifurcation into positive and negative, sensible and intelligible, phenomenal and noumenal. However, these metaphysical dichotomies are derivative from the primordial partition into holy and profane.140 One can move beyond this dyad only if one recognizes, in the words of Jacob to which Susan referred, that “in the deepest actions

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the greatest evil and the greatest good are mixed.”141 Insofar as every deed is rooted in original sin, even the most ethical action rests on a forbidden and wrong action, and the seemingly sacrilegious act is in truth sacramental.142 In Divorcing, Susan encapsulated the hypernomian surmounting of the discord between permissible and forbidden in the words of Ezra reported by Elaine Singer, the babysitter deflowered by him, “to the clean all things are clean,”143 and hence an act that appears to be impure is rendered pure by the standard of purity that is beyond the binary of pure and impure. It is worth mentioning a passage from Downgoing, the beginning of Susan’s literary autobiographical project initiated in 1956,144 in which she described the relationship of the protagonists Miriam Meyer and Joseph Vilna: Night after night he invited her in that strange sacrament till she was gathered up in his words, became the exiled presence, assumed all the incarnations of the people of God in its wanderings and estrangements, was the Bride, was the Virgin in the Dust, was Gomer the whore, sold to the prophet for a lesson, ransomed of a token of redemption. And while he spoke she began to discern the shape of the fate she had dimly sought and evaded like one tossing and turning in sleep in the man standing before her.145

The nocturnal sacrament described in this passage is palpably erotic in nature, but it also involved some linguistic communication, perhaps of a liturgical nature. Thus, Miriam is described as being gathered up in Joseph’s words. Utilizing the rabbinic-kabbalistic symbol of shekhinta ba-galuta,146 Susan depicted the metamorphosis of Miriam into the exiled presence, that is, the Shekhinah, who suffers along with the people of Israel by accompanying them in their banishment from the land. The kabbalistic influence is detectable in the additional images of the bride and the virgin in the dust to which is combined the scriptural reference to Gomer, the woman of harlotry that Hosea is commanded to take as a wife to symbolize the estranged relationship of God to the people of Israel. The line between the saintly and the sinful is blurred to the point that through the sacrament Miriam herself becomes a woman of promiscuity. As Susan put it in a letter to Jacob from September 26, 1950, provoked by reading “Anabasis” by Saint-John Perse,

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And this meeting between the people full of fresh arrogance and the earth full of a fresh and sensuous shyness is like the meeting of man and woman, before all reflection, before any distinction between “rape” and “holy marriage”, and therefore like the meeting of man and woman at the point when they no longer belong to themselves, utterly clear and of concrete and practical character, utterly beyond good and bad and beyond love in any romantic sense.147

The love of which she spoke invalidates the moral antinomy of good and evil and is thus not subject to the commonly held incongruity between rape and holy marriage. To grasp the surmounting of this discordancy one must be attuned to the sacrament of rape. Not through ascetic renunciation but through the enactment of the mystery of sexual union in the sepulcher of the verboten does one venture beyond the polarity of reverent and irreverent. The consummation of the consecrated is activated through the debasement of the other. The motivation of Susan’s position is brought to light in Jacob’s response to her letter written on February 21, 1951: The question is a possibility of the “ fanum” of rape. The mystery of Catholic-roman Church of the “immaculate conception” of the virgin points to deep tragedy in “conception”. Conception is not immaculate and the mystery of catholic-roman belief is a good guide to the labyrinth. Union is not possible except (“nulla salus extra ecclesiam” no “union” is possible outside the “ecclesia” the womb) only by “piercing”. It is a greater and far deeper mystery than a “miracle”. And the way of union is harder than an “asceticism”—and I cannot give the title of “holy” to any ascetic if the ascetic form of life is the end . . . And the Church knew it too—for also “marriage” is a sacrament. But the “also” of the sacrament of the Church concerning marriage is too obvious—a heritage of Paul’s not balanced “eschatological” faith, almost “chiliastic” faith and belief (and chiliasm darkens always the “eternal” structures of being and nothing). If you “read” about sacraments in the gnostic . . . or indian cults you can glimpse into more fundamental structures (and all “literatures” about it is yet poisoned by moral-christian or moral–bourgeois measures and yet a fundamental sight into the structure of ‘conception’ shines through . . . . The mystery of the Sohar is wonderful:

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the priest “must” be married, otherwise he is not allowed to ‘preform’ [sic] the sacrament between the “King” and the “Heavenly Queen” in the ἱερός γάμος question: I think that a “ fette yiddene at home” is of no relevance

to the priestly duties. Is it not more probable than to preform [sic] the ἱερός γάμος of the King and Heavenly Queen the priest must “unite” with priestess. The relation seems to me more of cor-relation than a private marriage certificate of the priest (and in this sense the catholic priest has more of priesthood than the protestant clergyman with his “yiddene”).148 To Susan’s halting image of the sacrament of rape, Jacob added the image of the sanctuary of rape. Emphasizing the spatial component led him to contrast the ascetic dimensions of Catholicism—emblematized by the doctrine of the immaculate conception, which in Jacob’s mind is anything but immaculate—and the kabbalistic eroticism reflected in the zoharic symbol of the hieros gamos of the King and the Heavenly Queen, the masculine Tif ’eret and the feminine Shekhinah. Whereas the Catholic priest had to be celibate to offer the sacraments in the inviolate place, according to the kabbalah, the priest below had to be married so that he would be capable of uniting the supernal couple. That Jacob’s intent was to apply the kabbalistic symbolism to the matrimonial bond with Susan is evident from the concluding remark of his letter, “My most beloved Susan who is my mysterious Lady I pray you should find in me anew your ways of union.”149

Lighting the Serpent and the Gnostification of Sabbath The hypernomian ideal undergirds Susan’s peculiar use of the symbol of the serpent to denote the Sabbath candles. In the letter to Jacob from December 22, 1950, Susan utilized the customary image in what appears to be a fairly nondescript manner: “I lit tonight not only the serpent but two long candles in the high candlesticks for the God of Israel and the people of God and prayed that we may know him and dwell in him as a people.”150 However, careful scrutiny of the letters in which this image of the serpent appears in conjunction with the Sabbath candles indicates that it more frequently conveys an implicit subversiveness in fulfilling the traditional rite. From that point of view, it is justifiable to use the term “hypernomianism”

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as it implies that destabilization of the law is only possible through fortification of the law and that, inversely, fortification of the law is only possible through destabilization of the law. Thus, in the letter from September 29, 1950, Susan wrote, “I lit the serpent’s fire late. I waited till all was silent within me.”151 Obviously, from a strictly halakhic perspective, kindling the candles late on Friday night is in defiance of the law, since once the Sabbath has begun at sunset on Friday evening, it is forbidden to light a fire. In the very act of commemorating the Sabbath, therefore, Susan was demeaning the Sabbath. One week later, in the letter from October 6, 1950, Susan wrote to Jacob, “My dear, the night of the Sabbath has entered and I have lit the candle of the serpent and asked for the blessing of the bread and of the fruit as I have no wine, and sat on the ground and prayed, and with writing to you end my prayer.”152 In this case, the candles seem to have been kindled at the proper time, but the Sabbath observance is breached by Susan’s writing to Jacob after the candles were lit. Noticeably, she spoke of this unlawful action as the concluding part of her worship, a gesture that fits perfectly into the nomenclature of the hypernomian.153 In the continuation of the letter, Susan implored that all who have toiled should for an instant meet at the common center of the mystery: and contemplate the mystery of their lives and their toil in the fire and the serpent. The serpent is the ΑΩ —the seducer and enchanter that leads away from the source only to lead back to the source. And the fire, sign of the Holy itself and our most primordial coming to terms with the Holy: the fire that if we touch with naked fingers—we burn and perish; but if we handle it cautiously, indirectly, with many defences, some cunning and distance, gives us its power of warmth, light, motion for the fulfilment of our human needs—and thus makes it possible for us [to] live with the holy.154

With poetic aplomb, Susan provided more information about the connection between the serpent and the Sabbath candles. The flame of the latter is identified as the sign of the holy, which is manifest in the dual nature of fire as a source of potential harm and as a source of potential warmth and light. The esoteric meaning of the consecration of fire is the obverse of the desecration of lighting and extinguishing a fire for pedestrian needs.155 And yet, it is

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one phenomenon that yields the schism of sacred and secular, which, in turn, corresponds to the dual comportment of the serpent marked semiotically as alpha and omega.156 One should not rule out the possibility that Susan has transferred the well-known association of Christ with these two Greek letters, signifying the beginning and the end, to the serpent, the symbol of gnosis, the “primeval ocean of nothingness,”157 which can be ascertained through fulfilling the halakhic rite in a manner that defies the restrictions of that rite. The purpose of the ritual is to envisage the mystery, an intent that can be achieved even—or perhaps especially—when the externals of the ritual cannot be executed in accordance with the stipulations of the law. The spiritual meaning of Susan’s idiosyncratic practice is disclosed in her comment in a letter to Jacob from February 16–17, 1951: “Tonight I have no serpent, no candle no ritual only the nakedness before the mystery.”158 At best, the figurative serpent and the material candle are both means to disrobe in front of the mystery. To attain the nudity proportionate to the nakedness of the holy, it was more effective to be unencumbered by these vestments of dissimilitude. A striking illustration of Susan’s gnostification of the Sabbath is found in the letter to Jacob from November 10, 1950: Oh, the strange Sabbaths I have: but does not the ridiculous difficulty in getting together one’s “ritual objects” have a deeply legitimate meaning—? Instead of the day being built around the ritual—the ritual has to be somehow fitted, squeezed into the day, wherever one “chances” to be, Dartmouth St., Central Park or Ambassador Hotel. I had no candle stick, so I planted the candle in the soil of a potted plant in the room; I searched for a sign of the serpent, there was none, so I drew one and afterwards burned it. The meaning of the burning of the “idol” is twofold: insofar as it is an idol and not the mystic serpent itself its burning is a caution against idolatry; insofar as the god is present in the symbol the burning is a sacramental act wherein the god must consume itself, die in every material manifestation as in this repeated dying and rebirth is its life.159

The subservient nature of the nomian is underscored by Susan’s comment that the ritual must accommodate the events of her day rather than the events of the day being shaped by the requirements of the ritual. Beyond

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the instrumentality imposed on the nature of the ritual, Susan expressed an even more radical notion when she noted that she drew the sign of the serpent and burned it. There is a twofold significance to the act of burning. On the one hand, inasmuch as the drawing depicts an idol of the mystic serpent and it is not the serpent itself, the burning thereof is emblematic of the iconoclastic forbearance not to succumb to the allure of theolatry. On the other hand, inasmuch as the god is present in the symbol, the burning assumes sacramental value whereby the god consumes itself. The burning of the image of the serpent, which alludes symbolically to the Sabbath candles, illustrates the principle that the divine must die in every material manifestation, and thus even the life of god is calculated by the metrics of the cycle of death and rebirth. Susan’s eccentric understanding of rabbinic ritual can be clarified from the following exposition of a comment regarding the representation of the Hindu deity Śiva in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) in the letter to Jacob written on October 19, 1950: A deep passage in the Campbell book which throws the command against idolatry very much in question—based on the study of Indian “idols”: the idol is a highly concentrated hieroglyphic or holy picture, where every “hair” of the divine body has its symbolic meaning. . . . All is presence + present. If the Torah were consequential it would condemn the dependence on the divine name (word magic) as well as the dependence on the divine picture (picture magic)—but it seems that the antithesis was not between a “magical” and a “spiritual” relation to God but rather between two different symbolic expression[s]—but the decision of the Name rather than the physical presence may have been a step to “spiritualization” which is also a step toward dividing male and female, worship of the abstract father turn out of the trinity of eternal present, revulsion at the mother, nature and all its powers and mysteries.160

To appreciate the religious essence of idolatry, as it were, one must be mindful of the fact that whereas the idol is a hieroglyph, a pictorial representation of the unrepresentable holiness, the phenomenological underpinning of the scriptural aniconism and the rejection of idolatry consists of the showing of the nonshowing, the unmediated advent of the divine, in Susan’s words, “All

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is presence + present.” The Torah falls short of its own iconoclasm inasmuch as it does not rebuke the power of either the divine name or the divine picture. The antithesis that we may elicit from Hebrew scripture, therefore, is not between the magical and the spiritual relationship to God but rather between two alternate systems of symbolic mediation. By allocating potency to the name as a linguistic or a graphic portrayal of the nonportrayable— thereby according value to both word magic and picture magic—there is a spiritualization of the concrete religiosity of ancient Israel, which was dependent on the immediacy of the indwelling of the divine glory. This process resulted in the gender division of male and female, the adulation of the abstract father and the revulsion of the mother, the former personified in the threefold compresence of the eternal present and the latter in the diversified powers and mysteries of nature. For Susan, the sacrament and the sacrilege are two sides of the selfsame coin. Only by scaling the boundaries of the law is one circumscribed within those boundaries. As she wrote in a letter from November 17, 1950, “It is 1:30 and I shall light the serpent. I could not do it earlier—I am such a ‘homeless’ one my ‘home’ begins after midnight when the day of business comes to an end, and the dragon sleeps.”161 Christina Pareigis detects in this passage a mixture of Gnosticism and Jewish ritualism. The serpent serves as a symbol for the “deep synthesis of knowledge and eros,” which was part of “the execution of an esoteric private cult between the partners” (Im Vollzug eines esoterischen Privatkultes zwischen den Eheleuten). Presumably, the letter “gives testimony to this cult, in which gnostic symbols, symbols of Judaism and the form of the ritual combine to create a possible place for the encounter of exiles.”162 From Susan’s perspective, there is indubitably something of a cultish nature in performing the rituals to tighten the bond between herself and Jacob, to whom she refers as her dwelling.163 Adamantly rejecting the bourgeois manner of settling down by collecting material objects, Susan spoke rather of creating a settlement based on her relationship to Jacob.164 As she wrote to him in a letter dated February 16–17, 1951: “Beloved child, without you everything has the empty, empty emptyness of ‘fullness’ and I miss the fullness of the nothing. And my heart aches for you and for me to come home to you, to myself.”165 Jacob, too, gave voice to a similar sentiment, assuaging Susan’s insecurity

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by assuring her that his love for her included the desire to find an appropriate habitation in this world: It was a good hour, a blessed hour in the stars of destiny that brought you into being. I feel it daily that in your nearness and presence I am “at home” and it is the great miracle that man who is “heimatlos” can say that Heimat is so near “in him”. . . . If I love the good and the holy I love it through you so I love you—if I am small, petty closed, egotistic—if I am dwelling outside the holy than I am also separated from you. So I pray I may be united with you and through you in the dwelling of a holy life in the sacrament of love. It was and is and will be the greatest present I received in life that I was worthy to be yours and I pray I will be worthy to be your Jacob AΩ166

The home that the couple inhabited as a consequence of their dwelling in the holy life of the sacrament of love was predicated on accepting the irrevocable homelessness of being in the world, the spatial dislocation commensurate to the temporal evanescence of existence.167 This is the intent of Susan’s recommendation to Jacob from the letter of September 21, 1950: But we must walk like priests through the world, homeless in

the absence of temples and altars, through the daily toil, rush and disorder, always searching among the many crooked, distorting lines for the true and holy countenance of the day and season. How can we hope, how shall we dare to build anything graceful, noble and rooted in the essential power of things, unless we first strengthen what is graceful and noble in our own powers. What does it help us to cover ourselves with what is no longer our own—? The heavens shall hardly help anyone who is afraid of being naked for a while.168 Like the priests ousted from their temples and altars, Susan suggested that she and Jacob must walk as drifters in the world not able to take refuge in the antediluvian laws. What advantage would it be to cover themselves with garments that they can no longer claim as their own? Courage calls for the willingness to discard irrelevant and outdated attire even if this disposal necessitates that one wander the world nakedly. The task of reconstruction nevertheless involves expecting the past and

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recollecting the future as a mode of celebrating the true and holy countenance of time in the present. The Sabbath, in particular, is a ritualistic location wherein time can be experienced in the abundance of its depletion. As Susan wrote in the letter to Jacob from November 24, 1950: I wait for the dragon to retire and then I make Sabbath . . . I lit the serpent and prayed for the blessing of the bread and the fruit and the purification of the soul from small lusts and fears. And that we should not fall short of our fate, that we should be ever ready to abandon all transitory shelters, possessions and defences—to the last self-abandon, in order to possess life and dwell in life.169

Susan transposed the Sabbath ritual into a gnostic rite that purifies the soul of the base desires of the dragon so that one may accept the essential rootlessness of one’s existential situatedness, to realize the nonteleological telos of possessing the self that emerges through abandoning the self. The service of kindling the serpent, therefore, is to ensure that Susan and Jacob “should not pass through Death alone” but rather that “they who belong to God walk together in the darkest passage.”170 Revealingly, love is not expressed as the couple basking together in the light but as journeying together through darkness.

Bending the Bow: Ritual Service and the Sexualization of the Spiritual Susan’s interest in and involvement with cultic-gnostic performativity is illumined by several letters where cryptic references are made to her friend J.C.171 In a letter from October 9, 1950, Susan reported the following to Jacob: J.C. whatever his faults may be “knows” he is deeply cultic, he is one of the initiates and we had the beginning of a gnostic evening. And if the exchange of symbols could not go to very end [sic]—it was only because the presence of two people were needed: you and Andrée. And it is clear to us that all must be present at the last moment of the sacrament. We are sober and clear as day and I think I have found two people who understand our symbols and who are ready for the mysteries. And tonight having before my eyes, Gerda, Andrée, J.C.—even Nanda when she is naked and you most beloved, I experienced very deeply the mys-

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tery of race the mystery of my jewish blood at the very point of my sex where the blood is engendered; all is said in AΩ it is the secret of man + woman and of the race; and at this point I understand that a jew is clean to me as no man of another race.172

The language in this passage is blatantly enigmatic. What is the meaning of the reference to a gnostic evening? And what are the symbols the exchange of which could not go to the very end? Apparently, to complete the sacrament, four people were necessary, a fourfold that consisted of J.C., Andrée, Jacob, and Susan. The amatory nature of the ritual is suggested by Susan’s recounting that by conjuring in her mind’s eye the following entourage— Gerda Seligson, Andrée Klotz, J.C., Nanda (that is, Ruth Nanda Anshen, who is imagined to be naked), and Jacob—she was able to experience the mystery of race and the mystery of her Jewish blood, linked to her genitals. Again we are introduced to the symbol of the alpha and the omega, but in this context, it is connected to “the secret of man + woman,” that is, the myth of the androgyne,173 which sheds light on the connotation that Susan assigned to the concept of race. In the end, Susan is brought to the moment of insight whence she can understand why the Jewish man is cleaner to her than a man of any other ethnicity. However we are to explain the gnostic exchange of symbols, what is clear is that it incited her to accept that a Jewish woman ideally can have intimate relations only with a Jewish man, an essential aspect of the sexual mores of the halakhah. The likelihood that the exchange of symbols involved the hypernomian venturing beyond the law is supported by Susan’s description of J.C. as a “good child,” who “understands the meaning of consecration and desecration.”174 In my opinion, this statement signals that consecration and desecration are not polar opposites but rather opposites that are the same in consequence of their opposition. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that the realization of this truth relates more specifically to the erotic affection shared by J.C. and Susan. A more tantalizing sexual undertone may be discerned in Susan’s letter to Jacob written on October 11, 1950: J.C. also gave me a corsage of roses, white and red, for chastity and for passion. And I thank you my good Pan that you made out of me a being of fire so that I am always treated as a great lady. And with your

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consent Jacob I would like to do service whenever there is a clean place and the moment is ripe; the cult is waiting for us and not we are supposed to wait for the cult.175

To do service whenever there is a clean place and the moment is ripe intimates the sensual intimacy of the cult.176 In a letter from November 1, 1950, Susan referred to J.C. as her “cultic” friend,177 and one must wonder if this, too, had a libidinous implication.178 Support for the likelihood of this interpretation may be elicited from the letter written by Susan two days later: The night before instead of going to the Israeli club with J.C. we stayed in his room and I unclothed him and veiled both of us and I did service for him and afterward he for me (more one may not dare before there is an actual cultic community) and I told him that we were acting in deep and terrible danger, walking on a holy, a forbidden ground, before the “rules” have been established before the man-aiding gods have given us defenses and protections against the holy that is non- and in-human. That we must pray that our act be accepted as service—and even pray for forgiveness, for no action of man in forbidden regions is perfectly pure and without sin.179

This passage—we stayed in his room and I unclothed him and veiled both of us and I did service for him and afterward he for me—divulges the undeniable carnal nature of Susan’s interaction with J.C.180 We can presume that the physical contact did not climax in coitus since that would have required “an actual cultic community.” However, the blending of the spiritual and the sensual is noteworthy—it is necessary to underline once more the use of the term “service” to denote erotic behavior—and thus Susan remarked that they were treading on dangerous ground, testing the libertine limits before the rules of engagement with the holy, which is demarcated as nonhuman and inhuman, had been established by the gods. No matter how pure their intentions—a purity justified by appeal to devotion to some imaginary cult—Susan was cognizant of the transgressive nature of their actions and hence the need for them to pray for forgiveness. Needless to say, that she could communicate this freely with her husband is remarkable. Such candor evidently points to what was a mutual agreement not to live within the restraints of monogamy and to embrace the licentiousness of a sexual antinomianism.181

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In the continuation of this extraordinary letter, Susan framed the particular indiscretion with J.C. in terms of a more speculative musing on the question of love and fidelity: Afterwards I thought this: (forgive my ways of “mytheology”) The truth of the mystical union of two mortal beings who belong to each other has two dimensions that are in tension with each other. One is the absoluteness of the union wherein beyond the I and thou there can be no other—expressed in ecstacy [sic]; the other is the relativity whereby we acknowledge that we are not identical with the ineffable I and Thou, but simply Susan and Jacob, who are not alone in the world, but one among many, many beings broken into man and woman, searching for each other, finding, but mostly perhaps not finding. And we must have this dimension of humility in our love, otherwise, since it possesses the absolute dimension, it shall pass into madness and destroy us. Put even more boldly there is an “ontological“ lie in just I and thou—Susan and Jacob are only a fragment of the truth in the world broken through and through—and if our gnosis that the individual in his walled-in separateness is a lie, and that all life is one blood, is not to be a mockery, we must be able in a cultic act to smash the walls[,] make ourselves naked to each other, and mix our blood.—Or else confess ourselves as, humanists, individualists and “nice guys” and not talk so “big” and not be “arm-chair” gnostics.182

Coining the expression “mytheology” to name her philosophical approach, Susan expounded on the nature of faithfulness in a relationship from the vantage point of mystical union. On the one hand, the union is so absolute that there is no other beyond the I and Thou of the ecstatic matrimony;183 on the other hand, the recognition that the bond between lover and beloved is only relative, given the existence of other men and women searching to consummate their alliance, leads to the acknowledgment that the couple are not identical with the ineffable I and Thou; indeed, it is an ontological lie to affirm that the heterosexual pairing is dependent on absolute exclusivity. Adherence to the nuptial vow to be committed to one partner is a metaphysical blunder emerging from something akin to the Whiteheadian fallacy of misplaced concreteness; that is, mistaking the particular for the whole and

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thereby undercutting the interrelationality that constitutes the plural singularity embodied in the singular plurality of each individuated being. Susan reiterated this feeling in the conclusion of the letter to Jacob from November 8, 1950: “Goodnight my mystical One—my flower—I love and cherish and contemplate you like a growing tree. I planted myself, and yet did not plant; you are all mine, and all yourself and yet belong neither to me nor to yourselves—and that is how love comes to be.”184 Elaborating on this theme in a letter from November 12, 1950, Susan wrote that the cult seeks to break-down the “exclusiveness” of love however “deep + absolute” and assert the community of blood—is not a service of one man and one woman (not in holy marriage) self contradictory? That is, beyond the holy marriage the service must be “public”. However, they that prepare the ground may have to wade through the marshes of sin.185

Unhinging oneself from the false belief—one might even say the idolatry of idolatry—of an inimitable allegiance gives the couple license to experiment sexually with other partners, and without that freedom there is the peril that the love will pass into a destructive form of madness. To reach this holier place, however, one must be prepared to transgress the established norms. The resonance with the heretical orientation of Sabbatianism is notable: sinfulness becomes the vehicle of pious adoration. Years later in Divorcing, Susan revealed the curious nature of her marriage to Jacob behind the fictional guise of the impact of Ezra’s unconventional sexual habits on Sophie and the commitment to a conventional connubial arrangement: If Ezra’s practices did not appeal to her that was a matter of personal taste; to judge him by society’s rules, as a principle she refused. She hadn’t asked for a bourgeois marriage; and if ever the depressing thought took hold of her that she was trapped in a bourgeois marriage, Ezra’s behavior assured that she was not. What kind of marriage did Sophie want? She didn’t want to get married in the first place. Ezra wanted to get married. Ezra had been profoundly shocked when she had answered his first proposal with the suggestion that they live together in free love; and she had been surprised, amused and finally

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touched by his reaction, for he had presented himself as a cosmopolite, a free spirit, and they were in fact in bed together at the time . . . . Ezra did not believe in bourgeois marriage either, or in orthodox Jewish marriage.186

Despite their reciprocal rejection of a bourgeois marriage, both Ezra and Sophie—that is, Jacob and Susan—entered into the marital covenant, not out of religious or moral conviction, or even out of a romantic ideal of love, but as a matter of pragmatic convenience. Thus Sophie found herself, while still frowning on marriage in principle, enjoying it in practice, enjoying the sheer twoness that endured independent of moods, likes and dislikes, that did not need reasons and that wouldn’t be destroyed by reasons; and was more baffled than hurt by Ezra’s running around, his need for distraction, which she knew did not arise from her insufficiency, just as her fidelity did not spring from any feeling for Ezra; they had different ways of being.187

The “tender theatricality” of marriage is such that veracity must always be mixed with mendacity, and thus it requires a “loan” because “true and complete giving” occurs only where there is “no thought of continuation.” In the double bind of truthful deceit—the permanent impermanence masked in the veneer of impermanent permanence—lovers pretend that they are pretending.188 Susan and Jacob—as any married couple—are only a fragment of the truth in a disjointed world, and it is precisely the gnosis of this fragmentation that facilitates the discrimination of unison expressed in the statement that all life is one blood, an intuition that is to be dramatized in the cultic ritual of becoming naked and mixing blood. The path of the mystical converges with the nihilistic: All this is madness in the world today: but do not all things have their birth in the nothing, in the night of chaos and madness: the hidden night that swells while the day yet shines on the petrified world. And innumerable beginnings struggle in the womb of night that never come into the day.189

There may be “no salvation beyond love” and therefore no technique or

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gnosis of love,190 but when judged from the nocturnal nothing, the matrix whence all things have their origin, “betrayal is its own death” because “in this torn world loyalty is hardly possible except at the expense of an equal betrayal.”191 Analogously, we can say in the domain of religious ritual, there is no upholding the law without the possibility of its being disbanded. To prepare the ground of the holy, therefore, one must wade through the marshes of sin.

Nostalgia for a Presently Future Past With this understanding, we can circle back to the main point of our analysis in this chapter. However tenuous Susan’s embrace of Jewish rituals, the realization thereof provided her an imaginary home to attenuate the homelessness she felt in the world,192 a temporary reprieve from the banishment—the exile from exile—experienced as the inertia of midnight193 when the dragon slumbers and the Muses sleep in the darkness of her unillumined body.194 As the household rests at night, and the routine boundaries are obfuscated, the spirit stirs and is filled with the most intoxicating sense of forbidden power: to be the only one awake, to be the only one who knows without being known, sees without being seen, possessing a great secret. . . . Man shelters himself within the “social body” builds a wall between himself and the “abyss” that at once covers his nakedness from the other, and covers the nakedness of the abyss. Yet this “dwelling” that is held together by “imaginary” bonds of community of all forms—where men “act roles” of husband, wife, brother, sister, friend, enemy and “dress up” like kings, priests, warriors—this dwelling of man is just his possibility of coming to terms with the Holy—and it is in the tension of the bonds, in the fragility of relations that he can drive to the forbidden.195

The social customs to which we must necessarily adhere are like rules of a play, albeit a “deep play” that is compared to the “ultimate dance” by which the son must disguise himself before the father. Without these norms, Susan contends, we are lost, uncomfortable, and ashamed.196 The wakefulness from this societal torpor is described in language that is decidedly theological in tenor: we typically apply to God the characteristics of knowing without

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being known except as the unknowable at the limit of knowability, of seeing without being seen except as the unseeable at the horizon of seeability, of possessing a secret that cannot be possessed except as the dispossessed in the furthest recesses of the inward exteriority. The nature of secrecy may be elucidated by the following critique of the respective nihilistic postures of Gnosticism and Heidegger offered by Susan in a letter to Jacob written on April 20, 1952: Retreat from the world is necessary not because there is no salvation or truth, except in retreat, but because only in the hour of quietness, of love, understanding + prayer are we freed from the bondage of the demons of the day and given a vision of ages, + experience past + future as presence.197

If wistfulness for a bygone age is the applicable sensibility, then the objective is, as Susan described the role of dramaturgical production within civilization, to channel “the nostalgia for the archaic rather than the archaic itself.”198 Susan’s antipathy to longing for the past is expressed as well in her letter to Jacob from February 8, 1952, “although we know that a life without dedication is dust, the sheer nostalgia for self-sacrifice without a deep conviction is not a sufficient reason for throwing one’s self in the fire of any cause, marxism, zionism, catholicism.”199 Unquestionably, one could extend the concern with Zionism to the apprehension about Judaism more generally. In a letter to Jacob written on January 2, 1951, Susan traced the term “nostalgia” etymologically to two Greek words, νόστος, to “return home,” and ἄλγος, “pain.”200 From this philological observation, we can extrapolate the philosophical insight that the nostalgic hankering to go back home is always fraught with the agony of the disjuncture between the ego recounting the plotline and the temporality with which it is identified. Nostalgia thus disrupts the very continuity it seeks to establish between past and present and testifies to the impossibility of a complete narrativization of the self.201 Accordingly, the goal of Jewish existence must not be to live in the past but rather to drag the past into the present as an inherent part of the future. With the demise of the commitment to faith, there remains a commitment to forms of aesthetic creativity such as painting and sculpture. Through the arts, the temporalization of the intemporal is achieved so that new rituals

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are instigated and the old icons are jettisoned. As Susan wrote to Jacob on April 1, 1952: Our almost exclusive interest in what does not belong to us and to what we do not belong . . . in the past that we reject, in worlds from which we are excluded is a curious phenomenon. Because a new sacrum which overthrows the old hasn’t the slightest use for the “relics” of the old. On the contrary it tramples down the old idols totally blind to their “artistic value”.202

To secure the compresence of the three temporal modes in the perpetuation of the past presently future, the Jewish rites are performed in such a way that they are transgressed. That the infraction is part and parcel of the performance implies that the distinction between reputable and aberrant is overcome. Susan trenchantly enunciated this overcoming in a letter to Jacob written on May 1, 1952: A few holy-days may be better than none; and those souls who have more access to the holy during the weekday than the majority on the Sabbath should not deprive the poor of the little they have but give them something more. When the Sabbath becomes a day for social calls a time of general boredom, irritation and slavishness to a set of meaningless rules (either the observance of the law under the present circumstances violates its original meaning or it was intended to terrorize, enslave and humiliate, in either case . . . ) I prefer to go to a spot where it’s not Sabbath nor (if possible) weekday. I would like to have neither the spirit of the “streets” nor the spirit of a Moloch-God in our home.203

If the halakhic mode of celebrating Sabbath is considered authentic, then one must conclude that the intricate laws are either intended to terrorize and enslave the Jews who observe them or that they are a meaningless contravention of the original intent of the Sabbath, an intent that blurs the contrast between the weekday and the Sabbath inasmuch as the former is as venerated as the latter. The emplacement of holiness is to be calibrated from the vantage point of this confusion of temporal boundaries that buttresses the guiding tenet of hypernomianism: the law is accomplished most pristinely

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through its eradication. The erasure of difference between quotidian time and sacred time brings to mind the rabbinic depiction of the world to come as a day that is entirely Sabbath.204 In this eschatological state, there is no disparity between the six days and the seventh day, and thus we are effectually standing in a spot that is neither Sabbath nor not Sabbath, a place that is no place but still a place, a time that is no time but still a time. Susan’s parting wish to remove from the home she would build with Jacob both the spirit of the streets and the spirit of Moloch is an alternate way to express her desire to live in a space delimited by the hypernomian surplus of the nomian, the exorbitant exceedance that transcends the polarization of the inside and the outside, the pious and the impious. Consider the following statement in Susan’s letter to Jacob from April 15, 1952, “I would like the orthodox laws to be enforced absolutely, so as to break the law from within by driving it ad absurdum: we love a ‘consequential’ enemy because we know he is digging his own grave.”205 Perhaps this was the intent of Jacob’s remark in a letter from May 1952 about Susan’s chapter on “pagan antisemitism” (paganischen Antisemitismus) and that her “antijudaism” (Antijudaismus) was not Christian or gnostic but paganistic,206 or in Susan’s own observation in a letter from April 8, 1952, “I’ll read the questions at passover. Mother prepares things in a pleasantly pagan way.”207 The celebration of the Passover seder paganistically lends credence to the fact that despite her determination to dissociate from her ethnic upbringing, however limited, Susan was, as she acknowledged in a letter from January 22–23, 1952, “haunted by the ghosts of Judaism.” Constant reflections on the Jewish problem could not alleviate the vexation that Jewishness remained the “unintegrable fact” in her existence that she had to carry “like a sealed box” containing either “dynamite” or “just stones.”208 As I have already noted, for Susan, the unassimilability of the particular delineates the contours of the universal, the intransigent resistance to incorporating the indiscriminate in the uniformity of the same. In a letter to Jacob from April 15, 1952, Susan bluntly denounced the two branches of talmudic Judaism—law and folklore—as a fiasco: Father gave me to read Bialiks Halacha + Aggada. It’s an unfortunate thesis: granted that human life can be the material of a work of art, and the education of a people analogous to the building of a cathedral—the

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jewish people can hardly stand up against a cathedral or a symphony. The divine experiment failed.209

The consequence of this categorical judgment is unnerving: the divine experiment failed. Susan repeated her unreserved pessimism about a future for Judaism in Divorcing: “Listen, O Shulamite with your teeth chattering ‘like a flock of shorn sheep,’210 Ezra is finished . . . The Jews are finished. Out of the past with you, down with the wailing wall. Yes, that’s it. We will demolish it brick by brick.”211

Callous words indeed that unmistakably bespeak self-loathing regarding her Jewish identity as well as her relationship to Jacob—the blasphemous image of the need to destroy the Wailing Wall corresponds to the certainty with which the ending of Ezra is proclaimed. And yet, it was precisely the revulsion on both fronts that stimulated the love that kept her bound to what she detested. A hint to the chasm that divided Susan and Jacob regarding the retrievability of tradition can be found in another passage in Divorcing that chronicles the contrast between Sophie and Ezra with respect to the pertinent anguish and grief that one should expend over objects that have been misplaced: Things got lost, but that was part of traveling. . . . She did her best to take care of things, and if they got lost despite her efforts she was cheerfully resigned to it, unlike Ezra who recalled the lost object over and over again. . . . Lost objects wanted to be mourned. . . . But it was against Sophie’s principles to suffer the loss of anything more than once. How could Ezra take the side of things? Not that Sophie was absolutely sure. In fact she was haunted by those lost things in spite of her principles . . . . It was in the nature of things to do this, Sophie concluded, and in her nature as a woman of principles to resist. If that thing still haunts me, Sophie considered, it must be because I did not suffer its loss as truly, profoundly, as I should. . . . As for the loss of anything that caused her true anguish, that loss she carried in her very marrow, compacted with it. If at any time she had wanted to know the total of

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what had been lost, all she needed to do was state the last thing lost and Ezra would begin reckoning, today this, yesterday that, all the way back. But Sophie wasn’t interested. Keeping count was men’s business. That’s what her father did and both her grandfathers.212

We can assume that by describing the tallying of lost objects as the propriety of Ezra, Sophie’s father, and grandfathers, the author was opining on the predominant patriarchal custodianship of tradition on the part of the halakhah, at least as interpreted and implemented by Orthodox Judaism. Sophie is not impervious to being haunted by an object that has been mislaid—just as Susan confessed that she was haunted by the ghosts of Judaism—but the lingering agitation is because she has not befittingly mourned the loss. As a woman of principles, she resists the obsession of recovery. On the contrary, to live in time means to “fly” with it, that is, to let go of holding on to the past and to flow with the stream of the present. The itinerant nature of her comportment is described in the first pages of the book. Sophie is in a room writing, and not only “are all the pages of the small pad already covered with words in some foreign language,” but the room itself keeps changing, which occasions the remark, “Sophie Blind is used to unfamiliar rooms. She has been traveling all her life.”213 For the one doomed to wander like a pilgrim in this world, what is familiar elides into the unfamiliar. Returning to the theme of itinerancy in another passage, the reader is told that “Sophie got nervous when they settled too long in one place.”214 In Chapter 3, I will explore in greater depth the significance of the nomadic in Susan’s attraction to Gnosticism, but suffice it here to repeat that the fate of being condemned to an everlasting exile undermined her capacity to accede to traditional Jewish ritual as a mode of structuring her life and placating her groundlessness.

In Limbo Neither Sacred nor Mundane: Secularization of the Theological Despite her hope that the love between Jacob and herself would bestow on the couple the resources necessary to withstand their ideological conflicts in the name of love itself,215 the conflicts proved to be insurmountable. Susan could never endorse the path of halakhic Judaism as a meaningful

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choice for her life, and this doubtlessly became a pivotal barrier separating and finally dividing them. In the letter written on January 25, 1952, which Susan sadly concluded with the internalized misogynistic apology “forgive me if I am stupid,”216 a lamentable rhetorical device that we have already noted, she responded to the accusation of her “perfect ignorance” of Judaism made by several of her interlocutors, including Hugo Bergmann and Emmanuel Levinas. Given the significance of this missive as a window through which we can gaze into Susan’s complex grappling with her Jewishness, I will cite it in full: The positive and imperishable element in Judaism is a sense of fidelity which pierces through the very center of man, sanctifies his earthly bonds and establishes a bond between heaven and himself. You have told me and it is true that by disloyalty to the past we jeopardise our own self-identity. The world of faithfulness becomes tragic when a man loses irrevocably his mate, his friend, his family, his people, his country. How can one remain faithful and continue to live? Not only death and destruction, but birth also, the entrance of a new reality, a new possibility into the old frame, a new discovery which is in itself legitimate and irrefutable, can shatter the world of loyalties. At this moment fidelity to the past and fidelity to the future cease to be identical, and one must choose between loyalty to the dead and loyalty to the living. It is horrible to think that the dead should be forgotten; it is horrible to think the rights of the living should be renounced. In a tragic situation there is in fact no possibility of choice, nor life. And those who continue to go on living compromise between swallowing the anguish of silence over the dead and passing the burden of memory on to their children. The only Judaism we really know, and the only Judaism to which we have a genuine attachment, was born out of the compromise of this tragic situation. A faithfulness that cannot be lived, a faithfulness to the memory of the dead, petrifies. You will say that God is beyond tragedy. But then God hardly needs man’s fidelity; then God is also beyond love, which may very well be; but then there can be no religion of the covenant.217

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Susan accepted Jacob’s assertion that disloyalty to the past jeopardizes one’s own self-identity, but she insisted nevertheless that at the present moment—living in the light cast by the darkness of the Shoah—the matter is more complex insofar as fidelity to the past and fidelity to the future are no longer coincidental, and thus every individual Jew is obliged to choose between loyalty to the dead versus loyalty to the living. The quandary persists since the memory of the dead should not be forgotten nor should the rights of the living be renounced. Therein lies the tragic situation in which Judaism finds itself, or at least the Judaism that Susan had known and to which she was genuinely attached. From this she concluded, in a manner that bears affinity to the divine suffering proclaimed by Weil and the kabbalists, especially those who disseminated the teachings of Isaac Luria,218 the religion of the covenant stipulates that God, too, is not beyond tragedy if we are to speak meaningfully of divine love and human faithfulness. In this regard, it is of interest to consider Susan’s letter to Hugo Bergmann from September 18, 1950. Religion, she wrote, cannot be “essentially allegorical” or “essentially historical,” but prescribes “that there must be a divine present and that when this divine present is broken so that there is only the divine past—a remembering—and a divine future—a hoping and believing—we lost the very ground and soil of sacrament.”219 Applied specifically to Judaism, the recuperation of the ground to reinforce commitment to its beliefs and rituals cannot be based simply on remembering the past or believing and hoping in the future; it is contingent upon the existence of a sustainable present, albeit a present shaped by a past that continues to resound into the future but that nonetheless shoulders the gravitas of the onticity of the moment. 220 Phenomenologically, the present is the “actuating horizon” that gives the person access to the “revelatory solicitation” through which one both recognizes oneself as the being so solicited and that what is solicited is framed out of one’s ownmost potency. 221 In contrast to the concern of the mystery religions with rebirth into life after death, Susan stated that her interest rather was with rebirth in this life that transpires always in the immediacy of the now. In being born we are not yet initiated into life, we are not yet in full

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possession of the essential forms and forces of our life, since we can exist simply nihilistically, as if nothing mattered, nothing was of any worth, as if life and death were the same. The cult initiates into life and prepares the human being for meeting its phases and crises. The secular existence is like a Limbo between the sacramental and the nihilistic worlds . . . . Surely, we all move in this limbo, and in this sense have only a glimmering of the sacramental and the nothing, but the Limbo is open to both ways. Both heaven and Hell exist, the nihilistic possibility is not to be “refuted”, it is legitimate in its own right.222

The cult to which Susan referred is decidedly not religious but secular, which is further described as a state of limbo between two worlds, the sacramental and the nihilistic, equally legitimate possibilities that cannot refute one another, the power of the mystery and the power of death.223 Translating the insight regarding the limboic indeterminacy wherein life and death are indistinguishable224 into the psychoanalytic terms of Julia Kristeva, we can say of rebirth that is the striving to be forgiven—to seek a pardon, that is, par-don, the by-gift—through which one gives oneself the time of a new beginning.225 The ideational positioning of the secular between the sacred and the profane is reminiscent of the view expressed by other twentieth-century thinkers, and particularly the exponents of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, 226 epitomized in Adorno’s conjecture that theological concepts undergo a “migration into the profane” (Einwanderung in der Profanität). The centrality of this motif in Adorno’s thinking has been noted by a number of scholars. 227 My focus here is more limited, as I am interested in the correspondence between this principle and Susan’s obscuring the distinction between the sacred and the secular. The expression migration into the profane appears in Adorno’s assessment of the view of Scholem—to whom he refers as the “antinomian Maggid”228 —regarding the legitimacy of the theological as a category to explain the historical in the letter to Walter Benjamin written on March 4, 1938. After recounting his first personal meeting with Scholem at the home of Paul Tillich, Adorno related that on the second evening Scholem discussed at great length Sabbatian and Frankist mysticism. In the context of offering his

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variegated views about Scholem’s historiographical scholarship, Adorno wrote that Benjamin’s “own intention to mobilize the power of theological experience anonymously within the realm of the profane” (die Kraft der theologischen Erfahrung anonym in der Profanität mobil zu machen) was “utterly and decisively superior to all of Scholem’s attempts to salvage the theological moment.”229 Upon further reflection, however, Adorno challenged the contrast between the process of secularization of the theological on the part of Benjamin and the philological-historical scholarship of Scholem on the kabbalah: “It strikes me as an expression of the most profound irony that the very conception of mysticism which he urges presents itself from the perspective of the philosophy of history precisely as that same incursion into the profane with which he reproaches both of us.”230 Tellingly, in a letter to Scholem written on February 17, 1964, Adorno illustrated the image of migration by the presumption that vestiges of the mystical tradition, discernible in a number of modern thinkers, at the same time bear a “radical metamorphosis through secularization” (radikale Verwandlung durch die Säkularisierung tragen). 231 Several years later, in the salutation offered to Scholem on his seventieth birthday on December 5, 1967, Adorno remarked that the “entry of mysticism into the profane” (Einzug von Mystik in die Profanität), which out of ignorance he had previously presented in contradistinction to Scholem, in fact overlaps with the latter’s “antinomian conceptions of the kabbalah,” a proclivity that Adorno incisively referred to as a feature of Scholem’s attraction to the nocturnal history (Nachtgeschichte) of the Jews, 232 a locution that might point to the melancholic and even demonic vision of the historical. 233 Leaving aside the accuracy of Adorno’s interpretation of Scholem, for our purposes the principal question is what is implied by the idea of the secular transformation of the theological? We may be helped in responding to this query by briefly examining several passages in Negative Dialectics. The first one occurs in the context of Adorno’s discussing the question of being (Seinsfrage) in Heidegger, relying mostly on Being and Time. To understand Heidegger’s “emphatic expression” of the word Sein, we must be attentive to the underlying concern with the category of authenticity (Eigenlichkeit). By speaking of the transcendence

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of being, what is meant is “to redeem the desideratum of authenticity as that which is not illusory.” Such a goal is corroborated in “the fact that the historic evolution of philosophy has leveled the distinction between essence and appearance.” Against the “inherent impulse” of philosophy to be “discontent with the façade,” there emerged the “unreflecting enlighteners,” who “have negated the metaphysical thesis of essence as the true world behind the phenomena.” However, this negation has led to the counter-thesis that “essence, as the epitome of metaphysics, is itself mere appearance—as if appearance, therefore, were the same as essence. Because of the dichotomy in the world, its authentic element, the law of dichotomy, is hidden.”234 Adorno grants that to some degree Heidegger is aware of the mechanism by which the law of dichotomy in being is hidden through the specter of dichotomies in the realm of beings. Nevertheless, he is oblivious to the fact that the authenticity he misses will promptly recoil into positivity, into authenticity as a posture of consciousness—a posture whose emigration from the profane [aus der Profanität auswandert] powerlessly imitates the theological habit of the old doctrine of essence. The hidden essence is rendered proof against the suspicion of being pure mischief.235

It lies beyond my immediate concern to disentangle all the threads intertwined in Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger. The point most relevant to our discussion is that the questioning of being leads us to see that the emigration from the profane parallels the theological doctrine of the essence. How is this so? The metaphysical dichotomy of essence and appearance breaks under the weight of the insight that the essence is appearance. This is what Adorno means when he writes about the law of the dichotomy of being consisting of the essence occluded in and by the dichotomous nature of the beings in the world. From this hidden essence, moreover, we can construe the key to the process of transformation, the recoiling of negativity into positivity. Improbably, at this spot Adorno locates a point of convergence between Marx and Heidegger: in both there is a presumption regarding “the ontological doctrine of Being’s priority over thought,” and thus

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in the “transcendence” of Being, the materialist echo reverberates from a vast distance. The doctrine of Being turns ideological as it imperceptibly spiritualizes the materialist moment in thought by transposing it into pure functionality beyond all entity—as it removes by magic whatever critique of a false consciousness resides in the materialist concept of Being. The word that was to name truth against ideology comes to be the most untrue: the denial of ideality becomes the proclamation of an ideal sphere.236

In another passage from Negative Dialectics, the principle of migration to the secular is elicited from Benjamin’s analysis in the Origin of German Tragic Drama of the ruinous landscapes as marking the moment of transience in which nature and history become commensurable: This is the transmutation of metaphysics into history. It secularizes metaphysics in the secular category pure and simple, the category of decay [Verfalls]. Philosophy interprets that pictography [Zeichenschrift], the ever new Mene Tekel, in microcosm—in the fragments which decay has chipped, and which bear the objective meanings. No recollection [Eingedenken] of transcendence is possible any more, save by way of transience [Vergängnis]; eternity appears, not as such, but diffracted through the most transient [Vergänglichste].237

In contrast to Hegelian metaphysics, which “transfigures the absolute by equating it with the total passing of all finite things,”238 the transmutation of metaphysics into history involves a transfiguration that preserves the smallest units; objective meaning is borne by the fragments chipped by the decay of time. Hence, no recollection or mindfulness of transcendence is possible except through transience; eternity appears as what is diffracted—or more literally as what is broken (gebrochen)—through the most ephemeral. Secularization of the metaphysical entails the acceptance of the engendering degeneration of history, the unwavering deterioration of time, and the apperception that what appears is real in virtue of being really apparent. The act of breaking is the mission of the method Adorno calls negative dialectics, that is, the persistent critique that shatters all presumptions of totality, the constant call to rationalize

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the irrational, the relentless struggle to unseal the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in every concept, the unremitting endeavor to discriminate the nonidentical in the identical.239 As Adorno concludes his magnum opus, “in the critique of cognition as well as in the philosophy of history, metaphysics immigrates into micrology [daβ Metaphysik in die Mikrologie einwandert]. Micrology is the place where metaphysics finds a haven from totality.”240 Adorno’s micrological epistemology does not imply that there is a whole reflected in the smallest details241 but rather that there is no whole of which to speak except a whole continually constellated by the manifold. There is no moment wherein we can posit a totality that is not still in the process of being woven from the minutiae entwined in the web of that totality. It follows that thought itself is continually undermining thought: Yet the need in thinking is what makes us think. It asks to be negated by thinking; it must disappear in thought if it is to be really satisfied; and in this negation it survives. Represented in the inmost cell of thought is that which is unlike thought. The smallest intramundane traits would be of relevance to the absolute, for the micrological view cracks the shells of what, measured by the subsuming cover concept, is helplessly isolated and explodes its identity, the delusion that it is but a specimen. There is solidarity between such thinking and metaphysics at the time of its fall.242

Adorno’s comments can edify Susan’s ruminations on the profanation of the theological that is the inevitable consequence of the metaphysical speculation on sacramental realities, which results in the rational systematization of religious experience and the objectivization of religious metaphors, myths, and symbols.243 On the face of it, her reflections are far more inchoate and unsystematic, but from her words we can elicit a similar criticism of the idealization of the denial of ideality, a rejection of the universal abstracted from its concrete materialization in the particular. Alternatively expressed, the departure from the profane is a repatriation to the profane, the secularization of the sacred that mirrors the sacralization of the secular. As Adorno put it, “The metaphysical categories live on, secularized, in what the vulgar drive to higher things

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calls the question of the meaning of life. . . . Metaphysics deals with an objectivity without being free to dispense with subjective reflection.”244 A corollary of this insight is that the “true nihilists” do not succumb to the negative by identifying with nothingness; they are rather “the ones who oppose nihilism with their more and more faded positivities, the ones who are thus conspiring with all extant malice, and eventually with the destructive principle itself.”245 In language that not only resonates with Adorno’s idea of the migration into the profane but similarly elicits support for this transformation from Scholem, Susan wrote the following in a letter to Jacob from March 1–2, 1952: Perhaps forms of prayer + discipline are possible, without claim to any “efficacy” without pragmatic justification, simply as a form of asking, without claim or justification.—Or maybe Scholem is right and only an absolute secularization can bring us to the “turning point”. Because we cannot turn backward but only forward. But this is too “eschatological”. It is our redemption, now, that is involved. The secular time is wasting, suffocating and transforms us into nought; not a “holy nought” but a shadowy, meaningless “Nichtigkeit.” The sacred is closed to us because its forms are no longer self evident, we “chose” them for “pragmatic” (however “theological”) reasons. The few symbols that are meaningful to us we have to keep “secret” or we will have to “justify” them to others. Secrecy is important because it is the necessity to justify one’s sacrum before the “outside” that creates theology—which is the beginning of the end. Lack of secrecy is what ruined both Judaism + Christianity.246

Struggling to find a path to preserve some ritual performance that might still be meaningful, Susan proposed prayer and other unspecified disciplines, gestures for which no efficacy or pragmatic justification can be sought. But she also pondered if Scholem was correct that the only way forward is through an absolute secularization of the religious. This possibility is too dependent on the traditional eschatological outlook inasmuch as it defers redemption to the future when what is pressing is the urgency of the present characterized by the closure of the sacred and the

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transmogrification of time into a phantomic and futile nullity. As Susan wrote in her dissertation, The path beyond theological and ontological rationalism lies in the direction of a hermeneutic of man not only as reason and will, but as he appears in the fullness of mythical consciousness; in the symbols of male and female, of demiurge and creature, of mother, of father, and of child of the hero, the rebel and the redeemer.247

The return to mythical consciousness without the bias of succumbing to either theistic or naturalistic positivism—a return that entails overcoming the polarity of immanence and transcendence as well as the distinction between anthropogony and theogony such that the propositions that God creates humanity and that humanity creates God are equivalent and interchangeable—necessitates the commitment to secret cultic activity whose symbolic import must be hidden from others. The esoteric is privileged, therefore, as it functions like a husk that protects the inner core of the ritual acts against the intrusion of external forces.248 The potential liability of these forces is their penchant to replace secrecy with theology, which is the beginning of the end of the spiritual vocation. Most remarkably, the logic of Susan’s thinking brings her to declaring that Judaism and Christianity were damaged by the dearth of secrecy. Susan’s contribution to this discourse is related to her contention that nihilism cannot be discarded; it is rather an integral part of the path toward recuperating a meaningful religious experience based on historical precedent. 249 This is especially the case with respect to Judaism. As Susan wrote in the letter to Jacob from January 25, 1952, If there can be any understanding, not to say judgement, of Judaism it must be in its historical totality. But I question the possible usefulness of an “objective” interpretation of religious texts—except for the purposes of a “history of religion” subsequent to its death. The reading [of] a holy script is spiritually fruitful just to the degree that the “letter” of the book is not fixed but open to the exploration of new meanings.250

The hermeneutical foundation of the postulate that the book is not fixed

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but open to the exploration of new meanings is in accord with the longstanding rabbinic idea of the chain of oral interpretation that complements and expands the revelation of written scripture. The ancient text must be read continually, albeit always from a new perspective calibrated to the impending of the future in the theophanous moment at hand. The tensiveness of time implied in the ever-evolving tradition, based on the never-ending revelation, consists of the simultaneity of past, present, and future. The future repeatedly interrupts the present, but interruption does not signal an unmitigated rupture of the past. The timeswerve of circular linearity dictates that without continuity we could not discern discontinuity. The synchronic and diachronic elements thus coincide in the coalescence of the three temporal modes in the interminable becoming of the moment. The dual deportment of tradition as malleable and durable—malleable in its durability and durable in its malleability—rests on the assumption that each moment instantiates the concurrence of the recollection of the past, the actuality of the present, and the anticipation of the future.251 What is actual about the moment is the inversion of this rectilinearity to the extent that it promotes the memory of what will be and the expectancy of what was. Accordingly, the mandate to remember, which legitimately can be called a central pillar of Jewish ritual and selfunderstanding, comprises not the nostalgic reclamation of a past sealed in its factical obstinacy, but an auspicious proclamation of a future foreseen in its evental unforseeability.252 For Susan, the recouping of a more viable Judaism is closely connected to her desire to return to a world wherein myth is privileged over logic. Consider her comment in the letter to Jacob from October 29, 1950: And though it is plainly written: Gen 1:27; Gen 5:1, 2 the “orthodoxy” has covered one side of the Holy with their scriptures + commentaries with the result that it is indeed dubious whether the jiddene’s are fashioned in the divine image and that the relation between the purely father-God and the purely male-man tends to become unhealthy. And if I were a “pious scribe” I would make an expurgated edition of the scriptures: this time elaborating the mythos and cutting out the priestly heresy.253

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The scriptural verses to which Susan referred affirm the belief that the dimorphic gendering of the human being is a reflection of God’s image, the literal meaning obscured until the medieval kabbalists audaciously advocated such an interpretation. Susan maintained that rabbinic orthodoxy covered the holy implication of this notion to the point that it is no longer clear if the Jews can be said to be endowed with that image. She astutely raised the adverse patriarchal repercussions of the interpretation that forges an unhealthy connection between the father-God and the male-man. Imagining herself as a pious scribe—and, I would add, in a manner that tallies with the kabbalistic interpretation of the imago Dei as an expression of the divine androgyneity—Susan recommended editing the biblical text by expunging the laws of the priestly heresy and elaborating the mythos. Revisiting this theme in a letter to Jacob from January 7, 1951, Susan wrote: But I wonder can there be a mythic “interpretation” more mythic than the mythos itself? I.e. the Bible—the more I read it the more I am struck by the genuine “primitive” mythos and the less I can connect the Thora with the so called “jewish tradition”—i.e. mishmash of Christian sickness, apologetics, bourgeois sentimentality, Alexandrine academicism, legalism liberalism etc. etc.254

The Bible as a repository of primitive myth is contrasted with the Torah of the Jewish tradition. The latter is a misnomer—hence it is qualified as “so called”—since it is in truth a hybrid of negative influences that are extraneous and incompatible with the mythic nature of scripture. The effort to recover a more embryonic layer of the tradition is in accord with Susan’s attraction to the mythological over the scientific as a more efficacious way to experience nature. As she wrote in a letter to Jacob from January 27, 1951, The “naturalistic” (scientific) concept of nature is either preserved but as a mere human convention or it gives way to a mythological relation. The scientific conception is after all relative to the interests of science; but this may not be our ultimate interest—or even our “original” interest. The opposition of Nature and spirit, or the

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Kantian phenomenon-noumenon is fruitless because its point of departure is from a very secondary notion of “nature” against which a just as un-original notion of spirit is then developed. But φύσις is there at the base of all interpretations although those who speak in categories of “physics”, “ethics” “metaphysics” etc. never face her; all “naturalism” and anti-super-trans (etc.)-naturalism is just a play on the evasion of the real countenance of “nature”.255

Although this comment appears after Susan criticized—incorrectly in my view—Heidegger’s idea of truth as unconcealment (ἀ-λήθεια) insofar as it allows things to be in their own being,256 her articulation of nature betrays the influence of the Heideggerian idea of φύσις as the self-revealing of being that is always also a self-concealing.257 Most pointedly, the encounter with nature of which Susan spoke is in accord with her emphasis on the need to recuperate the primitive myth that may be elicited from the biblical text, a mythopoiesis that countenances living in the timespace that is neither deified nor despoiled, sheltering in the mystery that is neither holy nor unholy, confronting the presence that is neither present nor absent.

2 Zionism and the Sacramental Danger of Nationalism The yearning glows in their nightly gaze Toward that homeland they will never find. So they drift in an unfortunate fate That only melancholy may completely comprehend. —Georg Trakl, “Gypsy”

I search for the criminal for the culpable but all I find is victims. Terrorism. —Susan Taubes, Letter to Jacob Taubes, May 6, 1952

In this chapter, I will discuss Susan Taubes’s attitude toward Zionism, the land of Israel, and the ramifications of ethnonationalism on the spiritual temperament of Judaism. The bulk of the documentary evidence that I will utilize to demonstrate my arguments is from the letters written to Jacob between 1950 and 1952, relatively soon after the establishment of the military, political, and socioeconomic complex that is the modern state of Israel. For a period of roughly six months, beginning toward the end of December 1949, Susan was physically with Jacob in Jerusalem, where she continued to work on her bachelor’s thesis on the relationship between myth and logos in Heidegger as preparation for what she considered at the time to be the subject of her doctoral dissertation on the mythical and theological elements of Heidegger. Additionally, she likely studied informally with Hugo Bergmann, professor 101

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at the Hebrew University.1 In the months of these critical years when they were not together in either Jerusalem or in New York, a fair amount of their interchanges focused on the practicality of her rejoining him in Israel. In many of the letters, we find Susan dealing with Jacob’s frequent grievances about academic politics in Jerusalem; Scholem is especially singled out for bad behavior.2 For example, in one letter, Susan wrote to Jacob, “I wonder how you are, beloved child. Now that I am with the parents and so much love is poured on me I think more of your lonelyness [sic] than mine.”3 And in the continuation of the same letter, she implored Jacob, “Write to me dear one how you are + you must be cheerful even ‘alone in Jerusalem’; it is not a question of ‘feeling’ but of ‘service’ cheerfulness should be like prayer, fast and feast.”4 It should come as no surprise that Susan tried to embolden Jacob, urging him to work in spite of his feelings of despondency triggered by difficult relations with other intellectuals and academics. Thus, in a letter from November 9, 1950, she wrote, And the Israeli atmosphere rather “unheimlich” that breathes in your words saddens me—because somewhere in my soul I yet pray that this land might, someday be a home or center for us. Ask your soul dear child what conditions you really need for your deep work of preparation. Here, the best conditions one hopes for is a “cubiculum” and library stacks—and to withdraw from the “busyness”.5

Striking a similar note in a letter from November 17, 1950, Susan remarked, “Your words on the ‘holy land’ are deeply saddening . . . Are the people completely without soul? But I am afraid you do not know the ‘people’— only the ‘beards’ and the academicians. And what is the matter with the Cananites [sic]?”6 These letters, and others that could have been cited, verify that early on Susan entertained the expectation that Israel might provide a genuine sense of home, a place to create a more meaningful life than just to escape the hectic nature of American capitalism by sequestering oneself in a sanctuary of books, and this in spite of Jacob’s experience of the environment there as unhomely, a sentiment that, in her opinion, was largely due to the fact that he fraternized predominantly with Orthodox Jews and academics. The disappointment with Israel is connected to a more general antipathy

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towards the professionalism of academia that Susan and Jacob shared in their youthful enthusiasm for the life of the mind. In the letter to Jacob from November 28, 1950, Susan wrote, I abhorr [sic] all talking about things and building systems. I want to live in holyness, and remembering the silence and I find it a desecration to speak at all about the things that are important[,] as men speak today under the name of Wissenschaft and a kind [of] professionalism that is prostitution.7

Even at this moment in their burgeoning relationship, Susan revealed—in a tone that echoes a similar reprimand offered by Heidegger—her disgust with academic scholars and the systematic-scientific pursuit of knowledge; her inclination, expressed emphatically, was to live in holiness and to remain silent rather than to discourse verbally about things that mattered most to her spiritual deportment and well-being. Telling in this regard is a comment of Jacob in a letter to Susan written on January 15, 1952. After recounting in some detail a “lovely talk” (schönen Vortrag) of Bergmann on Husserl’s metaphysics, and praising him for understanding the Husserlian method brilliantly and adding his own contribution, which focused on Husserl’s relationship to Fichte and Schelling, Jacob concluded, “But enough of academic stupidity [akademischen Dummheiten]—completely Schmonzes!”8 To conjure the image of academic stupidity after commenting so positively on Bergmann’s lecture and his own remarks seems like a non sequitur. However, I do not think Jacob’s rhetoric was meant to be taken ironically; on the contrary, even a favorable experience could not placate his acrimony toward the academy. The skepticism regarding the position of intellectuals in the university was expressed succinctly by Jacob in the essay “The Intellectuals and the University,” published in 1963: The task of scholarship is not only to demystify the exoteric nature in praxis but also to abrogate the esoteric human mystification. But is the university itself not comprised by the law, which governs the administered world? How should the university be able to secure its critical enterprise when it is dependent more than ever on the ruling powers, the state, and the economy, which alone are capable of furnishing the

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means for sponsoring research? . . . It is difficult to resist the force of this argument, yet everything depends on withstanding this temptation because as the institution of the university adapts itself to the most progressive elements of our society, the drive toward bureaucratic regiment only intensifies. Wherever this takes place, university labor begins to approach a factory-like form of production.9

The institutional matrix of the university in liberal bourgeois societies has the mandate to protect the freedom that advances scientific research, but to the extent that the university is ruled by state-sponsored agenda, which are themselves controlled by commercial conglomerates, how can it preserve that freedom? Alas, the “scientificized society [verwissenschaftlichte Gesellschaft] turns the society under tutelage,” and thus the university’s claim to independence is inescapably threatened.10 As Susan’s correspondence indicates, she, too, was of the opinion that universities and research institutions were incapable of providing the milieu conducive to meditate on the nature of a person’s theoretical and pragmatic ambitions, a subject that was allocated in one context to pure theology, a taxonomy that she quickly noted is one that she mistrusted.11 The Muses, we are told in Susan’s letter to Jacob from September 15–16, 1950, weep when she speaks academically.12 In Susan’s letter to Jacob from December 20, 1950, we find an impassioned description of her discouragement with the academy and her venerating oral transmission of the living word (à la Plato’s conception or the ideal of the sage in the rabbinic tradition) over scholarly writing. The only books after Hegel that should have been written are “the books to end the writing of books.” Susan went so far as to compare the grinding out of a scholarly paper to “spiritual prostitution,” and while she considered the possibility of writing a work that would be useful, her preference was “the luxury of silence, of speaking only what must be spoken, and write only letters and sometimes a poem or a prayer,—and the possibility, time to study.”13 A few days later, on December 23, 1950, Susan wrote to Jacob: Reb Menachem Cziczes—beisser (SS)14 says: if one wants to repudiate the academy, first one should be in the academy and then one should repudiate it . . . There is nothing “wrong” with gnosis. But does it

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belong in the academy? You want to expose esoteric philos. in public lectures?—And why my dearest are you in lethargy despair and darkness?15

Prudent wisdom indeed—the most effective repudiation of the academy wells forth from one who is ensconced in the academy. Gnosis denotes a form of knowledge that does not fit easily within the confines of the academy. How can the hermeneutics of esotericism, which demands divulging secrets through withholding, be accommodated in the university setting? It is no wonder, therefore, that Jacob’s wish to expose esoteric philosophy publicly through his lectures was bound to lead to a response marked by lassitude and melancholia. At times, Susan expressed her misgivings with the proverbial pressure placed on scholars to publish. A scathing articulation of this reservation can be found in the letter to Jacob written on January 18, 1951: I speak to many people—the “professors” complain against the “system”. Both teaching and research are pushed in the background for “publishing”—good or bad the number of words in print is the criterion for “jobs”—the result: further devaluation of the word—bad education, superficial research.16

I shudder to think how she would assess the current climate when even graduate students are coerced into publishing before they have earned their degrees. Be that as it may, the seemingly deplorable state of affairs in the Israeli academy enhanced these suspicions. In due course, Susan grew more impatient with Jacob and less forgiving of his own shortcomings with regard to this matter. As she wrote in the letter on April 11, 1952, “You will say your ‘hands are tied’ well, please untie them + act in a responsible way. I must say your behaviour in Jerusalem reflects atrociously on ‘human relation’ in Jewish society. Tied-hand, terror, impotence[,] neurosis. I am also fed up.”17 Susan’s impatience was rooted in a profound disillusionment with the quality of human relationships in the holy land. Such a concern is already evident in her letter to Jacob from October 25, 1950: The day went with the unpacking and the sight and smell of our Jerusalem things filled me with deep nostalgias. I love just that wrathful

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land and I miss it, I must confess, more than the Parthenon. But we must know not only where our land but also where our people are, and where we have the possibility of a most responsible life.18

These words indicate a genuine love of Israel—not a blind love as it is called the wrathful land—but Susan was clear that the criterion to determine where one can find one’s home is the people, who make possible living a moral life, and not merely the physical space.

Hopelessness of Hope: Estrangement in the Holy Land Notwithstanding the dissatisfaction with the academic scene in Jerusalem and the repercussions this uncivility may have had on the nature of the intersubjective displayed therein, the initial letters, as I have already intimated, testify to Susan’s harboring the hope that Israel would provide not only a physical home but also a spiritual-intellectual center, a hope that regrettably never materialized. In the letter to Jacob from October 13, 1950, she explained her homesickness for the land in terms of a cyclical movement of time predicated on the reversion to the point of derivation: Now you are in the land that is indeed holy: favored by the gods of earth, sun and moon, and you shall suck in their power + feel the vigilance of the sun and the stars at night, and follow the raving of the mad moon. For in spite of our linear conceptions of time, history, progress, the world is a sphere and the great westward movement of civilization from the Euphrates to Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Paris, London, N.Y., San Francisko [sic] must, if it keeps on moving return to the source. Write to me about the land and our friends. Slowly I grow home-sick.19

Curiously, the holiness of the land is framed in paganistic or mythological language that is antithetical to the traditional belief that the land derives its sanctity from the covenantal promise that the one true God bestows it exclusively upon the people of Israel.20 According to Susan’s heretical musings, the holiness is tied to the fact that the land is favored by the gods of the earth, sun, and moon. The appeal to the cosmic deities is cast as well in terms of privileging a cyclical conception of time as opposed to the linear conception that undergirds the more conventional idea of historical progress.

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Apart from the attraction to the land because of her desire to be with Jacob, Susan occasionally extolled the virtue of the state as a geopolitical reality that might enhance the welfare of the Jewish people. For instance, on November 2, 1950, she wrote to Jacob, “At Yale I browsed around for some hours looking through books at divinity book-store—with ‘Christianity’ ‘Jesus’ or ‘Ethics’ in every title. Nauseating. Israel will be good for the Jews if only to keep them from the contamination of Christianity.”21 Surprisingly, Susan adopted a rather parochial perspective in this comment, valorizing the insularity of the state of Israel as a location that would protect the Jews from Christian corruption. I surmise that this assessment is more indicative of her intolerance for Christianity than it is evidence of a spiritual narrowmindedness. Support for this contention may be gleaned from the letter written on December 20, 1950, wherein Susan commended the virtue of living in Israel as a means to attain a more wholesome and concrete existence in contrast to the abstract superficiality and emptiness of living in America that she remarkably linked to a fascist propensity: I would most like to be a “priestess” a humble one or shall we say a “rebezen” to cultivate the jidennes into a nobler race. I shall come and perhaps the land shall give me an answer. The land is anyway a good thing. One should not live in abstracto at any rate it is most dangerous and the Usa vacuum has had a very bad effect on me; my nature “abhorrs” it—anything is better—if one is not a “healthy american” as I am not it drives one to fascism.22

The state is portrayed as a place where Judaism can become a nobler race and where Susan might find an answer to solve the peculiar vagrancies of her own predicament. Indeed, the overwhelming motivation to return to Israel was personal and not ideological. In the letter from December 25, 1950, Susan expressed her willingness to do her graduate work in Jerusalem, adding the stipulation, Please keep in consideration that our future is so uncertain that it is almost foolish for me to try to make plans. Wherever you think you will be for the next few years there I shall do my grad. work. Perhaps you will discuss this with Scholem: he seems to take it as a personal insult

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if we leave; let him suggest how we can live there for the next few years and then we can consider it.23

Other early letters indicate that Susan embraced a somewhat romantic view regarding Israel.24 Thus, in the letter from September 24, 1950, she reported the following to Jacob: My darling, I had a very nice dream about Israel: we went there for the first time and found it was “technicolor” whereas all the world is only “black and white” and people had “schwanzes”! Long and graceful, and snakelike like cat’s tails and I was very happy.25

I cannot profess to understand the exact meaning of imagining Israeli citizens with the tails of cats, and I do not think it is related to the well-known abundance of cats in Israeli cities. The additional description of those tails as snakelike might suggest the colloquial use of schwanz in German or in Yiddish to designate the penis, and by implication the image might suggest someone with a prickly character, but I am not inclined to interpret Susan’s use of the expression in this manner. It is also worth noting that Susan periodically referred to Jacob as “Schwanz,”26 “Schwänzchen,”27 or “Katzenschwanz.”28 In none of these incidents do I think the intent is the membrum virile, and only in Susan’s letter to Jacob, written on February 15, 1952, is the term used pejoratively, “Aber sei kein Schwanz und tu deine Arbeit;”29 that is, she admonished him not to be belligerent and to do his work. In the vast majority of cases, these idioms were deployed by Susan as terms of endearment. In any event, what is clear about the dream is the joy Susan evoked in thinking about Israel in Technicolor as opposed to the rest of the world that is black and white. We can presume that this trope is meant to convey the vibrancy of the new state. The positive outlook regarding Israel is also implied in the letter written to Jacob on November 28, 1950. Susan remarked that the attitude of Gershom and Fanja Scholem “is really insufferable and I really would not like to be involved in his circle. I think too highly of the holy land to treat it in this kind of stupid + adolescent chauvinism as the Scholems + co.”30 The alleged appalling conduct of the Scholems diminished the holiness of the land. Once more, we see the quixotic undercurrent of Susan’s attitude to Israel even as she

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had departed from any nomian normativity—the sacredness of the soil is to be measured by the moral demeanor of the individual Jew and not by his or her allegiance to the laws sanctioned by the covenant. Another example of a more affirmative attitude toward Israel is found in a startlingly candid and heartfelt effort to encourage Jacob in Susan’s letter from the next day, November 29, 1950: I am sick of words becoming defiled on my own lips, I am sick of learning the tactics of a war where my victory is my defeat, and I think I fear destitution, disease, dirt and death less than I fear devaluation, being in “bondage to strange lords” and to strange gods. What I see, my dear,—and from looking at men in such enviable positions as Tillich or Weiss—that if we want to be successful we will have to sell ourselves: for that is simply what is meant by being a “professional”. There is no place for contemplation, and whatever shall be spoken from the silence of contemplation shall not be understood or wanted. The face of this land is sealed with cement and there is not one crack where spirit could break through: all is skin without pores: The only category of Being is being-outside, and all “inwardness” cast out is doomed to [be] a dead figure . . . . And where is it better? Nowhere. But there is one “place” where at least I can say with full conviction and authority that it “ought not be so”. For where is it written that America should not be [“]a face sealed to God”—? . . . But about Jerusalem something is written. And to remember that is worthwhile at the price of a hard and drab existence and even at the price of ultimate defeat; and to remember what is written on Jerusalem and Israel is more worthwhile than all the possibilities of all the world.31

The appraisal of the academic scene in America is quite severe: the emphasis on being a professional bespeaks a lack of appreciation for the introspective life and for what is spoken from the silence of contemplation. The superficiality of America more generally is described by the arresting images of a land sealed with cement in which there is no crack for the spirit to break through or as skin without pores. American culture comports an externality that has no correlative inwardness.32 While it may be the case that nowhere would turn out to be better, Israel, and especially Jerusalem, held out the

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possibility of being different. No matter how hard the existential conditions, it is a place that is more worthwhile than all other places in the world. In this post-Holocaust moment, the declaration of Jewish pride as an antidote to the abomination that the Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis is understandable and perhaps even excusable, but one is still shocked by Susan’s capitulating to such a prejudicial geocentrism, elevating the prestige of Israel above all other nations in the civilized world. The most explicit exaltation of Jerusalem appears in the letter to Scholem written on November 8, 1950. Responding to the false rumors that Susan chose deliberately to be separated from Jacob and the disdain directed to her for leaving the “godly land,” she wrote, “You and Mrs. Scholem and our friends and ‘Jerusalem’ fill my mind and heart and keep them full.”33 She then offered the following poetic ode to Jerusalem: NOW THAT MY EYES HAVE SEEN JERUSALEM THAT IS THE JEWEL ON THY BROW, VEILED SERAPHIM NOW THAT I HAVE SEEN HER GLOW OF THOUSAND HUES THAT ARE LIKE SOMETHING MADE OF STONE THAT DOES NOT PASS UNLIKE THE DULL FLEETING SHADOWS WHEREOF OTHER CITIES ARE MADE; FOR THE GRAVEL UNDER THE ASS’S HOOF IS BRIGHTER THAN GOLD IN JERUSALEMS LIGHT: THE DUST MORE DAZZLING-FRESH THAN A FIELD OF FLOWERS! FOR THE EVENING SKY IS WROUGHT WITH MORE FABULOUS DESIGNS THAN THE DOME OF THE MOST LAVISH TEMPLE: THE STORM-SKY MORE GLARING THAN THE SUN ON A SILVER SHIELD! NOW THAT MY EYES HAVE HUNG UPON THE SIGNS OF THY COUNTENANCE SERAPHIM BEHIND THE VEIL AND HAVE FILLED OUT SO WIDE EVEN AS THE SKY-RING WITH ENCHANTMENT

Zionism and the Sacramental Danger of Nationalism ­ —  111 NOW MAY YOU STOP MY EYES FOREVER IN DARKNESS MAY YOU SEAL MY EYES AND THE ARDOUR I’VE DRUNK FROM JERUSALEM’S FIRES SHALL FEAST ME FULL FOREVER.34

Susan’s rhetorical flourishes speak for themselves and well attest to her sincere passion for the spiritual vitality of the holy city. We see again her utilization of color to express this point: Jerusalem glows in a thousand hues, which are durable like stones, whereas other cities are constituted by dull and fleeting shadows. Beholding the countenance of the city is like envisioning the seraphim behind the veil. Having seen the radiant fires of Jerusalem, her eyes will be sealed in darkness, but she will be sustained forever.

Israel and the Politicization of the Theological In contradistinction to these positive assessments of the holy land and the city of peace, we find more explicit criticisms of Zionist nationalism and the establishment of the state. Thus, already in a letter from October 17, 1950, Susan wrote to Jacob, “And I am sad I could not experience the land as a pioneer—and did not manage to get there before the ‘government’. I read in the newspaper things are getting worse and worse.”35 A sobering estimation of the reality on the ground, so to speak, just twenty-nine months since the founding of the state! It is apposite to recall Jacob’s letter to Hugo Bergmann written on March 25, 1952, mentioned briefly in the beginning of the previous chapter. Jacob recounted his experience at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York and mentioned having met Susan amidst all the confusion he felt there. The burning issue for them was the question of “Jewish existence,” and Jacob spoke of his hope that in the land of Israel the matter would settle down “as if by itself” (ich hoffte im Lande werde sich dies “wie von selbst ergeben”). Unfortunately, as Jacob candidly admitted, during their time together in Israel there were upheavals (Umbrüche) that broke them by bringing conflict after conflict that kept revolving around the religious-spiritual axis of Jewish existence (die auch uns brachen und dies brachte Konflikt über Konflikt, die sich immer wieder um die eine Achse drehten: um

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die jüdische Existenz als religiös-spirituelle). The turmoil with the material ways that Judaism was embodied, the “fleshly Israel,” led Jacob to embrace the abstract or disembodied ideal of the “invisible Israel.” Hence, instead of being able to swim safely in the newly established country, they were psychically drained, forced to steer the ship rudderless because the law did not present itself as an intrinsic way of life (Lebensform) but something oversized (überförmlich) imposed from the outside (von aussen aufgesetzt), a sanctifying ritual (heiligend rituell) that violated its sanctifying power (heiligende Macht).36 These comments corroborate Christoph Schmidt’s conclusion that Taubes’s political theology is “both against Zionist sovereignty and against Jewish orthodox aspirations for a halachic society!”37 In the final analysis, Jacob believed that he found a homeland in Israel, and yet he grumbled that it was no home and not even a homeland (ich fand Heimat, aber kein Heim und sie nicht einmal Heimat). Moreover, he acknowledged that even though he was apprehensive of the danger of tearing Susan from her roots in America and leading her into a “wandering life” (Wanderleben), he calculated that in spite of everything, he was certain they belonged in Israel “because in this country (in all the chaos) we can create a community” (wir gehören hierher, trotz allem was dagegen spricht, weil in diesem Lande [in all dem Chaos] wir als Gemeinschaft schaff en können). To be sure, the community was to be based on the “truth of unbelief” (Wahrheit des Unglaubens), but such a truth, as precarious as it might be, was still superior to a religious community grounded only on social foundations (der besser ist als eine nur auf gesellschaftlichen Fundamenten stehende religiöse “community”). The great risk of normalizing the ritualistic-halakhic practice of Judaism in the holy land was the possibility of the tradition becoming a “political religion.” The only defense against such a politicization was to advocate that the ultimate rationale of the religion was to be sought in existence as such and not in politics. The social conflict notwithstanding, Jacob maintained a modicum of optimism in his suggestion that the remnant of the Jewish nation in Israel may be compared to a seed that must perish before it bears fruit.38 In an undated letter to Bergmann, but that was likely written sometime in 1951, Jacob elaborated on his hope that the Zionist renewal of the state would not be concerned primarily with the “preservation of the Jews or the Jewish nation” but with the establishment of the “Kingdom of God,” that is, the

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political entity that could fulfill the mission appropriate to the fact that the Jewish Volk as such is a non-Volk, a people whose peoplehood is universalistic in its particularity.39 This perspective seems to be reflected in Susan’s literary fragment entitled “Notes for the Return.” Framed as a dialogue between Ezra and Esther as they were riding a bus to Jerusalem, Susan wrote: The promised land is not a piece of earth he said to his wife. —What then? She laughed. A piece of sky? An idea? —It’s the community of the just, the saints.40

Just as Jacob had written that the virtue of Israel was that it was a place in which a community could be created, Susan similarly diminished the topographical aspect of the state and avowed that the promised nature of the land is related to the possibility that it could serve as the habitation to nurture the community of the just. Despite her efforts to support Jacob by imagining the possibility of settling in Israel, based not only on the desire to be together but on a genuine sentimentality regarding the holiness of the land and the sanguinity that it might serve as a potential home,41 we can cull from Susan’s letters consternation about the uncertainty and the instability of the socio-political situation in the newly formed state. Consider the remarks of Susan from a letter written to Jacob on May 4, 1952. Swayed by Hannah Arendt’s warning that it would be “sheer madness” for the two of them “to remain in Israel without U.S. papers,” Susan confronted Jacob, I hope you will consider whether you are really inwardly decided to be shut in within a crazy frontier in a totally unpredictable + uncontrollable situation. I am exasperated with paradoxes. I appreciate the security implied in a job at the H.U. but in the context of the general situation this security is a joke.42

Beyond worrying for their safety, some letters proclaim Susan’s ambivalence about the putative merit of modern Jewish nationalism on realistic and idealistic grounds. Suggestively, on November 24, 1950, Susan wrote to Jacob that in Israel she “experienced a positive hopelessness because hope stood there only raped at every turn. Here there is a sheer hope-less-ness, hope

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cannot even form itself.”43 Hopelessness characterized Susan’s experience in both Israel and the United States, but the latter yielded more dejection insofar as the diasporic hopelessness was predicated on the fact that hope could not even take shape, whereas in the holy land the hopelessness resulted from the hopefulness constantly being assaulted by the threat of the Jewish state “bringing about a new era of terror,” characterized as rape, which is to be distinguished from the ritual fetishism tied to mourning the destruction of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazi savagery.44 On December 26, 1950, Susan disconsolately expressed concern that the “bad ones” had gained the patrolling power in Israel, and she wondered if it were not feasible for a resistance to develop so that the new political entity would learn a lesson “from the history of the rise of police-states.”45 In time, Susan would answer her own question with a resounding pessimism about the dream of Zionist utopianism, as is shown clearly in the letter to Jacob from January 19, 1952: The existence of the Jewish state may improve the status of jews all over the world, personally it makes me feel ill at ease. Unless, the state means the renunciation of the jew’s religious pretensions as a group. But it doesn’t mean that. The devil is a master at “syntheses”.46

Here it is pertinent to mention an exchange between Jacob and Susan regarding the lingering impact of the carnage of the Holocaust on the state. In a letter written from Jerusalem on January 7, 1952, Jacob remarked that the country of Israel was “deeply troubled” because the government was negotiating for reparations from Germany, and in the process, pictures of the concentration camps revealed how grave was the wound inflicted on the Jewish people. In a personal vein, Jacob confessed that these horrors gave him pause about moving around the elevated places (Höhen) of German philosophy. Jacob candidly and emotively concluded, The events of National Socialism are part of the cross of our time and they also speak to us. I still stand without a shadow of an answer—all my compass is destroyed because the rift between “Europe” and my people is a rift that is through me. It is easy for those in the church!47

Several days later, on January 13, Susan addressed the point by offering her reflections on the Marxist logic of the philosopher György Lukács:

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There can be no “third way” between Idealism and Materialism; Idealism failed, it is false; any point of view in which the ideality of the external world can be admitted is false and dangerous. My logic is even cruder; my criterion of judgement for any theory or point of view is whether the new kind of terrorism can or cannot be admitted on the ground of its presuppositions. Perhaps we are not yet able fully to comprehend the nature of this new terror; but so much I know: it is not just “another Jewish persecution” (the Jewish reaction to the KZ experience is understandable but false); one of its main characteristics is to surpass the callous brutality of “brute nature” not out of “brutishness” but for sublime ends. The end may justify the means for god—and then god and Moloch are one—but not for man . . . And on the very concrete point of what men living in the same community may or may not do against one another—in the name of any “collective body”—prof. Lukacs is as evasive as prof. Heidegger. Heid. must endorse anything if the “holy openness of the Open, opens itself to it.”48

Admittedly, Susan’s jarring assertion that the Jewish reaction to the experience of the concentration camps is “understandable but false” strikes the ear as insensitive. However, her point was that to comprehend this incomprehensible terror, we must move beyond focusing on the ruthlessness directed only at one ethnos—just another Jewish persecution—lest we succumb to the allure of arguing that a sublime end justifies an abhorrent means. To concentrate on the Jewishness of this cataclysm is, in a perverse way, to reify the distorted logic buttressing Nazi antisemitism and its focus on Jewish ethnocentrism and the purported degradation of the Gentile. Such a tactic would effectively efface the difference between God and Moloch, but it is an unacceptable option for the moral struggle that human civilization must continuously wage.49 This stance, moreover, would be homologous to the amoral position of Heidegger according to which holiness is determined solely by the criterion of the openness of the open. In the wake of the extermination of millions of Jews by the Nazis, and the establishment of the modern state of Israel to serve as security against any future catastrophe of this magnitude, Susan boldly insisted in the letter to Jacob written on January 17–18, 1952,

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the center of the “crisis” is not in the “Jewish problem”: the question is not posed, nor can it be solved within Judaism. Retreat into the clan, into national enthusiasm, preoccupation with national problems, is an evasion, because we were not only the “victims” but the accomplices as well of European history.50

The valor shown in this cautionary evaluation of the ethnonationalism promulgated by the state of Israel—evocative of the premonition of Arendt that the ideology undergirding Zionism as a political response to antisemitism could become itself the Jewish version of European colonial imperialism preoccupied with statehood and would thus fail to achieve the goal of establishing a national entity wherein the Jew would be exemplary of the need to foster diversity and tolerance51—surely was rare the time it is was uttered, but it can still be deemed atypical in its intrepid and daring honesty. At the most basic level, it is obvious that the Holocaust was more than a Jewish problem from the fact that a myriad of non-Jews were slaughtered as a consequence of the Nazi cruelty and disregard for humanity. But the philosophical import of Susan’s point is more far-reaching. To think of the Holocaust as a Jewish problem is misguided for two primary reasons. First, the moral and political challenges raised by this historical event cannot be resolved wholly within the parameters of Judaism, and second, to categorize it in this hypernationalistic way obfuscates the fact that the Jews were accomplices in the drama of European history and not merely its victims. This is not meant to raise even a scintilla of doubt about the innocence of the Jewish martyrs or to distrust the unjustifiable nature of their suffering. It does, however, complicate the story by shifting the character of the tragedy from a parochial to a more universal understanding of Jewishness as it pertains to the ravages of the second world war. More importantly, Susan’s point was that focusing predominantly on the Jewish nature of the tragedy invariably validates the exclusionary tendencies of the state of Israel, which over time have led to the constant emphasis on maintaining political autonomy, territorial self-determination, and tyrannical control over a large portion of the population of Palestinian Arabs.52 In this regard, Susan anticipated more recent Zionist historiography that has pinpointed a Holocaust-centrism in Israeli society, instigating the rationale to defend the despotic mistreatment

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and occupation of the other in the name of national security,53 a danger that has recently been used to sanction the invocation of the cultural need to forget what has been provocatively dubbed Holocaust messianism.54 Susan gave voice to the potentially perilous correlation of the bloodshed of the Shoah and the existence of the Zionist state: the overly nationalistic emphasis of the former inevitably vindicates the overly nationalistic emphasis of the latter. Perhaps the most profound trepidation expressed about the moral implications of the nationalistic drive of Zionism can be culled from the letter Susan wrote to Jacob on February 26–27, 1952: If there is one thing that draws me to that part of the world it is the land, a harsh and obscene and inhuman land, whose cruelty, indifference and silences haunt me, so that I would like to return again and again and be refused again and again the secret of the sphynx. Therefore I hate all the more the willful vision of a people that is driving out the silences, and is resolved to conquer the desert in order to realize their will “to be a people”. . . . Misery and injustice may be the lot of man; but a programmatic misery and planned injustice is the worst of all; one cannot breathe one can neither revolt nor consent because everything is “necessary”. One is robbed even of the knowledge of the senselessness of misery and the stupidity of injustice because all the evils are essential for the realization of the ideal. The experiment may succeed, but can the people worship any other god than the one that created them as a people, can they do otherwise than to defy their success? They will be like all the other peoples, only more proud and pretentious.55

From this extraordinary passage we learn not only about Susan’s attitude to the country of Israel but also about her psychological constitution. The very harshness of the land—experienced as obscenity and inhumanity—is what drew her to it so that she could be repeatedly rejected. I assume the reference to the mythical sphinx is meant to underscore the inscrutable but treacherous riddle that is Israel. Ambivalent about the nationalist objective of Zionism, Susan expressed her contempt for the Jews whose willful vision is to conquer the desert in order to realize the will to be a people, that is, to be a political entity like all other modern nation-states.

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In a lyric that Susan included in the letter to Jacob written from Paris in May 1952, she criticized the mechanized effort of the inhabitants of Israel to dominate the land: Let us go to Galilee + watch the lilies grow —Do lilies grow in Galilee? —There are no lilies in Galilee, Oh, no. With a hey + a ho the bulldozers big Build Babel on Galilee’s shore —there are probably no bulldozers either in Galilee but the spirit of bulldozers (technic).56

Susan bewailed the disappearance of the lilies from the Galilee. This image may have been inspired by Jesus’s reference to the “lilies of the field” (Matthew 6:28, Luke 12:27), but in Susan’s case, the specific example of this wildflower, the Lilium candidum—sometimes offered as the translation of shoshannim (Song of Songs 5:13, 6:2)57 or in the singular shoshannah (2 Chronicles 4:5), coincidentally Susan’s Hebrew name—represents vegetation more generally. Hence, the hyperbolic language served as a denunciation of those who would build a tower of Babel—the cipher for the industrialized state—on the shores of the Galilee, the conquest of nature by the machinations of humanity. The reference at the end to “technic” and the “spirit of bulldozers” is reminiscent of Heidegger’s reproach of technology in Die Frage nach der Technik (1953), and even more specifically, the distinction he made between the unfolding of the essence of technology and the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.58 From Susan’s comment we can presume that she considered the spirit of technology even more damning than the tools of technology. It is worth recalling the following criticism of Marx offered in her dissertation: The major task of separating the technical mastery of nature put at man’s disposal through capitalism from capitalist economy, blinded Marx to the dehumanizing factors in technology itself. But technology as developed by bourgeois society embodies its particular criteria of value. Time and effort saving devices, standards of precision, speed, efficiency, uniformity and exchangeability are exigencies of capitalistic

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commodity production which come to define the standard of life and aspirations of modern society.59

Based on this Marxian analysis, Susan summarized Weil’s analysis60 of the structure of the modern industrial bureaucracy and the technological mode of production in a manner that could be applied plausibly to herself: The growth of bureaucratic power and the development of big industry are two complementary aspects of the same process: the mechanization of the entire sphere of economic and administrative activity through the specialization and division of labor, and the consequent marshalling of all human forces in the service of the operation of an impersonal system, whose complexity eludes the intelligence of the individuals whose activity maintains it.61

Given Susan’s obvious disapproval of the corrosive effects of technology, the coercive consequences of bureaucratization, and the exploitation of the industrialization of mass society, it is all the more relevant that she viewed the modern state of Israel as yet another example of the capitalistic commodification of culture. The audacity brandished by Susan in her condemnation of the programmatic misery and the planned injustice—in both the ecological and the intersubjective spheres—generated by the fledgling country is notable. The failings of the Jewish people in Israel cannot be excused by appeal to the fact that this is the inexorable lot of humankind. In pursuit of the goal for self-sufficiency, acts of immorality, indecency, and environmental abuse are readily justified. Susan acquiesced that the experiment of building the state might succeed, but she predicted that it would come at a great cost as Zionist ideology might very well morph into a form of idolatry. In the process of worshipping the God who made them into a distinct and holy nation—the theological raison d’être offered to justify the establishment of the state—the Jewish people will become just like all other peoples, albeit prouder and more pretentious. A disparaging analysis that inauspiciously proved to be prescient.

Possessing the Home That Is No Homeland Early on, as I noted above, Susan was willing to entertain the possibility of returning to Israel in order to reunite with Jacob. However, the willingness

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to accommodate Jacob eventually waned, and Susan expressed unequivocally her resolve not to return to Israel. As she adamantly wrote to Jacob sometime in February 1952, “About Israel—no, no, no . . . Why do you want to jump in a volcano? The ‘world’ is hard + bad—but not so hard + not so bad. It is the helplessness I fear.”62 Quite a divergence from the attitude expressed a few years before when she distinguished the holy land as the geographical locality with the greatest hope for the future, the place of multiple colors as opposed to the monochromatic nature of other countries.63 By this point, an utter helplessness with respect to Israel had replaced any morsel of hope that Susan had tried to maintain in the first year of her marriage. In the letter to Jacob written on April 11, 1952, she elaborated on her reluctance to emigrate to Israel, for the sake of her own well-being as well as Jacob’s, due to what she considered the pathological nature of the academic scene in Jerusalem, signaling out Scholem’s machinations as particularly pernicious: I could not force you in October not to return to Jerusalem and it is not in my power now to make decisions for you. My decision is clear + has been clear since a year I’ll repeat it if you like for the n’th + last time: NO. . . . I have no intention to return to Jerusalem under the present conditions; moreover the bitterness of the past three years because of material difficulties, the apartment, the borrowing + humiliation, because of Scholem’s manoeuverings + the neurotic, oppressive relations with the “university” because of time-strength- and health-devouring hardship where no one lifted a finger to help us—because the bitterness that I feel for this reckless + stupid waste—Jerusalem is in general out of the question for me. I must say the following however: Jerusalem may have its “advantages” but I do not think you are able to exploit these; you are emotionally bound to the whole pathological set up from Scholem to the general belly-button-worship atmosphere.64 It can only end in a catastrophy. I am always ready to “consider” + “hope”. But the last three years prove to me that Jerusalem is not the soil where you will grow (+ certainly not mine).65

Several other letters disclose her aversion to Scholem. Thus, in the aforementioned letter written directly to him on November 8, 1950, Susan commented,

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I cannot imagine that you should direct your demonic influences upon such unworthy subject as myself, however, I cannot otherwise account for a) rumours that have come to my ear through no material agency b) my terrible nostalgia for Jerusalem66 c) my longing to learn Hebrew— with some secret motive of seeking admission into the esoteric doctrines.67

The three reasons enumerated by Susan to explain her writing to Scholem are intriguing: first, she was perturbed by rumors related to her relationship with Jacob; second, she was motivated by her nostalgia for Jerusalem; and third, she desired to learn Hebrew so that she would be capable of engaging the secret teachings of the tradition. Toward the conclusion of the letter, Susan thanked Scholem for his help and for his exceptional kindness, and noted that it was an honor to Jacob and to herself that he would have the opportunity to study with Scholem, but what is most significant is her being driven to write such letter in which she forthrightly referred to Scholem’s “demonic influences.”68 In a letter to Jacob written on December 2, 1950, Susan amplified her condemnation by noting that Scholem’s remark on my letter “that I seem to be having a good time” is silly and an unworthy comment on what I wrote on Jerusalem. Anyway, wherever I go I hear of the bad impression of a big-mouthed chauvinism he left behind in N.Y. So I am not alone in my feeling toward him.69

Apart from loathing the academic scene in Jerusalem, Susan, together with Jacob, harbored the fear that the state of Israel could provide the pretext to justify political power theologically under the guise of religious necessity.70 Consider her remark in a letter from October 26, 1950, after having finished Arthur Koestler’s novel Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment (1946). Recognizing that the circumstances in Israel-Palestine would probably worsen as the immigration of Jews increased, she lamented that “the only gnostic answer to history is to bathe one’s self in blood,” a calculation that she startlingly linked to the proclamation of the “war-cries” in Deuteronomy 32:42. The repetitiveness underlying the realization that “nothing changes”

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confirms the futility of history and its inability to foster its own redemption.71 In the subsequent chapter, I will explore in more detail Susan’s gnostic repudiation of history, but suffice it to say at this juncture that her judgment that the only gnostic answer to history is to bathe one’s self in blood implies that inasmuch as the historical arena cannot produce its own meaningful resolution, the resultant liability is that the mayhem of war could be invoked as a justifiable means to deal with one’s enemies. Let me add that the gnostic disavowal did not mean that Susan advocated for a morose avowal of death over life—although we know tragically that this was her eventual fate. In the end, she could not uphold her own exhortation that life must be affirmed in spite of—or rather precisely on account of—its “transitory shelters, possessions and defences.”72 Belief in a divine force that is “witness and protector of the holy marriage,” as opposed to the “supreme indifference” to faithfulness on the part of Dionysius, is not lacking entirely in her worldview, but it is not the traditional deus ex machina.73 Susan’s gradual distancing from Israel and Zionism very much turned on the viability of what is often celebrated as the Jewish return to history in the second half of the twentieth century as is substantiated in the following comment to Jacob: I must confess that I am very far from “Jerusalem” in many respects. My problem is how the center of man’s humanity can be rescued from history: how history can be “denied”, (that is how the view that man realizes his specifically human, spiritual possibility in history can be denied) without a gnostic denial of the world as such and without a naturalistic denial of man’s spiritual, a- or trans-natural being. “Israel” insofar as it is taken to be seriously (insofar as it is not an “Algiers” where one may start, as Camus, but where one doesn’t go if not for very private reasons) has already decided in favour of “history”; now it needs men to back its decision with the corresponding “ideology”. Not me.74

Notwithstanding the fact that Susan situated her position about history between the gnostic denial of the world and the naturalistic denial of supernaturalism, the view she proffered is closer in tenor to the former as is attested in her stated wish to rescue humanity from history. Precisely the desire to be released from the vortex of historical contingencies is why she was disheartened

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with Israel’s having decided already in favor of history. Although the political gesture was reinforced by the Zionist creed that Susan rejected, the establishment of the modern state as an affirmation of history is a logical outcome of what she identified as the “historical obsession” whose source lies in Judaism. Astonishingly, Susan went on to say that this fixation, while naïve and optimistic for the Jews, is what drove the Occident into nihilism, and hence there is an intrinsic correlation with respect to what has happened between the healthy, if crude, self-glorification of the children of Israel and the tortured historical mysticism of Heidegger. The history of the Jew in the Occident may be one of torture but the history of the Occident itself is self-torture; the jew has a problem only within the Occident, once “at home” he is content with himself: The Occident is problematic to itself.75

The common denominator that conjoins the Jews and Heidegger is the esteem accorded to history and the torture that ensues therefrom. However, there is a critical difference. In the case of Judaism, the torture comes from the external occidental power and thus when the Jew is at home—which, paradoxically, means when the Jew accepts the itinerant nature of being homeless and thereby rejects any nationalistic sovereignty as a legitimate expression of autochthony—the problem dissipates, whereas in the case of Heidegger, exemplifying the Occident more generically, the torture is selfinflicted and irresolvable because the nationalism becomes determinative of the destiny of a particular people concretized in time and space. Heidegger’s historical mysticism—elsewhere designated by the German Geistesgeschichtemystik76—encapsulates the mystification of history as the domain that imparts meaning to human finitude. Responding to Susan in his letter from January 27, 1952, Jacob wrote: The historical mysticism of Heidegger is really “tortured” but, you are right in the torture of the Occident. History I would think is the realm of the finite spirit: “nature” (if such an abstraction is at all possible) has no history and the absolute spirit neither: therefore it is “absolut”. But the concrete spirit is “historical” in the paradoxal sense history is meant in since the revelation of the God of History.77

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Significantly, Jacob ignored Susan’s critique of Israel implied in her juxtaposition of the historicized self-glorification of the Jewish people and Heidegger’s historical mysticism. Not only did he overlook her main point, but he opposed it by repeating the more traditional view that history is the stage upon which the divine revelation is enacted. For Susan, Zionism is another link in the chain of historicism coupled with the theistic conception of a just God exercising providence, an idea that has prevailed from biblical times to the present. The matter is enunciated lucidly in Susan’s comment prompted by her reading Camus’s The Rebel: Camus’ attack on the O.T. notions of history and a tyrant god (which is absolutely true from the point of view of the non-jew, since the friendship of the God of Israel his mercy and lovingkindness extend only to his chosen people, the other peoples serve only as an instrument with which god proves his point to the favoured people; to the other peoples this god must remain, even with the mediation of Christ, a “step-father”) is not on a gnostic basis, but on the contrary on the basis of a man who does not want to be driven into a gnostic position which is the consequence of the O.T. religion imposed upon the world. And if Camus uses the symbols of the O.T. to describe the state of terrorism of the Hitler regime it is not out of “anti-semitism”, the massacre of the jews being among other atrocities the occasion for his book, but because the O.T. notions of imposed divine law, of the ultimacy of history and the divine justification of historical success as the ultimate value, made into a “universal” religion has led us to the edge of doom. . . . Let us guard the distinction—if there is one—between a divine justice above ours and the divine justice below our human justice. And if there is none, let us speak only of human justice. But isn’t justice the primary concern of the O.T.? And isn’t the religious contribution of the O.T. exactly the revelation of the God of justice, a God who is just and wants men to be just?78

The passage is another illustration of the sharpness of intellect and the boldness of spirit exhibited by Susan. She conceded that Camus’s characterization of the God of ancient Israel as a tyrant is confirmed by the ethnocentric privileging of the Jews over all other nations. Even with the mediation of

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Christ, the God of Israel is at best a stepfather to non-Jews. Intriguingly, Susan surmised that Camus’s attack on the view of history and the tyranny of God espoused in Hebrew scripture is a consequence of his wish not to be driven to the gnostic rejection of history, which is an outcome of the coercion of the religious position of the ancient Israelites on the world. More remarkable is Susan’s explanation that Camus’s use of symbols from the Old Testament to describe the terrorism of Hitler is not due to antisemitism, but rather is based on the fact that the notions of the imposed divine law, the ultimacy of history, and the divine justification of historical success as the ultimate value have turned the biblical faith into a universal religion that has brought humanity to the brink of disaster. The argument proffered here is in accord with Susan’s claim that the evils of Western society in the twentieth century should be traced to the attempt begun by Christianity to universalize the God of the Old Testament and thereby obscure the tangibility of the particular. As she wrote to Camus on February 2, 1952, The “root of all evil” is not so much the notion of a personal god, which may be the authentic experience of a people, though neither you nor I share it; it is rather the dogmatization of this idea into a world religion, whereby those to whom the experience of a personal god is simply alien, are forced to assume any variety of distorted attitudes in relation to him.79

On this score, Hitlerism is just a recent, albeit exceedingly barbaric, example of this much older Christian tendency to universalize the particularity of Judaism and thereby divest it of its concreteness. The negative aspersions cast on history are conspicuous and despite Susan’s attempt to distance that negativity from the gnostic renunciation of time, it is hard not to see a considerable similarity between her view and the one she rejected. In the conclusion, however, she does affirm that the true contribution of ancient Israelite religion was the emphasis placed on the righteous deity who demands justice from humanity. The prominence bestowed on divine rectitude demarcates the irreconcilable difference between the biblical and the gnostic perspectives. In a letter to Jacob written on January 25, 1952, Susan leveled the following criticism against Camus and Weil:

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But Judaism exists and the meaning of its holy scripture has been so radically modified by centuries of interpretation . . . that when Camus and S. Weil try to take the text “literally” they in fact ally themselves with the worst of Zionist zealots who make the bloodthirsty passages of the Torah their slogans. An objective attack or defense of the Torah based on the “letter” is as questionable, if not impossible, as an objective evaluation of the Veda or Babylonian books. S. Weil is guilty of both absurdities. If there can be any understanding, not to say judgement, of Judaism it must be in its historical totality.80

For our purposes what is especially noteworthy is Susan’s assertion that the hermeneutical mistake of reading scripture literally is akin to the bellicosity of the Zionist zealots, who justify their militarism by making the bloodthirsty passages of the Torah their slogans, a proclivity that has only increased exponentially in the course of the decades as the augmentation of Israel’s political and martial prowess has created a greater gap between herself and the Palestinians. Writing directly to Camus, Susan expanded on his error of interpreting references to the militant and cruel God of the Old Testament in their plain sense, which is again equated with the Zionist belligerence: By insisting on a literal interpretation and by ignoring jewish history and the interpretations it has developed, you and Simone Weil actually ally yourself with the most zealot of zionist terrorist [sic] who used the primitive battle cries of the Bible for their war slogans. The same terrorists professed themselves atheists, rejected judaism as a religion, since despite of their propagandist abuse of the Bible, their inspiration was not as much biblical as national-socialist. The two are not identical, or even similar as you seem to suggest. I might add that the religious jews of Palestine, those who claim to live by the word of the Bible, have to this day refused to recognize the State of Israel and have chosen to endure the greater deprivations rather than take out their identity cards without which they cannot buy rationed food, clothing and other necessary articles, but whose acceptance would be equal to acceptance of citizenship in the State.81

Susan did not hold back in her criticism of Zionist terrorists, who justify their

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penchant for war by interpreting scripture literally even though they were atheists and rejected the religion of Judaism. The motivation for their warlike predilection is ostensibly biblical but in truth it is national-socialist. Camus and Weil incorrectly equate nationalism and religious fervor. Uncharacteristically, Susan attributed a positive quality to the devout Jews who refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist establishment of the secular state, praising them for standing up for their principles and not becoming citizens even at the expense of forgoing material benefits. Needless to say, with the passage of time, the members of ultra-Orthodox communities that have rejected the state—in some cases avoiding compulsory military service—have done so without relinquishing the governmentally authorized assistances. However, it is revealing that in 1952, Susan considered it an act of civil disobedience on the part of Jews to oppose the state.

3 Gnosis and the Covert Theology of Antitheology Heidegger, Apocalypticism, and Gnosticism Every man can have his own peculiar truth; and yet it is always the same. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

Perhaps even only my errors still have an impelling power in an age overloaded with correct things and for the longest time lacking in truth. —Martin Heidegger, Ponderings V, §150

What today is not “theology” (besides theological chatter)? —Jacob Taubes, Letter to Armin Mohler, February 14, 1952

In this chapter, I will focus on Susan Taubes’s engagement with Heidegger in comparison to the interpretation that may be elicited from Jacob Taubes. Needless to say, far more attention has been paid to Jacob, and while there are obvious reasons why this has been the case, the fact is that Susan exhibited intellectual and spiritual depth that is well deserving of increased scholarly focus. Her gnostic interpretation of Heidegger is nuanced and innovative and should not be considered ancillary or subordinate. For instance, Willem Styfhals noted en passant, “Susan Taubes lived in Paris for several years and was also interested in the Gnostic features of modern thought.”1 The letters of Susan to Jacob, which spanned the years 1950–1952,2 and the one 128

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major essay on Heidegger that she published in 1954, indicate that she was more than just “interested” in the gnostic features of modern thought. She was passionately consumed with the topic, and especially with understanding Heideggerian thought from this vantage point.3 Beyond elucidating a figure whose way of reading Heidegger has gained purchase in more recent years, a close examination of Susan’s approach to this subject will shed light on some of the more important insights that may be educed from the writings of Jacob on Heidegger, Gnosticism, and theology.

Gnosis as Jewish Heresy and Self-Estrangement in Heidegger’s Fundamentalontologie In “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism” (1954), and again in “The Absent God” (1955), the initial note proclaims that Susan Taubes, the Josiah Royce Fellow in Radcliffe College, was “preparing her doctoral dissertation on the theological elements in Heidegger’s philosophy.”4 As I noted in the Introduction, this plan was never executed, and in its place Susan wrote a thesis, completed in 1956 and under the supervision of Tillich, on the political and religious thought of Simone Weil.5 It is logical to presume that the study on the gnostic foundations of Heidegger’s nihilism should be viewed as the urzelle of the preliminary proposal. Additionally, the letters between Susan and Jacob well attest that she was committed to retrieving Heidegger’s atheological theology through utilizing symbols and images culled from ancient Gnosticism. Consider, for example, the following comment in the letter dated November 12, 1950: “Read Heidegger ‘Über den Humanismus’ in ‘Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit’—till I reached p. 76 ‘Das “Sein”—das ist nicht Gott . . . ’ I thought he was in the end gnostic—the purest gnostic I have read.”6 In the letter from November 26, 1950, Susan mused about her next project, “Perhaps a ‘pseudo’-paper: ‘Existentialism and its relation to older trends of thought: Heidegger and the gnostic myth.’”7 We hear of this paper again in letters from November 27,8 December 149 and 16,10 and in more detail in a letter from December 25: As I wrote to you I finished the existentialism paper: a general presentation of Sartre and Heidegger . . . a discussion of the atheistic ground of ontology and thus the pseudo-humanistic traditional metaphysics of

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the judeo-christian source of existential thinking, the possible contradictio in adjectivo in “existential ontology” where Heidegger in Sein und Zeit seems to be living . . . that finally ends in gnosis.11

In her published essay on Heidegger, Susan elaborated on the assumption that his philosophy should be interpreted within the frame of reference of the gnosis of a covert theology.12 Relying on a number of scholars for her knowledge of Gnosticism—including Simone Pétrement and Henri-Charles Puech13—she was influenced mostly by Hans Jonas’s Heideggerian reading.14 Before delving into this approach to Heidegger, it behooves me to note that there is ample evidence from her correspondence with Jacob that over time Susan struggled with the use of the term “gnosis” to categorize Heidegger’s thinking. One of the keenest articulations of this doubt, and a clue to what may have been the impetus to forgo pursuing her original dissertation topic,15 is found in the letter to Jacob written in Zürich on April 20, 1952: As for my “thesis” it breaks down insofar as I am not competent to show the “gnostic” elements in Heidegger in their total historical setting. H. writing in the 20th C. after the history of the gnostic-self* [*as it passes through Mysticism, Idealism, Descartes, Hegel.] and the secularization of the gnostic [apocalyptic?, JT] eschatology in Marxism (partly already in Protestantism) and having to come to terms with historicism, [(]psychologism, biologism) lives in a different horizon than the early gnostics who actually experienced the “newness” of a revelation, who stood at the beginning of a new era. H’s, is an end-vision—a catastrophic vision. In the later works a variety of “gnostic” motifs are tangled up without coherence. φύσις becomes identical with the eschatological Sein = world history = history of Occidental metaphysics. The history of metaphysics is the history of nihilism. “Das Sein beirrt das Seiende”16 and at the same time it is the light of truth. Man is the “Hirt des Seins”17 but this Sein is a monster in the image of Prof. H. going forever astray on in Holzwege.18

The thesis to which Susan referred is, of course, the subject of the study she did publish on the gnostic foundations of Heidegger’s nihilism. Initially, she contended that the breakdown was due to her incompetence to tackle the topic,

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but it becomes clear that, in fact, the uncertainty was related to what may be derived from Heidegger rather than to her own inadequacies. In particular, she demarcated the difference between ancient Gnosticism as a revelatory phenomenon, which tenders the hope for something novel to emerge, and Heidegger’s end-vision, that is, his eschatology,19 a morbid theorizing of the end that revokes the prospect of redemption whether in history or from history. Heidegger’s “theologizing” the world of anxiety and error into which we are thrown only capitulates to that world and, in doing so, commits blasphemy against the logos. However, disorder is possible because there is order rather than absolute chaos, and hence the impossible annihilates itself in the possibility of its impossibility.20 In criticizing the nihilism elicited from Gnosticism and Heidegger, Susan offered an alternative eschatology that is noneschatological in nature, an eschatology that is not dependent on retreating from the world because there is no salvation or truth, but because in moments of tranquility and deeper spiritual serenity, we can be freed from infatuation with the present and experientially access the presence of past and future.21 In the letter to Jacob written sometime in the latter part of April 1952 from Paris, Susan reported that Hannah Arendt told her about a lecture from Jonas at Columbia University on the gnostic elements in Heidegger of which she was “very suspicious.”22 Susan then related her own thoughts on the matter: This bloody thesis is certainly giving me a headache. I don’t care whether the “drama of self” is gnosis or a new “schmusis” between Profs. Bultman—Jonas—Heidegger . . . Bultman + Jonas write exegeses on Christian + gnostic texts using Heideggerian categories + if these exegeses read like H’s philosophy—sometimes verbatim, maybe H’s philosophy is also an “exegesis”. But the “Heid. categories” are certainly a re-interpretation of theological categories whether this re-interpretation can be called “gnostic” is disputable + rather a question of choice. It’s certainly not the old visionary gnosis* [*and I think the gnosis is essentially visionary rather than “nihilistic” (the nihilism comes after the vision evaporates like a soap-bubble) therefore “atheistic theology”23 doesn’t work—nor is it gnostic + the gnosis is not the key to the atheistic re-interpretation of theological categories in Sein und Zeit.]24

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The critical point in this sweeping passage is Susan’s unambiguous contrast between the nihilism of Heidegger’s atheistic reinterpretation of theology and the visionary import of the ancient gnosis. Notwithstanding this misgiving, other letters confirm her use of the word “gnostic” to refer to Heidegger’s thought, the view she took when she wrote the 1954 essay. On May 4, 1952, Susan wrote to Jacob, “I am sweating like a dog on the thesis; it was easy while I was swimming with Heidegger; to swim against him involves more than ‘exposing’ his mythos, one must come to terms with another ‘frame’ i.e. the whole transcendental philosophy + Old man Kant. . . . The roots of H’s mythos reach into the gnostic experience but they pass through Kant + German Idealism.”25 The articulation here is unequivocal: no matter how indebted Heidegger was to German philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the foundation of his mythos lay in what Susan has dubbed the gnostic experience. Most relevant to the gnostic interpretation of Heidegger—or the Heideggerian interpretation of gnosis26 —was his use of the themes of thrownness and homelessness to explain Dasein’s estrangement in the world. In Susan’s own words, “Both for Heidegger and for the gnosis, thrownness expresses, beyond the manner of the self’s entrance into the world, the essential violence of the self’s being-in-the-world.”27 One of the more fascinating articulations of this perspective occurs in the letter of Susan to Jacob written on January 4, 1951: Last night I typed out your letter on Heidegger, Hegel etc.; but I do not quite understand the point on history and the ἐποχή—I read the end of “Der Spruch Anaximanders [”], I understand nothing—I only smell “madness”. I try to understand it “mythologically” (and I may be on the wrong track) i.e.: any advance through “thinking” beyond the sheer, awe-full reception of the present (—as “now” and as a “gift”)—just this sky this grass at all—is going into “Errdom”: but we cannot “chose” “therefore” not to make this step because we are expelled every moment from the “ineffable”. We are thus every moment living the expulsion from Paradise. (Those who live “as if” all is all-right, i.e. who do not think that they are expelled only feast on the error.) Then H. would say that the “expulsion” happens already in the heart of Being, i.e. the “Sei-

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ende” is expelled from the “Sein”. Then the beginning of history is the casting out of the Seiende—the burying-it-out-from the “Sein” (where it “ought” to be buried?)—the ἐποχή the “Ansichhalten” the remaining in itself, the not-appearing of the Sein.28

The madness that Susan detected in the concluding part of Heidegger’s 1946 study dedicated to the saying of Anaximander—ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν29—relates

to his idiosyncratic interpretation that this dictum alludes to the ontological difference occluded by Western metaphysics, “The oblivion of being is the oblivion to the difference between being and the being [Die Seinsvergessenheit ist die Vergessenheit des Unterschiedes des Seins zum Seienden].”30 The obliviousness to being, which results from the occlusion of the ontological difference, belongs to the essence of the being that it itself conceals; this is the import of Anaximander’s contention that things simultaneously come into being and perish in accord with the law of necessity determined by the temporal order. Susan recasts the Heideggerian formulation in the traditional idiom of being expelled from Paradise. The expulsion occurs in the heart of being insofar as beings are flung from being at the beginning of history or what Heidegger called the dawn (Frühe) of the destiny of being (Geschick des Seins),31 that is, the beginning marked by the not-appearing of the being that appears. The making apparent of the inapparent—the discharge of what remains held within—is the movement of being “that expels man so that man is the being whose being is at stake on the truth (ἀ-λήθεια) of Being: who thus ‘seems’ as the center of the problem, ie. [sic] as the one who ‘rapes’. What Augustinian Gnosticism!”32 I will return to the question of Gnosticism and Heidegger, but suffice it here to take notice of the intriguing expression coined by Susan, “Augustinian Gnosticism,” a hybrid term meant to convey that, for Heidegger, to live in error is an inevitable consequence of our relation to being, since human history is marked by the tossing out of beings from being, an ontological banishment that can be formulated theologically as the continual eviction from Paradise or theopoetically as the dismissal from the ineffable. The understanding of Gnosticism as a denial of the integral meaning of

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the world and hence the need to escape therefrom underlies Susan’s comment in the letter to Jacob from April 8, 1952: “I am through with ‘gnosis’ + all otherworldliness.”33 The repudiation of history and this-worldliness is what justifies the apposition of gnosis and otherworldliness; that is, the supposition that through this knowledge the pneumatic spark is freed from its entrapment in the material realm of space and time and is restored to the pleromatic realm of immaterial light. On April 21 of the same year, Susan enlarged her discussion on the negative cosmology and the condemnation of the world implied by the salvific gnosis: “Reality” may be a problematic term but for the moment let us accept the meaning it carries within the gnosis itself: the “world” against which the gnosis laments + revolts and which it devaluates: birth, death, suffering, struggle; the blind, the lame the hungry; the oppressed are really oppressed; the squalor, anxiety + insecurity are real. Gnosis is after all a judgement on reality, + it is as a judgement on reality that it must be questioned + tested. . . . But the gnosis says “the world is bad” “the world is worth nothing”. But discontent with the world contains an implicit affirmation of strictly worldly values; in the case of Christianity most common values: a world without want, work, worry, without sickness + death; a world which is all “good”. The otherworldlyness [sic] of the gnosis is false only insofar [as] it is a cry against the harshness of the world + thus a secret yearning for a less harsh world—even an infantile yearning for a paradisic world. . . . Otherworldlyness is an ambivalent nihilism.34

Applying the hermeneutical principle that from the negative we can adduce the positive, Susan perceptively grasped—in a manner that conspicuously accords with a view proffered by Bataille35—that the gnostic negation of the world willy-nilly contains the affirmation of worldly values. The mythic positing of another world of spirit can be decoded psychoanalytically as an infantile desire for a utopian escape from the severity of this world. To the extent that otherworldliness is predicated on the disavowal of this world coupled with an avowal of the values operative in that world, it can be classified as a form of ambivalent nihilism. For Susan, it is mandatory to mature from this posture and to affirm the

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this-worldliness of the reality of our experience in all of its illusory nature. As she put it in a letter to Jacob written on January 11, 1951: I suspect and fear at times that the gnosis is sick at heart with the sickness of Christianity. Now I am not interested in an “other-world” all I care about is this world with the sky and the earth and Jacob and Susan, all the “worlds” and “non-worlds” must find “place” right here under the stars and if they cannot find their place within the “ideal unity of Reason” we must abandon Reason: Kant was not firm enough in attacking “dialectic”—all the dialectical play with unity—duality etc. is a “magic” to coerce the God.36 But shall we gain anything by “coercing”—is it not better to pray or to curse—unless we love these exquisite dark flowers of thought, unless perhaps this strange rose is as pleasant to God as his “earthly” flowers—for both are as the Indians would say “maya”.37

Gnosticism, as the Christianity it rejects, posits the otherworldliness as a way to negotiate the rejection of this world. The task before us is diametrically opposed to this world negation; the dark flowers of thought and the earthly flowers of touch are equally part of the illusion that is the sensory world. To call the physical world an illusion, however, does not mean that it is pitted against a metaphysically real world. There is no ideal of transcendence that renders the illusion illusory; to know the illusion is to be acclimated to the reality of the appearance that is apparently real because it is really apparent. Susan’s position is to be contrasted with Jacob’s appeal in Occidental Eschatology to the “revolutionary pathos of apocalypticism and Gnosis. . . . The God beyond, the God of apocalypticism and Gnosis, is by nature eschatological because he challenges the world and promises new things [das Neue verheißt].”38 Deviating from Jacob, Susan did not posit an apocalyptic-gnostic eschatology that held out the hope of a novum breaking into history. The nihilating power of gnosis opens the channel that facilitates the acceptance of the world in the unconditional conditionality of its finitude.39 Although Susan’s name is not mentioned, the conceptual background for her viewpoint regarding the prominent characteristic of Gnosticism is well summarized by Jacob in the 1971 essay “The Dogmatic Myth of Gnosticism,” a response to Hans Blumenberg’s “Conception of Reality and Potential Effect of Myth.”40

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The predominant interpretation of late ancient Gnosticism by the Bultmann school takes the Gnostic alienation from history at face value, or hermeneutically akin to its subject (and dependent on Husserl’s unhistorical, absolute phenomenology and Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein [Daseinanalyse]) had interpreted the ahistorical index of Gnostic doctrine itself unhistorically, that is, phenomenologically. But even the Gnostic negation of history arose in a particular historical constellation. The stronger the loss of reality, the more intensive does the negative consciousness of world and world-creator become, and thus the more enshrouded does the mystery of redemption become. It seems to me to be important, for an interpretation of the history of Gnosticism, to recall the connection between Gnosticism and apocalypticism.41

The criticism of the Bultmann school hinges on the claim that the ahistorical tendency of Gnosticism is treated unhistorically, that is, phenomenologically. Bracketing the accuracy of dichotomizing the historical and the phenomenological, the decisive point is Jacob’s insistence that the ahistorical representation of the gnostic worldview—typified in the assumption regarding the alienation of gnosis from history (die Geschichtsfremdheit der Gnosis) filtered through the Heideggerian inquiry into Dasein’s alienation in the world— arose in a specific historical context, which can be explained by the connection between Gnosticism and apocalypticism, a central theme in his Occidental Eschatology, as I have already intimated.42 Several years later, Jacob restates the main point of his critique in the essay “The Iron Cage and the Exodus from It, or the Dispute over Marcion, Then and Now” (1984): “Hans Jonas, in Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late Antiquity (1934), interpreted the Gnostic teachings by means of Heidegger’s Dasein analysis so that the Gnostic form of Heidegger’s philosophy itself was brought to the fore.”43 What is distinctive to Susan’s argument was the claim that there are suppressed currents of Christian theology—and, more precisely, currents of a gnostic and more esoteric nature—that come to expression in Heidegger’s antitheology: The suggestion is not so strange if we consider that his attack on Christian theology is not at all on naturalistic grounds. In fact, he accuses the Christian theological frame of being too naturalistic; the line of at-

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tack that was used against classical ontology applies to theology as well: theology still moves in a cosmological frame. . . . Heidegger’s antitheological polemic is thus directed from a more radical theological position. We must recall that Christian theology is syncretistic. We are confronted with a tradition originating in a (gnostic) Jewish heresy which not only absorbed in itself the heterogeneous elements of Hellenistic mystery cults but had to reconcile itself with systems as incompatible with each other as they were alien to itself, first with the Old Testament and then with Aristotelian metaphysics. Heidegger’s polemic is directed against the biblical and metaphysical compromise of Christian theology and is thus carrying on a secret, esoteric, heretical, “Christian” tradition.44

Anticipating recent scholarly analyses,45 Susan incisively noted that Heidegger’s antitheological stance is not only not an estrangement from Christianity, as Karl Löwith argued,46 but it is, in fact, indicative of a more radical Christology, which she related to the Jewish heresy that helped give shape to Gnosticism. Astoundingly, in his polemic against the biblical and the metaphysical rudiments of Christian theology, Heidegger was carrying on a secret Christian tradition whose heretical origins are in the soil of the eclectic Judaism of Late Antiquity.47 Susan’s theological way of reading Heidegger’s atheology is synopsized in the letter to Jacob from April 6, 1952: One thing is clear that H.’s concern is utterly theological. The major preoccupation with “Sein”—the “is” as such (instead of ‘God’)—is motivated by a theological interest—because the sense of the “is” determines the sense of “God is” therefore the “is” must first of all be thought theologically; this seems to me the tendency of the later writings, while S+Z develops the “anthropological” (—conceived in opposition to the theological) interpretation of “is” to its last consequences. However the theological interpretation of the “is” coming from this side of Seinsdenken does not bring us nearer to the living god. God is on the other side—not of the world but of the self.48

It is interesting to compare the aforecited passage with the assessment of Jacob in a letter to Susan from May 1952:

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1. Heidegger has no place for “nature”, anticosmologically . . . 2. “Hist or y of Being” has nothing to do with world history, but can only be understood as a neutralized “history of salvation.” H. is a secularized theologian in an almost naïve way, he simply “translates” the theological vocabulary. H. belongs to the faction of German Idealism before Nietzsche, who wanted to overcome the Christian (and all filiations) interpretation.49

Susan carried forward both of Jacob’s points, which he himself related to an essay by Löwith:50 that Heidegger has no real concept of nature and thus can be branded as anticosmological, and that his history of being has nothing to do with world history but should be understood as a neutralized history of salvation whence we can also designate him as a secularized theologian, who sought to translate and to transpose theological vocabulary in an effort to transcend the constraints of Christianity. Consider the somewhat more conciliatory evaluation of Heidegger’s religious sensibilities in Susan’s letter to Jacob from March 24, 1952: I am afraid the laugh is on us: “Der Feldweg” is by our Heidegger51 and in a recent talk he said that all his works are an “Attente de Dieu” and that “the child at play, the peasant at work, the soldier before death” are nearer to the “Being” than the thinker who only “dreams” of Being— and the nearest to Being is man at prayer (!). Well—I am afraid the old man will end up in the church—but at least I prefer the religiosity of prayer to that of poetry.52

The structure of the argument about Heidegger tallies with Susan’s observation in her doctoral thesis that Nietzsche strives to overcome Nihilism by exposing the roots of nihilism in the Christian idea of God as spirit. In his revaluation of values Nietzsche discovers that the Christian values and specifically Christian theistic interpretation of the world governed by personal providence is actually responsible for the devaluation of the cosmos.53

Also pertinent is the following comment of Jacob in The Political Theology of Paul, based on lectures held in Heidelberg, February 23–27, 1987:

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The same kind of appeal to Kierkegaard happens at the same time in theology and in philosophy. I can’t expound here on how Heidegger wants to subvert this and wants to neutralize the Christian in Kierkegaard; this is something the theologians have never understood, that Heidegger wanted to dig the grave of theology, but I can’t go into the Bultmannian naïvetés today, who wanted to understand natural man using Heideggerian categories and Christian man using Pauline categories. And Heidegger played along and managed in this way to make the entire theological Marburg circle into his apostles, which was no small matter. Heidegger, you see, was a tactician, a strategist of the highest order.54

Subsequently, I will return to Jacob’s understanding of Gnosticism in relation to Judaism, but what is of relevance to underline here is that despite his view that Heidegger’s philosophy in Being and Time is a radical endorsement of finitude that neutralizes the ontotheological, he strategically encouraged others to embrace his thought as the ground for their own theological ruminations. I note, in passing, that in Occidental Eschatology, there is no overt attempt to link Heidegger and Gnosticism as we find, for instance, in the aforementioned study “The Dogmatic Myth of Gnosticism.”55 It is reasonable to surmise, consequently, that this pivotal point was Susan’s innovation, although we can presume from the extant letters that her understanding of both Heidegger and Gnosticism was indebted in no small measure to Jacob’s own cogitations on these topics.56 Be that as it may, what is worthy of emphasis is that Susan’s reading Heidegger through the prism of an esoteric-gnostic current of Christianity was more than an intellectual exercise. The indication that this is so is in the demarcation of that current as originating in a Jewish heresy57—a position affirmed by a number of scholars, including Scholem, to some extent,58 and by Jacob, as we shall see, but spurned by Jonas, who argued that it would be preferable to think of Gnosticism evolving in the vicinity of or in close proximity to the intellectual-spiritual milieu of Judaism and therefore betraying the influence of Jewish structures of thought and modes of scriptural exegesis but also reacting polemically and antagonistically to other vital aspects of late-antique Judaic monotheism.59 Following the former line of thinking,

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Susan proposed that the secret and heretical tradition that fueled Heidegger’s rejection of Christian theology was a form of Jewish-Christian gnosis. The philosophical assumption undergirding this historical explanation is the belief that heresy “implies a most intimate and complex relation to orthodoxy wherein repulsion and attraction go hand in hand.”60 This statement was offered to explain the theological bedrock of Heidegger’s atheology, but it may be extended to the gnostics: the anarchic aspects of Gnosticism are, in part, anti-Jewish interpretations of Judaism,61 and, as such, they are not to be deciphered as a heterodox refutation of orthodoxy, terms that are widely inappropriate for the period when Judaism and Christianity evolved as distinct liturgical communities. The gnostic heresy disrupts the setting of impervious boundaries; the rupture ensues from a bending rather than a breaking of tradition.

Serpentine Seduction and the Paradoxical Sameness of Polarities The heretic imparts the hypernomian secret that nullification of tradition is the supreme gesture of sanctioning tradition.62 In line with this truism, we can speak of Susan’s interest in Gnosticism as providing the historical precedent for a Jewish way of undermining Judaism.63 As she put it in the letter to Jacob, dated September 15–16, 1950: It seems that wherever one raises the lid of a question the same old Gnostic serpent twists up its seductive head and gives me its key to enter the problem of the “double truth” in scientific and mythopoietic language. . . . Forgive me for being so “academic” the Muses weep when I speak so; but I listen to the serpent, for he seduced us away from the source only to seduce us back to the source. And I trust the serpent who knows the secret of the passage and who embodies the mysterious necessity wherein “the way up and the way down are the same” and the way of going hence is the way of returning; moreover this may be the only ultimately legitimate use of the copula.64

Susan availed herself of the primeval symbol of gnosis, the serpent, which endowed her with the key to gain access to the problem of the double truth of adulation and abhorrence. One is here reminded of the “double doctrine of truth” posited by Harry A. Wolfson to name the widespread belief in

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medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophical sources of two equally legitimate modes of articulating a single verity, the scriptural and the rational.65 For Susan, the doubleness signifies that the single truth can be expressed scientifically and mythopoetically. But what is the nature of that truth? This can be deduced from a more careful consideration of the symbol of the serpent. In a manner intriguingly reminiscent of Sabbatian thought wherein the serpent is identified with the savior (based on the numerological fact that the words naḥash and mashiaḥ both equal 358),66 Susan noted that the serpent assumes the paradoxical role of seducing one back to the source from which the serpent has seduced one away. To appreciate the idea communicated in these words, we must bear in mind that the two gestures are concomitant and not sequential; hence the seduction to depart is itself the seduction to return, and the seduction to return is the seduction to depart, a point substantiated by the reference to the Heraclitean maxim that the way up and the way down are one and the same.67 Most provocative is the concluding remark that the paradox that the way of going is the way of returning may be the only legitimate use of the copula. Candidly, I am not entirely certain what Susan intended by these words, but a hint is divulged by the technical definition of a “copula” as a word that links the subject of a clause to a subject complement, which may take the form of an adjective, an adverb, or a prepositional phrase. If we add to this the fact that the primary verb “be” is sometimes referred to as the copula, perhaps Susan was intimating that the serpentine wisdom of the paradoxical equivalence of ascent and descent, or of progression and regression, offers a window through which one can gaze into the mystery of being. Heidegger’s Fundamentalontologie may have been constructed on the basis of Christian luminaries, and especially the existential categories of Kierkegaard, but the theological underpinnings of the “destruction of the entire history of ontology”68 can only be understood by reference to the gnostic revolt against the harmony of human and cosmic nature. The “acosmic notion of the self”69 has a parallel in Heidegger’s Being and Time where the ontological concern is “not the Being of cosmos but the Being of self. . . . The self defies all worldly categories; it is discovered not through the world but in opposition to it.”70 Herein lies the core of the spirit of gnosis—an insurgence that has its roots in a heretical form of Judaism but whose repercussions can

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be found in the Gospel of John and some of the Pauline epistles—the belief that humanity is not at home in the cosmos, and consequently we may say of the logos of this gnosis that it is not, quite literally, of this world.71 In a letter to Jacob dated February 12, 1952, Susan shrewdly captured the logical contradiction of identifying world-denial as the central trope of Gnosticism: If the gnostic revolt is absolute it must in order to remain consistent negate the world as world, absolutely without reference to judgement; i.e. negate good as well as evil, meaning as well as absurdity, purpose as well as senselessness; in other words it must negate salvation and eschatology. But then it is no longer “gnosis”. If the analysis is right then the moving principle of the gnosis is a dialectical trick, an evasion, a self-betrayal.72

Generalizing in a way that would not be fashionable today, Gnosticism is demarcated as negating the world as world, which is to say, the world that consists of the light as well as of the dark. But if this is the case, then the negation of captivity would extend to redemption itself, and hence the gnosis would negate its own possibility as gnosis. Expanding on this theme, Susan concluded, All gnostic mythology and speculation revolve around the drama of the self, its fall and redemption. . . . The phase of self-estrangement is the dialectical point of the gnostic drama, since there strangeness reaches its climax: the strange self is estranged from itself to the strange world.73

The self’s realization of its estrangement is the first moment of recovering from the forgetfulness of itself. Nostalgia for home may initiate the excursion to discover a home, but there is no being at home that is still not part of the journey to come home.74 History, then, is the way from and at the same time the way back to the source. The way of the self into the world is represented by the notion of a fall or “thrownness”; the way through the world by erring, exile, and homelessness; the way out of the world by homesickness, remembering, and redemption.75

Gnostic soteriology entails discerning that one is born into a material world

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from which the spirit is alienated, doubly so to the extent that the embodied spirit lives in a state of agnōsia, that is, the unknowing of not knowing that one does not know, the ignorance of being ignorant, an imprisonment that leads to the estrangement from one’s own estrangement, a dislocation that engenders a feeling of dread. An echo of the gnostic motif is discernible in the following passage in A Lament for Julia: How am I to understand my own role in this tragic farce? Am I supposed to say that I am some kind of knowledgeable being? At times I have conceived myself as a heavenly spark. As a fallen angel, if you will; without going into the details, from where, how or why there has been the falling, and without fantasizing about the heavenly homeland to which I would then probably have to belong. Because since I have fallen, the plummet has completely erased my memory.76

Attaining knowledge in the tragic farce, which is the world, is dependent on envisioning oneself as a heavenly spark or a fallen angel that has descended from the celestial homeland, the memory of which has been erased by the plunge into the material body. In the continuation, Susan elaborated on the effort that this spark—rendered in various metaphorical terms but most importantly as the consciousness that has been rammed into the flesh like a nail (als wäre dieses Bewusstsein ins Fleisch gerammt worden wie ein Nagel) and thrust into the female body like being placed in a garrison (kaserniert in einem Körper, und ein Frauenkörper musste es sein)77—must undertake to “circumnavigate” the “mythological swamp” by taking on different roles and doing battle against opposing forces in order to stay sane (Verstand) as much as is possible and to maintain a state of “clear thinking” (klaren Denken), to be endlessly variable (endlos veränderlich) until it finally disappears.78

Gnosis, World Negation, and the Fallenness of Time The twofold gnostic alienation—being alienated from being alienated—is detectible in Heidegger’s interpretation of the line in Hölderlin’s elegy “Bread and Wine,” und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit, “and what are poets for in a desolate time?” Not only have the gods [die Götter] and God [der Gott] fled, but the

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radiance of divinity [der Glanz der Gottheit] is extinguished in worldhistory. The time of the world’s night is the desolate time because the desolation grows continually greater. The time has already become so desolate that it is no longer able to see the default of God as a default.79

In this state of destitution, devoid of the gods, God, and the glow of divinity, the ground that grounds being is the abyss, the Abgrund, which Heidegger identifies as the “total absence of ground” (das völlige Abwesen des Grundes).80 The disenchanted spirit, awakened by the call from the groundless ground, is not redeemed in but rather from the world. For Heidegger, the loss of the gods (Entgötterung), which he marks as one of the characteristics of modernity, does not imply a “crude atheism” or “the mere elimination of the gods” (die bloße Beseitigung der Götter). On the contrary, the loss of the gods—when viewed from the perspective of Christendom—is the “condition of indecision [Entscheidungslosigkeit] about God and the gods.” Counterintuitively, the loss of the gods not only does not exclude religiosity (Religiosität), but it is transformed into religious experience (religiöse Erleben). The religious experience, which arises from the fleeing of the gods, is depicted further as a void that “is filled by the historical and psychological investigation of myth.”81 One can elicit from Susan Taubes an equivalent understanding of the exploration of myth as a religious experience independent of belief in any transcendental being, an experience informed by the gnostic desire to be liberated from rather than within the spatio-temporal world of darkness into which the spirit of light has been thrown. As Susan wrote in the letter to Jacob dated March 25, 1952, prompted by reading Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, which was published in 1929: Kant’s archetypal intellect is perhaps in the line of the tradition of the Aristotelian Nous; Heidegger is gnostic enough to insist that Sein is contemporaneous with Dasein and is not the source of the Seiende; it only “lets things be”, for to be is to be “named” to be in the light or in the truth of Being. Before man was “sent” into the “Light”—and also the “Errdom” of Being there was neither “is” or “is not”. In Platonic imagery: the “sun” and the “eye” are equally necessary for “vision” and arose simultaneously. Maybe Heidegger is denying reason to make

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room for poetry: if only Sein is the business of thought than the whole world of existents—stars, trees, cats, people—goes to the poet.82

There is an allusion here to the ontological difference to which I referred above: being is not the source of beings, but it is the medium that lets them be, a letting be that consists of their being named by Dasein in the truth of being. The import of the term “gnostic” applied to Heidegger relates to his postulation that the world of beings is a world of error in relation to being of which we can say that it neither is nor is not, that is, the beingness beyond the metaphysical polarity of being and nonbeing. Moreover, if the concern of thought is being, then the concern of the poets is the multiple beings of the world. The division that Susan elicited from Heidegger between thinking and poeticizing is questionable, as we shall explore in more detail in the final chapter, but the important point to emphasize here is that the repudiation of the world implied by the contrast between being and beings justifies the characterization of Heidegger’s thought as gnostic. The renunciation of worldly things as the essential feature of gnosis is made more clearly in Susan’s letter to Jacob from April 9, 1952: The ultimate “optimism” of gnostic-eschatological thinking . . . reveals the infantile psychological mechanism behind it: there is first the experience of misery, oppression, impotence; all these negative elements are projected into the “world”; “paradise” “salvation” is then automatically obtained by negating the world, renouncing reality; + it looks as if the whole creation is geared to the sole purpose of man’s “salvation” + imaginary liberation from “evil”.83

An allusion to the illusive nature of the soteriological myth—the imaginary liberation from evil—is discernible in Heidegger’s transferring the ontological delimitation of being as the most general to the most particular, the concrete situation of Dasein.84 Ontology, in other words, is moored in the existential analysis of the self, and insofar as the latter is identical with time, the fluctuation of the temporal serves as the horizon for any understanding of the stability of being.85 In contrast to the archaic gnostic myth, however, Heidegger maintained that Dasein is not a “spark” thrown off from the beyond into the world.

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There is no world independent of Dasein nor Dasein independent of the world; rather, the possibility of self as an estrangement from the Being is coequal with the possibility of a world. That there is a drama at all is due to the essentially temporal ek-static structure of the self.86

Whereas the “ethical nihilism of early gnosticism was tempered by an eschatological hope and a positive, if mythical, faith in a ‘beyond’ which promised a perfect community of spirits,” for Heidegger, the “nihilism is naked and unadorned. There is no question of transcending ethical norms or of an apothesis87 of man by breaking through the limits of individuality, as in gnostic-Dionysiac cults.”88 In a letter to Jacob written on December 30, 1950, Susan expressed this point in the form of a question raised by her reading Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (1946): for the moment one might ask what becomes of the “ethical” in H’s negative ontology. (What H. does with Ethos in ÜBER DEN HUMANSIMUS does not satisfy me at all; i.e. what does it mean that man has his dwelling in God (daimon)? and if his hands are covered with blood—may his soul still dwell in the house of Being?89

In sync with many critics of Heidegger, including most eminently Levinas, Susan asked the obvious question: without ethics what value can be ascribed to ontology? Can one dwell in the house of being—an allusion to Heidegger’s celebrated remark in the first paragraph of “Letter on ‘Humanism’”90—if one’s hands are covered with blood? Notwithstanding the distinction between the lack of concern for the ethical in Heidegger’s negative ontology91 and the ethical nihilism of ancient Gnosticism, Susan still maintained—drawing particularly from the 1929 essay “What Is Metaphysics?”—that the “nihilistic features” of Heidegger’s thought “are rooted in the same experience as the cosmic nihilism of the gnosis.”92 Susan’s point corresponds to Jacob’s suggestion that Heidegger’s concept of Dasein should be rendered as homo absconditus, a locution that intimates that the human is the locus for the opening to being. Jacob acknowledged the resemblance to deus absconditus, but he cautioned against interpreting homo absconditus as a secularized derivative of the theological idea. On the contrary, for Heidegger, the theological is derivative from categories that

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describe the human condition.93 I note, parenthetically, that the position taken by both Susan and Jacob regarding the Heideggerian motif of being thrown into existence as the locus of the disclosedness of Dasein’s facticity squares with the observation of Hannah Arendt in the essay “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” (1946): Heidegger arrives at this ideal of the Self as a consequence of his making Man what God was in the earlier ontology. Such a highest being is, in fact, possible only as a unique individual being who knows no equals. What, consequently, appears as “Fall” in Heidegger, are all those modes of human existence which rest on the fact that Man lives together in the world with his fellows. To put it historically, Heidegger’s Self is an ideal which has been working mischief in German philosophy and literature since Romanticism. In Heidegger this arrogant passion to will to be a Self has contradicted itself; for never before was it so clear as in his philosophy that this is probably the one being which Man cannot be.94

In a letter from November 29, 1950, Susan laid out to Jacob her argument concerning the theological footing of Heidegger’s gnostic antitheology in language that resounds with the aforecited passage from Arendt: As far as I can judge Heidegger sees the relation of “Sein” to “Seiende” and to the “eksistentz” of man only in the moment of thinking: i.e. to ask a “cosmological” or “dialectical” question like how does the “Seiende” “come out” of the “Sein” would be illegitimate since the Being is the “light” that makes things “visible” and the ultimate relation of Being to things and to thought is not cosmological, the ultimate happening is not any kind of producing of things and world: the relation is not even ontological in the usual sense . . . but theological. That is Being, things, and ek-sistence, in the moment of thinking the truth of Being are prior to any “cosmos” all the problems of one + many, actuality + potentiality . . . implied in “cosmos” . . . and I do not quite understand what the world of transactions (Seiende) “is” except that it is the openness wherein we are thrown from the “Being”—and our ek-sistence, our exile in the world, in the lighting of Being, remembering and be-

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ing shepherds of the Being is as “simple” as the Biblical story only even more mysterious.95

I trust readers will agree that this is a judicious account of the theological ground of Heidegger’s atheology: being assumes the posture of God as the invisible light that makes all beings visible. The relation of being to the multiplicity of beings is not cosmological or ontological but theological inasmuch as the world of beings is the openness wherein we are thrown from being—the blind spot in our vision where the seeing of the world meets the ground of the world bereft of visual data—and presumably can return to being. Human existence—the Ek-sistenz of being-in-theworld—is indigenously exilic, and thus salvation can come only by way of a recollection that makes us mindful of the task to shepherd being in the fallen state of our being, the self-determination to will to be the self that the self cannot be. In a letter from December 3, 1950, Susan told Jacob she was inspired by a conversation with Eugen Kullmann to delve more deeply into the appropriateness of thinking about Heidegger in light of Gnosticism, going so far as to question whether we can apply “gnostic vocabulary” to him at all, since one of the basic premises of Being and Time is that there is no objective time, and so no objective history i.e. no objective stage on which the drama of the fall, exile, wandering through the world, remembering and homecoming could be played. Speaking now only in the frame of S&Z, one has not even the right to speak of a “FALL” but only of a “fallenness”, a “falling”; and from this fallenness we cannot point to a fall prior to it and that from which we fell: thus the whole panorama including the primary distinctions of ek-sistenz, Sein, Seiende are derivative of our state of fallenness.96

Adopting a somewhat peculiar phraseology, Susan ascribed to Heidegger an Augustinian kantism which says that all our terms for what lies prior to the Fall and what is beyond the state of fallenness, even the conception of God is only born out of our state of fallenness. Beyond this state we cannot speak of Being or God or of anything.97

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Perhaps the reference to “Augustinian kantism” can be elucidated from the letter written on January 12, 1951: Our conception of the soul is as good and no better than our conception of the world—so we either stay locked in Kant’s “bad cosmos” or we run out “negatively” in the gnostic mad-alley. In either case the bad cosmos remains as a blot negatively attributable to the “good” God—but does the negative explanation i.e. that the badness of the bad world is simply his absence, in any way “excuse” him—for he is entirely responsible for the world, he creates it unless we assume another God. But the mysteries of the nothing are deeper and beyond the “badness” or “goodness” of the cosmos.98

Every ontic determination derives from the ontological condition of fallenness. Prior to the plummet into the world from which the divine is absent, there is nothing of which we can speak but the nothing of which we cannot speak, a nothing that is beyond the polarity of good and evil. The formulation of the Heideggerian worldview is starkly similar to the previously cited passage from Arendt. Susan would have surely concurred with another passage from Arendt’s study on existential philosophy: Heidegger’s philosophy is the first absolutely and uncompromisingly this-worldly philosophy. Man’s Being is characterized as Being-inthe-world, and what is at stake for this Being in the world is, finally, nothing else than to maintain himself in the world. Precisely this is not given him; hence the fundamental character of Being-in-the-world is uneasiness in the double meaning of homelessness and fearfulness. In anxiety, which is fundamentally anxiety before death, the not-beingat-home in the world becomes explicit. “Being-in-the-world appears in the existentiel mode of not-being-at-home.”99 This is uneasiness.100

Although Arendt did not use the word “tragic” in her characterization of Heidegger’s thought, she clearly understood that his view of the human being entailed the tragically agonizing awareness that it is impossible for one to become oneself in the world except by confronting the nothingness of self that is laid bare in the departure from the world. In her own words,

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Death may indeed be the end of human reality; at the same time it is the guarantee that nothing matters but myself. With the experience of death as nothingness I have the chance of devoting myself exclusively to being a Self, and once and for all freeing myself from the surrounding world.101

For all of Heidegger’s phenomenological exertion to reclaim the worldhood of the finite world—or, translated back into Husserlian terms, to return to the things themselves102—the resoluteness of his notion of being-in-the-world is colored effectively by the steadfastness of not-being-at-home. Simply put, to be at home in the world is to be homeless, and thus the groundedness of being is ungrounded in the unground of being grounded such that the meaning of being-toward-death is demoralized in the nonbeing that is death.103 Susan correctly understood that it is from the standpoint of this deepseated finitude that we can speak of the problem of time looming in the center of Heidegger’s thought:104 This question formulates itself most radically in the question of the objectivity of time. In this question the simple man asks, are our deeds on record, and are our hours held to account—again does what we decide and do “count” at all. . . . And the philosopher asks if the moment, the event that was and is no more has an eternal “locus” “somewhere”; that is, if there is an objective stage for our acts which are in passage, and finally for our life-span, for our very person which also passes. And the question of ontology itself: is there a “Being” which is the “support”[,] the permanent locus for all that is passing . . . And this question H. answers by No. The deeds of the past, the dead moments and dead men have no place, they are nowhere on record. And so we are falling from “nothing” back into “nothing”, we are exiles from “nothing”, we must remember “nothing”, and our home is “nothing”: where “not to remember” and to “remember nothing” are radically distinct.105

The question of the objectivity of time relates to the existential problem of the meaningfulness of human action. If there is nothing but the fleetingness of the temporal flow such that the only endurance is the lack of endurance, and the only permanence is impermanence, then seemingly we have

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no foundation upon which to establish enduring significance to our lives. From the matter of temporal variability, therefore, we come invariably to the question of ontology: is there a lasting being that is the source of all that fades away? For Heidegger, that being is nothing and thus there is no record of a past that would ascribe fixity to a present that passes perpetually into a future. Persistence means to change, and changeableness to persist.106 As Heidegger glossed his use of the term Zeitigung in Being and Time, “Zeitigung als Sich-zeitigen ist Sich-entfalten, aufgehen und so erscheinen,”107 which can be translated as “Temporalization as self-arising is self-unfolding, rising up and thus appearing.”108 Insofar as the imperishability of time consists of its perishability, since for the moment to appear it must disappear, we can say that, according to Heidegger, the unfolding of temporality (Zeitigung der Zeitlichkeit)109 proceeds from and recedes into nothing. Condemned to our temporal solicitude, we are exiles from nothing, and yet this nothing is our home from which we roam and to which we revert; our predicament necessitates that we must have constant recourse to this nothing, which is distinct from not having recourse to anything. The memory apposite to the phantasmic ebb and flow of time is constituted by forgetfulness as the ocean of nothingness that spreads over and covers one’s tracks so that nothing of the beginning is retrievable in the end and nothing of the end is foreseeable in the beginning.110 Hence, we remember nothing only if we forget nothing, but if we remember nothing, there is nothing to forget. Unable to cut through the intractability of this Gordian knot, intellect must surrender to the unintelligible, forced to think within the space of nonthinking, the nonconceptual fringe by which we take hold conceptually of the fugal disjuncture of nonbeing under the conjunctural semblance of being.111 To assist in the comprehension of the incomprehensible, Susan invoked Jacob’s speculation on the dialectic of logos and thanatos from which she inferred that without eros there is no truth . . . no constancy . . . no abidingness; and our ultimate relation is not with God but with the devil, no longer disguised as a fascinating tempt to sin and vice but revealed in his nakedness as sheer nothing, a nothing for which the most fiendish + hideous disguises (popular pictures of the devil) are euphemisms.112

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Whatever the historical merits of the argument that Gnosticism was a Jewish heresy, I propose that, for Susan, this hypothesis granted her the means to comprehend and to verbalize what is at stake existentially with her own marginalization and rootlessness. From the perspective of her personal bewilderment, she postulated a more generic theory of philosophical disorientation, “the truth that the thinker however deeply and organically his thinking is married to and with the world, thinks at a point outside the world.”113 The point outside the world does not denote a transcendental axis but rather the externalization of self, a detachment of consciousness from the world to which it is attached by nonattachment. Susan thus credited Jonas with tracing negative theology—viewing the divine plenitude as nothingness in opposition to the fullness of the world—to the “negativism of the gnosis,” whence it follows that the “negativity of the gnostic god serves to undermine totally the positive empirical reality of the world and its claim to any value or validity. . . . Gnosis means knowledge of the unwordly god in its absolute otherness, and it is radically opposed to the knowledge of the world.”114 Again, we see the elevation of world denial—or Entweltlichungstendenz, the tendency to turn away from the world115—to the highest rung of the gnostic ladder: gnosis is tied to the apophatic assumption that God is unworldly in absolute otherness, a gnosis that is essentially discordant with the knowledge of the world. The influence of Jonas’s position, at least as understood by Susan, is reflected as well in her letter to Jacob from February 5–6, 1951: I wonder if the “gnosis”—alias, existential ontology, alias negative theology—is not simply the most drastic formulation of “philosophy” as such. But from the gnosis there is no way out—the mystical outlets deceive and lead only deeper in the labyrinth. . . . The gnosis unbalances the “it is good” of God: the twofold objective and subjective genitive of “God’s revelation” that is not only God’s revelation of himself to Creation but the revelation of Creation to God: that it is good.116

Here it is germane to consider the summary of the gnostic acosmism offered by Susan in her doctoral thesis: The early gnostics expressed their hatred for the “natural order” by acts of defiance against law and custom; their revolt against the “cos-

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mos” could take libertinistic forms of lawlessness, excess and cynical contempt for worldly authorities, as well as ascetic forms of abstinence. By reducing the transcendental good to a total negation of all possible modes of existence and by stripping it of all analogical resonances that could be sounded by the “otherworldly” and the “supernatural,” Simone Weil has removed the antinomian sting from gnostic nihilism and has converted a vision of the beyond which received its impetus from revolt into a principle of obedience.117

I will refrain from assessing the accuracy of the comments about Weil in this context because the subsequent chapter will be dedicated to a fuller analysis of Susan’s engagement with her mystical atheism and negative theodicy. For our purposes what is notable is the emphasis placed on the world-negating nature of Gnosticism and its antinomianism,118 themes that were crucial to Jacob’s gnostic apocalypticism and to his portrait of Paul as one who promulgated the principle that abrogation of the law is the most perfect implementation of the law, a transvaluation of values enacted through the crucifixion, that is, the defamatory death ratified by the strictures of halakhah.119 The suspension of the law releases the insurgent energy confined within the law and thereby allows for a renewal of the covenant.120 The anarchic nature of messianism is such that the world must be destroyed in order to begin again ex nihilo. In Jacob’s precise words, “I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is.”121 In accord with what has been called the “messianism of destruction,” Jacob declared that “the impulse to save the world is inextricably bound with the impulse to destroy it.”122 The law preserves the provisional status of the law and the affirmative valence accorded mundane matters. In truth, however, the material universe is irredeemably fallen and is therefore incapable of spiritual rectification; there is no exodus from the bondage of space and time. The utopian element is both anti-metaphysical and anti-naturalist. On occasion, Susan expressed displeasure with the Heideggerian trope of thrownness (Geworfenheit), even insisting that “the locus of authentic Being” is to be sought in the “juncture of the world and the Holy, and not the individual.”123 In a letter to Jacob from January 27, 1951, Susan wrote, If Heidegger is truly gnostic then only through history can we pass beyond history and come “home”—otherwise the animals and degen-

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erate savages are dwelling in the holy more than man. So, man “belongs” in history as his “exile”—and his ultimate being at home in the “beyond” is already pointing to his exile.124

We see once more confirmation of the point that the paramount feature of Gnosticism is its rejection of the possibility of salvation in the spatio-temporal realm. Gnosis is, to utilize Harold Bloom’s elocution, a lying against time, that is, the desire to be elsewhere generated by the awareness that one is not where one is supposed to be.125 History is accorded the incontrovertible status of the uncanny, the unassailable exilic condition to which we remain bound in the unbinding of being bound. As Heidegger argued, the retrieval of thinking that surmounts the mathematical bias of modern science is based on the possibility of knowing and safeguarding the truth of the incalculable (Unberechenbare), but this is only possible in the “creative questioning” that issues from “the power of genuine reflection [Besinnung],” which “transports the man of the future into that ‘in-between’ [Zwischen] in which he belongs to being and yet, amidst being, remains a stranger [Fremdling].”126 If there is a suprasensible realm to which the incarcerated spirit returns, the pleroma of godly light, it is only proof of the implacably disaffected nature of the corporeal world. The despondency is magnified immeasurably when the gnostic imagination is without potential transcendence—exemplified by the thought of Heidegger—and hence without the hope to unfetter the pneumatic sparks trapped in the somatic shells.127 In a letter to Jacob from January 4, 1952, inspired in part by reading Éric Weil’s Logique de la philosophie (1950), Susan offered a more intricate critique of the gnostic reverberations of Heidegger’s discussion of the anxiety of beingin-the-world and the nonbeing of death: Philosophy is nevertheless a highly dubious occupation. In the end, science, the will to conquer the beings in the world may be more legitimate than philosophy: the will to conquer “non-being”: death, “le temps perdu” + the strangeness, the quality of otherness of being . . . . Nevertheless, I would say against Heidegger that the feeling of vertigo . . . before the past, that one lived, that one was, and that is no more, testifies to a relation, indeed a painfully negative relation to the non-temporal. What I would like to say (but I don’t dare) is that in the

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dread before the constant and the ultimate annihilation, without ceasing to fear one reaches god, god is present in the fear,—or it is because of god that one fears. . . . Heid. only speaks of “wovor die Angst sich ängstet”128 but not of why there is Angst, or why man is “unzuhause”.129 The “why” does not ask for an “answer” but rather for dwelling more totally more humbly within the question itself, living the question and rejecting false solutions.130

Pushing against Heidegger’ signature idea of the anxiety that arises from being-toward-death, referred to variously as the strangeness, the otherness of being, or the lost time—tellingly glossed by Jacob as aber das “perdu” bleibt,131 that is, what is lost nevertheless remains—Susan suggested that death testifies to the painfully negative relation to the nontemporal. What is intended by the latter is elucidated in the comment that the dread before the constant and the ultimate annihilation is the fear that one experiences in relation to the divine. This is the source of the uncanniness that Heidegger failed to name, the question of why there is this anxiety, a question that summons not an answer but rather the need to abide humbly in the question.132 Several days later, in a letter to Jacob from January 11, Susan contrasted the biblical emphasis on trust in God and the pessimism of the gnostic vision in terms that are jarring in light of how her own life ended: The gnosis tries to resolve the agony of mistrust and distrust by relieving God of all responsibility for the world, for fate and for history. But we who have chosen to live on earth eating the bread, suffering and enjoying and struggling to sanctify the bonds of human love, we long to be reconciled with the God of the wor[l]d, the God of fate and history. The other way is no reconciliation, it is pure negation, whose only legitimate form of expression is suicide.133

Deviations of this sort notwithstanding, the preponderant sense one gets from Susan’s literary corpus is that the gnostic-Heideggerian idea of thrownness accords with her perception regarding the shattered nature of the world in general and the nomadic propensity of the Jew to be somewhere by always being elsewhere in particular.134 Comparable to Jacob’s apocalyptic messianism, and his interest in the Marcionite theopolitics of

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Paul,135 the delineation of Gnosticism on the part of Susan as a Jewish heresy offered her a way of relating to a tradition from which she was becoming increasingly more alienated, including from Zionism and the political situation that was evolving in the newly formed state of Israel, as we discussed in the previous chapter. The existential despair was expressed somewhat differently in a letter written to Scholem on November 8, 1950: “I confess to you, it is no pleasure to be here at all. The only spirit that I have found here to converse with is the angel of apocalypse. (He-she sends his-her greetings to you).”136 Ostensibly, the focus of this comment is her discomfort living in America, since Susan is responding to rumors that she wished to be separated from Jacob, who at the time was living in Israel. However, it is not unreasonable to deduce that the reference to conversing with the angel of the apocalypse is a metaphorical way of marking a deeper disillusionment that is not limited geographically. The apocalyptic sensibility is commensurate to the gnostic insofar as both convey a sense of foreboding with respect to the future. The finitude of being cannot be placated by escape to otherworldly realms or the positing of transcendence beyond the purview of history governed by the physical laws of space and time. At best, as Heidegger himself suggested at the conclusion of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, the need for ontology, the understanding of being (Seinsverständnisses), is the infinitude (Unendlichkeit) that is justified on the grounds of Dasein’s innermost finitude (innersten Endlichkeit).137 Heidegger left open the question regarding the exact meaning of this infinitude, but it is plausible to presume that the infinity of which he spoke is related to Dasein’s task to be infinitely creative, a task that wells forth from and must always return to the depth of an inflexible finitude. This principal insight is linked to Heidegger in Susan’s letter to Jacob from November 21, 1950: The “scientists” so strickt [sic] about meaning speak meaninglessly when they say that those that see angles138 live in their “own world” and “escape” from the facts of reality; escape where? what world of one’s “own” can the positivist permit? In his world there is “nowhere” to escape and no “own” world—and from this “no” we must go to the ways of Heidegger in “What is Metaphysics?”139

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Continuing this theme a few days later, on November 24, Susan wrote to Jacob: And you my mad one, my mystical one . . . . What shall become of you. All the places are wrong for us because the time is wrong. I think of you in the dark night hours of illuminations. Ah I’m so exiled. The earth is without sex here and dead as a rug. And the house of knowledge when it is the House of Hades what good is it—for god is the god of the living.140

The separation from Jacob amplified Susan’s feeling of being interned in exile, which included the dearth of physical intimacy alluded to in her comment about the earth. Even if the domicile that she inhabited was a house of learning, without the possibility of concretizing her carnal lust for Jacob, that domicile was a house of the god that watched over the dead in Hades and not a house of the god of the living. Susan goes on to write that in Israel, signified by the Star of David, she “experienced a positive hopelessness because hope stood there only raped at every turn. Here there is a sheer hope-less-ness, hope cannot even form itself.”141 As I noted in the previous chapter, in contrast to the utter hopelessness of America in which hope cannot assume any shape, Israel offered some hope in the hopelessness, and hence it is a positive hopelessness, but it is a hopelessness nonetheless, the hope that is raped at every turn, quite an arrestingly violent image. Significantly, in an undated letter, which seems to have been written from Paris in early May 1952, Susan remarked that the language of Heidegger’s essay “The Thing” (1950) reminded her of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a “language of madness” that finds its justification in the experience of ultimate perplexity. . . . The strange thing is not so much that such works are written, but that they are read. It seems the poets have really taken over the function of priests; like priests they are dedicated to their absolute, they pray for us who go on living in half measures + compromises, + give a Sunday to our weekday. But the many priests serve each a different God + the world is not healed.142

In his response, Jacob alleged that despite the fact the Susan’s “antijudaism” was neither Christian nor gnostic but rather paganistic, she still knew that

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the poets or priests serve different gods and the world remains unhealed.143 What Jacob seemed to miss was that for Susan, in a way that ironically has affinity to his own view, the heresy of Gnosticism stipulates a taxonomy of hybridity that, at once, reinforces and destabilizes the hyphen that separates and connects the two foci of identity construction, Judaism and Christianity. Hence, as Sigrid Weigel noted, from Susan we can extrapolate that the “transitional historical moment in which antique Judaism and early Christianity together largely formed a fused culture, because the programs of Jewish and early Christian Gnostic heresy were not yet polarized” could serve as a model for a “post-assimilatory, post-confessional or secularized culture in which loci of Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers can no longer be clearly distinguished.”144 Moreover, the comparison of Heidegger to Joyce, centered on a language of madness, affords us an opportunity to understand Susan’s fascination with the relationship of myth and logos. Logic is the vehicle to express the myth that has the potential to subvert that very logic. Years later, Jacob articulated an analogous view, although he would substitute logos with revelation: “Gnostic symbolism is shaped by the contradiction between the mythic intentions of late ancient Gnosticism and the boundary making that grounded the myth-liquidating doctrine of revelation.”145 For Susan, the commingling of myth and logic is another point of affinity between Gnosticism and Heidegger. In a letter to Jacob from November 18, 1950, Susan described Francis M. Cornford’s From Philosophy to Religion: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (1912) as “excellent material for my Mythos + Logos.” Most evocatively, she exhumed from her reading of this book an inference that is Heideggerian in tone: “And isn’t ‘nature’ ‘mythological’ in hiding the mysterious becoming in the secrecy of darkness and enclosure, in covering the seed by the egg-shell or womb with the naivety of mythopoiesy?”146 The mythopoeic mindset blurs the boundaries between what is imagined to be real and what is really imagined.

Illumining the Shadow as Shadow: Truth and Concealing the Unconcealment An allusion to this traversing of the schism separating the virtual and the actual can be detected in Susan’s letter to Jacob from November 8, 1950: “I was reading Heidegger’s translation of Plato’s parable of the cave. It could almost

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fit into Kafka’s Gleichnisse.”147 To understand this coupling of Heidegger and Kafka, we must probe the former’s interpretation of Plato’s allegory of the cave in the Republic. In a separate study, I offered a composite analysis of this topic based on Heidegger’s lecture course The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus from the winter semester of 1931–1932, the lecture course On the Essence of Truth from the winter semester of 1933–1934, and the essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” written in 1940 but based on notes from the earlier lectures.148 Since the last source is the one to which Susan related, I will concentrate mainly on that text even though ideally it should be read in conjunction with the other sources.149 Explicating the fourth and final stage in the occurrence of truth from Plato’s allegory, Heidegger focused on the fact that the “movements of passing out of the cave into the daylight and then back from there into the cave require in each case that the eyes accustom themselves to the change from darkness to brightness and from brightness back to darkness.”150 The acclimation to each region is the essence of what Plato called paideia, the counterpart to the German Bildung, literally “formation,” but interpreted by Heidegger as a crossing (Übergang) that occasions “the whole human being in the turning around [Umwendung] of his or her essence.”151 The meaning of the allegory of the cave is to instruct one about the nature of truth, but this rotates around the idea of education as the ascent of the soul to the place of its essential being. The justification for the juxtaposition of Bildung and Wahrheit lies in the fact that truth and the transformation (Wandlung) it undergoes expediate the basic structures (Grundgefüge) of education.152 To be educated, on this score, is to be delivered from the shady world of appearance, but this deliverance comes about through disclosure of the essence of truth as the unconcealment of the concealment in the concealment of the unconcealment, a disclosure that discloses by refusing to disclose. Rejecting the conventional idea that has prevailed in Western thinking, Heidegger insisted that truth is not the “agreement of the representation in thought with the thing itself: adequatio intellectus et rei,” but it is rather the unhiddenness (Unverborgenheit)—rendering the Greek alētheia—that makes accessible whatever appears by revealing its concealment in the concealment of its revealing.153 As Heidegger already noted in Being and Time, to grasp the nature of truth, one must be attentive to the pre-philosophical use of the Greek

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term ἀλήθεια, the discoveredness that belongs to the λόγος as φράζων ὅκως ἔχει, that which tells how things comport themselves (wie das Seiende sich verhält).154 Aware of the hazard of understanding his approach to alētheia as the contemporaneous concealing and unconcealing of the primordial phenomenon of truth as advocating an “uninhibited word-mysticism,” Heidegger insisted that it is the business of philosophy to preserve the power of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself and to protect them from being flattened by the common understanding to the point of unintelligibility, which in its turn functions as a source of illusory problems.155

The definition of truth advanced by Heidegger, consequently, is not a shaking off (Abschütteln) of tradition but is rather its primordial appropriation (Aneignung).156 Those held captive in the cave are blinded by the shadows and are thus unable to recognize the shadows as shadows. The unconcealment of which they are capable covers up the uncovering of the ideas, the agency of the selfshowing (Sichzeigen) in the not showing itself (Sich-nicht-zeigen) by which the nonappearance of the appearance becomes apparent,157 the light that alone can expose the shadowy nature of the shadow. For the prisoners, the shadows appear to be truth, what is unhidden, but, in truth, they do not even see the shadows, since they do not apprehend either the things of which the shadows are shadows or the fire in whose luminosity the shadows are cast; indeed, they are altogether unaware of the distinction between light and darkness.158 Truth is the mystery of the unconcealing of the concealment, the opening that tears away the unhidden from its hiddenness.159 The complete removal of all hiddenness foreshadows the menacing awareness that there is nothing to illumine but the illumination of there being nothing to illumine. By exposing the shadow as shadow, the one who is emancipated reveals that the “unhidden is such that, precisely in its showing, the beings hide themselves.”160 What is disclosed, therefore, is the showing of the nonshowing, the concealment that conceals itself in its unconcealment. From Heidegger’s perspective, the essence of truth was not revealed by Plato because “unhiddenness remains harnessed in a relation to looking, apprehending, thinking, and asserting. To follow this relation means to

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relinquish the essence of unhiddenness.”161 The unhiddenness is fully unhidden when we apprehend that the essence of truth as unconcealment consists in overcoming the concealing of the concealment, which is to say, when we fathom that unhiddenness is connected essentially with hiddenness, that untruth (Unwahrheit) belongs inextricably to truth (Wahrheit).162 In Being and Time, Heidegger already gave voice to this cardinal idea that guided his circuitous ambling on the path of thinking through many decades: the existential-ontological meaning of the statement “Dasein is in the truth” also says equiprimordially (gleichursprünglich) that “Dasein is in untruth.” Hence, only insofar as Dasein is disclosed [erschlossen] is it also closed off [verschlossen]; and insofar as innerworldly beings are always already discovered [entdecket] with Dasein, are such beings covered over [verdeckt] (hidden) or disguised as possible innerworldly beings to be encountered.163

That the Greeks deployed the privative alpha in their designation of the essence of truth, ἀ-λήθεια, insinuates that being-in-untruth as much as beingin-truth constitutes the essential determination of being-in-the-world.164 Mythically, the goddess of truth, who led Parmenides, placed him before two paths: that of discovering (Entdeckens) and that of concealment (Verbergens) to indicate that “Dasein is always already in the truth and untruth.”165 Indeed, the essence of truth (Wesen der Wahrheit) and the nonessence of untruth (Unwesen der Unwahrheit) “were originally unified with man’s basic neediness as a being who has been thrown into beings, to be compelled to understand something like Being.”166 To uncover and to recover—the double movement of the act of discovery—occur synchronously and not successively. The goal of Heidegger’s exegesis of Plato was to establish the ground for his retrieval of the unconcealment of truth as the concealment of untruth. I propose that it is this insight that fostered Susan’s comparison of Heidegger’s treatment of Plato’s allegory of the cave to Kafka’s parables. In a previous publication,167 I noted that in a letter to Scholem, written on April 19, 1939, Adorno sagaciously commented that a passage on the story of creation from the zoharic anthology, translated in Die Geheimnisse der Tora (1936), suggests that “the language into which the symbol is translated . . . is itself a mere language of symbols—a point which calls to mind Kafka’s remark

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that all of his writings are symbolic, but only in the sense that they should be interpreted through ever new symbols in an endless series of steps.”168 The parabolic nature of truth proffered by Kafka—an orientation that resonates with the kabbalistic Symbolsprache—closes the gap separating fact and fiction and thereby opens the horizon of textuality to the commensurability of the incommensurable. Poetically visualized, insofar as language is always an act of translation of one parable into another parable, what is spoken can never be said except as unsaid. Notably, Adorno also commented in the letter to Scholem that he was astonished at the relation of the zoharic text to “the Neoplatonic-gnostic tradition.” In lieu of imagining the work of medieval kabbalah to be “the most inward and hermetic product of the Jewish spirit,” he was now of the opinion that “in its very foreignness, it is most enigmatically intertwined with Western thought.” The Zohar, accordingly, represents Judaism “in the mediated sense in which the Galut constitutes the Jewish fate.”169 Astonishingly, even though Adorno lacked the philological competence to analyze a Jewish mystical text, let alone one as complicated as a passage from the zoharic compilation,170 he nevertheless not only displayed an acute understanding of the parabolic constitution of the world when seen through the respective prisms of kabbalah and Kafka—likely due to the influence of Scholem’s scholarship—but he also ascertained that this approach presumes that the Jew experiences the world as an indigenously unfamiliar place and thus is doomed to persevere in an unending state of exile, a condition that mimetically reflects the status of the divine presence. From the kabbalistic perspective, the unfastening of the glory to a fixed habitat is an interpretive expansion of the rabbinic myth of the divine presence escorting the people of Israel in exile.171 As we read in a pericope in Sefer ha-Bahir, the Book of Illumination, one of the earliest collectanea that had a significant role in molding the symbolic contours of the esoteric theosophy that evolved in earnest in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the glory (kavod), which is also identified as wisdom (ḥokhmah), assumes the dual fortune of being rooted in and yet deracinated from the pleroma of divine potencies. This is the import of the verse “Blessed be the glory of the Lord from his place,” barukh kevod yhwh mi-meqomo (Ezekiel 3:12), that is, the word mi-meqomo denotes that the place of the glory is remote and it is therefore inaccessible and unknowable.172 The matter is illustrated by a parable of a princess who comes

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from afar, and people do not know whence she came until they perceive that she is an eshet ḥayil (Proverbs 31:10), a woman of valor, who is beautiful and worthy in all her deeds, and thus they declare that she was certainly “taken from the side of light, for her deeds illumine the world.” When they ask her from where she came, she responds “from my place,” and they decree, “If so, the men of your place are great. Blessed are you and blessed is your place.”173 We can elicit from this text the insight that the place of Sophia is discerned precisely from her being displaced. Insofar as the Jewish soul is homologous with the divine, a point enunciated more clearly by later kabbalists, it follows, as Adorno understood, that the soul, too, can discriminate its place only from being ardently attuned to its displacement. To return to the main point, although the Heideggerian rhetoric is patently distinct, Adorno’s insights about Kafka lend credibility to Susan’s placing his use of the parable alongside Heidegger’s idea of truth.174 Hermeneutically speaking, like Kafka and the kabbalists, Heidegger espoused the idea that the interpretation of a symbol always involves the production of another symbol, and so on ad infinitum. There is no naked truth to be uncovered, only another layer of truth exposed in the covering of its untruth. In the letter to Jacob from December 8, 1950, Susan stated that Heidegger made her re-question the division between Logos + Mythos: not only sensible imagery can intoxicate, there are enchanted ways of thought, there is the dance of the Logos that is no longer “logical” and thought itself is drunk: the Holzwege lead through these enchanted paths of thought, where thought ceases to be purposive and come to “results” and all is dance and sublime play. The academicians disapprove but I find something deeply legitimate in this play, and something slightly “pseudo” in what is not play; of whatever issues forth into the world, of whatever can be shown or said one should ask, aside from service, only enchantment; and the rest is silence; the rest we cannot know, cannot grasp except in silence.175

One can detect in this passage the influence of Nietzsche’s depiction of dance as a superior mode of parabolic thinking, a form of playfulness that exceeds logic and language.176 Furthermore, as we learn from Susan’s letter to Jacob, dated December 26, 1950, the parable in Plato and Kafka instructs us

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“negatively” as a way to compare allegorically the incongruent domains of the heavenly and the earthly. Only through the parable can one converse about the “hidden realms” that “do not allow straight forward description—and about that what cannot be spoken one should be silent or speak in a ‘silent’ way i.e. using words that point to the silences between the words.”177 Returning a few days later to the mimetic function of the gnostic parable to overcome metaphysical binaries, Susan commented in the letter to Jacob from January 2, 1951: The gnosis gives the key to the formulation of the basic question of which “Mythos vs. Logos” “Fact vs. Fancy” “world of sense vs. world of ideas” and all the “dualisms”—whether mythically, dialectically, allegorically, parabolically, etc. etc., “reconciled”—are just reflection— because the gnosis makes the “brokenness” its fundamental question and is by its very starting-point prevented from answering the question “discursively” it can only hint at the relation of the “one” to the “other” through the parable.178

From gnostic literature we can elicit that the parable presupposes a gap between dichotomies that is continuously crossed but never collapsed, a fissure of language that allows disparate entities to converge without any mediation of their divergence. The parable is the bridge that spans the breach between literal and figurative, the rift between reality and appearance, the chasm between fiction and nonfiction, the verbal leap that propels one across the space of an irreducible opposition. Inasmuch as truth is intrinsically parabolic, it can be apprehended only through another parable, which is to say, the face of truth is unmasked through the mask of truth that is untruth.179 If we conjure the metaphor of light for truth, as Blumenberg famously suggested,180 then we could say there is no lucidity that is not concurrently obscurity.181 Further support for my proposal may be gleaned from the discussion of Heidegger’s doctrine of truth as alētheia in the fifth section of “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism.” I will focus on the part of the argument most relevant to our topic. As Susan remarked, Heidegger followed Heraclitus and interpreted truth and error respectively as “dis-covery” (Unverborgenheit) and “covery” (Verborgenheit). Philologically, as I noted above, the first syllable of alētheia is the privative alpha, and hence “truth means to

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lift out of oblivion (lethe).”182 At the same time, based on an analysis of a saying of Anaximander, Heidegger construed the interplay between concealment and unconcealment as the cosmic drama between being (Sein) and beings (Seiendes): The being itself does not step into the light of being. The unconcealment of the being, the brightness granted it, darkens the light of being. By revealing itself in the being, being withdraws [Das Sein entzieht sich, indem es sich in das Seiende entbirgt].183

The last sentence, we are told, is the key to Heidegger’s concept of the dialectic between the nothing and the world, from which he develops his interpretation of history. The world that in its very apparentness covers the ground of the nothing is in errdom: its erring coalesces with its openness. . . . The world, as such, by being there as a world, is “out of joint.” Not this or that relation in the world is out of joint, but the very fact of there being relations, testifies to a resistance against the sheer negativity of time.184

The gnostic refraction of Heidegger’s thought again comes into clear focus: the multifarious beings are the cloak of the ground of the nothing, but this ontic cloaking, as inescapable as it is, is a form of error that accentuates that the world qua world is ontologically disjointed in its disregard for the negativity of the ecstatic temporalization of time that conceals the meontological truth that being is nothing.185 It is noteworthy that Susan further observed that “Heidegger’s concept of the self-withdrawal of Being recalls the idea of divine retraction in gnostic mysticism which infused German idealism through Schelling’s philosophy of freedom.”186 Curiously, no mention is made of the kabbalistic doctrine of ṣimṣum, the primal contraction and withdrawal of Ein Sof to create a vacuum within the plenum—the othering of the one that has no other, the division of the indivisible into the dyad of light (or) and vessel (keli), the masculine potency to overflow and the feminine capacity to receive, the play of opposites that is necessary for there to be creation seemingly separate from the infinite—a mythopoeic idea that may have influenced Schelling and, by extension, Heidegger.187 To return to the main point, the paradox of the concealment of being in the unconcealment

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of the beings of the world is what brought Heidegger to the conclusion that the oblivion of being is oblivion to the difference between being and the being.188 This comment on the ontological difference was explicated by Susan in a decidedly anthropogonic way as the shrouding of being occasioned by the internment of the self in nature: Because the self is lost to the world and has forgotten that it belongs to Being, forgotten the difference between the world and Being, the self is in error. Since the self is essentially fallen prey to the world (wesenhaft verfallend), the self is in untruth. The untruth is the veiling of the Being. This cover is not only a darkness; it has its own light, its own presence, a “dark” light, as the gnostic myth would say.189

Departing from the Platonic cornerstone of the gnostic mythos, there is no escaping the dimness of the chimerical world by absconding to the radiant realm of everlasting truth.190 Quite to the contrary, truth is das dunkle Licht, the dark light, Hölderlin’s memorable catchword that conveys that the illumination does not dispel the darkness but rather is its innermost inflection, appearing in the nonappearing of appearance, manifesting in the refusal to manifest but as the nonmanifestation.191 The self has not only disregarded its connection to being; it has eroded the difference between the world and being, and thus it falls prey to the material realm and lives in the error of untruth. Incarceration in the body implicates the soul in forgetting that it has forgotten that it has forgotten—a double negative that yields a third term whose positivity is entrenched even more profoundly in the negative. Redemption is instigated by the reminiscence that undoes the knot of triple amnesia as the soul begins to remember the forgetfulness of the forgetfulness that has been forgotten.

Apocalyptic Alienation, Theopolitical Nihilism, and Historical Overcoming of History The demand to redeem an inherently irredeemable world is the crux of the eschatological essence of history endorsed by Jacob Taubes. The eschaton, the reader is told at the beginning of Occidental Eschatology, is the terminus through which history surpasses its limitations and is thus seen for what it is.192 History is calibrated from the vantage point of the unidirectional

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(einsinnig) and irreversible (unumkehrbar) timeline steered by an impulse that is always moving toward an end.193 The interdependence of time and history is possible because of their origin in eternity whence we can infer—in an unmistakably gnostic proclivity—that the temporal interim of history is the demise of the eternal. “Time emerges when the eternity of the origin is lost and the order of the world is gripped by death. The face of death is the sign of this world.”194 No mention is made here of Heidegger despite the affinity between his preoccupation with being-toward-death as the possibility of the absolute impossibility that is the mark of Dasein’s authenticity and Jacob’s demarcation of death as the ultimate signifier of the temporal deportment of human existence. However, in the fourth part of the book, when discussing the philosophical eschatology of Europe, Jacob did remark that as a successor to Kierkegaard, Heidegger was “preoccupied with finitude and postulates nothingness as an absolute.”195 To attend the full consequence of Jacob’s comment, we must bear in mind that Hegel’s postulate in the Science of Logic that the indeterminate and immediate being is neither more nor less than nothing leads to the paradoxical conclusion “Pure being and pure nothingness are therefore the same” (Das reine Sein und das reine Nichts ist also dasselbe).196 Explicating the identity of being and nothing affirmed by Hegel, Jacob wrote, “But nothing [das Nichts] is not the harmless nonpresence of something [Nicht-anwesenheit von Etwas]; rather, it is the annihilating power [die nichtende Macht] of death which puts an end to finitude. Finitude exists, but the truth of finite being is the end of being.”197 The absoluteness of nothingness presumes that the degeneration of death is the final stage of finitude, or as Hegel put it in his dialectical account of being turning into nonbeing (das Sein umschlägt in das Nichtsein), the power over the perishing necessitates that the perishing itself perishes (aber sie ist wieder die Macht des Vergehens, so daβ das Vergehen vergeht).198 I am not sure that Jacob is correct to apply to Heidegger the Hegelian notion of the degeneration of the degeneration—an alternate way of naming the sublation (Aufhebung) of the negation of negation, that is, the negation that relates itself to itself and is thus the absolute affirmation (die Negation der Negation, die sich auf sich beziehende Negation, und dies ist absolute Affirmation)199—but by arguing this point he brings Heidegger into his theory, based on the conjecture of Ferdinand Christian Baur, regarding the gnostic dimension of Hegel’s

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dialectic of Verendlichung, the process of finitization by which absolute spirit attains self-knowledge as absolute spirit and thereby returns back to itself in the negation of the negation of finitude.200 In a manner that seems far from Heidegger, Jacob postulated a dichotomy between time as the Prince of Death and eternity as the Prince of Life: “To conquer time eternity has to enter the temporal zone of history [zeitlichen Ort der Geschichte]. History is the place where the substance of time and the substance of eternity, death and life, cross paths.”201 What is disclosed in time is the triumph of time by eternity, a conquest of history to be performed on the stage of history, culminating in the Endzeit, the end of time in which the temporal order has been fulfilled and sublated:202 Seen from the perspective of the course of history, the end is a temporal end. Seen from the perspective of complete full-fillment [Voll-endung], this temporal end is eternity. In the order of eternity, being is sublated as time [das Sein als Zeit aufgehoben].203

The attuned ear will discern the Hegelian drift of Jacob’s language, and inasmuch as he accepted the connection between Hegel and Valentinian Gnosticism, we can also presume that he viewed history through the eyes of a world-negating gnosis.204 Support for this claim may be derived from any number of passages of which I will here cite the following striking account of the “monstrous inversion” (ungeheurer Umkehrung) of the apocalyptic debasing of the world as an abundance of what is bad: Apocalypticism negates this world in its fullness. It brackets the entire world negatively. . . . The world is a totality which keeps itself distinct from the divine, forming an auto-nomy in relation to God. . . . As the world does not contain its real source of power but is determined by an opposite pole, God is also held in tension at a distance from it. This relationship of tension is mutual and determines both poles. The world is that which stands in opposition to God, and God is that which stands in opposition to the world. God in this world is alien and unknown. . . . He is nonexistent [nicht-seiend] in the world. . . . The “non-existent” God is an annihilating God [nichtender Gott] who clasps and destroys the world [die Welt umklammert und ver-nichtet]. The “nonexistent”

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God puts the being of the world in question by contesting the entire validity [Gültigkeit] and finality [Endgültigkeit] of what exists.205

The dualistic posture could not be expressed more clearly and dramatically: the world is counter-divine and God counter-worldly (Die Welt ist das Gegengöttliche und Gott ist das Gegenweltliche). What the apocalypse reveals is that God is alien and unknown in this world (Gott ist in der Welt fremd und unbekannt), and thus ontically nonexistent. Far from being ontologically disempowering, the nonexistence empowers God as the annihilating force that takes hold of and destroys the world. In this negating power lies the theopolitical basis for the revolutionary longing of nihilism: The “nonexistent” God in the world and against the world sanctions the nihilistic viewpoint mankind has of this world. The “nonexistent” God, and that means the “not-yet-existing” [noch nicht-seiende] God, is the powerful promise of a turning point. God will annihilate the world and then appear in his might.206

The temporal logic of the nonexistence portends a not-yet—albeit a not-yet that is now in virtue of now being not-yet—that marks our conflict with the world that should stimulate political resistance mirroring God’s own annihilating potency vis-à-vis the world. The nonmanifest is manifest when the manifest is obliterated. With this in mind we can better understand Jacob’s claim that history and truth have a common origin in the essence of freedom, since freedom alone lifts humankind out of nature into the realm of history, but freedom can only reveal itself in apo-stasy [Ab-Fall]. For as long as freedom is caught up in the divine cycle of Nature, it is subject to the necessity of God and Nature. . . . Only mankind’s answer [Antwort] to the word of God, which is essentially a negative one [ein Nein], is evidence of human freedom. Therefore, the freedom of negation is the foundation of history.207

The foundation of history is in human freedom, but human freedom in its most pristine form is the negative response to the divine, the negation that is an act of apostasy, Ab-Fall, literally, a falling away, a decline. Jacob’s apocalyptic-gnostic perspective—indebted to Jonas’s delineation of the revolutionary

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and the indignant motifs in the physiognomy of Gnosticism208 —rests on proffering an act of abandonment of that which is foreign to God and to nature, the renunciation that is the measure of freedom by which the vicissitudes of history are grounded.209 Moreover, just as the essence of history is founded on freedom, so too is the essence of truth, but insofar as truth is founded on freedom, concealment and obfuscation will be the inevitable corollaries of disclosure and transparency. Although Heidegger again is not mentioned, Jacob’s words bring to mind the previously discussed Heideggerian idea that truth cannot be disentangled from untruth, that every unconcealment is inescapably a concealment.210 The veracity of being human is always to be gauged from having been tossed into a world of errancy. As Jacob put it, Forgetting the mystery, the world is fashioned according to the latest designs; the constructions of the world block the path to the mystery, so that there is no escape from the labyrinth of constructed routes. The labyrinth of this world is the state of error [Stätte der Irre]. . . . Knowledge of error, as error, is the pathway to escaping from error on the way to the revelation of the truth.211

The truthfulness of the mystery is the foothold of history, but that truthfulness inevitably entails the duplicity that is necessary for the survival of the worlds we confabulate. Assuredly, these imaginary worlds are indispensable for human subsistence, both individually and collectively, but they block the path to the very mystery by which they are propagated as the coverup of the myth. Consonant with his understanding of Gnosticism, Jacob contends that the divulging of the mystery begins by recognizing the knowledge of the error that is the labyrinth of the world. To flee from error, therefore, one must unveil the error as error rather than disclose a truth behind the veil of the error. This is consonant with Heidegger’s contention that enlightenment in the intransigently fractured world consists of inundating the shadow with light so that the shadow will be illumined as shadow. In one telling passage, Jacob articulated the gnostic ramifications of positing revelation as the subject of history by combining scriptural imagery and the language of Heidegger, albeit reframed theistically: Revelation is the fire which casts light upon the clearing [Lichtung]

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between God and the world. The burning fire reaches the center of heaven; the world is darkness and gloom. The voice of God, which is the very essence of revelation, is to be heard in this fire, but has no visible form. It sprays flames of fire. Mankind cannot break through to God without being scorched. It can only see God from behind, but not face to face. Nobody can see the face of God and live.212

Jacob availed himself of the Heideggerian Lichtung—to be pictured not as the clearing between God and the world but as the opening in which being is disclosed in the concealment of its disclosure—to reinterpret the biblical idea of revelation. What is revealed is that God cannot be revealed because of the insuperable chasm separating the divine and the cosmos. As such, revelation exposes the brute fact that this world is a place of darkness and gloom. In a beguiling exegetical turn, exemplifying the best of rabbinic sophistry, Jacob extracts evidence for a gnostic dualism from the deuteronomist’s account of the Sinaitic theophany: the mountain was ablaze with flames to the heart of the heavens, and the Israelites heard the voice of God from within the fire but they saw no shape (Deuteronomy 4:11–12). The rebuke against positing a visible divine image, confirmed by the allusion to the response to Moses’s request to behold the glory that he could see the back but not the face (Exodus 33:18–23), is interpreted in a gnostic register; that is, the face of light cannot be perceived in the corporal world, the realm of historical time, where the concealment inexorably is concealed. In the paradisiacal state—described by Jacob in Schelling’s portrayal of art in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) as the “holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder”213—we can imagine that God was seen face to face, but as a result of the primordial transgression, the “oneness of God and the world is torn apart, and the face of death weighs heavily on the world.”214 The phonocentric interpretation of the divine epiphany is transferred to the beckoning of the redeemer: “The beyond, which is not at home in this world, is heard as a call in the world . . . . The call is a fundamental symbol in the context of apocalypticism and Gnosis. Mandaean and Manichaean religion can be described, like Judaism, as the religion of the call.”215 Preserving the scriptural denunciation of ocularcentrism, Jacob maintained that God or the savior, the nonworldly

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(Nicht-Weltliche), comes into being through the call, and hence the entirely other becomes audible in this world as the entirely other (Das Ganz Andere wird hörbar im Hier der Welt, freilich aber als das ganz Andere).216 It is likely, as Susan suggested,217 that the emphasis on the call of the beyond, which arouses the stranger to the quandary of self-estrangement, may also reflect what Heidegger notoriously designated in Being and Time as “the call to conscience” (Ruf des Gewissens), that is, the call that incites Dasein from the stupor of being subsumed in the everyday they-self of heedful being-with-one-another to appropriate its ownmost potentialityof-being-a-self (eigensten Selbstkönnen).218 The possibility that Heidegger’s philosophical translation of the gnostic motif impacted Jacob’s apocalypticism is supported by this passage: History is the source of revelation for mankind and his pathway through time. In the aeon of sin, existence begins as time, aiming toward death. Time contains the principle which brings death. . . . Time is not the place of life, but contains the pestilential smell of death, and plunges life into the Sheol of the past. Not until the End Time, at the end of time, when transience itself passes away, will eternity triumph over the deadly principle of time.219

One might counter that Heidegger did not entertain an Endzeit in which transience would pass away, but the main gist of the passage aligns with the Heideggerian dismissal of any endeavor to posit a transcendence that would unshackle humankind from the temporal yoke of finitude. Time can be redeemed only by time in the same way that death can be defeated only by death even though the death of death, in the end, is still a mode of dying. Analogously, Jacob harbored a demonstrably negative view about time and history: the endtime signifies hyperliterally the time of the end that is the end of time, the victory of eternity over temporal becoming. Translated into Heideggerian terms, we could say that eternality is not a timelessness (Zeitlosigkeit) that negates time but rather “the deepest oscillation of time in its refusing and bestowing, preserving and losing [die tiefste Duchschwingung der Zeit, in ihrem Verweigern und Verschenken, Bewahren und Verlieren].”220 The victory of the eternal over temporal becoming is secured by discriminating that time is permanent in its impermanence, abiding in its nonabiding.

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The gnostic reconfiguration of the Jewish idea of redemption in Occidental Eschatology was sharply—albeit obliquely—critiqued by Susan in the letter to Jacob from February 22, 1952. Susan began by contrasting Jacob’s fervor for redemption, which she shared, and Camus’s view that we must learn to live in the world without hope. In some sense, the repeated cycles of nature, fluctuating from one state to its opposite, can be considered a movement of eternal redemption. “Thus there can be redemption in seasonal rites and a discipline of eros whereby fast and feast are rhythmically related, and to break this harmony would result in a cosmic evil, as if the sun swerved from its course or spring did not follow winter.” And yet, as Susan noted in the continuation, “we are exiled from the sacred order of nature” to the point that “we are weary of the repetition of the seasons, and it is just from the order of nature with its eternal alternation of tides that we want to be redeemed. So, what is involved is redemption from the world.” The disillusionment with nature and the consequent coveting to be redeemed from the world lead to only one option, to “gamble for the Apokalypse,” which will herald the conflagration and the termination of the world.221 The end, however, is subject to unremitting deferment as the end cannot end being the end and remain the end. We are thus left with the ensuing dilemma: We cannot bring about the apokalypse and yet we must go on living; suicide is not consequential, my life and my death are equally meaningless without total redemption. What are we to do? We are in the midst of an ocean dying of thirst, the saltwater only increases our thirst; but we must drink the saltwater and die of it and that’s all there is to do; sometimes there is a little rain from heaven which relieves for a while the nausea and suffocation.222

The “suffering peace” that we must make with the earth affords one the possibility to achieve the “eternity of love,” but the latter is predicated on “the knowledge that the craving is always greater than the fulfillment.”223 Appropriating but radically transforming the gnostic myth of the redeemed redeemer constructed by Reitzenstein, Bultmann, and Jonas,224 Susan wrote in her doctoral thesis, “The redeemer himself must be redeemed, or man goes astray in the world of his own construction and his manipulations lose

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their root and thus their end; the path of Prometheus must be bent back toward its source in eros. The circle of life is broken in order to redeem life.”225 That the redeemer must be redeemed does not mean that the redeemer is redeemed from the spatio-temporal world in order to return pneumatically to the transmundane pleroma of light, to be awakened from the slumber that has alienated the soul from the awareness of its own alienation, but it means rather that the redeemer is redeemed from the very belief that there is the possibility of redemption. In the capriciousness of our expecting the unexpected, of waiting for what cannot arrive, lies our obdurate fidelity to a future that is both present and not present, present as not present, not present as present. The import of the comment about Prometheus can be illumined from what Susan wrote to Jacob on September 15–16, 1950, a letter to which I have already referred above: The act of naming for the increase of human powers even as Prometheus’ theft of fire for the same ends is an instance of the fall. Then, “the naming of the holy” or let us say the whole whence we have been cast out, would mean: to regain IN the word what has been lost THROUGH the word. That is to create in the substance in the very corporeality of language, that destroyed the immediacy of the whole, the totality. And in this effort to regain the holy the poet drives the cursed-godgiven language through all the excluded and forbidden realms of genesis, through all the secret passages of the creation out of nothing.226

Insofar as the Promethean myth of stealing fire from the gods and imparting it to humans in the form of knowledge and technology represents a fall related to language, we can presume that bending the path of Prometheus back to eros is equivalent to regaining in the word what has been lost through the word, that is, retrieving the mode of language beyond language, a form of speech centered on naming the holy, which is the task of the poet. In this effort to speak the unspeakable, we can locate the only viable path to salvation, but this path is predicated on traversing the secret passages of the creation out of nothing. By restoring the somethingness of creation to the nothingness whence it was created, one comprehends that the only way out of the world

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is through the world. I propose that the cognizance of this truth—the truth that there is no truth227—is the implication of the searing remark: the circle of life must be broken in order to redeem life. If the only hope is apocalyptic in nature, then, paradoxically, hope is proportionate to hopelessness—indeed, we cannot be acclimatized to hope except as an expression of the hopeless—and this would result in a gnostic transmutation of the Jewish ideal of redemption. That Susan struggled with this possibility is attested in the following letter where she summarily rebuffed the gnostification of the role of the Jewish God in history: The apokalypse is what we hope; and we cannot hope for anything from it, beyond itself. If our hope is a peaceful, just and prosperous community we should fight for it on earth; if what we crave is love in its purity and faithfulness we must learn to love our father, mother, brother, friend, wife, child etc. But if we chose apokalypse, it means we have renounced these hopes and that we have no right to look forward to a heavenly paradise. End of the world does not mean the accomplishment of a “perfect” world, perfect love, perfect justice. Analogical truth boils down to affirming a finitude infinitized or an infinite finitude; a monster. . . . I cannot envisage the God of Israel in a “gnostic Judaism”. I rather see him walking beside the just, beside the patriarchs and David and Salomon, bringing up his people to live in the sacred order of the world, that is god’s world, whose law is god’s law. And as long as the word of god is on the lips of men as long as long as redemption is experience through the law, the craving for redemption is without ever being stilled partially fulfilled. But we seem to be as exiled from that sacrum as from Hellas.228

As this passage rightly indicates, Jacob’s position is unfailingly dualistic: time is the darkness of death that must be conquered by the light of life that is eternity. A possible challenge to this conclusion might be made on the basis of a passage from Hans Leisegang’s Die Gnosis (1924), cited by Jacob to elucidate the structure of apocalypticism and gnosis, wherein the “circular patterns of basic concepts” (kreisförmige Führung der Grundgedanken) in gnostic thinking, which are both dualistic and monistic, are said to be incongruous with modern philosophical jargon. The starting point and goal of the path

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of gnosis so regarded is a coincidentia oppositorum rather than a partition of the world into two irreconcilable forces.229 Jacob maintained that Leisegang’s summary of the pattern of apocalyptic and Gnostic thought is wrong only in the assumption—and this is a significant barrier to understanding apocalypticism—that it is incompatible with modern philosophical terminology. Apocalypticism and Gnosis inaugurate a new form of thinking which, though submerged by Aristotelian and Scholastic logic, has been preserved in the present and was taken up and further developed by Hegel and Mark.230

The logic of the dialectical method meets the criterion of being both dualistic and monistic insofar as it reconciles the opposition of thesis and antithesis into a synthesis within the course of history, a view that was rejected forthrightly by Susan in a letter written on April 26, 1952: Leisegang’s argument that the gnosis must be characterized as at once dualistic + monistic + that the source + aim of the gnosis is not the dichotomization of the world into 2 hostile + irreconcilable forces but the “Ueberwindung der gegensätze” (which you cite and accept in your A.E. [Abendländische Eschatologie]) seems to me very questionable. Isn’t the major thesis of the gnosis that “God” (the source of the self) is not the source of the world? The evil is not the “dualism”, the contradiction, but the “mixture” of self + world. To “forget” the contradiction (the difference between Sein + Seiende) is root of all error. Therefore Hegel is not a gnostic but a Christian rationalist + Heidegger is a gnostic. The end of history is not the fulfillment of reason but the catastrophy [sic] of error.231

While I understand Jacob’s strategy to accept Leisegang’s point in order to validate his hypothesis that the dialectic is “the ontological form of apocalypticism and Gnosis which is passed down to Hegel and Marx,”232 I concur with Susan’s critique. I would add, moreover, that the Hegelian interpretation does not cohere with Jacob’s understanding of Gnosticism, and by implication apocalypticism, which is indisputably far more dualistic. Recall the aforementioned statement “the world is counter-divine and God counter-worldly” (Die Welt ist das Gegengöttliche und Gott ist das Gegenweltliche). There does

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not seem to be any space for a dialectical synchronization by which this antinomy could be sublated; the apocalyptic revelation exposes the truth of God annihilating—not sublating—the world. Indeed, the justification for Jacob treating Gnosticism as the “kindred spirit” of apocalypticism—or as he literally put it, “Gnosis is the spirit of the spirit of the apocalyptic” (Die Gnosis ist Geist vom Geiste der Apokalyptik)233—turns on the irresoluble enmity between God and world: “In their narration of the history of the world the apocalyptic myths introduce self-estrangement as a dramatic leitmotif, and it is on this very theme that the more theoretical, ontological speculations of Gnosis are founded.”234 Based on this deduction, I do not see justification for Jacob’s assertion that the foundations of the dialectic are to be found in God’s alienation from the world, which coincides with the severance of the human into the psyche and the pneuma, and that the process of redemption occurs ontologically in God’s sublation of the world and anthropologically in the pneuma’s sublation of the psyche.235 The first part of this statement is consistent with Jacob’s exposition of Gnosticism, beholden to Jonas, who argued as well that a salient feature of gnostic apophaticism is that the transcendence of the unknown God does not stand in any positive relation to the essence of the world but represents its negation and cancellation.236 From the perspective of the world, God is always other, the deus alienus. Hence, in accord with a passage from The Political Theology of Paul cited above, the apocalyptic ethos is such that one has “no spiritual investment in the world as it is.”237 The second part of the statement, however, is more problematic. Not only is Jacob’s extrapolation regarding sublation not corroborated philologically or textually, but it contradicts his own description of the final revelation as one in which God annihilates the world. Annihilation is not sublation. Even if we think of the latter as the annihilation of annihilation, in the case of God annihilating the world, the double annihilation would amount to an unmitigated extinction, and thus there would be nothing in the world that could be labeled as innately redeemable. Once more, let us listen to Jacob’s own language: In Gnosis the cosmos is seen as a world and an order devoid of meaning. For Gnosis, the unity [Geschlossenheit] of the ancient cosmos is conceived as a barrier or wall against which we collide in desperation.

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It is only this barrier, in its unity, which enable us to say that the beyond exists, which means precisely the beyond of the outermost shell enclosing the cosmos. The cosmos, as portrayed in Gnosis, has not been emptied to a point of utter powerlessness; rather, the abundance of evil contained in it renders it powerful. The cosmos is ruled by the substance of darkness. . . . This shows that the division between God and the world, and mankind’s self-estrangement, are taken to extremes in Gnosis. Gnostic mythology turns over on itself [überschlägt sich selbst] and rages against the origin from which it derives its revolutionary pathos. To the extent that Gnosis sees Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, as the guarantor of this world by virtue of his creative word, the apocalyptic, revolutionary hatred of the world changes into Gnostic outrage against that God and his principle.238

Jacob attempted to salvage his Hegelian reading of the gnostic myth by arguing that the rigorous negation of the cosmos is possible only because the cosmos is held in tension with its opposite pole, God. God and world are not distant [entfernt] but estranged [entfremdet] and divided [entzweit], and therefore hold each other in mutual tension [so gegenseitig aufeinander zugespannt]. Just as there is nothing of God in the cosmos, so God is the nothing of the world. . . . The apocalyptic, Gnostic God is not beyond this world [überweltlich] but essentially against this world [gegenweltlich].239

One would be hard-pressed to recognize in these words the dialectical logic of Hegel. The contrast made between distant, on the one hand, and estranged and divided, on the other hand, amounts to the proverbial distinction without a difference. The tension of which Jacob speaks does not allow for any sublation as is attested by the statement “Just as there is nothing of God in the cosmos, so God is the nothing of the world” (Wie im Kosmos nichts von Gott ist, so ist Gott das Nichts der Welt). Positing such a rigid disparity is far from Hegel. Transcendence denotes not what is beyond but what is against the world, and hence the enunciation (Aussage)

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of the unknown God—the God that is known as unknowable—necessarily comprises the renunciation (Absage) of the world.240 Here it is well to mention the language of Jacob in a letter to Carl Schmitt from September 18, 1979: “One can argue over the boundary between the spiritual and the worldly, and this boundary will constantly be redrawn (an everlasting task of political theology), but if this distinction is neglected, then we breathe our last (Occidental) breath.”241 Reiterating the point in even stronger language in a passage from The Political Theology of Paul, Jacob wrote, “You see now what I want from Schmitt—I want to show him that the separation of powers between worldly and spiritual is absolutely necessary. This boundary, if it is not drawn, we will lose our Occidental breath. This is what I wanted to impress upon him against his totalitarian concept.”242 It is well-nigh impossible to interpret such an absolutely necessary separation of the worldly and the spiritual in terms of Hegel’s dialectic. It is incumbent upon me to acknowledge one passage in Occidental Eschatology where there is a more concerted effort to uphold the Hegelian perspective: Dialectic is the signpost on the pathway of history, from creation to redemption. The inherent possibility of dialectic springs from the essence of freedom. Freedom only exists where it allows for the freedom of negation. . . . The gap between thesis and antithesis reveals the principle of freedom as history. The thesis is the totality [das All], when God and the world are not yet differentiated. The antithesis is the separation of God and the world; synthesis is the union of God and the world through mankind, so that in freedom God may be all in all.243

I acknowledge that in this text the resonance of Hegel’s logic is incontestable. However, in many other passages, Jacob abdicated the tripartite structure of the dialectic by denying that there is any mitigating factor by which the friction between God and world can be assuaged.244 Insofar as the cosmic is antithetical to the divine, and the divine to the cosmic, God is the counter-principle to all things natural and nature the counter-principle to all things godly. As such, the world does not

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provide the context in which God may become all in all. One might protest that the passages wherein the clear-cut dichotomy between God and world is upheld represent the second state of the dialectic, but this does not compute with the overall sense one gets from Jacob’s insistence that the darkness of temporal existence is irreparably adversarial to the luminosity of the spirit of life, that redemption is from and not within history. It may be the case, as Jacob wrote, that “it is the essence of time to move forward, irreversibly straining toward something new,” and therefore, “the spirit is strictly bound up with time.”245 History, which is technically the project of spirit that surpasses nature, is impelled by time “directed toward something which has not yet been but will be, and which, when reached, will not be lost again.”246 From that angle, history is necessarily the history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte), the event that diremptively recurs as the interlude stretched between the no-more of creation and the not-yet of redemption. 247 However, the messianic hope expressed here is short-lived as the predictable deferral of the end—the unexpected for which there is constant expectation no matter how often the advent of the expectation is delayed248 —cuts a wedge between the double connotation of the eschaton as the axiological that-which-once-was of creation and the teleological that-which-one-day-will-be of redemption, 249 a temporal incision that results in the melancholic realization that time cannot find its resolution in time. In an interview conducted in 1987, Jacob recapitulated the thesis of his dissertation by saying about the notion of the apocalypse, Whether one knows it or not is entirely irrelevant, whether one takes it for fancy or sees it as dangerous is all uninteresting in view of the intellectual breakthrough and experience of time as respite [daβ Zeit Frist heiβ t]. . . . There is no eternal return, time does not enable nonchalance [Lässigkeit]; rather, it is distress [Bedrängnis].250

Jacob’s apocalyptic-gnostic view of history is pithily encapsulated in the statement that time is distress. Undoubtedly, Jacob maintained that this lack of tranquility is true for humanity at large, but he emphasized—in the spirit of Pauline universalism that signifies the election of

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Israel251—that it is a fate borne most uniquely by the Jewish people, “the restless element in world history, the leavening that first actually produces history.”252 Reverberating in Jacob’s biblical exegesis is the familiar ethnocentric chord that the divine can be disclosed only to one race [Geschlecht] which has not trodden the same path as other nations . . . . The revelation of God wrenches the race of Abraham from its homeland, its birthplace and ancestral home, and promises a land “which I shall show you” [Genesis 12:1]. Abraham is a stranger on this earth, a foreigner to the lands and nations he meets. Abraham’s race regards itself not as belonging to the nations, but as a nonnation [Nicht-Volk].253

The notion of a non-nation—that is, a nation differentiated from all other nations in virtue of its nationhood (Völkertum) no longer being determined by territorial occupation and political sovereignty—corresponds to Rosenzweig’s identification of the Jews as the metahistorical reference point in history. 254 Indeed, like Rosenzweig, who argued that the Jewish idea of peoplehood is based on the ancestral blood-community (Blutsgemeinschaft) and not on attachment to the land, 255 and in accord with Levinas, who extricated the holiness of the holy land from geopolitical ownership, maintaining that, for the Jew, expulsion from the worldliness of the world is the truest sense of returning to the autochthonous property of their covenantal pledge, 256 Jacob underscored the vagrancy and diasporic condition that is intrinsic to the identity of the Jewish people. 257 Enrootedness is not, as Heidegger and the Zionists maintain, being tied to a specific soil; on the contrary, as Levinas argued, as opposed to paganism, which is defined as “putting down roots,” the substitution of the letter for the soil in the advent of scriptures in Judaism is illustrative of the “uprooting” that is constitutive of “being-at-home,” and thus only by descending into the text is the true spirit universally fulfilled. 258 Expressing the biblical imagery in gnostic terms, Abraham is described as a stranger in the world at large, a foreigner to all nations and their respective lands. Jacob cited a passage from Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (1842)259 to substantiate the interpretation of the inessential essence of what it is to be a Jew:

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This is exactly what the name Hebrew means. “Abraham who is called Ibri, that is: Abraham, belonging to those who pass through, having no fixed abode, living as a nomad as the patriarch was still known in Canaan: because he who does not bide a while anywhere, is only a stranger, a wanderer.”260

Schelling astutely understood that the very name ivri denotes eccentricity and separation insofar as it “is consistently given to the Israelites only in contrast with the peoples or nations. Thus, it appears the name would have to also express their difference from the peoples or nations.”261 The Jew is most fully inside the home as the outsider that has no home, the one who resides with no fixed residence. Echoing a theme shared by any number of thinkers, Jacob downplayed the spatial facet of Judaism: The power of the origin and rootedness in space break down when it comes to Israel. Thus, Israel is able to become a “people without space” [Volk ohne Raum]. It does not perish because it knows itself to be a “people of time” [Volk der Zeit] who have been uprooted from their rootedness in space.262

Note that even though Jacob evoked the verse from Genesis in which Abram is commanded to leave his native land and to go to the land he will be shown, a promise that augments the patriarch’s being an interloper in the world, the assurance of inhabiting the land of Canaan does not bestow upon Abraham and his progeny the dispensation of indigeneity.263 Unquestionably, Jacob would have agreed with Rosenzweig that since the “full proprietorship” of that homeland is disputed—an allusion to the biblical admonition that “the Canaanites were then in the land” (Genesis 12:6)—the Jewish people “is itself only a stranger and tenant in its land.”264 Regrettably, the promise to Abraham of emplacement in the land is responsible not only for the displacement of the other—the abstract concept of alterity signified symbolically by the tangible example of the Canaanites—but also for his own displacement. The connection between the people and the homeland, consequently, is not a matter of autochthony; it derives from the fact that the land belongs to God, and hence

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the Israelites can reside therein only as foreigners and strangers (Leviticus 25:23) in the same manner that Abram was told that his offspring would be strangers in a land that was not their own (Genesis 15:13). From the biblical narrative we can adduce homiletically that even when homebound the Jew remains homeless. In a similar vein, Jacob, paraphrasing Hegel, says that Abraham’s status as a stranger, who stands in opposition to the world, was supported by a God estranged from the world.265 For Jacob, as for Rosenzweig,266 redemption and alienation are not to be construed as polar antinomies but rather as dialetheic opposites juxtaposed in the sameness of their difference; that is, exile is not the antithesis of being at home but the ontological condition267 that affords one the possibility of cultivating the sense of homeliness.268 This brings us back to the question of the historical connection between Judaism and Gnosticism. As we noted, one of the contributions that Susan made to this discourse was to emphasize that Heidegger was influenced by a theological strand in the Christian tradition that may have originated in a gnostic Jewish heresy. The clearest articulation of a corresponding point was made more elaborately and emphatically years later by Jacob in “The Dogmatic Myth of Gnosticism,” where his difference with the Heideggerian interpretation as it influenced Jonas and the Bultmann school is made explicitly: Late ancient Gnosticism emerges in the immediate environment of early Judaism, and in pagan quarters only, if at all, in those reached by the missionizing propaganda of Hellenistic Judaism, where the doctrine of the creator-God started to take effect against the dominant polytheism. Gnostic myth marks a crisis in monotheistic religion of revelation itself. The mythic reaction to the doctrine of the monotheistic religion of revelation comes from the borderlands of early Judaism, from Samaria, Syria, Transjordania, and Alexandria. This circumstance, essential for a historical interpretation of Gnosticism, is not considered in the foundational work of Hans Jonas, which has dominated the entire field of the study of Gnosticism for decades. Even if his phenomenological analysis remains valid for Gnostic topoi, such as the alien, this world, and the world beyond,

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worlds and eons, light and darkness, anxiety, erring, homesickness, the noise of the world, the call from beyond, the alien man, and so on, they acquire a different matrix if the problem of Gnosticism is considered from the perspective of the history of the Jewish religion—precisely in that reaction against the boundary making of the monotheistic revelation and its interpretation in rabbinical exegesis.269

Against the Bultmannian-Heideggerian interpretation of Gnosticism that informed the perspective of Jonas, Jacob highlighted the connection between apocalypticism and Gnosticism, suggesting that the latter phenomenon—or its engendering myth—should be explained in terms of a theological crisis within Judaism. More specifically, the crisis relates to the sustainability of the monotheistic split between a transworldly creator-god and the creation brought on by the failure of the apocalyptic vision of the end to transpire in time: Gnosticism reveals itself as one of the ways in which Jewish and Christian groups react to the deferral of parousia: the accent shifts from the cosmic and historical parousia to the entry of the divine into the individual soul. With the decoding of subjectivity, the scene is prepared for Gnostic mythology.270

The roots of Gnosticism are positioned in Jewish apocalypticism but there is a crucial shift from salvation history to the redemption of the spirit.271 As an internal rebellion within Judaism itself, the locus of evil is identified as the transcendent creator, and creation itself is hurled into disarray. In Susan’s words, which we cited above, gnosis makes the brokenness its fundamental question.272 She would have concurred with Jacob’s conviction that the gnostic myth seeks to bridge the unbridgeable abyss according to which God is not worldly and the world is not godly.273 As Susan wrote to Jacob in a letter from April 4, 1952: If there is something to be healed, the brokenness is within the world. To ask for the eradication of brokenness as such is to wish the annihilation of the world. To heal the broken relations within

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the world, requires first that we acknowledge the reality of these relations (instead of fleeing into the imaginary) + then drawing from the tree of life, science, art, wisdom, cultivate + transform them. The powers of creation, of life are also the powers of destruction: every transformation passes through chaos.274

The dark vision of gnosis—to envision the spark of holiness that grows within the shadow275—was likely an aspect of the magnetism that initially drew Susan and Jacob together, just as it was likely an aspect of the revulsion that eventually tore them apart. In a letter from December 28, 1950, Jacob wrote to Susan, “it is the greatest gift of God that I found in you the ‘way’ and the ‘abyss’ at the same time”276—indeed, the way to the abyss that turned out to be the abyss of the way.

4 Tragedy, Mystical Atheism, and the Apophaticism of Simone Weil That ontology is nihilistic is tautology: that it is atheism may be more significant. —Susan Taubes, Letter to Jacob Taubes, October 30, 1950

I believe we greatly need to learn how to pray. —Jacob Taubes, Letter to Susan Taubes, December 31, 1950

The loyalty and solidarity of the species, the tragedy of life that must devour life, is very moving. —Susan Taubes, Letter to Jacob Taubes, January 21, 1952

I know God can’t appear. He is still becoming. —Susan Taubes, Divorcing

It should come as no surprise that given her personal suffering and lifelong battle with depression, the subject of the tragic was of philosophical interest to Susan Taubes. This is clearly demonstrated in the brief but incisive essay “The Nature of Tragedy” (1953). At first glance, it would seem that the phenomenon of tragedy could be explained in categories familiar to the concern of religion and philosophy—to wit, the form of ritual, the frame of myth, the relations between human and divine, and the nature and meaning of transgression—but closer scrutiny dictates that tragedy is marked by the distinctive quality that it cannot be integrated within a mythical, religious, or rationalistic worldview. Historically, ritualistic patterns of sacrificial purification may 186

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have been the impetus for the formation of the tragic sensibility, and indeed the theatrical enactment of rituals is still discernible in secular tragedies,1 but ideationally, tragic mimesis is distinguished from ritual mimesis inasmuch as the former centers on a human protagonist defiant in the face of the noumenal powers dreaded and mollified by the latter. In Susan’s own words: “The spell of ritual participation is broken once the stage is set for tragedy, and we witness the spectacle of human actions, of man himself deliberating, contriving, probing and holding his ground against the gods.”2 The nature of sin is calculated in a fundamentally different manner. From the perspective of religion, transgression is interpreted as an act of maleficent insubordination, whereas from the perspective of tragedy, transgression is interpreted as a gesture of heroic grandeur.3 By encroaching the line separating humanity from the gods, the tragic hero gains a profounder intuition into their relation.4 Susan’s idea of tragedy can be gauged from her critique of Nietzsche’s conception of the Übermensch and the extolling of the human will that she elicits from passages in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science: For is it not true that most to be loved is what is most fragile and trembles in mortality; and if we would be like gods and burn the rubbish of man’s past looking straight into the sun, is it not more godlike to give one’s soul to the idlest thing the vainest thing and spend the day with a blade of grass is it not more godlike to lay one’s fame on the sands than to dream of yet greater feats of man, and to will to be superman! Will is also sickness; what is more human and ridiculous than to will . . . Man is a hollow reed and his will barren, unless by the back-door of the soul, like a dream of rising waters the god enters and fecundates it.5

Tragedy consists of the human becoming more human in an effort to be godlike by inflicting the will to power over others; to overcome that tragic misstep, the human being must become like the divine by surrendering to the trivialities of nature. The seemingly banal advice to spend a day with a blade of grass is reminiscent of the profundity contained in the beginning of the “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”6 But unlike the illustrious English bard, Susan maintained, building on the view of Lukács, that the continuation of

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life must be centered on thoughts of death. Indeed, the pledge that life must go on is the deceit that tragedy and mysticism share, but, in the end, the excruciating recognition that death is the incontrovertible terminus of living is what gives shape to the tragic orientation and the mystical vision.7 Both of these perspectives illumine the empowerment that results from the diminishing rather than the intensification of the will. The moral-pietistic demand is for one to become a hollow reed, to decimate the autonomy of the self, which allows the divine to enter and to sustain the vitality of the soul, an incursion that is compared intriguingly to a dream of rising waters.

Unhappy Ending: Tragedy and the Irresolution of Binary Opposition Susan described the unique characteristic of tragedy—the characteristic that cannot be characterized due to the unstable8 and transitional9 nature of its position—by noting that it “focuses on a single action, which develops complete and self-enclosed from its own inner causality; it isolates a concrete instance, through which man’s entire universe must pass as through the eye of a needle.”10 Tragedy so conceived is the dissolution of structure that endows the human with structure insofar as it is an assault on the very possibility of meaning that nevertheless “offers a total interpretation of life . . . as an alternative to the mythical, philosophical or religious interpretation.”11 Speculating further on the nature of this unique quality, Susan suggested that tragedy is the domain where the good is attainable as a “precarious balance” of contrary forces. “The tragic stage is a balance where human action is weighed, where man’s will is measured against the working of the gods, meaning against futility, order against chaos.”12 If a person inhabits a world wherein “order and meaning are eternally and immutably established,” or a world “without bounds or stability, void of meaning,” then there is no experience of what is “essentially tragic.” On the contrary, the experience of tragedy implicates one in uncertainty and conflict, contradiction and paradox: The tragic play balances perilously between the extreme poles of hope and nihilism. Man is still a member of a sacred order, but the noumenal world has become incomprehensible and full of menace and no longer assures him of an ultimate harmony.13

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Whereas the religious attitude conceives the noumenal realm in the form of a benevolent personal god, the tragic-mythic consciousness is predicated on the experience of the demonic and destructive aspect of the gods that must be placated through ritual sacrifices, prayers, and the observance of taboos.14 “In tragedy the old gods of myth and ritual, that reason and monotheistic religion have only temporarily subdued, rise again to threaten the order of man’s cosmos.”15 Appeasement and circumvention of the sinister notwithstanding, human existence is plagued by the perennial clash between the satanic and the divine, the orderly and the chaotic, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, in Nietzsche’s terminology.16 The tragedy of the tragedy, therefore, is that the ideal point of equilibrium cannot be achieved, and hence the polar opposition of good and evil is not reconciled in the end by the tragic action. In that respect, tragedy is “a situation which by its very nature excludes a solution, which encloses and isolates the hero within its limits and permits no way out.”17 There is no exit because there is no entry if the latter is determined on the basis of belief in a single principle, whether construed philosophically as an ultimate canon of rationality or theologically as an omnipotent god. There is only the apperception that evil belongs to a transethical sphere, a positive and substantial reality, and not merely a negative attribute or a privation, that is independent of and thus cannot be absorbed into the good.18 The paradox of tragedy resists a dialectical sublation of antinomies, and in its place, it upholds “the alternatives in a perilous balance that leaves the door open to nihilism as well as to faith.”19 Implicitly, and likely unwittingly, Susan has here appropriated one of the far-reaching paradoxes affirmed by kabbalists concerning the identity of belief and nonbelief in the indifferent oneness of the infinite,20 a paradox that supplied the theoretical underpinning of the ideal of pious transgression in the Sabbatian movement and its aftermath in the Frankist heresy.21 It is plausible that Susan became acquainted with this idea either through reading Scholem22 or through Jacob’s writings and conversations with him.23 Be that as it may, what is important for our purposes is that her categorization of tragedy as opening the door to nihilism and to faith resonates with this kabbalistic idea. One door opens to both possibilities because the opposites are congruent in virtue of their incongruence. Ironically perhaps, the thread that unifies Susan’s wide-ranging philosophical ruminations on a plethora of topics is her unremitting commitment

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to the fragmentariness of human experience and the unfaltering fleetingness of the world. Reflecting on the text of her essay “Time of Midnight Snow,” composed in 1947 when she was a student at Bryn Mawr, Susan wrote, And as I tried to say in my “opus”—though I feel very strange and forever strange in this world, yet I’m not mad, for I know—no less than I know this strangeness—that in this strangeness I am in communion with all men—if not with all creatures in the universe who ever were or will be.24

Susan here affirmed a presentiment that proved to be decisive to Heidegger as well, in spite of her criticism of him on precisely this issue: the potential for empathy toward the other is cultivated within the womb of sequestering from the other.25 The implacable feeling of wandering continuously through the world as a nomadic,26 and lauding the fate of being persistently at home in a state of exile27 grew exponentially in the course of her life. As Susan described Sophie, her fictional doppelgänger, in Divorcing, published a few days before her suicidal demise, “Her sense of the matter was that things were generally hopeless and that there was no place for her anywhere: the world in which she would have wanted to love had ended—before Hiroshima, before Auschwitz.”28 Even the solace she sought early on in her relationship with Jacob, which she envisioned as the serenity of home offsetting the disjuncture of being in the world,29 eventually soured and augmented her dejection and desolateness. Years later, in A Lament for Julia, Susan painfully expressed the struggle for recognition and the fear of invisibility in the voice of the unnamed narrator, identified “as the grey and nondescript ghost, cold and sober to the bone” (als grauen, unscheinbaren Geist, kalt und nüchtern bis auf die Knochen): “Nobody discovered me. I could have left it at that, snatched my stolen treasure and devoured it in secret. But I was obsessed with the urge to be recognized.”30 The modus vivendi of Susan’s relationship with Jacob in particular—and likely her acerbic attitude more generally about human intersubjectivity—is encapsulated in the line from Divorcing about Sophie and her partnership with Ezra, “She had accepted as part of the marriage two people walking together in solitude and opposition.”31 It is hard to imagine a more heartrending derision of the matrimonial hope of living together synchronously

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but separately than the image of two people walking together in solitude and opposition. In another passage from this novel, the fissure between Jacob and Susan is captured agonizingly in the description of the fictitious couple: They both struggled against their own dreams and inclinations. Ezra wanted to be different, she, perhaps, wanted simply to stop dreaming, waiting, virginal; he lying that he wanted her, still wanting what he could not wean himself from; wanting to believe himself, her to believe him: that he wanted her; lying himself into believing. She, silent, still holding truth dearest like a last coin in her palm—perhaps a worthless coin—in the twinkling of an eye she flung it away, leaving her so empty-handed . . . .32

As I noted in the previous chapters, estrangement was a central motif that informed Susan’s effort to establish a credible sense of her Jewishness in the world, and it can also explain her intellectual interest in Heidegger, Gnosticism, and Weil. Astutely, Susan detected that the alienation from the world afforded her the opportunity to be connected with all humanity, and perhaps with all creatures; solitude, on this score, is concomitantly the refuge of segregation and the web of connectivity. On this point, she was critical of Heidegger: In the end Heidegger is wrong. The self in its self-isolation is a sheer formal act of self-reflexion[,] all the other categories, language, freedom, guilt, dread are introduced arbitrarily. Because all these are categories of community and describe relations. I am not free “in myself” but only in relation to other human beings . . . . It is not man who is free, but the relation between men can be free.33

Susan’s criticism is itself subject to critique insofar as she ignored or downplayed Heidegger’s notion of Mitsein, the being-with, that is, the existential structure that undergirds the capacity for relationality in his understanding of the selfhood of Dasein.34 What is most important to our analysis, however, is that the possibility of social relations, dependent on the dignity that some people are capable of achieving, and the devotion to carry on with her own work compelled the young Susan to keep writing, offering her a modicum of strength in the midst of her overwhelming discouragement as the “devil of despair and

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resignation” hammered at her ears.35 In spite of her affirming the primacy of relationship and community, the enduring isolation was an unbearable burden that Susan bore through much of her life. The demoralizing termination by her own hand as the final resolution to this grief was a possibility she already imagined in the story “Resolutions and a Pink Hat,” written in 1945: I can’t stand this any longer. Everything is hateful and meaningless. Life has no other purpose than suffering and everything is petty and disgusting. As soon as I shall have no more obligations, that is as soon as Father shall die, I shall kill myself by jumping off the old bridge. I have to keep this promise; there is no way out of it.36

Regrettably, Susan kept her promise by choosing suicide as the only way to deal with her despondency. The following comment in a letter Susan wrote to Jacob between January 8–9, 1951, reveals her rather negative assessment of humanity: Thank God for the rain and thank God also for the barrenness. Man, who is full of spirits, passions and full sometimes with no-thing, man needs a very barren place to live; for nothing is boring except what is an expression of boredom; and what are all the trinkets crowding the stores, the stores crowding the streets, the cars, the radios and journals, the world filled with people’s chatter and people’s pictures—except expressions of boredom.37

The tautology nothing is boring except what is an expression of boredom drives home the depth of discontent: everything tedious that occupies people’s attention can be reduced to dire expressions of boredom, the no-thing with which the human spirit is filled. Reflecting in the letter to Jacob written on December 15–16, 1950, on the respective attitudes to Christianity espoused by Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Susan opined that they both failed to think about the tribulation of the human self in the world and the terror of existence: We know well enough the vulnerability of the body but are we willing to face that there is no point of invulnerability anywhere in our existence, least of all in the soul, that we are totally exposed. And that means that the soul has its own need for bread, shelter and clothing, of

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which it can be deprived all too easily. There are times of security and plenitude; but then come times of invasion, dispersion and chaos; and the soul denuded, beaten and cast out from its home stands cold, hungry and forlorn on a strange road; and the “orthodox” try and clothe it in ridiculous garments that only point to its nakedness and yield but the least warmth and protection.38

This passage is another illustration of Susan’s displeasure with Orthodox Judaism, which we discussed at length in the first chapter, but in this case the disapproval is related specifically to the failure to affirm the proper role of the body as part of the spiritual economy. She notes sardonically that the garments in which the Orthodox clothe the soul only point to its nakedness. Instantiated here is the kernel of Susan’s aesthetics, which is presented more fully in the letter to Jacob from March 6, 1952: The science of the symbolic use of the body—the body of the world as well as the body of man—is of course the task of art; and the ideal is to integrate—and not to disintegrate as in an art of sheer revolt—the “practical” and the “symbolic” use of the body. The ideal is to attain the coincidence of the “ideal” and the “real” of heaven and earth, of the natural and the transnatural in the acts of eating, loving, fighting, building, cultivating and producing. Because the “authentic life” the authentic reality and authentic ideality is neither the real nor the ideal but their coincidence. This sounds “hegelian”; but again whereas Hegel thinks that by thinking these things we arrive at them I do not think that the synthesis is rational it is not the synthesis of reason. Nor is the irrational “integrated” (aufgehoben) in the rational; chaos and form are not eschatologically reconciled “in the end”, do not tend toward any such reconciliation, but are eternal and eternally antinomical. The victory of form in synthesis is not final but momentary, chaos reasserts itself and breaks the bonds of forms.39

In contrast to the model of disintegration related specifically to the art of revolt, the task of art generically is linked to the integration of the practical and the symbolic use of the body on both the cosmological and the anthropological planes. The aesthetic paradigm is to attain the coincidence of the

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ideal and the real in such a manner that we recognize that authentic reality and authentic ideality are not considered as either real or ideal in and of themselves but only in relation to the convergence of the two in the space of their divergence. Marking the deviation of her view from Hegel, Susan emphasized that whereas the Hegelian synthesis is achieved through the rational, in her case, the synthesis is not a matter deduced by reason. It is not clear to me that she was well served by utilizing the language of synthesis to name her own view, since her idea of coincidence involves the bridging of an unbridgeable disparity that resists the synthetic overcoming of binaries such as the ideal and the real, the natural and the supernatural, heaven and earth. Her understanding of coincidence is expressed succinctly in the statement “if there is no chaos (not just a formal ‘nothing’) no sheer unsignificative energy, there is no genuine signification.”40 Although this is presented as a criticism of Heidegger’s Seinsdenken, I propose that what Susan was trying to express is in fact very close to his idiosyncratic idea of Zusammengehörigkeit, the belonging-together of what persists in the sameness as opposed to the identity of difference.41 Thus, the irrational is not sublated in the rational, and there is no eschatological reconciliation of chaos and form; on the contrary, her notion of coincidence preserves the perpetuity of this adversarial relationship. Susan did not invoke the term “tragedy” in this context, but, as we shall see, the nature of the tragic is described by her precisely in terms of the irresoluble tension between the chaotic and the formal. Here it is apposite to mention the comparison of Susan Taubes and Simone Weil offered by Susan Sontag: S.W. of course makes me think of Susan [Taubes]. Same hunger for purity, same refusal of the body, same unfitness to live. What was the difference between them? That S.W. had genius and Susan didn’t. That S.W. assumed her own desexualization, affirmed it, drew energy from it—while Susan was “weak”: she could never accept the love of women; she wanted to be hurt and dominated by men; she wanted to be beautiful, glamorous, mysterious. Susan’s refusals only weakened her, they didn’t give her energy. Her suicide was second-rate. S.W.’s was an exaltation— that’s how, finally, she succeeded in imposing herself on the world, securing her own legend, blackmailing her contemporaries and posterity.42

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Putting aside the question of the fair-mindedness of Sontag’s judgment regarding Susan’s weakness, sexual shortcomings,43 and lack of genius44—not to mention the tactless depiction of her suicide as second-rate45—the hunger for purity, refusal of the body, unfitness to live, and self-desexualization are all insightful clues to understand Susan’s melancholia and her inability to inculcate a more positive evaluation of the corporeal. For all of the misgivings concerning Weil’s critique of historicism based on a negative theodicy that privileged the vanquished in her construal of human culture and the theological presupposition regarding the disappearance of the creature to facilitate the appearance of transcendence that can only appear through its nonappearance,46 Susan seemed to be speaking about herself when she wrote that “history is the domain of falsehood and idolatry for it perpetuates in the heart of man a criminal and contradictory attachment to the cave.”47 I suspect that it was the unyielding nature of this condemnation of the sensible world—depicted by the celebrated Platonic metaphor—that inclined Susan to react unsympathetically to Heidegger’s understanding of eternality as the timeliness of time,48 the recurrent generation and degeneration of temporal finitude that precludes any need to posit a relation, even if negative, to the nontemporal.49 However, unlike Sontag’s testimony about herself, Susan was not able to survive the suffering of time she suffered timelessly.50 The nature of tragedy, as Hölderlin conceived it, is linked to the quality of time as that which does not allow for a final repose but continues in its infinite process of dissolutions and structurations.51

Fragmentary Wholeness, Ontological Untruth, and the Mythical Lie In a letter to Jacob from November 3, 1950, Susan reported that she was working on the chapter of her honors thesis at Bryn Mawr dedicated to the topic of the “lie in myth,” which is glossed as “the real ontological untruth—every attempt to reconstruct the broken world into a totality has an ontological ‘flaw’ which is most important for the understanding of the meaning of that attempt.”52 A curious phrase indeed, the lie in myth that is the real ontological untruth—that is, a truth that is untrue insofar as it ensues from the misguided effort to envisage the fractured world as an undivided whole. In the previous chapter, I discussed Heidegger’s signature idea of the inextricable connection between truth and untruth. Susan expanded this motif

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by connecting it to the parabolic disbanding of the boundary separating fact and fiction, reality and dream. Suggestively, in a letter from November 10, 1950, Susan posed the following question to Jacob, Unless the terms of Philosophy shall be utterly emptied as those of physics does it not become at least as cosmology merely an “extrapolation” of mythos? Of “rarefying” the myth-born terms, Φύσις, κóσμος, etc? Is not all cosmology mythos, with the veil torn off?53

In a heated discussion with Susanne K. Langer, reported in a letter to Jacob written on November 28, 1950, Susan defended the use of “ontological” in her thesis by noting that the “naturalistic” explanations for the being of myth, logos, thought seemed to me derivative + un-essential and that one must seek to understand how they come out of the Being and again turn back to the Being. Alas, to Miss Langer Being is an empty, mystical, “literary” term and the end of it is she told me I am no “philosopher” and I should occupy myself with something else.54

Disregarding Langer’s harsh and obviously fallacious appraisal of Susan’s philosophical competence, the terms “mystical” and “literary” can be applied appropriately to her ontologizing belief that mythos and logos issue from and return to the primal source of being. The lifting of the veil and the ensuing obfuscation of the boundary separating the cosmological and the mythological, the untruth of truth and the truth of untruth, are transfigured in Susan’s ontological thinking into the basis for the tragic worldview that lionizes the inherent rupture of the world and the heterogeneous but yet indissociable disjointedness of the psychic-somatic experience of self. To paraphrase Cornelius Castoriadis,55 the singularity of each entity is determined by its participation with and integration in other entities such that the interior closure of the particular is indicative of the exterior openness of the universal.56 Any postulation of the generic must proceed from the specific that always betrays the capacity to disrupt the generic. When we speak, therefore, of a world in fragments, we imagine a universe that is not “explicable in terms of a panlogistic application of subjective or objective categories,” a reality that resists the “full application of any one logic because, in

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its self-alteration, it makes be other logics irreducible to previous ones.”57 It is surely germane to apply the locution of a world in fragments to Susan’s path of thinking inasmuch as the cohesiveness and coherence of her Lebenswelt is to be assessed from the acute awareness of the irreparable brokenness of the world. Moreover, as we saw in the first chapter, in her letter to Camus from February 2, 1952, Susan noted that the Pauline understanding of Judaism, which has dominated Western thinking, attempted to universalize a religion whose essence lies in its concrete particularity.58 An even more halting criticism of a universalism that effaces the particular can be found in Susan’s letter to Jacob from October 24, 1950: Universal—i.e. exoteric popular—religion has two possibilities, faschism [sic] or humanistic ethics Judeo-Christianity and Christo-Judaism are surviving on the basis of both. But at least our generation can see that the end of “universalism” hastened by television, radio, photoprint (the newest, maybe in 10 years every man will be able to carry the Harvard library in his pocket) H. Bomb etc. etc. is not universal utopia and angel-hood but rather the mountain of rubbish on which the art, and the religion and the knowledge which sought to please all, enlighten all and save all, shall smash itself, and our tower of Babel shall crumble. So be it.59

The promise of universalism in the ideology of fascism, in the humanistic ethics of the hybrids Judeo-Christianity and Christo-Judaism, or in the leveling out of difference provoked by the uniformity of technology,60 all have the opposite effect: the effacing of the face of the individual in the political, religious, and scientific domains that results in the devaluation of the universal. In line with Castoriadis, therefore, Susan would have concurred that if we are to speak of a universal, it must be a universal that is rooted in and returns to the particular. From the vantage point of a universalistic particularism as opposed to a particularistic universalism, we are attuned to the fact that, in contradistinction to the commonplace assumption, the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts because there is no whole of which to speak but the whole constructed by an ever-waxing and an everwaning accretion of the parts nested within one another ad infinitum. The whole, we might say, is composed of unassimilable fragments that should not

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be construed mathematically as integers assimilated within an incomposite whole but rather as dissoluble components that together make up the indissoluble aggregate, the immediacy of the totality fractured by the mediacy of the linguistic gesture of naming that totality.61 Univocity of the relativity of finite becoming is the mark of the absolute differentiation obliterated in the infinite indifference that is one by not being one.62 In a letter to Jacob written on November 8, 1950, Susan mentioned in the context of pondering the triangulation of thanatos, eros, and logos that perhaps the latter is nothing more than “a kind of weapon and shield one needs in an evil + broken world.”63 More emphatically, in a letter from February 11, 1952, Susan wrote to Jacob, the nomos as the logos is broken into the manyness of mortal beings; the brokenness is ultimate the “one”, the only one is broken; but each broken part mirrors an ideal unity which never “was” and never “will be” which is on the other side of time. It is man who makes law, even as it is man who makes discourse, but man is a part of the “one” law of the “one” discourse.”64

The diversification of the law as the logos that is broken into miscellaneous human beings reflects the broken state of being. Each broken part mirrors an ideal unity that never was and never will be insofar as it is outside the spacetime continuum. The only oneness we experience temporally and spatially is the one that is broken, whence we can infer that there is no unity but the unity constituted by partition. As she lamented in the letter to Jacob from February 28, 1952, It is because I cannot think the world that I look beyond the world for a thought that I can think. Logos and Eros are born in the brokenness of the world and their “perfection” does not lie in attaining an absolute unity. In the One there is neither Eros nor Logos.65

In the same letter, Susan criticized Heidegger for treating Sein as a “sentimental object,” which purportedly would run the risk of denying the fact that there is nothing beyond the world and no need to posit an a priori possibility of the world.66 To my ear, this evaluation fails to take into account Heidegger’s indefatigable insistence on finitude, which I discussed in the

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previous chapter. Susan departed from Heidegger, however, in her insistence that the quest for transcendence stems from an inability to think the world in its worldhood. From this conjecture she hypothesized further that logos and eros, which correspond respectively to the stillness of the order of being and to the motion of the chaos of becoming,67 are both born in the brokenness of the world. There is no perfection that would entail attaining absolute unity because there is only the relative unity engendered continually in the discontinuity of its periodic degeneration. To say that there is neither eros nor logos in the one implies that the one is beyond being and becoming, whence we can infer that if there is a one of which to speak, it is the one always in excess of being one—that is, the unitary pluralism of ontological diversity,68 the differential magnitudes of the absolutely transcendent immanence of the absolutely immanent transcendence. The theme of frivolity in the face of life’s brokenness is bolstered in other letters written by Susan to Jacob including the one from February 10, 1951. Acknowledging that without social conventions we are lost in this world, she insisted nonetheless that it is all a game, a “deep play,” in which man must be able to “deceive” himself—that is play his part with the maximum of innocence. He must both know and not know that he is playing—as a great actor who does not “fool” his audience but draws them through “play” into depths that are closed in nature and open in ritual. Man’s looking has its source deeper than his own look can grasp and in looking he draws the world into that bottomless well, to the hidden source outside the world.69

Insofar as brokenness is the invariable character of the world, to eradicate brokenness would be tantamount to annihilating the world.70 Even the uncompromising love that Susan felt for Jacob was not enough to protect her from the volatility of existence or to dissociate her from the alarming assessment that all the truth we profess is duplicitous and that life is naught but a protracted drama in which the rituals and the rules we adopt are symbolic corrections to a prevailing sense of misbalance.71 Against this unrelenting agony, the impassioned yearning for Jacob only seemed to enhance her loneliness, as we see in her words to him from the letter written on November 24, 1950 (cited in the previous chapter but worth repeating here):

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And you my mad one, my mystical one—? What shall become of you. All the places are wrong for us because the time is wrong. I think of you in the dark night hours of illuminations. Ah I’m so exiled. The earth is without sex here and dead as a rug. And the house of knowledge when it is the House of Hades what good is it—for god is the god of the living.72

As the adage goes, misery loves company. The spatial dislocation of Susan and Jacob is explained by the temporal assumption that the moment was not right for either of them. Articulating this mutual sadness, however, only amplified her desolation and sexual frustration, conveyed symbolically by the image of the earth being without sex and dead as a rug. Even the accumulation of knowledge is not salvific if and when things are so deadly, since the divine should be experienced as the God of the living and not as one who presides over the house of Hades. In a brief letter written on January 12, 1952, Susan communicated to Jacob the “deep terror” occasioned by her fear of the corrosive impact that time would have on their relationship during the physical separation: Time, change and death work for oblivion; we fear to forget and to be forgotten; truth, (as Heid. says somewhere) is rooted in being true73 . . . oblivion is a monster who devours truth. In the kingdom of oblivion those who were lovers, pass without recognizing each other.74

From the apparent tautology that truth is rooted in being true,75 Heidegger educed that the ontological meaning of the saying “there is truth” (es Wahrheit gibt)76—the being-revealing of the statement (das Entdeckend-sein der Aussage),77 the proposition that discloses the phenomenological ground through which the bestowing of truth becomes visible in the confirmation that the being that is spoken shows itself as the very same thing (als dasselbe zeigt) in its selfsameness (Selbigkeit)78—cannot be discerned except through the structures of temporality exhibited by the property of disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) that belongs essentially to the being of Dasein as the phenomenon of care (Sorge).79 The intricate connection between truth becoming phenomenally explicit in knowing itself and our capacity to remember through the facility of language is in inverse proportion to our experiential fear of the double

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bind of forgetting and being forgotten. The fear invariably materializes in the inexorability of the transience of time whence there comes forth the forgetfulness of truth that devours the possibility of the truth of forgetfulness. In the permanence of this impermanence, even intimate lovers devolve into strangers lurking in the ethereal evanescence of the kingdom of oblivion. The philosophical skepticism concerning the sustainability of anything substantial generated by this ephemerality is portrayed evocatively and unequivocally in Divorcing: The deception is endless. To laugh. To cry. To curse. To breathe is actually most that she can manage. The night is paling. Soon it will be dawn. Day will be starting. The light dim, thick at first, clears till it is entirely weightless; there is only the pure surface of day, the city of streets and buildings, the walls inside and outside, all will be surface only, on which other surfaces cast precise shadows.80

Despite Susan’s denigration of humankind based on what she perceived as ubiquitous deceitfulness81—a deception so pervasive that beneath the surface we are prone to discover more surface upon which not light but shadows are cast, or translated into a familiar symbol in the kabbalistic lexicon, within the shell we uncover not a core but another shell—her reflections on the tragic nature of being were not morose and irreparably pessimistic; her sin, to reverse the words of Dylan, was not her lifelessness.82 On the contrary, one can elicit from Susan’s letters what may be best termed as “optimistic pessimism” or “pessimistic optimism,”83 that is, an underlying exuberance for life breeding a constant effort to palliate her predilection for melancholia and to temper her penchant for cynicism.84 For example, she wrote in the letter to Jacob from October 14, 1950, “I long so for the light—and I wonder sometimes that even with all the difficulties and stupidities, if it is not worthwhile at least to have lived having seen the sun, moon and stars and all the enchantment of the earth, than to live in bareness and perpetual twilight.”85 If we attend carefully to Susan’s words, we note that her longing for light proceeded from submersion in darkness, or more precisely, from the austerity of an apparently unending twilight, the liminal state between the diurnal glow and the nocturnal gloom. From the figurative language deployed by Susan, we may deduce that the possibility of hope arises from hopelessness

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just as the possibility of light arises from darkness. To apply to Susan a line from A Lament for Julia, she rode both horses, the tragic and the comic.86 Here it is noteworthy to recall the following reflections of Susan on Heidegger prompted by Jacob’s negative evaluation: The question of the openness of the question is fundamental and you are right in your criticism of Heidegger.87 The openness is “longer” than “Angst”; there is something “smiling” in the abyss, I think perhaps of the archaic smile that opens beyond sweetness and bitterness. Heidegger cannot smile; and yet the smile of man is as abysmal as all the tenseness and gravity of thought.88

Heidegger rightly placed emphasis on the question as the way in which thought initially advances from and incessantly returns to the unthought,89 but Susan, in the wake of Jacob, was critical of his identifying anxiety exclusively as the stimulus inciting the interrogative mode that leaves one suspended in doubt. It is necessary to recuperate the laughter befitting the abyss, the archaic smile that opens the path beyond the dyad of sweet and bitter. That Heidegger was not able to smile betokens a serious limitation to his thinking, for the joviality of the thinker goes deeper than the sobriety of thought. The stance taken by Susan regarding the abysmal vivacity can be profitably compared to Beckett’s worldview as interpreted by Adorno, “The slightest difference between nothingness and coming to rest would be the haven of hope, the no man’s land between the border posts of being and nothingness.”90 The poet lives in this haven of hope, the borderline between being and nothingness to which no one can lay claim, the territory that can be possessed only by dispossession. The sanguinity borne by poetic angst is poignantly expressed in the statement that concludes her essay on the nature of tragedy, “The hopeful message of tragedy is that though evil is irrepressible it is not endless, that human life has meaning and dignity, though the odds are against man.”91 The odds are indeed against us but even so the intractable evil is not interminable. Therein lies the resolute optimism coiled in the heart of Susan’s chronic pessimism. After months of being subsumed by her study of the gnostic motifs of Heidegger, Susan came to the conclusion, in a letter to Jacob written on February 12, 1952, that “gnosis is by its nature a radical intellectualization

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of experience in general it is a statement of death.” The experience of self, by contrast, is embroiled in the “sheer wonder” of “opening to the world, of the miracle of consciousness of life in its purity,” and hence, “if what is intolerable and absurd is that the self is in the world, what is wonderful and miraculous, if not that the self is in the world!”92 Reiterating the point in slightly different terms in a letter to Jacob on April 20, 1952, Susan wrote, “Distance, like death, ennobles, but it is life we want with all its irritations.”93

Mystical Atheism and the Idolatry of Faith One can well imagine that in Susan’s description of Simone Weil in “The Absent God,” published in 1955, we are offered a glance at her own postNietzschean negative theology: Atheism, which used to be a charge leveled against skeptics, unbelievers, or simply the indifferent, has come to mean a religious experience of the death of God. The godlessness of the world in all its strata and categories becomes, paradoxically and by a dialectic of negation, the signature of God and yields a mystical atheism, a theology of divine absence and nonbeing, of divine impotence, divine nonintervention, and divine indifference. Religious atheism is distinct from secular atheism from the start, in that it invests the natural world, from which divine presence and providence have been totally excluded, with theological significance.94

The via negativa promulgated by Weil was not sufficiently negative insofar as the meaning accorded the world that is bereft of God is still determined from the vantage point of the presence of God’s absence from the world: The thesis of religious atheism has been most boldly formulated by Simone Weil: the existence of God may be denied without denying God’s reality. . . . The unworldliness of God, his silence and nothingness are his most essential features. God can be present to us only under the form of his absence.95

In spite of Weil’s bold assertion regarding silence and nothingness being God’s most essential feature, her mystical atheism lacked legitimacy because, as Susan put it in the letter to Camus from February 2, 1952, to which I have referred several times in this monograph, atheism is authentic only if it is

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free of all theological motivations, unless there is no trace of a reaction against a theistic frame in its basis. A pure atheism is unmilitant and unmessianic, it does not enter the game of theological warfare. It is simply the experience of the ultimacy of earthly life, its loves and losses, of the ultimacy of death and the consequent rejection of god as the meaning of the world, and of all divine consolation—even the “ineffable” consolation of which Simone Weil speaks.96

Conversely, while it may be the case that the presence of the holy shows itself only through the nonshowing of its absence, Susan was skeptical about Weil’s negative theology insofar as it levied a Kierkegaardian distinction between the outwardly and the inwardly dimensions of the human comportment in the world, a distinction that she related as well to Heidegger’s ontological difference between being (Sein) and beings (Seiende). However, as she was quick to note, the absolute difference of inwardness . . . must either make no difference to the external world, leave it totally as it is, or negate it in toto. But both alternatives are in fact impossible. We continue to go on living and choosing, and making a difference between one object and another. . . . Nihilism as a way of life can only amount to cynicism.97

Bracketing Susan’s larger criticism of the apophatic, her assessment of Weil seems to me to be accurate: to experience the world as deprived of the divine is the religious experience par excellence: suffering the absence of presence in the presence of absence.98 Several years before this essay was published, in a letter to Jacob from January 17–18, 1952, addressed as the “devil boy” (Teufelsknabe),99 Susan speculated on Weil and the possible kinship between the mystical and the atheistic. The fuller context in which Weil is invoked is a discussion about the hiddenness of God, a “crisis” that necessitates the fact that “mystical life”—which for Jacob encompassed adherence to a Jewish orthopraxis—must be lived in secret because we are not able to pray even alone with ourselves, because the estrangement from God means estrangement from our own “nonworldly” self: sacraments, prayers, sanctifications are not ways of conjuring or evoking the divine presence when we have lost it, but just

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ways of being in the divine presence. The only experience of God accessible to us is the awfulness of the absence; the only experience of eternity: the anguish before the nothingness into which our life passes; the only experience of certainty: the anguish that our very anguish is baseless, incomprehensible, absurd because the only legitimate basis of our anguish would be that God is absent—that nevertheless “somewhere” God is waiting for us, and in contact with us.100

The current spiritual disaffection—the post-Holocaust predicament wherein God’s occlusion from history was drastically reinforced to the point that the occlusion itself is occluded—is not only a “Jewish problem.” If what is concealed is perforce experienced as concealed, then even the hopefulness that God is waiting must be rooted in the insufferable distress brought on by the apprehension that the absence of God from the world is the only viable presence of God in the world.101 One is reminded of the aphorism of Ernst Bloch placed as an epigraph to Atheism in Christianity—“Only an atheist can be a good Christian; only a Christian can be a good atheist” (Nur ein Atheist kann ein guter Christ sein, nur ein Christ kann ein guter Atheist sein)102—a dialectic that Jacob Taubes referred to as “a superlative mystical proposition” (ein hochmystischer Satz) that appears false from the conventional standpoint of either Catholic or Protestant theologies.103 To know God in his desertion—the crucified Christ—means to fathom that there is no solution to human suffering without resort to the living God that has withdrawn; one can base one’s hope in the resurrection only on the insurrectionist foundation of this absconding,104 and hence to speak of the living God hypothetically under these terms is a necessary contradiction that can be true if it is false and false if it is true. In the published essay on Weil, Susan elucidated the idea of atheistic faith as a form of refinement: Since God can be present in the world only in the form of absence, “we have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist.” . . . While belief in God as a consolation actually insulates the soul from contact with the true God, atheism that endures the emptiness of God’s absence is a purification.105

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It would be advantageous to cite Weil’s own words that were the basis of Susan’s comments: There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God. . . . Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other. . . . We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything, except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists. . . . Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith: in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be atheistic with the part of myself which is not made for God. Among those men in whom the supernatural part has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.106

To rectify the idolatrous nature of faith, one must reclaim the kenotic gesture on the part of the divine, the annihilation, or in Weil’s terminology, the decreation, that brings about the spectacle of incarnation,107 and the accompanying self-abasement on the part of the human, the disincarnation that results from ascetic renunciation, purging the mind of all images by taking hold of the nothingness of the good.108 Just as on the cross Jesus invoked the verse “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Psalms 22:2),109 so the craving of every person for God must attain this state of extrication by cleansing the soul of all objects of covetousness: We must give up everything which is not grace and not even desire grace. The extinction of desire (Buddhism)—or detachment—or amor fati—or desire for the absolute good—these all amount to the same: to empty desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to desire without any wishes. . . . Always, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, we have to fix our will on the void—to will the void. . . . But this void is fuller than all fullnesses.110

To will the void is to void the will of all willfulness, to be detached from all attachment even the attachment to detachment, to desire nothing, not even the nothingness of desire,111 to advance by the grace of the gravity of retreating; affliction results in the deprivation of positive reality,112 which fosters the temporal waiting proportionate to the spatial coordinate of the vacuum,

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the empty fullness depleted fully of its emptiness.113 “We have to go down to the root of our desires in order to tear the energy from its object. That is where the desires are true in so far as they are energy. It is the object which is unreal.”114 In emulation of God assuming the form of the world by emptying himself of godliness, we are called upon to assume the form of slaves through emptying ourselves of worldliness, reducing ourselves to nothing, “the point we occupy in space and time.” By withdrawing into a state of absolute seclusion commensurate to the crucified God, we strip ourselves of the “imaginary royalty of the world” and thereby “possess the truth of the world.”115 The cruciform is made by the soul taking the same journey through the thickness of time and space as God, albeit starting from the opposite end: God descends toward the human through a depletion of godliness, and the human ascends to God through a depletion of humanity.116 Ascetic self-effacement—the sacredness of the human personality consists of each person becoming impersonal by means of physical and mental solitude117—is the ethical analogue to the theological doctrine of kenosis: “God can love in us only this consent to withdraw in order to make way for him, just as he himself, our creator, withdrew in order that we might come into being.”118 The directive to become a slave is thus a form of imitatio dei: May we be the slave whom his master sends to bear help to someone in misfortune. The help comes from the master, but it is intended for the sufferer. Christ did not suffer for his Father. He suffered for men by the Father’s will. We cannot say of the slave who goes off bearing help that he is doing it for his master. He is doing nothing. Even though in order to reach the sufferer he had to walk barefoot over nails, he would suffer but he would not be doing anything. For he is a slave.119

Susan judiciously noted that Weil both restated the Marxist analysis of socioeconomic alienation in theological language and endorsed the same brand of faith that Nietzsche discarded by viewing Christianity as a slave religion.120 To be faithful to Christ, it is necessary to experience “faithfulness in the void,”121 to contemplate the inscrutable mystery that the “void is the supreme plenitude”—a mystery so sublime that even “Christ himself, for an instant, was completely without knowledge of it”122—for only in this way can one

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ascertain the paradoxical truth that the world both manifests and hides the divine, not sequentially but concurrently; that is, the divine is manifest by being hidden and hidden by being manifest. “A representation of the world in which there is some void is necessary, in order that the world may have need of God. . . . At the same time, the world, as a manifestation of God, is full. . . . The Universe both manifests and hides God.”123 The compassionate presence of the nonpresence of the divine in the world is made possible by the kenosis of God the Father resulting in his assuming the incarnate form of the Son: The Creation is an abandonment. In creating what is other than Himself, God necessarily abandoned it. He only keeps under his care the part of Creation which is Himself—the uncreated part of every creature. That is the life, the Light, the Word; it is the presence here below of God’s only Son. . . . God is absent from the world, except in the existence in this world of those in whom His love is alive. Therefore they ought to be present in the world through compassion. Their compassion is the visible presence of God here below.124

In what reads like a Christological adoption of a rudimentary tenet of Lurianic kabbalah,125 Weil wrote that “God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself. . . . It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day.”126 Paradoxically, the presence of God is confronted in the absence of God, and hence, the withholding of the being of the divine reality from the world explains the bestowal of the nonbeing of God’s existence in the world.127 In Weil’s own words, “God can only be present in creation under the form of absence. . . . The world, in so far as it is completely empty of God, is God himself.”128 Although presented as a summation of Weil’s views, the following words can be read as a declaration of Susan’s own bleak sense about the turbulent condition of humanity: one “lives in a universe that is absurd, but whose absurdity is significant, and its significance is God. God, however negatively conceived, explains the world, explains the nothingness of God in the world.”129 To articulate the paradox of religious faith that ineludibly assumes the form of doubt, Susan turns to the oxymoronic phenomenon of mystical atheism:

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Simone Weil’s logic of the absurd (as she qualifies la logique de la raison surnaturelle) is quite of a different dimension: her experience is not so much of the absurd as such in its purity but of the irreducible contradiction between God and creation. The basis of the logic of the absurd is the fact of creation, of existence whereby the law of contradiction (not of non-contradiction) becomes the principle of knowledge (γνῶσις— says she!). That is we cannot describe our ultimate situation except in contradictory statements. I.e.: God abdicated for our sake because he is good; we consented to exist . . . because we are evil. Or: from God’s side, life is a gift, from our side it is a theft. We cannot contemplate God unless we renounce everything even that God exists in the same thought. It is the problem of Rabbi Nachman: the situation of the man standing in the “space” vacated, abdicated by God’s withdrawal: which is an essentially atheistic situation; is there a “way out”? Yes and no. I.e. only by suffering-through the divine absence, the divine non-being. This suffering is made possible through the love of God (l’amour surnaturelle) which S. Weil understands mystically as the joyoussuffering distance between God and his Son.130

From the provocative association of Weil’s Christian mysticism and Naḥman of Bratslav’s ḥasidic piety, Susan found support for the conviction that gnosis is linked to the principle of contradiction, and specifically, the contradiction between God and creation. Just as Weil extracted from the theological ideal of kenosis the cosmological mystery that the world is God insofar as it is completely empty of God,131 so based on the kabbalistic myth of ṣimṣum, the primordial diminution of the light of infinity that gave rise to the space devoid of the light in which the worlds ostensibly external to the divine will come to be—an idea rooted in the dialetheic axiom that every concealment is itself a disclosure as opposed to the dialectical postulate that every disclosure is preceded by a concealment132—Naḥman disseminated the apophatic secret that God is most present in the place from which God is most absent.133 Elsewhere Susan associated this truism with standing on “atheist soil,” which much like Jacob’s own “negative ontology” leads to the arresting syllogism: if there is no God, then there is no being as ground, and thus being is not, which is to say, being is nothing.134

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In the letter of Susan to Jacob written on October 30, 1950, the paradoxical identification is transmitted in terms of the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena, which she rendered as “that which does not appear is the ground of that which appears: what is not (nothing) for that which is (Being).”135 Parallel to Susan’s view, in a letter written on January 6–7, 1952, Jacob maintained that atheistic existentialism is right to the extent that it recognizes that the revelation of truth is not possible without presuming that the mind is a tabula rasa, that is, empty of preconceived ideas, the epistemological condition that allows it to disclose something against the backdrop of nothing.136 Phenomenologically, the inapparent functions as the foundation of the apparent, but what appears manifestly disappears in the concealed appearance of its disappearance.

Meontological Mystery of the Holy: Neither Being nor Nonbeing The negative ontology of Jacob—which, in my view, overlaps with the nomenclature of meontology in more recent philosophical and theological speculation—is summarized in his essay “Notes on an Ontological Interpretation of Theology” (1949): The term “ontological” refers to no special philosophical discipline, but signifies a method: the way to the ἀρχή. The ontological method of interpretation asserts that only by going down to the ground of all phenomena are the demands of interpretation fulfilled. The way down to the ἀρχή and the way up to the τέλος are one. An ontological interpretation of theology has therefore to descend to the ἀρχή of the θέος and so to ascend to the τέλος of the θέος. The interpretation of the nihil as a possible horizon of the revelation of a θέος is the goal of this inquiry.137

The task of theology is to explicate ontologically the being (esse) of god (theos), but to do so methodically, it must both descend radically to the primordial beginning (archē) and ascend proleptically to the ultimate end (telos). In this respect, it is the nihil, the nothing to be seen as what cannot be seen, that is the horizon of the disclosure of divinity as the essence

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of existence that is the existence of the essence beyond the distinction of essence and existence. It follows, moreover, that the ontological mandate of theology is necessarily atheistic insofar as the descent to the peripheral ground of the actually existing nonessence implies a “willful disobedience to the creator,” and hence, the “absolute relation between creator and creature is overthrown.” Considered as a science of reflection, theology must take its place within an atheistic ontology; indeed, as the antithesis to the logos theo, “theology reveals itself as grounded atheistically.”138 The essential relation of theology and atheism is expressed grammatically in the fact that the a-privativum of “atheistic” empties the “theistic” of its content, and thus the necessary juxtaposition of these contradictory terms renders visible the dialectic of reversal,139 which entails the discernment that belief and unbelief equally reveal the nihility of God: Theology and atheism wish to establish by their statement, “God is not”, that God is not an object. Must then theology subject itself to the verdict of the logic of science and abandon God as null, as a nothing, as the nothing? Yes. Theology must accept the verdict of the logic of science and plead its case on this nothing. May the nothing be meaningfully articulated? The nothing can never be an object but is ever and everywhere prior to all as subject. If language is confined to the limits of the logic of objects, then the nothing cannot be articulated. But language must be freed from enslavement to the logic of objects. . . . It is not language which fails; it is the logic of objects which is incapable of expressing an ontological subject. Were language liberated from the logic of objects, even silence could be articulated in it.140

The essence of the divine is its being nothing, the nothing that is the ontological subject prior to any ontological object. Translating Taubes’s thinking into a more contemporary idiom, we could say the nothing is the meontological ground of every imagined something of the self that is the actual nothing in being something actual in relation to the imagined nothing of the other. Regarding this nothing, therefore, we must be silent, but this silence is itself a language, albeit the language of the

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subject that is beyond the language constricted by the logic of objects, a saying that is simultaneously an unsaying. Jacob’s account of the theological atheism of his atheistic theology dovetails with the kabbalistic interpretation of the nothingness of the infinite. The correlation is most conspicuous in the supposition that creatio ex nihilo means creatio ex deo insofar as deus and nihil are identical. The ostensible contradiction between the propositions ex nihilo fit ens creatum and ex nihilo nihil fit is resolved in the coincidence of God and the nothing; that is, mystically conceived, the nothing whence something is produced is the divine, which is identical with the nothing, and thus we can avow, on the one hand, that from nothing comes created being, and, on the other hand, that from nothing comes nothing. In language that is evocative of the Lurianic cosmogonic myth, Jacob wrote: If deus and nihil are identical, then creatio ex nihilo and ex nihilo nihil fit coincide. Creatio means then the shattering of the nothing into the many of the something. In the shattering of the nothing, the multitude of somethings is born. . . . In the nothing there resounds the birth-pangs of the something. Birth as the shattering of the nothing into the multitude of somethings, death as the fusion of the many into the one of the nothing, return eternally upon themselves.141

It is pertinent to recall that in his letter to Scholem dated October 2, 1949, Jacob spoke of his gathering materials to investigate when he arrived in Jerusalem the “nothing as a philosophical and mystical category.” He added that “the problem of nothing can reveal the essential difference between philosophy and mysticism.” Parmenidean philosophy has disallowed the nothing, but it can be considered the cornerstone of mystical speculation.142 Additionally, Jacob related that his intention was to trace the concept of the nothing historically and systematically, and this would include in his purview the texts of the kabbalah, which go beyond mere “philological curiosity,” as he stated with respect to the compositions of Azriel of Gerona published in an essay by Scholem.143 Apropos of Jacob’s negative ontology and the identification of being and nothing,144 it is worth citing Susan’s judicious observation in the letter

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from September 26, 1950, on the need to venture beyond the binary of being and nonbeing that has shaped Western philosophy: “We are a footnote to Parmenides”145 is not so simple: with “Being” and “Nothing” our vocabulary is not yet closed: there is movement, Becoming, “Eros” or quite prosaically DOING—neither in the pure Being of Parmenides nor in the pure Nothing of the Indians can the “doing” conceive and bring about itself: neither does the Indian “passivity” escape the circle of “doing”, the circle of polarity, and it derives its power from being a term of the polarity. I realize all this is “metaphysical” whereas your look is more mystical. Nevertheless think about it.146

Susan returned to this topic in a letter from October 6, 1950: Dear Jacob, your probings in the Being and Nothing are deep and dangerous; that the fullness, the compactness—the continuity . . . of the Being is the Nothing in the Being says that Being in its pure Beingness, replaces, supplants or “fills in” the nothing to the point of becoming identical with it—and however one terms the problem the two by necessity always merge and collaps[e] into one another— there is no way of keeping them apart from the necessity of the 2 terms themselves; I wonder therefore if beyond the Being and the Nothing there must be a third: that which keeps the poles in separation, in a tension of opposition so that they are poles—since out of their own nature they fall back into identity. I wonder if there must not be a third—what we call God, the holy, the mystery beyond the Being + Nothing that composes “the structure of reality” who even as he separates light from darkness has sundered Being from Non Being and keeps them apart. For the separation of light and darkness so that there is light + darkness, and the separation of Being and nothing so that the world is and is lifted out of the ambiguity of Being—Nothing—this is the mystery the IS that is the holy fiat of the Creator, that is a mystery because it will never be “deduced” from any manipulation, calculation or prestidigitation on the Being—Nothing. He has set the poles and keeps them apart, and the

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“metaphysical” distance between the poles, between the light and the darkness is his substance, and the life of the universe as the opposites strain toward each other and Being and non-Being merge and are freshly polarized, this life, this Eros circulates through his substance. But it is better to pray and to do service than to think and talk about this thing too much.147

Susan verbalized the implications of Jacob’s thought on being and nothing in language that is far more lucid and exacting than his own.148 She correctly understood that his appropriation of the Hegelian dialectic leads to the conclusion that being in its pure beingness is identical to and inseparable from nothingness. However, she adds to his analysis by asking the incisive question if this identity of opposites compels one to posit a third reality—variously called God, the holy, or the mystery—that is neither being nor nonbeing and thus can be referred to indexically as beyond the beyond. Creation demands the dualistic positing of a metaphysical distance between light and darkness, the ontological division that fuels the erotic tension of the two poles of existence ontically striving toward and then pulling away from each other—in the language of Ezekiel’s description of the angelic beasts utilized by Jewish mystics to mark the vicissitudes of the spirit, raṣ o wa-shov, running and returning, the departing and the arriving, the ascent and the descent, correlated with fire and water, respectively the element that surges upward and the element that overflows downward149—but the one who penetrates beneath the façade comprehends that the severance is overcome in the enigma of divine holiness, the timespace that is neither day nor night because it is both day and night.150 Imagining the third term would signify a rectification of the dichotomies and the antitheses in Western philosophy—a return of sorts to early Greek thinking and the positing of the mystery of the other151—that Susan traced in the letter of November 9, 1950, to the original “splitting of the Parmenidean-egg”—the putting of Being + Nothing in a specific tension. For Parmenides was no innocent mystical soul—simply immersed in “Being” but made the terrible

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cut into is and is-not—Heraclitos [sic] thinks yet in “paradise” before the Parmenidean Fall.152

Moreover, as Susan suggested in the letter from February 10, 1951, disentangling religion from philosophy occasions a return to a mythopoeic world wherein the gods are both at the center and at the periphery, positioned as the safeguard against the nothingness of the holy: Last night after lighting the serpent I read again your letter on the “pointless” point, the real opposition between “religion” + “philosophy” and the “question”. . . . The idea is of course (as one says in U.S.) “dangerous”: it undermines “philosophy”—scoops out all its “contents” concentrates it to a point where there is no room for “professors” to walk around. I wonder what the consequences for “religion” are . . . Perhaps a turning back to “mythos” where the gods are beings in the world and yet at the limit of the world as shelters against the “nothing”. But where then is the “holy”?153

I note, parenthetically, that Susan’s suggestion—most likely unbeknownst to her—about the mystery beyond being and nonbeing bears affinity to the metaontological delineation of infinity on the part of kabbalists as that which is “neither something nor nothing” (lo yesh we-lo ayin).154 In the 1975 essay “From the Adverb ‘Nothing’ to the Substantive ‘Nothing’: Deliberations on Heidegger’s Question Concerning Nothing,” Jacob concluded that the nothing of Heidegger is not the nihil of the mystictheological tradition from Johannes Scotus Eriugena to Jakob Böhme and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, nor is it disclosed in ecstasy or meditation, but rather in anxiety, even though he acknowledged that it is still worth ascertaining “how the most paradoxical formulations of the mystical insight into God are related to the Nothing that Heidegger emphasizes.”155 Jacob did not discuss the mystical nothing in kabbalistic theosophy, but he did illumine Heidegger’s perspective through a citation from Gershom Scholem’s study “Creation Out of Nothing and the Self-Limitation of God,” which deals with the mystical interpretation of creatio ex nihilo whereby “God and his Nothing are established as two aspects of his own

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essence, and sometimes both are regarded from a deeply heretical perspective that invokes the mythical from the deepest abyss.”156 Also relevant is Jacob’s letter to Susan from January 7, 1952, where he described Scholem’s seminar on Lurianic kabbalah that focused on “the problem of the dialectic” applied to explain the presence of anger and fury within Ein Sof. On the one hand, to deny the presence of judgment in the primordial ground (Urgrund) would curtail the perfection of God, but, on the other hand, negation cannot be attributed to the infinite. The resolution of the dilemma, attributed to Joseph Ibn Ṭabul, involved interpreting creatio ex nihilo mystically such that judgment is the “being” in the divine nothingness (das “Sein” im göttlichen Nichts), and hence there is a reversal of the maxim of medieval scholastic metaphysics that to assign negation to the essence of God is equivalent to ascribing a fault to that essence.157 Jacob correctly noted that implied here is the mystical understanding of creatio ex nihilo related to the kabbalistic doctrine of the self-contraction of God amplified by Luria and his interpreters.158 To my ear, the position taken by Jacob resonates with what Susan argued with respect to Heidegger in the 1954 essay “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism,” which I discussed in Chapter 3. Her thesis is anticipated in an abridged fashion in the letter to Jacob from December 30, 1950: I was reading H’s “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” without success. The passages you mentioned in your letter—“dass mit dem Sein nichts ist [”],159 I understand very well. . . . And the question of metaphysics is why there is something rather than nothing; the answer: because of no-thing, nothing. But perhaps this recourse to the “nothing” is again a “philosophic trick” to “conquer” terror—here the ultimate terror—through “knowledge”.160

Returning to this theme in a letter written to Jacob in the early part of January 1952, Susan noted that even Heidegger who writes a treatise about “das Sein” who can explain to himself the ultimate structure of being + therefore need not fear. But the nothing, like the holy can only be named, it cannot be

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spoken of, or it ceases to be awe-full. It can be spoken-to as long as we do not pretend that we speak to a person, as long as we speak into the nothing—and do not veil it to ourselves, except insofar as we have to, being human.161

The inescapable quandary of being human is such that we must veil the nothing, the ineffable and yet nameable holy—nameable as nameless, since the name of the nameless cannot be spoken except as that which cannot be named. The impossible task that religion imparts to us—highlighted when apperceived through the prism of Susan’s mytheology—is to speak dialogically to the nothing without succumbing to the theopoetic tendency to personalize the holy, to embrace the givenness of the nothingness of being without configuring it as a manifestation of a gift of a transcendent and invisible power. Any linguistic description, conceptual ideation, or imaginary confabulation of the nothing is a concealing of its concealment, a twofold concealment that reveals the nothing as the nothing that is everything in virtue of being nothing. In the nothingness of nothing—the beyondness of being beyond being that propagates a limitless and indeterminate multiplicity of limited and determinate beings—the metaontological and the polyontological intersect in the identity of their difference. Diversity is at the core of sameness and sameness at the core of diversity.162

Negative Theodicy and the Gnostic Revolt Against the World The taxonomy of the nothing takes us back to Weil’s mystical atheism. Even though this doctrine is meant to articulate a basic theological truth that informs the religious experience available to humankind in which the godlessness of the material universe is disclosive of an aspect of divinity,163 it would be imprudent to deny that after the ravages of the second world war the moment was one wherein God’s being present by being absent was magnified for Jews and non-Jews alike. The roots for Weil’s theology are to be sought in the atheistic ground that “God can be present to us only under the form of absence,”164 and hence even though the cross “remains the symbol of redemptive suffering it loses its specifically Christian content” and becomes “the point where gnostic revolt against the world

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and stoic resignation converged.”165 Effectively, the elevation of suffering as redemptive excludes the element of hope, and as a consequence any credibility to a messianic religion based on the expectation for salvation in history and the improvement of society is undermined.166 Weil’s transcendental immanence—the presumption that the absent God reveals its divinity in the miracles of the human soul—renders transparent the “anti-theistic elements in the Christian gospel of redemption which have provided the seeds for a new pneumatic religion from the early gnostic sects to the present.”167 Susan granted that there is philosophical merit in envisaging the spiritual destiny of humankind in terms of suffering, and she acknowledged that Weil was duly cognizant of the unspeakable vindictiveness perpetrated by the Nazis, atrocities that revealed the extreme depreciation of the modern depersonalization of personal identity—the objectification and reduction of self to exploitable material—in the eyes of both the executors and the victims.168 To her credit, Weil “recognized that in our time the source of man’s anxiety is not the anonymity of the infinite spaces but the blind mechanism of social existence.”169 However, Susan voiced concern that Weil’s theology of absence too easily justified the dehumanization dissociated from its historical causes,170 and thus the interpretation of redemption through the cross “bears a striking resemblance to the kind of inner fortification some of the concentration camp inmates actually developed on a purely psychological level without any theological overtones.”171 Although Susan admits that Weil warranted the distinction of being “the only religious thinker of our time who recognized in the fact of the concentration camps a serious challenge to religion,” her advocating for the theological value of suffering was all the more tragic insofar as the appeal to a supernatural basis for human suffering became “a weapon in the hands of those who profit from human affliction.”172 Perhaps inadvertently, Weil’s analysis of the twentieth century “culminates in the catastrophic vision of the mechanism of total war, a mechanism of the absurd, which triumphs over all considerations of human dignity and even man’s material well-being.”173 The position criticized by Susan is epitomized in the following comment of Weil:

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Redemptive suffering is that by which evil really has fullness of being to the utmost extent of its capacity. By redemptive suffering, God is present in extreme evil. For the absence of God is the mode of divine presence which corresponds to evil—absence which is felt. He who has not God within himself cannot feel his absence.174

A repercussion of Weil’s negative theodicy is that the undeniable existence of innocent torment does not serve as a predicate to question God’s being or justice. On the contrary, the traditional theodicies, which attempt to explain or to rationalize human hardships, are sacrilegious. If the innocent suffer, it is because God cannot prevent it. The impotence of God to thwart evil is not a symptom of apathy, but it is rather indicative of God’s willingness to suffer and to consent to malevolence as is attested in the foundational Christological myth of the Father allowing the Son to be crucified. That God is the author of evil and of sin is a manifestation of the self-annihilating agency of divine love.175 Sharply criticizing this dimension of Weil’s thought, Susan wrote: By way of a negative theodicy, Simone Weil interprets the complete absence of justice, mercy, and the good in the world as the sign of divine justice and goodness. Thereby she defends divine justice, but not without destroying the possibility of man’s justice. . . . There is no answer to the suffering of the helpless, to the tortures of the concentration camps, to the slow death of manual labor. . . . And yet, by finding theological uses for suffering, she has, in whatsoever unjust and absurd a manner, striven to justify and to rationalize it. To say that the cries of the afflicted praise God, that supernatural grace fills the voids of the crippled and the humiliated, is finally as grave an insult to the hells of human suffering as to say that the suffering of the innocent is rewarded in heaven or serves God’s final purpose.176

Beyond the inability to provide an adequate explanation, let alone justification, of the savagery sustained by Jews and other victims of National Socialism, Weil narrowed the gap between perpetrator and prey by

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attributing to both the identical degree of spiritual depravity. As Gustave Thibon remarked, Weil harbored the same aversion for Hitlerian antisemitism as for the Jewish idea of a temporal Messianic rule. How many times did she not speak to me of the Jewish roots of antisemitism! She was fond of saying that Hitler hunted on the same ground as the Jews and only persecuted them in order to resuscitate under another name and to his own advantage their tribal god, terrestrial, cruel and exclusive.177

Even if we are to bracket this problematic framing, a point that was elaborated by Levinas in his reproachful exposé of Weil’s attack on Hebrew scripture, the severity of the law, and the implied gnostic classification of Judaism as inherently evil,178 the position taken by Weil is subject to criticism inasmuch as she made no effort to explain the suffering of the spiritual death that stems from “the subordination of life and thought to the abstract logic of things.”179 However, to the extent that the passion of suffering presumes a prominent place in her theological worldview, it is justified ipso facto and consequently rationalized at the expense of innocent human beings. She is thus credited with wringing an experience of divine love from the facts that seemed most brutally to deride it. She discovered the supernatural in the mortification of God: in the meaningless suffering of the concentration camps, in the futility of manual labor, in the coercive necessity of matter, in the mechanistic behaviorism of the human psyche. . . . Simone Weil’s theology is stamped by the social fact of the concentration camps which represent the most extreme form of the universal uprooting of humanity and the subjugation of man under the totalitarian state.180

Susan’s attraction to the existential pathos of the apophatic dimension of Weil’s mystical atheism, which was amply expressed in the aforementioned letter to Jacob, is reiterated in her dissertation: In this respect the ritual symbolism of the via negativa in the writings of the mystics is perhaps less illuminating for her religion of

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detachment, self-effacement, and “de-creation” of the person than the actual predicament of human beings under terror, in which a part of the soul, however infinitesimal, could be made invulnerable to destruction from without, only by way of total detachment and through the deliberate destruction of the person, by the person, from within. For Simone Weil the supernatural has precisely this function. And while she herself tends more and more to formalize the stations of the Cross into a mystical ritual it is important to remember that her theological language is born out of the actual crucifixion of men in our time.181

Apophatic theology is not sufficient and it must be transposed kataphatically if one is to establish a relationship to a divine being that is present. As I discussed in the first chapter, to know God in absence is meaningful only to the extent that it affords one the opportunity to encounter the absent presence of the living God through embodied rituals of enfleshment and not merely in the speculative jouissance of absorbing the dialectical hypothesis that the absence of absence is presence.182 Rightly or wrongly, Susan maintained that Weil fell short of efficaciously affirming the negation of negation, and hence we cannot elicit from her thought a basis for the transmogrification of the negativity of death into the positivity of resurrection. Susan accentuated the point by noting that despite the similarity of Weil’s “mysticism of atheistic purification” to the “dark night of the soul” put forward by St. John of the Cross, there is a crucial difference: But while the Spanish mystic is describing an ecstatic experience of the soul’s death prior to its re-birth in God, for Simone Weil the dark night of God’s absence is itself the soul’s contact with God. . . . To endure the void, to suffer evil, is our contact with God.183

To be sure, Weil’s atheistic mysticism draws on the history of ChristianPlatonic apophaticism,184 but, as I noted above, Susan contextualized the insistence on the void as the plenitude in which God is manifest by being hidden, and hidden by being manifest, in the historical suffering brought on by the second world war. The guiltless victims epitomize Weil’s ideal

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of detachment, the affliction that has no consolation.185 The Christological symbol serves as an appropriate icon to depict this suffering insofar as the emphasis on the sufferer “reverses the original sense of the scandal of the cross”; that is, the suffering of both the incarnation and the crucifixion of Jesus reveals the superiority of the human over the deity.186 Extending this insight to the plight of humankind more generally, the turmoil of living is not alleviated by the conquest of good over evil or by the hope in life invariably succeeding death: The figure of the crucified Jesus abandoned by God and dying without hope of resurrection, does not, however, yield the image of man’s tragic complaint against a deaf sky . . . . The contemporary situation does not lend itself to a tragic interpretation; its image is not the hero fighting against great odds and defeated in the end but the masses of helpless victims subjected to meaningless waste and torture, defeated from the beginning. Its image is not the sinner who wilfully transgresses God’s law, but the oppressors and the oppressed alike as mere victims of a mechanism of drives and compensations. Its image is not even that of the martyr, for martyrdom, like heroism, can be chosen. . . . It was surely a profound experience of the pits of unredeemed human suffering in the contemporary world, combined with a pitiless realism regarding the effects of affliction on men’s souls, that led Simone Weil to realize that any attempt to resurrect the dead God is doomed to remain romantic rhetoric. Her insight into the fact that God dies in the souls of men subjected to the extremes of torture and humiliation drove her to devise a religion of a dead God: a God who is not so much unmanifest because he is the primordial and inexhaustible source of all that can become manifest, a God who is not so much transcendental because he is beyond the limitations of time, space, and necessity, but a God who does not exist, who emptied himself into the world, transformed his substance in the blind mechanism of the world, a God who dies in the inconsolable pits of human affliction.187

From the premise that tragedy demands a defeated heroic figure, Weil is led to the conclusion that the unredeemed suffering of the victims of

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the various forms of inhumane torture that transpired in the twentieth century cannot be considered tragic or even as examples of martyrdom, since the latter, like heroism, requires an element of choice. The more appropriate taxonomic image is the crucified Jesus, who surrendered to his death with no hope of resurrection. The symbol of the cross, accordingly, is the most suitable figure to depict the penal suffering imposed on Jews and non-Jews against their will by the ruthlessness of the Nazi violence.188 In Weil’s opinion, barbarism should “be considered a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.”189 Most provocatively, the theological consequence of Weil’s explanation of the Holocaust is that she affirmed the religion of a dead God; that is, a God who has emptied himself in the world, a God who has perished in the calamitous quagmire of human existence.190 The forsakenness of God expressed in Jesus’s utterance of Psalms 22:2 at the crucifixion is the key to comprehending the godliness of Christianity: The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides! “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine. To be just it is necessary to be naked and dead—without imagination. That is why the model of justice has to be naked and dead. The cross alone is not open to imaginary imitation.191

The contrasting view of tragedy proffered by Susan is illumined in an especially clear fashion by the following comments she made on the play Henry IV by Luigi Pirandello: One wonders throughout the play who is mad and who is sane, who is “acting” and who is sincere. It is a continuation of “six characters in search of an author”192—a criticism of an age where man stands lost on the stage searching for a “playwright” to give him his role— where the “old” roles which were associated with man’s “eternal nature” can no longer be played and man has to retreat in a paranoiac madness in order to play a serious role. A strange “tragedy” based on the nostalgia for the tragic in a senseless world where tragedy is

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no longer possible. But the tragic is only play + pretence and in the end everything disintegrates into senselessness.193

The dramatic image of retreating into a paranoiac madness in order to play a serious role bespeaks the blurring of the line separating sanity and insanity that applies to the current state. An obfuscation of this sort gives way to the nostalgia for tragedy in an incongruous world where tragedy is no longer possible. The sense of the tragic has morphed into play and pretense and, consequently, all sense has degenerated into senselessness. The idea of tragedy espoused by Susan is well captured in Jean-Luc Nancy’s quip that “in the most powerful sense of the term,” tragedy implies “sense fulfilling itself in the passage to the limit of sense itself, in accord with its own fatality.”194 The tragic so described calls to mind Susan’s assessment of the gnostic dimension of Weil’s thought: The Gnostic traits of Simone Weil’s mysticism are striking at first sight. And her notebooks contain ample evidence of her familiarity with Gnostic, Manichaean, and Catharist sources. Her intellectualism in matters of faith, the obsession with purity, the notion of transcendental immanence, and the pathos of the non-existent God place her in the line of Gnostic heretics. Simone Weil adopts the basic motifs of the gnosis, the absent God, the divine void, the world order as an all-embracing predatory mechanism wherein man is imprisoned, the pneuma or divine part of the soul that is opposed to both the body and the psyche, and the dialectical unity of the supernatural self and the supernatural God, but eliminates the eschatological drama and the mythological frame. She reinterprets the gnosis by robbing or “purifying” it of its aura of positive transcendence, of its visions of the splendor of the utterly strange and utterly new God, its sense of genuine liberation from the bonds of necessity.195

Weil is commended for being more consistent than the Gnostics but that consistency yields an even darker vision as there is no light to assuage the darkness. In that respect, the very goal of becoming religious served as a “legitimate way of self-effacement” and satisfied her “nostalgia for

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death.” Her misery, therefore, permitted her some valid philosophical and psychological sentiments.196 As Susan put it elsewhere, Weil’s deepest insights issue from a tragic perspective. . . . Her own deep understanding for the fragility of all that is spiritual in man’s earthly life, and which is all the more precious for its extreme vulnerability, would render the perspective of tragedy more adequate to her thought than the point of view of the divine.197

Supernatural love itself is construed as a kind of death, and thus we cannot project the image of life on some transcendental plane. “Freedom and the sense of spiritual exaltation are the illusions of life; they are inextricably bound up with the world we must renounce. . . . The proof of God is not Resurrection but the Cross.”198 In a peculiar, if not dubious, interpretation, as I noted above, Weil averred that the cross represents the crucified Jesus abandoned by God and subject to death without the prospect of revivification. The cross is the symbolic representation of the kenotic essence of the incarnation: Redemptive suffering which transports the presence of God to the farthest extremity of the world through the co-operation of the creature. One might thus account for the suitability (in the sense used by St. Thomas) of the Incarnation, by saying that it is not suitable that God should depend on his creature. He took upon himself the form of a creature so that this act should be accomplished once, perfectly, and beyond any doubt. The Cross is the very essence of the Incarnation.199

This perspective on the disembodied embodiment signified by the crucifixion might sound heretical, but it is homogenous with Weil’s ascetic portrayal of freedom as arising from the correspondence between thought and action in place of the correspondence between desire and satisfaction.200 The freedom conveyed here consists of being freed from freedom, a motif to which I shall return in the subsequent chapter.

5 Facing the Faceless Poetic Truth, Temporal Oblivion, and the Silence of Death Truthful—thus I call the one who goes into godless deserts and has broken his revering heart. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Ah, I am so, so full I cannot speak clearly—and yet one must speak, even if only to arrive at the point of silence. —Susan Taubes, Letter to Jacob Taubes, December 29, 1950

In a letter to Ingeborg Bachmann written on September 21, 1963, Paul Celan referred to a new volume of his poems as a “document of a crisis,” and then added “what would poetry be if it were not that too, and radically so?”1 Although Susan Taubes does not use this precise language, it would not be inappropriate to apply Celan’s taxonomy to her own view of poetry. But in what sense is this the case? I would suggest that the poem is a documentation of crisis to the extent that the poetic is rooted in and reinforced by the nihilistic meontology that envisages being as the nonbeing that nothing is and everything is not. From Susan’s writings we can elicit an inherent connection between the theoretical quest for knowledge and the practical task to quell nihilism, and poetry played a crucial role in the process, as she wrote to Jacob in the letter from April 13, 1952: “Thank you also for reminding me of poetry. I am waiting for the wounds to heal—the inner wounds of the ‘gnosis’, the outer wounds of the Moloch.”2 The battle against the nihilist challenge of meaninglessness and the allure 226

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of death as a plausible escape from the ordeal of this realization plagued Susan throughout her relatively short time on this planet. As she reported in a letter to Jacob from November 12, 1951, she told her friend Fern Babcock, there is in the human soul a hidden terror and despair before death and also life—and Paulinism, Catholicism, even perhaps Marxism meet this “dread”—and if one ignores it—as Protestantism does—under cover of “ethics” “humanism” etc.—the “terror” will burst out in awful underground forms.3

Occasionally the distress Susan felt about humankind bordered on misanthropy as in her comment that Marxism and Freudianism may both lead to the conclusion that the human being is naught but “an unsuccessful monkey” (ein misgelungener Affe).4 The despondency is captured as well by Susan in a letter to Jacob in which she averred that the categories of Romanticism are no longer adequate because the current social universe is one in which people do not trust one another. In lieu of the commonly held belief in the potential of language to function as an authentic form of communication, Susan advocated for an esoteric withholding and the creation of secret fraternities: Today every man is a barbarian and divided against the other. The only genuine discourse that can take place today must perhaps be in the form of conspiracy and secrecy. We should no longer talk to a “public” because there is no genuine audience and we are talking into a chaos. We speak “in the air” because no hearing corresponds to our words, our speech is not guided and disciplined by a listening. We must speak to each other and create community secretly inside of the bad totality.5

There is no denying the bleakness expressed here: every man is a barbarian and divided against the other. Such a categorical dismissal is not hyperbolic oratory on the part of Susan; it reflects her deep-seated pessimism about human society and the rationale for adopting a conspiratorial taciturnity. Thus, in the continuation of the letter, she wrote: I believe that Camus is more to the point in observing that in fact we are no longer living in a revolutionary situation, that official “revolutionalism”—marxism, nationalism etc.—are no longer revolutionary

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and that therefore genuine revolution has a legitimate task. The question is not whether to sit at the right hand of Stalin or of Spellman but to form a resistence against the world of lie and tyranny. Power itself is neutral; but there is “free” power and “slave” power. Today the power of the “statesman” is similar to the power of the official executioner (hangman). The tyrant can do neither good nor evil: he can only do his “job” which is defined by the statistical relations between pressure groups. The world looks like a more or less well organized concentration camp, where nobody is sure who are the rulers, or who are the privileged, where privileges are taken as arbitrarily as they are given; a kafka world.6

Genuine revolution is not political; it is a moral crusade against deceitfulness and tyranny, characteristics that typify the ideological arena of politics. There is the power of the free person and the power of the enslaved person. The statesman is nothing but an official executioner, and the world seems to be an organized concentration camp—acrimonious words indeed—a Kafkaesque reality wherein everything looks haphazard and there is no way to discern the difference between the rulers and the ruled, the privileged and the underprivileged. Not even love has the power to overcome the inescapability of our mortal fate in a fundamentally fraudulent universe. In language that is evocative of the oneiric quality of the quest of the lover and the beloved to consummate their relationship in the Song of Songs, Susan wrote to Jacob on October 28, 1950: “how is it you never visit me in my dreams—no one I love ever comes to me in sleep except as sought and not found. This means, if I interpret rightly that death severs the bonds of love, ultimately and mercilessly.”7 The concluding statement can be read as an inversion of the verse ki azzah khamawet ahavah, “For love is as strong as death” (Song of Songs 8:6). Just as in a dream there is no basis to distinguish fact and fiction, so with respect to love, as we may elicit from the dialogical encounters in the Song of Songs, we do not have a solid epistemological criterion by which to discriminate what is real from what is being imagined to be real. The surplus of metaphoricity permeating this book gives rise determinatively to a semantic indeterminacy. The intense yearning for sexual union on the part of the male lover and the

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female beloved is tempered by the insistent admonition to defer gratification whence we discern that desire is centered on lack; indeed, it is the prolificacy of lack that illumines the profusion of desire. But here it is necessary to exercise caution as the trajectory of desire does not move unilaterally from lack to fullness or from fullness to lack. It swings rather like a pendulum from one pole to its opposite, constantly seeking the other manifest in its nonmanifestation and nonmanifest in its manifestation. Susan surely would have concurred with the counsel that to suffer eros one must succumb to the disquiet of craving, to walk the path of want that culminates in wanting no path to walk. Notwithstanding the imperishability of eros presumed by its being equated with thanatos, the measure of lovesickness is in the ephemeral seeking and not in the irrevocable possessing the subject of affection; the durability of the quest thus depends on being faithful to the repeated vow not to wake or to incite love until it desires (Song of Songs 2:7, 3:5, 5:8, 8:4). Love overpowers death to the extent that love, like death, exemplifies the possibility of the impossibility of bending the timeline such that not yet is no more insofar as no more is not yet. By contrast, Susan’s trepidation that no one whom she loves—including Jacob—comes to her in her dreams except as the one who is sought but never found indicates that death eventually will subjugate love. This consternation is captured in the closing words from Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Angoisse,” which Susan applied to herself in a letter to Jacob written from Paris in the early part of January 1952:8 Je fuis, pâle, défait, hanté par mon linceul / Ayant peur de mourir lorsque je couche seul, “Obsessed by my shroud, I flee, pale, undone, / Afraid of dying when I sleep alone.”9 The nexus between the erotic and the thanatotic is framed in terms of gnosis in Susan’s letter to Jacob written on February 28, 1952: If knowledge is lastly the knowledge of death then logos and eros are deeply bound together because love is the experience of the joyful agony and agonized joy of separation of not being one; the other is as unobtainable and unconquerable as he is irrevocably lost to death. The mystery of the other that we are not, is a hard mystery. Only the being who thinks has a world, therefore also only he can lose the world. The other the world, is at once the most intimate and the most strange. Hei-

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degger speaks of these things but my reproach to him is that he speaks too nicely as if the secret itself spoke through him, and not like a man who knows that he cannot know.10

The philosophical meditation on gnosis, love, and death was impelled by the exasperation Susan felt, especially at night, on account of the physical detachment from Jacob. Expressing her sexual frustration poetically, she wrote that “the beasts gnash their teeth and pant on the leash and the flesh cries for redemption. The storm does not come and the rivers are pent up. I eat out of despair I would like to eat up the whole world.”11 Against this backdrop one can better understand Susan’s opining more abstractly about the goal of knowledge as the knowledge of death. What is meant by such knowledge is an intuitive wisdom rather than a discursive ratiocination, a thinking that thinks the surplus of what cannot be thought,12 or what has been suggestively called “dethinking”—that is, the paranoetic presence of nondifferentiated oneness that blurs the triadic distinction between the subject that thinks, the process of thinking, and the object that is thought.13 In the knowledge accrued from this nonthinking, eros and logos are bound together in the jouissance of the wavering between sexual suffering and satisfaction.14 Love is the confluence of joyful agony and agonizing joy emerging from the disruption of the union of the lover and the beloved. Susan’s separation from Jacob served as the catalyst for her melancholic view that love consists ultimately of the recognition that the other is unobtainable and unconquerable, and thus the beloved is considered by the lover as one who is dead. The mystery of alterity is such that the other must persevere in its otherness. This applies to the world, the most primally incalcitrant other to human consciousness, the external reality that is, like the beloved in relation to the lover, the most familiar and yet the most strange, the most proximate and yet the most distant. Heidegger is commended for understanding this truth, but he is also condemned for arrogantly pretending that the secret was fully known to him. The true possessor of gnosis is the agnostic, the one who knows that knowledge consists of knowing that one cannot know. Thus, in a letter to Jacob written on November 10, 1950, Susan approvingly cited the comment of Kierkegaard: “the supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.”15 The unknowing of the

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secret, or knowing the secret that there is no secret to be known, can be apperceived only from the perspective of death. It is pertinent to recall that the main character in Divorcing, Sophie Blind, an obvious cipher for the author herself, narrates the story from the vantage point of having already departed from this life. Thus, the reader is informed early on that Sophie’s death by decapitation was publicized in the newspaper France Soir,16 and at a later point in the story the details of her funeral are described.17 Most significantly, Sophie announces, “Now that I’m dead I can write my autobiography,” which is immediately followed by the gloss, “Of course I’m not serious.”18 However, one may raise doubt about the validity of this disclaimer. The novel before us is, in great measure, Susan’s attempt to record her life story thinly cloaked by the mantle of fiction, and since it is retold after the narrator has died, we can say that it fulfils Sophie’s stipulation that she can write her autobiography only after she has died. But what does this mean? Given the laws of physics and the cessation of the biological and neuroanatomic functions that constitute the conditions necessary for one to write the chronicle of one’s life, this counterfactual proposition cannot be literally true. Obviously, we must understand the poetic conceit of the book in a figurative register. What, then, is the philosophical import of the contention that autobiographical writing can only transpire consequent to the corporal demise of the writer? How are we to understand the view on identity proffered by this surreal premise?19 At the very beginning of the novel, we read that Sophie ponders why her lover looks into the distance with his head thrown back instead of allowing her to see his eyes, and he explains “because you’re dead Sophie.”20 Whether she keeps her eyes open or shut, she cannot but help seeing things from this perspective and thus getting used to hearing this new voice: Yes, I’m dead. I knew I was dead when I came but I didn’t want to be the first to say it. . . . My sense of things is sometimes distorted. But I never felt so intensely alive as now. . . . Women want essentially only happiness, you said, happiness more than power or truth. But I care for truth. Now I am dead I care only for truth.21

Pushing against a misogynist stereotype, Susan insisted that while women who are alive essentially want only happiness, the woman who is deceased

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cares only for truth. Hence, the truth to unfold in the book can be told only insofar as the person telling it is dead. But what is the affiliation between truth and death? Why is the enunciation of the former only possible in the transpiring of the latter? The supposition that the narrative can be pronounced by Sophie only from a postmortem perspective suggests that she lived the life of death before experiencing the death of life. Having been dead in life she is more intensely alive in death.22 As Susan wrote in her diary from 1969, the year of her suicide, the writing of the novelist is “like a foretaste of death, it offers forbidden delight of experiencing one’s death; and a certain immunity from time which is so intolerable to the creature.”23 In Divorcing, the anomaly of this patently nonempirical circumstance is expressed somatically. Thus, after describing that she died from being struck by an automobile, Sophie declares, “the sensation of my head severed from my back is still vivid. My body growing enormous, its thousands of trillions of cells suddenly set free, spread, speeded, pressed jubilant.”24 Astonishingly, in death the body—at the cellular level—is subject to growth rather than to decay, and hence the intransigent fleetingness of our being has the potential to confer upon us a newfound liberation.25 Elsewhere in the novel, Sophie professes, “When I’m truly dead, my friends, I won’t see you standing around me. I will find a way out, I’ll get back my arms and limbs, my head, even my heart, I’ll find it whatever you’ve done with it.”26 Even though Sophie addresses her remarks collectively to her friends, the emotional anguish that Susan felt specifically with respect to Jacob is palpably at play here. Beyond the obvious attempt to express psychologically the particular misery she endured in her marriage, Susan was making the larger philosophical point that just as in birth one begins to die, so in dying one is reborn—not in the traditional sense of being resurrected, acquiring an afterlife, or undergoing metempsychosis,27 but rather in the pneumatic sense of retrieving the body that has been commandeered or neglected. Somewhat humorously, in the scene recounting the court proceedings of the annulment of Sophie’s marriage to Ezra, the reader is told that a coffin was brought in, and when they removed the lid, Sophie, in a white gown, stood up. With bitter irony, Ezra asserts, “You have to admit she looks good. Fifteen years married to me; you can’t say she isn’t well preserved. As good as the day I married her.”28 At the suitable time the judge decreed, “Her divorce is granted

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whether she is alive or dead.” To drive home the absurdity of this scenario, Susan added parenthetically, “The coffin is turned upright. SOPHIE is presented with a Bill of Divorce.”29

Death, Rebirth, and Temporal Reversibility The renewal accomplished by claiming life from the perspective of having already died entails a reversal such that the past is antecedent to and consequently constitutive of the present. The narrative telling of time from the vantage point of death may be compared to oneiropoetic mentation wherein the linearity of the conventional temporal parameters is disrupted. The structure of Susan’s novel reflects this disruption and thus the tissue connecting the different parts cannot be subjected to a linear logic conditioned by a unidirectional causality. The poet, in particular, is acclimated to the musicality of the lyrical time of the present wherein the past is recollected as future and the future is anticipated as past.30 The transposal of tenses is epitomized in the arresting exchange between Sophie and Kate: “Why didn’t you call me earlier?” “I was in a coffin.” “Baloney! I went to your wake ten years ago and the next morning we had blueberry pancakes.”31

Being in a coffin is no excuse for Sophie’s not being in contact with Kate inasmuch as after the former’s wake the two of them went to eat breakfast, another indication that death is the portal to a more enriched visceral life. At a much earlier date, in a letter to Hugo Bergmann written on September 18, 1950, Susan made this point explicitly in her reinterpretation of the notion of rebirth promulgated by the mystery cults of late antiquity: The ancient mystery religions offered their initiates rebirth; whether this rebirth meant primarily rebirth into the life after death our concern is rather with rebirth in this life. In being born we are not yet initiated into life, we are not yet in full possession of the essential forms and forces of our life, since we can exist simply nihilistically, as if nothing mattered, nothing was of any worth, as if life and death were the same.32

Susan altered the meaning of the rite of initiation of the ancient mystery

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religions by viewing rebirth not as the attainment of eternal life subsequent to death but rather as the restoration to temporal life occasioned by death: Today the ways of death or halfdeath have an almost sure and easy stronghold on us. Here each goes his own way into the same darkness. And the ways of life where we walk together and that no man can build from and for himself alone are not yet built. Nor is it anywhere written that they must or will be built. We know only that the power of the mystery may be as strong or stronger, than the power of death.33

The power of the mystery is regarded as strong or stronger than the power of death because the mystery is the openness of love whence the human being experiences the nothing that reveals the blurring of the distinction between death and life.34 The position affirmed by Susan dovetails with Heidegger’s interpretation in “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven” of the memorable line Leben ist Tod, und Tod ist auch ein Leben, “Life is death, and death is also a life.”35 From the paradoxical identification of life and death, Heidegger inferred that the expression “love of life” (Lebensliebe), used by Hölderlin in the concluding part of the third version of the ode “Griechenland” (Greece),36 conceals the deeper reality that love of life must include death in its purview. This inclusion instructs us, moreover, that “as death comes, it vanishes. The mortals die the death in life. In death the mortals become im-mortal [unsterblich].”37 Mortality is the benchmark of our immortality—not in the promise of a postmortem existence,38 but in taking hold of the collapse of the discrepancy between life and death in ascertaining that the persistence of time consists in its passing whence we can adduce that time is insofar as it constantly is not. From the mythological identification of Artemis, the sister of Apollo and bearer of the bow and lyre, as both the goddess of light and play and as the goddess of darkness and death, Heidegger argued that we can discern in the antagonism of living and dying their collocation: Life and death turn against one another. Certainly. However, what turns against one another turns, at the moment of its most extreme opposition, intimately toward one another. . . . Life and death, like light

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and night, correspond to one another, in that they at the same time “contradict” one another.39

The import of Heidegger’s words can be appreciated if we recall Nietzsche’s depiction of Zarathustra set in contrast to Jesus, who is said to have died too young because he knew only the tears and the melancholy of the Hebrews: But in a man there is more child than in a youth, and less melancholy; he knows more about death and life. Free for death and free in death, a sacred nay-sayer when it is no longer time for yes; thus he knows about death and life. . . . In your dying your spirit and your virtue shall still glow, like a sunset around the earth; or else your dying has failed you.40

Cast in Heidegger’s distinctive terminology, inasmuch as Dasein of all beings is the custodian of the balance of antinomical forces, death is experienced uniquely as a signpost of the human experience of time, an assumption that is unquestionably at the center of his thought.41 Strictly speaking, mortality can be ascribed only to humans and not to other species of animals, because the former alone can experience death as death in the same way that they alone can speak. One may well disagree with this Heideggerian assumption, but it is precisely on the basis of this anthropocentrism that, for Heidegger, we can contemplate the “essential relation between death and language,” which he believed was still unthought.42 Moreover, insofar as the poetic is emblematic of language in general, this connection beckons us to take to heart the thematic affinity between death and the poetry of the world.43 Thus, as he put it in “ . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,” the mortal status of our being relates to the fact that humans die in a manner that is not shared by other finite beings: To be able to die means: to be capable of death as death. Only man dies—and indeed continually, so long as he stays on this earth, so long as he dwells. His dwelling, however, rests in the poetic. Hölderlin sees the nature of the “poetic” in the taking of the measure by which the measure-taking of human being is accomplished.44

Heidegger identified the essential property of poetry as measure-taking (MaßNahme), and the paramount expression thereof is tied to the dwelling of the human as a mortal being.45 A vital link is established, therefore, between

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poiēsis and death, the silence that is the concealed holding to measure (Maßhalten) in which language is grounded.46 A similar stance, albeit expressed in a far more pensive and sullen manner, is discernible in the following entry from Susan’s diary written in March 1969: Put away the days, the days are like dust, put them away. There were always too many days, too many steps, seconds impossible to count, too many heartbeats, light scattered on the point of a thorn; too many words. All is flying dust. The days the steps the heartbeats I’ve put them down, locked in words; and now I want to put back the words in the dictionary but they won’t stay put. They are flying around, the words, the days, dreaming, waking, living, dying it’s all the same, all is flying dust.47

To underscore the perspective shared by Heidegger and Susan, it is worth considering the following response of Harold Bloom to Freud’s death instinct, which presumes that the aim of all life is death: Perhaps we can say that a man, even as a man, is capable of wishing to die, but by definition no poet, as poet, can wish to die, for that negates poethood. . . . Death is therefore a kind of literal meaning, or from the standpoint of poetry, literal meaning is a kind of death.48

For Heidegger, as for Susan, the opposite is the case; that is, death opens the path to the metaphorical meaning that is revealed only through its concealment in the literal. In that regard, death is the metrics of truth by which the human being assigns to itself in the clearing of being the mission of decisive moderation by hearing attentively and speaking inaudibly.49 Generalizing from Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s representation of Antigone, we can say that death is the becoming homely (Heimischwerden) that emerges within and from out of being unhomely (Unheimischsein).50 Susan, too, imagined death as a way to come home, to come alive, spellbound by the dust of language, the visible seal of silence, through which the dream of reality is recounted in the reality of the dream.51 With this in mind, let us consider the following comment in Susan’s letter to Jacob written on February 11, 1952: There is compassion even in the fate of death; we are not strong enough

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for everlasting life—even for a very long life. Time is suffering—the years collect and weigh on our heart. The agony + tension of finite existence cannot find rest except in that absolute annihilation. Life is good, but the goodness of it is conditioned by death. The equal mystery of life and death makes both bearable. And for one who is breathing in the charged field of this mystery, who knows that each moment is once + never again, life is never “boring” time itself is sanctified.52

The goodness of life must be assessed from the standpoint of death; that is, in suffering time as transient beings, we partake in the suffering that is time, and thus without the cessation of our being the temporal torment would be insufferable. The inexorable tensiveness of our finitude—the ontologizing of time that would preclude any opening to the alterity of an infinite transcendence—points to the inescapably tragic and solicitous complexion of our being in the world.53 Respite from the trial and tribulation of existence is found only in the irrevocability of its extermination. The intertwining of the mystery of birth and death makes tolerable each terminus of the intolerable circle of ephemerality that begins without beginning and ends without ending: The final victory is to chaos and death in order that synthesis and love should be eternally possible. The victory of reason is desirable only for an eschatological Weltanschauung which has a horror of eternity or rather a horror of the temporality of form and thus wants to eternalize its victory. But the notion of definitiveness shuts our eyes to both of the essential poles of the eternal, its double instantenaity whereby each instant is in eternity and all instants are in eternity; neither a “now” nor an absolute point of beginning or end can be fixed in time. Or to be heideggerien [sic]: “eternity” is the very timeliness of time. Whereby time running around and around, going nowhere, continually generates itself and continually defeats itself. Christian time is a monster made on the model of the finite human will, taken as “infinite”.54

Time does not, as Weil put it, cover everything with a veil of unreality,55 but rather it uncovers the nothing with a veil of reality. As I expressed the matter in a previous study, time is the veil through which the unveiling is

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veiled as the veiling of the unveiled.56 The moment we are born, we commence the process of dying. The same logic induces its own commutability: the time of death is the time of birth. To know the beginning is to stand in the end just as to know the end is to stand in the beginning. Mortality is lodged in the core of natality; the inception already bespeaks the expiration whence we may extrapolate the following axiom about the nature of temporality: perdurance consists of passing away.57 The paradox of time is such that there is no permanence but impermanence; all things are evanescent but the evanescence of all things. Accordingly, the timelessness of who we are not comes to appearance in the finitude of who we are in our timely disappearance.58 Susan perceptively comprehended that, for Heidegger, eternity is not the negation or the sublation of time but the enactment of the timeliness of time in the distension of the moment as “what is in the highest sense” (dasjenige im höchsten Sinne seiend): that is, that which constantly presences (das “ständig” anwest), the eternal being (ἀεὶ ὄν).59 Present in the nucleus of all beings is the absence of being, and it is in virtue of this nothingness that being is enduringly temporary. What Susan expressed episodically is articulated succinctly by Bataille in his musing on the conceptual bind that loops together nothingness, death, transcendence, and immanence: For me, nothingness is the limit of a being. Beyond definite limits—in time, in space—a being no longer exists. For us, this non-being is full of meaning: I know that I can be annihilated. The limited being is only a particular being, but does the totality of being (understood as a sum of beings) exist? Fundamentally, the transcendence of the being is this nothingness. It is only if it appears in the beyond of the nothingness, in a certain sense as a given fact of nothingness, that an object transcends us. On the contrary, to the extent that I grasp in that object the extension of the existence that is initially revealed in me, the object becomes immanent for me.60

More recently, the posture I have attributed to Susan—bolstered by the identification of nothing as the limit of being, disclosed by the annihilation that is death, in the diverse formulations of Heidegger and Bataille—has been expressed by Wouter Kusters:

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The nothingness of death and finiteness sets limits on time and fractures eternity. In this view, ecstatic experiences of eternity are merely frenetic attempts made by an overtly confident subject to ignore the nothingness. . . . Time and nothingness are inextricably linked.61

For Heidegger, too, there is an indissoluble bond between nothingness and time, but the finitude of death consolidates rather than shatters eternity. The nihilation of our being in the nonbeing of our annihilation encompasses the eternality of our temporal insubstantiality, and thus we can speak of the outcome of the delimitation of Dasein in relation to death as the dissipation of death into life.62 We are in the habit of calculating time quantitatively, but its movement cannot be counted mathematically; it may be compared rather, as Susan put it in Divorcing, to the drops from a faucet leaking in a deserted house. The struggle is in time and against time, that much is certain. The object is not so clear. To set up the start and finish lines. Chart a course. To salvage from the morass of memory and the diffusion of the present—what?63

Expressed in Heidegger’s characteristic language, in knowing that each moment comes forth once and never again—hence its uniqueness depends on the repeatability of the unrepeatable—the poet sanctifies time through the trickling of time by naming the unnameable mystery of the holy in the manner that the saying of being on the part of the thinker issues from a longprotected speechlessness (langbehüteten Sprachlosigkeit).64 The bringing into name through remembrance (Andenken) is the act of pointing (Hinzeigen) by which the sign (Zeichen) lets appear that which is to be shown (daß es das Zuzeigende erst erscheinen läßt) and thereby renders what is beyond the limits of thought thinkable in its unthinkability.65 Reflecting on this Heideggerian motif in the letter to Jacob from September 15–16, 1950, Susan wrote: An artificial sign or word is an object substituted for a natural sign (sense datum) the advantage of the thought-sign being that it is fixed, manageable and accessible to the subject at will, whereas the nature sign is passing, ponderable and cannot be produced by will. The common pivoting point whereon this translation from object to name turns

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is at the decisive point of the dialectical act of naming: for in the act of naming the object itself is created in the name and the nature-sign or object and the thought-sign or name stand for and fix identically a field of possible relations between confronting beings. . . . And in this effort to regain the holy the poet drives the cursed-godgiven-language through all the excluded and forbidden realms of genesis, through all the secret passages of the creation out of nothing. (And I must confess, speaking as a heretic, I can’t think of a greater poet than the writer of the Bible.)66

The identification of the task of the poet to name the holy is contextualized in the larger claim regarding the linguistic transition from the nature-sign of the object to the thought-sign of the name. Susan is here alluding to the fact that, for Heidegger, by bringing the holy into speech, poetizing is a form of higher contemplation that exemplifies the belonging-together (Zusammengehörigkeit) of speech (Sprache) and thing (Sache): that is, the apposition of logos as verbal assertion (Aussage) and the entity that it names, a correlation that precedes and makes possible the demarcation of truth as the adequation of language and being.67 The act of poiēsis amplifies the salient feature of Heidegger’s concept of language, which corresponds to Susan’s approach despite her condemnation: the primary task is not in making assertions about beings in the world but rather in “the preserved naming force of language and words [die unzerstörte Nennkraft der Sprache und Worte]” through which “things first come to be and are [werden und sind erst die Dinge].”68 In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger educed this crucial insight from the ending of Stefan George’s “The Word.” So lernt ich traurig den verzicht: Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht. So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be.69

In these words, Heidegger finds support for his conjecture that a poet must renounce any previous relationship to language in order to appreciate the relation between thing and word: that is, to undergo the experience through

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which the poet ascertains that only the word as visual image can bestow a relation to a thing.70 The poet—much as the kabbalist—presumes that the beingness of being is tied to language such that when there is no word, there is not only no thing of which to speak but nothing to experience. In this respect, the abandonment of the conventional understanding of language as a vehicle for social commerce gives rise to the adoption of an alternative understanding of language as the decisive experience of the imagination that makes things appear as the things that they are and thus lets them be absently present for the human being.71 “The poet experiences his poetic calling [Dichterberuf],” wrote Heidegger, “as a call to the word as the source, the bourn of Being. The renunciation [Verzicht] which the poet learns is of that special kind of fulfilled self-denial [erfüllten Entsagens] to which alone is promised what has long been concealed and is essentially vouchsafed already.”72 This is the import of the difference, the isthmus of the between or the middle, connecting and separating word and object, marked by the seemingly tautologous expression “Language speaks” (Die Sprache spricht) as Heidegger explained in the 1950 essay “Language”: The word consequently no longer means a distinction established between objects only by our representations. Nor is it merely a relation obtaining between world and thing, so that a representation coming upon it can establish it. The dif-ference [Unter-Schied] is not abstracted from world and thing as their relationship after the fact. The dif-ference for world and thing disclosingly appropriates [ereignet] things into bearing a world; it disclosingly appropriates world into the granting of things. . . . The dif-ference, as the middle for world and things, metes out the measure of their presence. In the bidding that calls thing and world, what is really called is: the dif-ference. . . . Language speaks in that the command of the dif-ference calls world and things into the simple onefold of their intimacy.73

The art of Dichtung is thus a presencing or bringing-forth into being—what Celan designated as the poem’s construction of the “last thingness” (letzte Dinglichkeit),74 an expression that is consonant with Heidegger’s speculation on “the be-thinging of the thing in the word” (die Bedingnis des Dinges im

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Wort); that is, it is the capacity of the poetic word to allow the thing to presence as thing (Das Wort läßt das Ding als Ding anwesen)75—the modality of appearance that, broadly conceived, is the unfolding of history, the fugal structure of experience as event.76 The Heideggerian understanding of poetic language—which may itself be profitably compared to the prevailing attitude toward speech in the various branches on the tree of Jewish mysticism—is discernible in the account of Celan offered by Peter Szondi: Poetry is ceasing to be mimesis, representation; it is becoming reality. To be sure, this is a poetic reality: The text no longer stands in the service of a predetermined reality, but rather is projecting itself, constituting itself as reality.77

As Heidegger put it in “The Way to Language,” the essential being of language is the saying as showing (Das Wesende der Sprache ist die Sage als die Zeige).78 The demonstrative function of showing as the naming that “first brings beings to word and to appearance”79 led Heidegger to conclude that language “is poetry in the essential sense. But since language is that happening [Geschehnis] in which, each time, beings are first disclosed as beings, poesy, poetry in the narrower sense, is the most primordial form of poetry in the essential sense.”80 Insofar as every bestowing is at the same time a withholding—and thus we can say of being that it gives itself and refuses itself simultaneously (Es gibt sich und versagt sich zumal)81—it follows that every giving is a nongiving, every disclosure is a concealment. The poet apprehends from the juxtaposition of thing and word the paradox that the “is” of the former “itself is not [das selber nicht ist],” just as the latter is in the same case of not being a being [nichts Seiendes ist]. Neither the “is” nor the word attain to thinghood [Dingwesen], to Being, nor does the relation between “is” and the word, the word whose task it is to give an “is” in each given instance. But even so, neither the “is” nor the word and its Saying can be cast out into the void of mere nothingness [die Leere der bloßen Nichtigkeit].82

Poetically, to say (sagen) is to abjure (entsagen) as what is affirmed of the nature of the thing occupies the space between the isness of what is not and

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the nothingness of what is. In this regard, poetic speech illumines the truth that in its essence the nothing is the word of being,83 and hence, the diction of the poet, as the elocution of the thinker, is always in the category of “the saying of the to-be-said” (die Sage des Zu-sagenden).84 Heidegger argued that since the foundation of human existence is dialogue with the other, conversation (Gespräch) should be regarded as the “authentic occurrence of language” (eigentliches Geschehen der Sprache). However, as he also notoriously maintained, “the primary language is poetry as the founding of being” (Die Ursprache aber ist die Dichtung als Stiftung des Seins).85 In the letter to Jacob dated March 1–2, 1952, Susan referred to this passage and offered the following criticism: The “new dimension of the holy” is hardly in view. Heidegger’s “Stiften des Sein”—“founding of the permanent” is as desperate a contradiction as Nietzsche’s “willing necessity” or “willing eternal repetition”. Because there is an irreconcilable opposition between “founding” + “permanence” “will” + “eternity”. But neither can we chose between time-self-freedom + eternity-being-necessity. To chose is to be in the domain of “history” + exiled from the sacred.86

Susan’s critique leveled against Heidegger is unwarranted as it is based on a false dichotomy between “founding” and “permanence,” between the historical and the sacred, just as her negative appraisal of Nietzsche is based on a false dichotomy between the temporal fluctuation of the freedom of the will and the eternal recurrence of the being of necessity. More importantly, as much as Susan wanted to dissociate her views regarding poetry from Heidegger, she was in accord with his assessment that in the poetic naming of being, the naming cannot be severed from the nameless that defies naming, the mystery of the holy—the open—to which language can only hint as that which it names by unnaming.87 The iterability of language—the constant reformulation of the saying (Sagen) that brings the unsayable (Unsagbare) as such to the world88—consists of its capacity to be repeated without repeating the repetition it performs.89 What Susan called the dialectical act of naming is not merely a passive mirroring of the sensory object; it is rather an active creation of the object through linguistic confabulation. Many poets have expressed the magico-mystical

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power of language to craft the nature of the very reality that they seek to describe, but here I will offer one concise illustration from the opening stanza of the poem “Words” by W. H. Auden: A sentence uttered makes a world appear When all things happen as it says they do; We doubt the speaker, not the tongue we hear: Words have no word for words that are not true.90

To my ear, the filter through which Susan understood the motif of the concurrence of word and thing is the identification of language as the underlying stuff of creation, one of the elementary precepts of various currents of Jewish mystical speculation. I surmise that when Susan offered her heretical view that the writer of Hebrew scripture was one of the greatest poets,91 she was thinking of this very idea regarding the poetic structure of the world predicated on a conception of semiosis that is both structural and generative.92 Moreover, Susan’s words call to mind Derrida’s identification of the Jew as poet, based in part on the assertion of Marina Tsvetaeva, “All poets are Jews,” cited and discussed in the Introduction,93 which in turn is resonant with William Blake’s statement in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” that the people of Israel “taught that the Poetic Genius . . . was the first principle and all the others merely derivative.”94 A reverberation of the cosmological assumption regarding the homology of language and being is found in the Heideggerian-inflected speculation in Susan’s letter to Jacob dated September 15–16, 1950, to which I have already referred in Chapter 3: The act of naming for the increase of human powers even as Prometheus’ theft of fire for the same ends is an instance of the fall. Then, “the naming of the holy” or let us say the whole whence we have been cast out, would mean: to regain IN the word what has been lost THROUGH the word. That is to create in the substance in the very corporeality of language, that destroyed the immediacy of the whole, the totality.95

Ever a careful reader of Heidegger, even if, nay especially when, she disagreed with him, Susan shrewdly understood that naming the holy is predicated on

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being banished from the holy—the domain characterized as the immediacy of the whole or the totality—and hence it is language that affords the poet the possibility to regain what has been lost through language. The theme is elaborated by Susan in the letter to Jacob written on March 6, 1952: A positive symbolic gesture can only be born in complicity with the real, the real, not as an object but in its presignificative state. The formal world of objective (natural) signification can only be broken by another ideal (symbolic) of form, but this new form can only be generated by returning to the amorphous substratum of the real, by steeping ourselves in the ocean of formlessness. But this “return” this descent is as hard as the ascent, because ultimately it is identical with the generation of the form itself. The descent is already the ascent and it is the hardest; it needs not “mental concentration” but demonic powers; it needs the “hero” who lives near the “source” to whom the chaos is accessible. The symbolic significations generated through this “return to the source” cannot be “judged” by any criterion since they define the horizon of significance; they can be surpassed only in a new creation. This sounds a little like the old Heidegger (or the “new”—time runs both ways, the oldest is the youngest) except that H. sees the descent and the transtemporal moment of union when the poet names the holy as a contemplative act, as a moment in the process of “Seinsdenken”. . . . And H.’s Seinsdenken and naming of the holy remains an empty form on paper. Let him come out dancing from his cubiculum and then I’ll believe him.96

There is a necessary correlation between the symbolic and the real; however, the latter is not to be understood naïvely as empirical objectivity but rather as the presignificative state of the ideal. New symbolic forms are generated through a return to the chaos of the source—the amorphous substratum of the real—by stepping into the ocean of formlessness. The return of form to formlessness is also characterized as a descent, which, in line with the wellknown Heraclitean dictum,97 is said to be identical with the ascent.98 Tellingly, the process of generating symbolic significations from the horizon of the insignificant is compared to the Heideggerian Seinsdenken understood

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as the transtemporal moment of union in which the poet names the holy. Well ahead of her time, Susan questioned the linear temporalizing of Heidegger’s work by challenging the distinction between the old and the new based on the supposition that the timeline is reversible.99 Be that as it may, the main point for our analysis is that Susan was critical of Heidegger’s notion of the poet naming the holy as a contemplative act and demanded of him to apply it more practically; hence—reminiscent of Nietzsche100—she invoked the bodily image of dance as the marker of a trustworthy form of cogitating about being. The criticism notwithstanding, it seems that Susan would have subscribed to the essential point of Heideggerian poetics: language, in its most primordial inflection, as he put it in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” is the summoning that “nominates beings to their being from out of that being,” a projecting of the clearing (Lichtung) wherein beings are unconcealed in their concealment as the beings they appear not to be in the being of their appearance.101 By naming the holy, the poet is united transtemporally with the formless origin and thereby bequeaths form on what exhibits the gravitas of beings that are esteemed to be real. The thing’s thingliness, or the thingly character of things, is determined from the thing’s belonging to the earth, but this belonging reveals itself most transparently in the thingliness brought into the clearing through the act of poesy, the prototypical work of making art, the figuration that enframes the becoming of truth, the opening up of the open that fabricates its advent as the factical thrownness directed toward the possibility of beings in the world concealed in the unconcealment of the concealedness.102 The poeticizing projection (dichtende Entwurf) is the bestowing from nothing that is withheld in the grounding of nothing as the indeterminate being propelling the determination of beings through which the labyrinth of historical existence is interwoven.103 In Heidegger’s own words, Truth, as the clearing and concealing of that which is, happens through being poeticized. All art, as the letting happen [Geschehenlassen] of the advent of the truth of beings, is, in essence, poetry. . . . From out of the poeticizing essence of truth it happens that an open place is thrown open, the place in which everything is other than it was. . . . What poetry, as clearing projection, unfolds of unconcealment and projects into

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the rift within the figure [Gestalt] is the open; poetry allows this open to happen in such a way, indeed, that now, for the first time, in the midst of beings, it brings them to shine and sound.104

The poeticizing of the truth of being comes about through the word taking shape in the open optically as that which shines and acoustically as that which sounds, a showing-saying that cannot be explained in merely historiographical or philological terms.105

Waking to the Dream of Waking: Poetic Time and Encounter with the Mystery The obfuscation of the differentiation between dying and living is related to another theme that is crucial to Susan’s writing and understanding of poetry:106 namely, the power of language to disable language and to obliterate thereby the boundary separating fact and fantasy. In the letter to Jacob from November 21, 1950, Susan made the following observation spurred by reading Ernst Cassirer’s The Problem of Knowledge: Schelling was the first to say that the truth of the Mythos is not allegorical but “tautogorical”.107 Heidegger goes so far as to say that the word is in its “metaphorical” meaning in its authentic meaning and is merely allegorical in its “everyday” meaning. . . . Is not there something quite “Kabalistic” (or at least mystic) in conceiving of the empirical as mere “allegory”[?] So that to speak of the “arm” of God is no crude anthropomorphic “projection” but rather the “animal” arm in all its forms is only an echo, a reminiscence, a symbol of the “divine” arm—that is not merely a form, or idea, but more substantial than its physical “copy”.108

One might question the distinction between the “metaphorical” and the “merely allegorical” that Susan applied to the contrast that Heidegger made between authentic and everyday meaning, but what she aptly grasped is that the mystical tenor of his poetic understanding of language—what she called in another context his “clandestine Geistesgeschichtemystik”109—breaks down the barrier between the literal and the figurative.110 Commenting in his essay “Remembrance,” on the following passage from Hölderlin’s Becoming in Passing-Away, “[in] the state between Being and not-Being, everywhere

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the possible becomes real, and the actual ideal, and this is in the free imitation of art a terrible but divine dream,”111 Heidegger wrote that the poetic calling (Dichtertum) apportions to humankind the historical task of dwelling upon earth to disclose the nonreal (das Unwirkliche) that precedes everything real, the fullness of the inscrutable gift suspended between the no-longer-actual (Nichtmehr-Wirkliche) and the not-yet-actual (Nochnicht-Wirkliche), the advent of the holy that appears unexpectedly in the “divinely terrible nonreality” ( furchtbargöttliche Unwirkliche) of the dream, the space of the “free imagination of poetry” ( freien Bildens der Dichtung), the state between being (Seyn) and nonbeing (Nichtseyn), in which the possible becomes real and the actual ideal.112 The image of the dream is not invoked in Susan’s portrayal of the poetic craft, but it is undoubtedly relevant inasmuch as the oneiric can be characterized as well by the propensity to symbolize the actually real by means of sensuous images of what is thought to be unreal. In “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Heidegger overtly affirms this perspective: Poetry awakens the illusion of the unreal and of the dream [Schein des Unwirklichen und des Traumes] as opposed to the tangible and clamorous actuality in which we believe ourselves to be at home. And yet, on the contrary, what the poet says and undertakes to be is what is truly real [was der Dichter sagt und zu sein übernimmt, das Wirkliche].113

The unreal—or what I would prefer to call in Husserlian terms “the irreal”114—is determinative of what is perceived noetically to be real, and as a result, the discrimination between facticity and fictionality is conspicuously blurred.115 In a world where there is nothing but dissemblance, where reality is naught but the appearance of reality, even dissemblance is a token of dissembling. Congruent with the view of Heraclitus transmitted by Polybius, “In taking the poets as testimony for things unknown, they are citing authorities that cannot be trusted,”116 Nietzsche disarmingly espoused the idea that the poet is the most veritable liar insofar as poetic language serves “to make the unreal appear to be real.”117 The poet discloses that the only truth to behold is the truth manifest in the dissimilitude of its nonmanifestation.118 Due to its unavoidable dependence on a network of images and metaphors, poetry vividly conveys the axiological tenet of Nietzschean epistemology: truth is an illusion of which we have forgotten that it is an illusion,119 or, expressed

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pragmatically, truth is the kind of error without which we could not live.120 Poetry, on this account, is in proximity to the doubling of illusion implied in the depiction of the dream as the appearance of the appearance to which we assign the status of reality. As Nietzsche put it in Human, All Too Human, usually the dream is a bungled product—chains of symbolic scenes and images in place of the language of poetic narration [an Stelle einer erzählenden Dichter-Sprache]; they paraphrase our experiences or expectations or circumstances with such poetic boldness and definiteness that in the morning we are always astonished at ourselves when we recall our dreams. In dreaming we use up too much of our artistic capacity— and therefore often have too little of it during the day.121

In a comparable spirit, Blanchot expressed the nocturnal nature of the oneiric, “The dream is that which cannot ‘really’ be. The dream touches the region where pure resemblance reigns. . . . The dream is the likeness that refers eternally to likeness.”122 Insofar as Blanchot associated dreams with “signs of poetry,”123 we can hypothesize that the poetic, too, may be characterized as the duplication of the image of what cannot be except as the “reality which always escapes and which one cannot escape.”124 Explicating his claim that writing is characterized by an essential solitude “whose essence is the dissimulation that appears in it,” Blanchot speculated further on the nature of poetry as a language that favors images: “This is probably an allusion to a much more essential transformation—the poem is not a poem because it contains a certain number of figures, metaphors, comparisons; on the contrary, the poem’s particular character is that nothing in it functions as an image.” At the deepest level, the language of the poem, as literature more generally, is an “imaginary language, one which no one speaks; a language that is, which issues from its own absence, the way the image emerges upon the absence of the thing.”125 Compatible with Heidegger’s understanding of poetic language as the art of exposing through hiding, Blanchot affirmed that the power of semblance in the poem is its dissemblance—nothing in the poem functions as an image because the poem is nothing but a cluster of interconnected images—and thus it shares with the dream the phenomenological haziness of nocturnality that obfuscates the diurnal distinction between what is imagined to be real

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and what is really imagined, leading to the conclusion that “being is essentially its being at the heart of concealment.”126 The axis of the poetic turns on the point of ambiguity in which the “complete realization of language coincides with its disappearance. Everything is pronounced . . . everything is word, yet the word is itself no longer anything but the appearance of what has disappeared—the imaginary, the incessant, and the interminable.” The language within the poem is the ungraspable luminous evidence that “shows nothing” and “rests upon nothing.”127 A similar understanding of the poetic may be extricated from Gaston Bachelard: We are offered a veritable cure of rhythmo-analysis through the poem, which interweaves real and unreal [le réel et l’irréel], and gives dynamism to language by means of the dual activity of signification and poetry. . . . With poetry, the imagination takes its place on the margin, exactly where the function of unreality comes to charm or to disturb— always to awaken—the sleeping being lost in its automatisms.128

As in the dream, so in the poem, there is an amalgamation of the real and the unreal to the point that the real is presumed to be unreal inasmuch as the unreal is presumed to be real. A hint to this archaic trope can be heard in Divorcing where the line separating actual experiences (or the memory thereof) and the imagination in the topography of the dream129 is not easily drawn.130 Thus, Susan wrote explicitly in one passage, “Between life and dream there was not much difference really, however the two wrangled, struggled, played tricks on each other.”131 At the conclusion of the book, Sophie utters that it is “disconcerting how the urgencies of dream and waking life correspond. At home in neither. The one who got up no more myself than the one dreaming.”132 Challenging the commonplace view that distinguishes definitively between the self of the dream and the self of waking consciousness, the dream state and waking reality are placed on an equal phenomenal footing, and hence the sensible world is deemed to be naught but a dream from which one must awaken by waking to the dream in which one is merely dreaming that one is awake. From this transliminal vantage point, lucidity of mind consists of obscuring the difference between the wakeful character of dreaming and the dreamful character of wakefulness.133

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Heidegger articulated this theme in slightly different terminology in the following passage about poiēsis: Poeticizing is here thinking the poem, the figure, of being, far from it in the parting to the difference out of the rift of the freeness of freedom. Mis-appear: freed from freedom, letting itself be in the releasement of belonging in the com-mencement to the fulfillment as an event of expropriation.134

Typically allusive, Heidegger’s language seeks to cogitate on the nature of poeticizing (Dichtend)—thinking the poem (Denken das Gedicht)—as the constitution of the figure of being in the parting of the difference (Abschied zum Unterschied) that issues from the rift in the freeness of freedom (aus dem Riß der Freye der Freyheit). Being freed from freedom—an apparently self-contradictory statement that demarcates a state of sovereignty that is at once determinately indeterminate and indeterminately determinate—effectuates the mis-appearing (ver-scheinen) of the nonessence that is the essence of all things that have no essence, the nonphenomenalizable manifest in the appearance of its nonappearance and unmanifest in the nonappearance of its appearance. Hence, whereas knowledge (Wissen) entails “standing in the state of attesting to appearance” (Stehen im Stand der Bezeugung von Schein), thinking (Denken) implicates one “going toward beyng in the course of the event” (das Gehen im Gang der Ereignung zum Seyn). Thinking, as opposed to knowing, fosters the discernment that appearance is not equal to “mere appearance” (bloßer Anschein) but it is rather “the objective showing oneself” (das gegenständliche Sich-zeigen), a showing dependent on the letting go (Lassen) of the self that is allied to the grasping (Fassen) that belongs to the egoistical aspect of mineness.135 The showing of the nonshowing—the revelation of nothing to be revealed—is coupled with the Heideggerian notion of being letting itself be (Sichlassen) in the releasement (Gelassenheit) of belonging in the beginning to the implementation as the event of enowning, the event of presence of what persists in its absence, indeed, a presence that is present merely through absence, the givenness of a given that can be given only in its ungivenness. From the vantage point of this act of opening that allows that which is withheld to shine forth in its withholding, the expansion contracted in the expanded

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contraction, the phenomenological account of temporality must be construed as a phenomenology lacking any phenomenon and therefore a phenomenology of the nonphenomenal.136 The latter term does not signify a reified metaphysical transcendence beyond the world but rather an immanent transcendence, the pulsation of infinity vibrating in the heart of the finite, the epistemic provision of all phenomenality, the inapparent that resides in and occasions the appearing of all things apparent but which itself evades appearance, the unseeing that neuronally enflames every act of seeing.137 The circular linearity of the timeswerve may be visualized as the kinetic metrics by which the criterion of immateriality recurringly renders the material world visible in its invisibility and invisible in its visibility. Time is the cadence that modulates the computation of the incomputable appearance of all that is apparent in the withdrawal of its apparentness.138 I note, incidentally, that one can detect the influence of Heidegger in Derrida’s explanation of Celan’s characterization of the poem in his Meridian speech as the “mystery of the encounter” (Geheimnis der Begegnung), a locution to which I referred in the Introduction.139 Displaying his exegetical prowess, Derrida elicited from Celan that the secret of the encounter is the secret of the poem. The double sense of secrecy intimates, moreover, that the secret is the genesis of the poem, that is, the condition of its possibility, as well as the present in which there is the presentation of the poem that resists presentification. Temporally speaking, the experience of the encounter is in this present, the presencing that continues to remain secret, at bottom a present that does not present itself, a phenomenon that does not phenomenalize itself. Nothing shows itself, the nothing, the absurd shows itself in manifesting nothing. We will come to this, to this manifestation as non-manifestation.140

Avoiding both the rigidity of thingness and the fluidity of nothingness, the poem seeks to divulge the singular plurivocality of the ipseity that pervades the very beings from which it has absconded.141 The poem, as a dream, occupies the timespace where the suchness of being is the vacuity of nonbeing, the spacetime that is neither celestial nor terrestrial, indeed, a nonspatial space, wherein the opening of imagination conjures the presence of the image that is present only by being absent,142 and the invisible is envisioned as the

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concealment manifest in the manifestation of its concealment.143 Expressed in Levinasian terms, which suggest an ideational closeness to Heidegger despite what Levinas himself may have acknowledged, the opening is the trace of an absence of a presence that has never been and never will be present rather than the trace of an absence of the as of yet non-revealed presence.144 Along similar lines, Derrida wrote that the trace is a trace “only if presence is irremediably eluded in it . . . and only if it constitutes itself as the possibility of absolute erasure. An unerasable trace is not a trace.”145 Time itself may be viewed through this prism of the trace of the erasure of the trace, and thus it portends that what will be in the future is constituted by what was in the past, but what was in the past is constituted by what will be in the future. The present, we might say, is the incenter of the circle that is open at both ends.146 Celan himself briefly alluded to this temporal component of the poem in the Meridian address: the poem stands fast at the edge of itself; it calls and brings itself, in order to be able to exist, ceaselessly back from its already-no-longer [Schon-nicht-mehr] into its always-still [Immer-noch]. This always-still can only be a speaking.147

There is debate regarding Celan’s conceptual kinship with Heidegger’s hermeneutical privileging of the temporality of the poem (die Zeitlichkeit des Gedichts),148 the expression that Heidegger himself entered on the cover page of his personal copy of The Meridian: Speech on the Occasion of the Presentation of the Georg Büchner Prize, published in 1961,149 but surely it is not inconsequential that the aforecited passage was heavily annotated by Heidegger in an apparent effort to substantiate the affinities between Celan’s poetology and his own views on the nature of poiēsis.150 Furthermore, it is reasonable to assume that Celan would have assented to the Heideggerian depiction of the language unique to the poet as the decisive way toward the leap into the completely other of being-historical-thinking (Die Besinnung auf die Sprache gilt hier als ein entscheidender Weg zum Einsprung in das ganz andere, nämlich seynsgeschichtliche Denken),151 a hermeneutical undertaking buttressed by the temporal presumption that what has been thought is perpetually in the state of what is yet to be thought.152 Analogously, the sounding of the poem materializes in the chiasmic present situated between the past that

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is already-no-longer and the future that is always-still-to-come—rendered even more paradoxically by the curvature of the timeloop wherein the past is always-still-to-come because it is already-no-longer, and the future is already-no-longer because it is always-still-to-come—and thus what has been disclosed in the poetic saying has the status of the unsaid yet to be disclosed. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe put it, But the poem’s “wanting-not-to-say” does not want not to say. A poem wants to say; indeed, it is nothing but pure wanting-to-say. But pure wanting-to-say nothing, nothingness, that against which and through which there is presence, what is.153

It is clear that Celan privileged the future in his allegation—also likely reflecting Heideggerian idioms154—that the poem is solitary (einsam) and underway (unterwegs).155 This orientation indicates that the poet speaks under the angle of inclination of his Being, the angle of inclination of his creatureliness. Then the poem is . . . one person’s languagebecome-shape [gestaltgewordene Sprache], and, according to its essence [Wesen], presentness [Gegenwart] and presence [Präsenz].156

The present can thus only be found in the work of the poet who does not forget that he speaks from under the angle of inclination of his being (Dasein), which is identified further as the angle of inclination of his creatureliness (Kreatürlichkeit).157 With these words Celan intones—in language that Heidegger judged to be amenable with his signature terminology158—the indelible and incontrovertible fact that finitude is the ultimate signpost of the nothingness of our being that we countenance unremittingly as the being of our nothingness. Endorsing this truth is hardly remarkable, but what is notable is Celan’s view that the essential presence of poetic language assumes shape from within the ontic-existentiell presentness of the individual (Einzelnen) fashioned by the feeling of mortality. The point is reiterated more emphatically in another passage from the Meridian speech in which Celan described poetry as an “infinite speaking” (Unendlichsprechung) about “mere mortality and purposelessness [lauter Sterblichkeit und Umsonst]!”159 From Celan we may corroborate the position taken by Susan Taubes: the poet is mandated to discourse about that which is categorically the termination in language that is interminable.

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Speaking endlessly about the seeming uselessness of mortality is the conceptual underpinning of Celan’s comment that through the utterance of the poet, the actualized language (aktualisierte Sprache) is “set free under the sign of a radical individuation that at the same time, however, remains mindful of the borders language draws and of the possibilities language opens up for it.”160 The actualization of language on the part of the poet is correlated with the individual and not the collective because poiēsis signals the singularity of the moment, and hence it partakes inimitably of the temporariness of human existence.161 “Even in this here and now of the poem—for the poem itself, we know, has always only this one, unique, momentary present [punktuelle Gegenwart]—even in this immediacy and nearness it lets the most essential aspect of the other speak: its time [dessen Zeit].”162 The apparatus of the poet consists of words shared by others—and this includes neologisms compounded by familiar expressions that are hardly original—but the form created by the poetic innovation is unique to the ecstatic moment of the encounter with the mystery. “In the poem,” wrote Celan in one of the drafts of the Meridian address, all synonymy and tropes . . . are led ad absurdum; in the poem language repeats itself, in the single and finite [Einmaligen und Endlichen], as spiritual shape [geistige Gestalt]. In the single and finite the word becomes name . . . . It is assigned to a name that is unpronounceable [unaussprechlich].163

Toward the beginning of the version of the speech that Celan delivered orally, he refers to this idea: “Homage is being paid to the majesty of the absurd as witness for the presence [Gegenwart] of the human. This, ladies and gentlemen, has no name fixed once and for all, but I believe that this is . . . poetry.”164 It is reasonable to theorize that Celan’s understanding of language is molded in part by the Jewish tradition about the ineffable name.165 Significantly, he emphasized the qualities of singleness and finiteness of the poetic word that becomes the unspeakable name, a process that he also referred to as the spiritual shape assumed by the language of the poem. Elaborating on this theme in the section entitled “Atem” from his notebooks, Celan wrote, “the shape of the poem [Gestalt des Gedichts]: that is presence [Gegenwart] of the single, breathing one.”166 The event of the poem, like the nonevent of

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death, is always instantiated in the presentness of a present that cannot be presentified—at all times one dies in an incalculable and unforeseeable moment that is now, not before and not after. I suspect, however, that by putting the emphasis on the futurity of what is always still to come, Celan may be attributing to the poet the quality of eternality that is associated in the rabbinickabbalistic tradition with the compresence of the three temporal modes in the nunc stans of the divine present. Just as the Jewish God is branded as the one who is coming rather than as the one who came and is coming back à la the Christian parousia,167 so the poet’s language is constellated within the hiatus of the temporal deferment, the future that is continuously configured in the now as that which is not yet now, the interval that oscillates between the already-no-longer and the always-still.168 In addition to the possible kabbalistic influence, it should be noted that this idea of compresence corresponds to the equiprimordiality (Gleichursprünglichkeit) affirmed by Heidegger in Being and Time as a way to convey the inseparability of the three temporal ecstasies,169 an idea that he later expressed in the following language: The simultaneity of time: the has-been, presence, and the present that is waiting for our encounter and is normally called the future [Das Gleich-Zeitige der Zeit sind: die Gewesenheit, die Anwesenheit und die Gegen-Wart, die uns entgegenwartet und sonst die Zukunft heißt]. Time in its timing removes us into its threefold simultaneity [dreifältig GleichZeitiges], moves us thence while holding out to us what is opening up at the same time [das dabei Sichöffnende des Gleich-Zeitigen], the oneness [Einigkeit] of the has-been, presence, and the present.170

Alluding to the temporal intonation of the act of poeticizing in analogous terms, Celan wrote: I had, for my idea that, that the real [das Wirkliche], as it may each time be understood by the creative, word-giving I [schöpferischen, wortgebenden Ich], is constituted anew in the poem, i.e., grows together with the word that offers itself & in the process makes the latter’s sphere of reference its own—and that sphere of reference is, as it were, even if only “on a small scale” that of the whole of language, basically unlimited— The poet, even if he sets this real free for the moment of the poem, nev-

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ertheless falls back into his (old) reticence—from which, if ever, only the next poem frees him again—this time too only for a “moment.”171

The poem is constituted anew in the moment (Augenblick), and in that moment the poet brings the real into being through language. Celan’s poem “Corona” seems to be framed by this process of temporalization. Thus, he writes in the first stanza “We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk: time returns to the shell [die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale],” and concludes the last stanza, “It’s time for it to be time. It is time [Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird. Es ist Zeit].”172 To the degree that the time of the poem’s creation is in the moment, the poem can be considered to be outside the temporal sequence. Perhaps this is what Celan meant by the paradoxical statement Das Gedicht hat Zeit und hat keine Zeit,173 “The poem has time & has no time.”174 We can say of the poem that it concurrently has time and has no time if we understand that the time it possesses bears the character of being without time. It would be beneficial to recall the following remark of Celan in his Bremen speech: “For a poem is not timeless. Certainly it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time—through it, not above and beyond it [Denn das Gedicht ist nicht zeitlos. Gewiß, es erhebt einen Unendlichkeitsanspruch, es sucht, durch die Zeit hindurchzugreifen—durch sie hindurch, nicht über sie hinweg].”175 Recasting Celan’s insight, we could say the poem is an aperture to the entwining of timelessness and time, a crisscrossing that unsettles the prevalent view that the past is behind and the future is ahead.176 By shedding light on the copresence of the three temporal modes implicit in the linear circularity of time, the poem is, at once, an embrace of life and a preparation for death. Herein we confront the paradox of the present as the “time of an occurrence,” in the language of Lyotard, which is absolute and therefore “cannot be grasped as such,” nor can it “be synthesized directly with other presents. The other presents with which it can be placed in relation are necessarily and immediately changed into presented presents, i.e. past.”177 By stringing all moments together diachronically, we slip from the presenting time implied in “each” occurrence, to the presented time it has become or, better, from time as “now” . . . to time considered as “this time” . . . an expression which presupposes that “one time” . . . is equivalent to “that time”. What is forgotten in this

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objectifying synthesis is that it takes place now, in the presenting occurrence that effects the synthesis, and that this “now” is not yet one of the “times” it presents along the diachronic line.178

The paradoxical constitution of the event as the occurrence of the nonoccurrence—akin to Heidegger’s experience of nothingness179—is based on the fact that the presentification of the present defies representation insofar as it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp presentation itself and to present it. . . . That something happens, the occurrence, means that the mind is disappropriated. . . . The event makes the self incapable of taking possession and control of what it is. It testifies that the self is essentially passible to a recurrent alterity.180

Metaphoricity and Untruth as the Veil of Truth The poetic wisdom of the givenness of the terminability of the present as what is interminably ungiven—the disappropriation of the event of appropriation as the recurrent alterity—can be gleaned from Heidegger’s elucidation of the expression dunkle Licht, the “dark light,” derived from Hölderlin,181 as I mentioned in Chapter 3.182 From the standpoint of our habitual thinking (gewöhnliche Denken), this language is blatantly contradictory and seemingly impossible, since light, no matter how faint, wards off darkness. The poetic image, however, imparts a higher mode of thinking, a deeper introspection that is attuned to and takes hold of the paradox regarding an illumination that comes to shine through its darkness, so that here something appears in concealing itself. It refuses manifestness and thus raises presentation into the boldness, not of replacing the dark illumination [dunkle Leuchten] by an empty brightness, but rather of corresponding to it in the clarity of presentation to be attained.183

Remarkably, Susan drew an analogy between Heidegger’s understanding of poiēsis as luminal darkness—the concealment of being in the unconcealment of beings through the “fixing in place of truth in the figure” (die Fest-stellung der Wahrheit in die Gestalt)184—and the kabbalistic principle that all things empirical should be reckoned as allegorical in relation to the divine realities.185

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What she called “allegory” corresponds more or less to what Scholem famously designated as “symbol” in contrast to allegory.186 Just as Scholem— adopting in his interpretation of the kabbalah the Romantic understanding of the symbol as a linguistic mode of communicating the incommunicable—forged an analogical linking of the incomparable spheres of divinity and nature,187 so Susan understood allegory as a way to speak silently or negatively about indescribable hidden realms.188 In the letter to Jacob written on November 28, 1950, Susan expressed her desire to live in holiness and to heed the silence, believing that speaking about important things was a form of desecration. Contrasting the especially egregious defilement on the part of professional academicians who speak about matters that should be kept silent, Susan noted that the wise men of the past, the gnostics, + kabalists had to disguise their thought in fantastic garments to protect them, because to utter these things nakedly is to kill them and ourselves too. We must guard the truth in silence + in “disguise”.189

From the practice of the wise men of old—the gnostics and the kabbalists— to hide their thoughts in garments in order to shield them, we can extract the hermeneutical truism that uttering secrets nakedly, that is, stripped of their imaginal encasements, has lethal consequences for the truths laid bare and for the recipients of those truths. Emulating these sages, it is necessary to secure the truth in silence; however, this is accomplished not by refusing to speak but rather by speaking in such a way that the unspeakable is adorned symbolically and thereby preserved in its unspeakability. To paraphrase a passage in the Gospel of Philip that lends support to Susan’s generalization, truth cannot come into the world naked but only in “types” and “images” that are homologous to the world. Devoid of all metaphoric embellishments, truth in and of itself is rendered metaphorically as a being that is unclothed. To appear phenomenally, however, truth had to be arrayed in the symbolic alignments that could be received by the inhabitants of the world.190 Bracketing the question of nomenclature, Susan’s brief remarks demonstrate that she intuited something rudimentary about the kabbalistic attitude to language and being. Reversing the typical approach to anthropomorphisms articulated by medieval philosophical exegetes, the kabbalists maintained that

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spiritual entities could be described in human terms, for the tangibility of the human body is determined by the divine body to which it is correlated, a body whose limbs are constituted by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Biblical anthropomorphisms, accordingly, are not to be explained as a concession to the limitations of human reason—“the Torah speaks in human language,” according to the talmudic maxim utilized by the philosophers to formulate the principle of accommodation—but rather they function as semiotic signs (simanim) that inform us about the comportment of the hidden reality of divine bodiliness, which sheds light, in turn, on the corporeal nature of the world and that of the human being.191 This mystical conception—and perhaps it can also be labeled Platonic in nature, as Jacob Taubes submitted in his handwritten gloss to the aforementioned letter of Susan from November 21, 1950192—is ascribed to Heidegger and to the kabbalists. Susan’s poetics share with Heidegger and the kabbalists the presumption that unconcealment is not a disrobing of the naked truth but rather the disposing of the garment in which truth is attired for the sake of donning another garment in its place. Insofar as the nameless is declaimed by way of the name that both reveals and conceals its namelessness, and the formless is envisaged by way of the form that both reveals and conceals its formlessness, gnosis is inseparably bound to agnosia; that is, one cannot know the unveiling of the veil of truth but through unknowing the truth veiled in the veil of untruth. From kabbalistic material one may elicit the wisdom that, in my opinion, is expressed in other mystical traditions as well: the removal of the veil results in the unfurling of another veil to be unfurled. The enlightened visionary comprehends that the apocalyptic notion of the final veil to lift implies that the final veil to lift is the veil of thinking there is a final veil to lift. We can speak of the removal of all barriers once we realize that the greatest of barriers is to speak of the removal of all barriers. Only when it is understood that we cannot see without a veil may the veil be discarded.193 The emphasis on manifestation without concealment amounts to being worthy to decipher the truth of the manifestation of concealment. To employ Henry Corbin’s explanation of “the test of the veil” (l’épreuve du Voile) in the Ṣūfi tradition,194 the one with mystical insight perceives that the material world is the hiddenness of the divine hiddenness, and hence through the veil one sees the veil and discerns thereby that God is present in the world from

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which God is absent. The cosmos, accordingly, is the intermediary through which the divine light sees itself as that which is allegedly other than itself; that is, the other that comes to be within the nihilating autogenesis of the not-other, the one true being in relation to which there is no other since there is nothing outside it. Insofar as there can be no other to what is not-other, every disclosure of the one true being perforce will be a concealment of that being. From the theosophic cosmography of the Andalusian mystic and poet Ibn ‘Arabī, Corbin adduced the principle that all creation is an act of divine imagination that passes from occultation to revelation, an epiphany (tajallī) of the imperceptible.195 The disclosure of the invisible in the visible—the homologization of the infinite in finite form196 —ineludibly requires that the invisible endures as invisible in its disclosure otherwise it would not be a disclosure of the invisible. Combining a crucial insight from Heidegger regarding the nature of the self-showing of a phenomenon coinciding with a presence that does not show itself197 together with his singular interpretation of the Ṣūfi symbol of the veil, Corbin ascribed to the imagination the dual role of hiding and exposing: This Imagination is subject to two possibilities, since it can reveal the Hidden only by continuing to veil it. It is a veil; this veil can become so opaque as to imprison us and catch us in the trap of idolatry. But it can also become increasingly transparent, for its sole purpose is to enable the mystic to gain knowledge of being as it is, that is to say, the knowledge that delivers, because it is the gnosis of salvation.198

Once transparency is achieved, the visionary can discriminate between the hidden and the manifest, but at a deeper level the imaginal vision transmits the wisdom of the coincidentia oppositorum: opposites are identical by virtue of their opposition, and hence there is no manifestation of the imaginative presence (Ḥaḍrat al-Khayāl) in and through the theophanic imagination— that is, the speculum of the imaginative faculty in the consciousness of the believer wherein the apparition of the imageless and ineffable essence of the Godhead assumes incarnational form as an image in a mirror199—that is not at the same time an occlusion. Any unilateral affirmation of a unity that confounds the binaries of the nonmanifest and the manifest, the Lord and his vassal, the worshipper and the worshipped, the beloved and the lover, or

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a discrimination that disregards that these binaries are of the same essence, is “a betrayal of the divine intention and hence of the Sadness which in each being yearns for appeasement in the manifestation of His secret.”200 The kabbalistic-Heideggerian interpretation of Susan’s position resonates with what Blanchot called the “duplicity of revelation” intrinsic to the nature of the image as “what veils by revealing; it is the veil that reveals by reveiling in all the ambiguous indecision of the word reveal.”201 One is reminded as well of Derrida’s aporetic probe in the essay “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” is revealability (Offenbarkeit) more originary than revelation (Offenbarung), and hence of all religion? . . . Is this not the place in which “reflecting faith” at least originates, if not this faith itself? Or rather, inversely, would the event of revelation have consisted in revealing revealability itself, and the origin of light, the originary light, the very invisibility of visibility?202

The originary light, as Derrida writes in the continuation of this passage, is a nocturnal light, an expression that is not meant to designate the light that shines in the night but rather the light that itself divulges the nature of nocturnality, that is, the nonphenomenal that makes all phenomena visible by eluding visibility, the supplement that “introduces the incalculable at the heart of the calculable.”203 More recently, Jean-Luc Nancy has argued that nudity is always an abstraction, since every denudation is “the index of an even more intimate denudation, perhaps bottomless or unattainable.”204 We are led, therefore, to the conclusion that the naked truth is unattainable not because it is something potentially attainable that is currently not attainable but rather because truth divested of the veneer of untruth is forever in the category of nothing that is attainable. In this sense, we can apply to Susan’s notion of poiēsis the expression poetic nihilism coined by Jacob to refer to late Romanticism,205 a categorization that denotes that poetry shines a spotlight on the premise that truth is the investiture that masks the mask exposed as the face that unmasks the face.206 With respect to this cognitive stance, we can mark the connection between Susan’s view of the poetic and her understanding of the gnostic.207 In contradistinction to Kantian epistemology based on the hypothesis that appearances presuppose something that appears, the way of gnosis postulates that “nothing” appears, which is to say, there

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is nothing but appearance.208 This coincides with the comment cited in the previous chapter wherein Susan compared the necessary compliance to social mores to conceding to the rules of a play in which one must deceive oneself by concomitantly knowing and not knowing that one is playing a part.209 To recognize the consensual inevitability of deluding oneself in this fashion is to ascertain that the only truth that is truthful is a truth that is concocted, that is, a truth that is true precisely because it is untrue. In this notion of the truth of untruth, one can hear resonances of Heidegger. As Susan wrote in the letter to Jacob on November 11, 1950, But even in the chaotic nightmare of mythos and its pandemonium I have not forgotten the truth of Bialic [sic]—that is the truth of silence. And I know that the images my thoughts raise up only conceal what I really seek. Each formulation of a “truth” screens, blocks from the view what we are pursuing. And in the end what “hides” what does the image “cover”? This, you my priest who has entrance into the “void”, who can penetrate into the “nothing” that the “being” covers must answer.210

From the poet Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, Susan elicited the connection between truth and silence whence she surmised that images of thought conceal the imagelessness that one really seeks, and thus each conveyance of truth is a screen that blocks one’s vision of the invisible. She acknowledged, moreover, that Jacob may have been exceptionally equipped to respond to the question of what is being hidden by the image because he entered the void and fathomed the being that is nothing. Based on the identity of the nonidentical, we can say that beneath the substance of the image is the nullity of the image, the covering of untruth through which the uncovering of truth is recovered. With this understanding of the poetic, we can better appreciate the distinction Susan made between myth and logic as a response to Cassirer in a letter to Jacob written on October 25, 1950: It seems to me that to the one (the Logos) its categories are its very essence whereas the Mythos only works through “categories” (and such ones as tend to confuse rather than clarify nature, and are shocking to the Logos) but it is engaged primarily to break through categories, to dwell in the forbidden “phantasmagorical” realm of gods that is broken

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up, and named according to the categories.—And we know what happens when the Logos condescends to make categories for god, mythos, etc. the eye receives only the light, and the ear only the sound; but are the logical and mythical organs side-by-side fellows serving the same centrum? And if they are ultimately complementary is not this complementation the mysterious harmony of polar opposition rather than that of parts of a same class making up a whole? But all these discussions ignore the task in its concreteness: the mythos is the art of lifting the veil from the Holy, graciously, beholding with the eye of awe, so as not to offend it and bring death upon our souls. And to fail in this art, either through over-timidity or rudeness or by shirking the task altogether, is all too easy.211

The antagonism between mythos and logos is such that the goal of the former is to confuse and to break through the categories of the latter. The complementariness of the two domains is indicative of a mysterious harmony of polar opposition rather than two equal parts of one whole. If the logos condescends by making categories in which divinity and the mythical are garbed, the function of myth is to lift those veils from the holy. Poetry, in particular, is the art that embarks upon the revelatory task of drawing back the veil212 to allow one to gaze upon the sacred without succumbing to the danger of death ensuing from the profusion of light. Susan did not relate her discussion of truth as a veil to Heidegger’s idea of the intermingling of truth and untruth, which I discussed in Chapter 3, but I would propose that her view can easily be translated into this central doctrine of Heideggerian hermeneutical ontology. Let me cite one representative formulation not mentioned in the previous analysis: Truth is un-truth in that there belongs to it the originating region [Herkunftsbereich] of the not-yet- (the un-)disclosed in the sense of concealment. In un-concealment as truth is present, too, the other “un-” of the twofold refusal. Truth as such is present in the opposition between clearing and the twofold concealment.213

The inseparability of truth and untruth is circumscribed in terms of the temporal deferral of the not-yet (Noch-nicht), the refusal of the refusal, and

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thus truth is thought to be present in the opposition between the clearing and the twofold concealment (zwiefacher Verbergung), the concealment of the unconcealment in the unconcealment of the concealment. Concerning that which is hidden in the unhiddenness of truth (alētheia)—the unconcealment concealed in the opening of presence (Unverborgenheit als Lichtung von Anwesenheit)214—Heidegger posed the following questions: Does this happen only by chance? Does it happen only as a consequence of the carelessness of human thinking? Or does it happen because selfconcealing [Sichverbergen], concealment [Verborgenheit], lethe belongs to a-letheia, not just as an addition, as shadow to light, but rather as the heart of aletheia? And does not even a keeping and preserving rule in this self-concealing of the opening of presence [Sichverbergen der Lichtung der Anwesenheit] from which unconcealment can be granted to begin with, and thus what is present can appear in its presence? If this were so, then the opening would not be the mere opening of presence, but the opening of presence concealing itself, the opening of a self-concealing sheltering.215

Insofar as lēthē (concealment) belongs to the heart of a-lētheia (unconcealment), the self-concealing of the opening of the presence is that which bestows the presencing of that presence in such a manner that the presence can be manifest only as the absence that is hidden. “What is true,” writes Heidegger, “stands in an essential alliance with concealment and self-concealing.”216 Untruth, accordingly, is entangled invariably with truth to the point that we cannot proclaim something as true except as a proclamation of what is untrue. That there is no truth denuded of the apparel of untruth accords with the kabbalistic percipience that the infinite cannot appear except as inapparent, that every configuration of the imageless is an imaginal disfiguration of the image. The formless can be faced only through the effacement of its form.217 Translated epistemologically, truth is not visible unless it is enveloped in the veil of invisibility.218 In a lengthy discussion on the nature of the symbol in the letter from March 6, 1952, to which I referred above, Susan wrote, “We cannot escape signification altogether unless through a mystical and saintly discipline of dissolving the forms of thought and I wonder if even silence (internal as well

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as outer) isn’t a form of signification.”219 The only way to be unfettered from the snare of signification is the silence that comes about from the dissolution of linguistic forms. But silence, too, is a form of signification. Hence, the poet fortifies the foothold of language through its suspension. As Susan put it in the letter to Jacob written on January 9, 1952, in seeking salvation through poetry as opposed to sacrificing poetry for charity à la Paul, “the poet identifies sin with the non-poetic; but the ultimate obstacle of poetry is language. So that the poet, driven to the extreme of his position ends by having to destroy language.”220 Ostensibly, one might argue that this statement concurs with Wittgenstein’s celebrated adage at the conclusion of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen).221 Prima facie, this suggestion is ratified by Susan’s comment, “Positivism and the rest is silence; or the ‘silent’ ways of poet, prophet and priest.”222 A different perspective emerges, however, from the reflection on the nature of language and allegory in Susan’s letter to Jacob written on December 26, 1950, inspired in part by her reading Alexander Altmann’s exposition of the Romantic view of myth and symbol and the way it is reflected in Jung and Cassirer:223 The “hidden” realms do not allow straight forward description—and about that what cannot be spoken one should be silent or speak in a “silent” way i.e. using words that point to the silences between the words. Allegory destroys meaning, whether we say that the “heavenly” is “just” an allegory of the earthly or the earthly just an allegory of the heavenly. For in the one view “heaven” is really nothing and we should be content with the world; while in the other the world is nothing and we do not understand why there is a world, i.e. why “heaven” must “allegorize” itself in a world. What we must think and speak is how the one is and is not the other, how their relation is the ultimate category of being, and meaning—and this can be thought or said only “negatively” in the parable (Plato, Kafka—Jesus speaks more in “examples” and analogies and not true parables–) and by “naming” the heavenly Ones.224

Needless to say, the remark that one should be silent about what cannot be spoken seems to cohere with the aforecited statement of Wittgenstein, but Susan added that one may speak in a “silent” way, that is, to make use of words

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that point to the silences between words. In contrast to the Wittgensteinian assumption that the mystical names the inexpressible that shows itself—Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische225—Susan’s terminology resembles Heidegger’s assumption that speech is always a resaying of the language heard from the soundless voice (lautlose Stimme) that comes to us226 as well as Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic of listening to the voice of silence (la voix du silence),227 the dimension of being that trespasses the horizons of the visible, the nameable, and the thinkable,228 such that the meaning of language is not “sheer signification” but “the excess of what we live over what has already been said” (l’excès de ce que nous vivons sur ce qui a été déjà dit).229 Assuredly, Susan would have agreed with the observation of Heidegger that silence is not saying nothing or remaining speechless but rather letting the unsaid appear in one’s speech, whence it follows that only one who has something to say can be truly silent.230 The muteness of which Heidegger speaks—rendered figuratively in one context as “the hearing of the tolling of the bell of night [das Hören des Geläuts der Glokke der Nacht]”—is the silence that proceeds from “the severity of an abundance of saying [der Strenge einer Fülle des Sagens].”231 Silence, accordingly, is itself construed as a mode of conversation (Schweigen als Gespräch), which leads Heidegger to the dark insight that the courage to guess the riddle of being requires the withdrawal of letting oneself go, the onslaught of the refusal that clears the way.232 The unspeaking whereby this speaking through the effraction of silence between speech and nonspeech is achieved233—a speaking-not, as opposed to not speaking, that renders what can be thought hypernoetically as the unthought or what can be expressed hyperlinguistically as the unexpressed—is the act of naming through the use of allegory or parable that is a bridge conjoining the heavenly and the earthly. And just as a bridge connects by keeping what is connected disparate, so the allegory or parable reveals with respect to the heavenly and the earthly the paradox that one both is and is not the other, indeed that one is the other by not being the other. Simply put, naming the unnameable in the bridging of the unbridgeable is the task of poiēsis. The poem, in Celan’s formulation, unmistakably shows “a strong tendency to fall silent.”234 Poetic speech is the language that exceeds language, the phonological decoding of the nonphenomenality that takes shape beyond the phenomenal limits of

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the metaphoric, an insurmountable gap traversed by a verbal leap from the visible to the invisible. The poem is the place where all synonymy ends; where all tropes and everything improper is led ad absurdum; the poem has, I believe, even there where it is most graphic, an anti-metaphorical character [antimetaphorischen Charakter]; the image has a phenomenal trait, intuitively recognizable.—What separates you from it, you will not bridge; you have to make up your mind to jump [du muβt dich zum Sprung entschlieβen].235

Through the veil of unveiling the poet speaks the unspeakable in unspeaking the speakable and thereby brings to language the silence that can be vocalized only insofar as it is voiceless. Perhaps as a corrective to the Heideggerian idea of being-toward-death, Susan offered an interpretation that connects death to the poetic venturing beyond language through language, the gesticulation of speaking-away that verbally delimits the limitless limit distending at the perimeter of the limit of limitlessness, a view that may reflect the rhetoric of negative theology advanced by Weil.236 Leaving aside the question of textual influence, the important conceptual point is that the revelatory nature of death is not a laying bare of something hidden beneath the façade of nonbeing but rather the reclaiming of nothing unhidden at the heart of being. In that regard, the poetic act is garnishing the garment through which truth is contemporaneously seen and unseen, that is, seen as what cannot be seen and not seen as what can be seen. As the nonbeing that exceeds all being, death is the superfluity of the not yet that endows each person with the mortality that makes one human, or in the words of Blanchot, the possibility that “the future of a finished world is still there for us.” Death is the end that is “man’s greatest hope, his only hope of being man.”237 This admittedly discordant appeal to the hopefulness of death may be interpreted in light of the scriptural reprimand that just as a good name is better than fragrant oil, so the day of death is better than the day of birth (Ecclesiastes 7:1). Reading against the grain of the pessimistic and fatalistic perspective attested in other parts of this book, especially in the proclamation that the same fate awaits the righteous and the wicked and that the dead

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have no recompense as even the memory of them will perish (Ecclesiastes 9:2–5), I submit that the verse is not extolling the virtue of death over life, or holding out the possibility of life after death, but rather affirming, ironically enough, that the transience signified by the inevitable cessation of one’s worldly existence secures a sense of perpetuity and ownness in the same way that the good name is more enduring and individuating than fragrant oil.238 The expectation of what cannot be expected betokened by death—the absence of horizon that conditions the future as the puncturing of the presence of every horizon239—is expressed most poignantly in the “hope of language,” the life that endures death and maintains itself in it.240 In addition to imparting the deception of the hope that commits us to an illusory beyond, death teaches us to affirm a more profound hope that comes to light particularly in the writing of poetry, “to reveal in what ‘is’ not what disappears, but what always subsists, and in this disappearance takes form,”241 the eidolon of what is not, which is to say, the presence of absence that can only be present as absent and absent as present. And yet, the negativity of this excess provokes an irresolvable hardship. Thus, commenting on Mallarmé’s use of the image of digging into verse, Blanchot remarked: Whoever goes deeply into poetry escapes from being as certitude, meets with the absence of the gods, lives in the intimacy of this absence . . . . Whoever digs at verse must renounce all idols; he has to break with everything. He cannot have truth for his horizon, or the future as his element, for he has no right to hope. He has, on the contrary, to despair. Whoever delves into verse dies; he encounters his death as an abyss.242

In the poem “Post Apocalypse,” Susan gave voice to a similar sentiment: “After we have tasted death how shall we taste / any other thing? // A great shudder we felt at the instant of unveiling / Our faces peeled off, face to face with the faceless.”243 The captivating image of death as the face-to-face encounter with the faceless affords us the opportunity to reflect phenomenologically on the notion of the face, for only by taking full measure of the face can we appreciate the defacement of the faceless. To unveil the veiling of the face, we must veil the unveiling of the mask. The mask is thus not an impediment that masquerades as the face, but rather the medium through which the face

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is disclosed in its concealment and concealed in its disclosure. As epistemically disorienting as the eradication of the distinction between face and mask might seem, the path of gnosis leads to the discernment that there is no face behind the mask that is not itself another mask feigning to be a face.244 Here it is apposite to consider the deliberation of Susan Sontag on the mask and the face: No mask is wholly a mask. Writers and psychologists have explored the face-as-mask. Not so well appreciated: the mask-as-face. Some people, no doubt, do wear their masks as a sheathe for the lithe but insupportable emotions beneath. But surely most people wear a mask to efface what is beneath and become only what the mask represents them to be. More interesting than the mask as concealment or disguise is the mask as projection, as aspiration. Through the mask of my behavior, I do not protect my raw genuine self—I overcome it.245

I gather that Susan Taubes would have acquiesced to the belief that for most people the mask exposes as much as it camouflages, and hence wearing a mask is not a suppression of the self but rather a channel of its exhibition. Even the romantic commitment to love as unmasking is offset by the sobering awareness that fidelity is not only countered by infidelity, but that infidelity is the standard by which fidelity is delineated: Thought need not be hybris as long as it does not seek its own salvation in the truth. There is no salvation beyond love and there is no technique, nor “gnosis” of love. . . . It is sad, because, in the end loyalty is the virtue by which the soul lives, betrayal is its own death; in this torn world loyalty is hardly possible except at the expense of an equal betrayal. The past is swept away in a chaos, in the present everything is futuric, everything is only temptation.246

From Susan we can unearth a gnostic counternarrative to gnosis: the redemptive potential of truth is to reveal that there is no redemptive potential to be revealed by truth. If, as we noted above, truth cannot be disengaged from untruth and every representation of the unrepresentable is a distortion, it follows that there can be no conclusive rectification of the fissure that lies at the very core of the possibility of being,247 no discarding of the garment

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to reveal the body without any concealment.248 Deliverance would consist, therefore, of being delivered from the impulse to seek deliverance. In coming to this realization, we can appreciate the temporal implications that the past no longer has bearings and that in the present everything is futuristic, which is to say, there is nothing ontically actual but the enticement of a faithfulness that cannot be real except through faithlessness. Alienation ensues from the concealing of the concealment such that not only has the truth been forgotten, but the forgetting itself is forgotten, and as a consequence, truth is severed from untruth. Conversely, emancipation, the restoration of truth to its untruth, requires one to be released from the impasse of the dual obscuration, to remember the occlusion that has been occluded, to be mindful of the oblivion that has been obliviated. In the final analysis, the light of veracity is illumined only by the murkiness of mendacity.

Strange Apocalypse: Silence of Poetic Speech and the Revelation of Nothing Above I referred to Susan’s query if silence should not be gauged as a form of signification. This parallels the comment of Jacob, mentioned in the previous chapter, that silence is a language of the subject that supersedes the language of objects.249 Upholding the apophatic ideal of poetic speech as a form of unsaying—a saying of the unsaid ground that is never properly said250—Susan wrote in one of her own poems: Strange Apocalypse The Word crawling like a great broken-winged bird on its rotting feathers The Word withers on our lips.251

What is the import of the first line of this verse and perhaps the intended title of this unfinished poem? Why are the exceedingly disturbing images of ineptitude and disability assumed to be strange? The strangeness of what is revealed relates to the fact that instead of imagining a healthy and strong bird in flight, we are asked to picture a broken-winged bird crawling on its rotting feathers. The withering of the word on our lips is compared figuratively to that weakened creature. Now we are in the position to understand

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the eccentricity of this apocalypse: the weakening of the word is at the same time its augmentation, and thus we can presume that the image of immobility conveys kinetically that nothing is disclosed but the disclosure of nothing. With respect to this paradox, the poetic overlaps with the mystical.252 The linkage between the sigetic, mystical, and poetic is affirmed in Susan’s remark in a lengthy letter devoted to the topic of redemption, written on February 22, 1952: “Eternity haunts us and we cannot shut our heart to it. But eternity is a mystical category, and the language of mysticism is silence or poetry.”253 This triangulation explains as well Susan’s attraction to Heidegger’s thinking about poetry, even though at times she maligned his approach. In particular, as I have already indicated, she was intrigued especially by his portraying the language of the poem as speaking the unspoken254 and by the role that poetry enacts in establishing the bond between prayer, prophecy, and redemption.255 She would have certainly agreed with Heidegger that working on “the stillness of the proper silence [die Stille des schicklichen Schweigens]” is the hardest part of poetic thinking that one must learn slowly.256 Following Nietzsche’s assertion, “The stillest words are those that bring the storm [Die stillsten Worte sind es, welche den Sturm bringen],”257 Heidegger proffered that the “capacity for expression” of poetic discourse is “precisely not supposed to express anything, but to leave the unsayable unsaid [sondern das Unsagbare ungesagt lassen], and to do so in and through its saying.”258 Poetry, in a word, is a “projective saying” (entwerfende Sagen) that “brings the unsayable as such to the world.”259 The purported goal of poetic speech is the unconcealment of beings, but imperative to that unconcealment is the concealment of the being of what has been revealed. By speaking apophatically, the poet preserves the unspoken in what is spoken. In the last two lines of George’s poem “The Word,” mentioned above, Heidegger found support for the view that in giving voice to the unsayable, the poet transforms the verbal utterance into the echo of an inexpressible saying (Widerklang einer unsäglichen Sage), and thereby experiences the sadness of renunciation. Denying the claim to something prompts the nondenial of self to the mystery of the word, which sanctions the bethinging of the thing, Heidegger’s oblique notion to which I briefly referred previously: the power of the word to let the thing presence as thing without being objectified in its thinghood. This is the import of Heidegger’s assertion that renunciation

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entails retaining the treasure of the word’s being veiling itself in commemorative thinking (Andenken).260 The poetic is thus connected intricately to the mystery (Geheimnis), which is further identified as the highest figure of truth [die höchste Gestalt der Wahrheit]; for in order to let the mystery truly be what it is—concealing preservation of authentic beyng—the mystery must be manifest as such. A mystery that is not known in its power of veiling is no mystery. . . . Poetic saying of the mystery is denial [Verleugnung].261

For the mystery to be manifest, it must be concealed in the disclosure of its unconcealment. Consequently, the mystery cannot be known “by unveiling or analyzing it to death, but only in such a way that we preserve the mystery as mystery.”262 The taciturn nature of the poet’s speech is especially well suited to disseminate the hermeneutical principle that the secret is revealed only in its concealing, that the mystery is unveiled only in its veiling. Every poetic avowal is a disavowal, every confirmation a denial. Heidegger extended the watchword of esotericism operative in poeticizing to a recommendation about thinking the property of being more generally: The thinker can never say what is most proper to him. It must remain unsaid because the sayable word receives its determination from the unsayable [Es muß ungesagt bleiben, weil das sagbare Wort aus dem Unsagbaren seine Bestimmung empfängt].263

Evocatively anticipating potential criticism, Heidegger remarked that in spite of the fact that philosophers would consider his effort to contemplate the unsaid in poetry “as a baffled descent into mania [ein Abweg der Ratlosigkeit in die Schwärmerei],”264 his resolve to proceed was not diminished, since he was following the course pursued by destiny.265 In Susan’s appropriation of Heidegger’s perspective, the saying of the unsayable corresponds to the liturgical nature of the poetic vocation. It is of interest to recall her words in a letter to Jacob written on May 4, 1952: I am slowly beginning to work on poetry. There was a time when I was protected by the gods; now I am no longer + that is why it doesn’t go.

Facing the Faceless  —  274

The poet needs the protection of the gods, the life of his vision depends on that he sees one thing and that thing only and his eyes are shielded from all the other worlds no matter how interesting + important they may be. Nor is it possible to develop one’s own protection without the gods, for then the choice remains a choice, something arbitrary. My eyes have been opened and I see too many worlds; and “my” world it is buried somewhere like a hidden treasure; it’s no good searching for it; only prayer can help. And one must continue working even in a state of dis-grace.266

Just as Heidegger maintained that the task of thinking is to think one thing well, and the call of poeticizing is to speak the one word that remains unspoken,267 so for Susan, the poetic gaze requires the mental focus to concentrate on the vision of a single world and to be shielded from the distraction of other worlds. This is what was intended by the polytheistic language of the poet needing the protection of the gods. One cannot search for the matter that is unique to the individual’s inspiration; only prayer can help one find the way back to it. In the meantime, however, the mandate is to continue working even if one has fallen out of grace. The characterization of poetry as a vision of the single world corresponds to what Susan reported in the name of her teacher at Bryn Mawr to Jacob in the letter from January 27, 1951: Miss Stearns suggested to me that (the despised) Aristotle hints in the Poetics that the poet achieves what he in the Metaphysics could not, the illuminated intuition of the particular—the individual + universal understood through—+ inseparably from each other.268

Although disparaging of Heidegger’s ruminations on the nature of poetry, the correlation established by Susan between the poetic and the individual is intrinsic to the view he sponsored. To cite one example from an entry in the Black Notebooks written in 1946, Insofar as it brings the truth of being in its twisting to language as the saying of the poetry of difference [die Sage der Dichtung des Unterschieds], perhaps thinking comes under the guarantee of factuality [die Gewähr der Sachlichkeit]. . . . But it rests in the solitariness of the essence of being [der Einsamkeit des Wesens des Seyns].269

Facing the Faceless ­ —  275

In this characteristically dense statement, Heidegger articulated his understanding of poiēsis as promoting the twisting—Verwindung, a term that implies the process of overcoming by meandering on the path270—of the truth of being to language. Especially noteworthy is the classification of that language as “the saying of the poetry of difference.” To grasp what is conveyed by this formulation, we must bear in mind, as I noted in the first chapter,271 that, for Heidegger, difference is a facet of sameness (Selbigkeit) as opposed to identity (Identität), and thus when construed dialetheically, “the same is only the same as the different [das Gleiche nur gleich ist als das Verschiedene].”272 Even with respect to grasping reflexively the freestandingness (Freiständigkeit) of selfhood (Selbstheit), the presumed permanence (Beständigkeit) and selfsameness of the I consists of the possibility to become oneself, and hence discontinuity is as integral to the cohesiveness of continuity as continuity is to the intrusiveness of discontinuity.273 The becoming oneself, however much it is dependent on community and reaching out to the other through language, rests in the solitariness of the essence of being. In my estimation, Susan would have endorsed Heidegger’s belief that “solitude is most rare and is a necessity of being—insofar as being, in its abysses [Abgründen], bestows itself on the Da-sein of the human being.”274 From the comparison of thinking (Denken) and poetizing (Dichten)— the comparison that led to the postulation of an originary metalanguage that opens the space for the bilingual dialogue between the language of poetry (dichterisch) and the language of thought (denkerisch)275—Heidegger deduced that it is incumbent “to see what is different through the same and through the difference of the same to always see into the very essence of that which stands in the comparison.”276 Of the many other texts that I could cite to elucidate this seminal point on the path of his thinking, I will mention two poetic offerings of Heidegger. The first is the opening stanza of “Das Selbe” (The Selfsame): Nur im Immer-Andern schont das Selbe sich als das Gesparte Eine.277 Only in the always-changing does the selfsame spare itself as the saved one.278

Facing the Faceless  —  27 6

The second is the poem “Das Gleiche und das Selbe” (The Identical and the Selfsame): Wie, das Gleiche wollt ihr überall? Ständig ist’s nur das Gemeine, das sich im Besonderen brüstet. Doch das Selbe kennt ihr nirgends. Einzig bleibt’s das einzig Eine, das uns rein Eigene rüstet.279 How do you want the identical everywhere? All the time it’s only the common, that prides itself in its exceptionality. But you do not know the selfsame anywhere. Uniquely it remains the unique one, Equipping us with the pure peculiarity.280

Undergirding the aforementioned expression the saying of the poetry of difference is the pivotal motif enunciated by Heidegger in these two poems: in contrast to the identical, the selfsame persists as the uniqueness that is always changing. The poet masters the art of recurrently speaking the unspeakable such that each recapitulation is the return of the same that is the same in virtue of being different. In “The Pathway,” Heidegger wrote that always and everywhere the call [Zuspruch] of the pathway is the same. The simple [Einfache] preserves the enigma of what abides and is great. . . . The wide expanse of everything that grows and abides along the pathway is what bestows world [spendet Welt].281

The beckoning of the pathway—the appeal that palpably confers the impression of the spatio-temporal world upon the human being who walks the pathway and is thus potentially receptive to the call282—partakes of the same that is always different in the sameness of its difference, the simple that sustains the mystery of what abides in its variable complexity. Those who are conscientious of the simple so conceived are “servants of their origin [Herkunft]” and “not slaves of machination [Machenschaften].” The attempt to impose

Facing the Faceless ­ —  277

order on the world is doomed to failure unless one is ordered by the call of the pathway that perforce comprises the disorderly. The lack of attunement to that entropic call has the risk of leaving one disoriented in the world, and as a consequence mistakenly experiencing the simple as monotonous uniformity rather than realizing that it is the fount of unpredictable vacillation. Only through renunciation to the same does the call of the pathway allocate the inexhaustible power of the simple to the point that one is made to feel at home in the arrival of the distant origin.283 By attending punctiliously to the novel restatement of the word in the identity of its difference, the poet is peculiarly oriented on the path and is thus in propinquity to being at home through the remoteness of the wellspring in relation to which one is homeless. As Heidegger put it in the lecture course on Parmenides delivered at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester of 1942–1943: The poetry of a poet or the treatise of a thinker stands within its own proper unique word. It compels us to perceive this word again and again as if we were hearing it for the first time. These newborn words transpose us in every case to a new shore. . . . Only if we are already appropriated by this transporting are we in the care of the word.284

Inasmuch as the art of poiēsis in particular—and the path of thinking more generally—abets the recurrence of what is yet to be, it embodies the hermeneutical task of translation (Übersetzen) as the transporting (Übersetzen) of “our whole being into the realm of a transformed truth.”285 In the thoughtpoem “Teilnehmend Handeln,” Heidegger noted that transformation (Verwandeln), as opposed to change (Verändern), implies “the selfsame one that is always new / in its multifaceted property” (immer neu das einstig Selbe / in sein vielgeschicklich Eigentum).286 In the appropriation of this transport of language—to be transposed to the new shore where we have always already not been—we are cognizant of the conjunction of the different that arises from within the disjunction of the same. Poetic speech is the unparalleled replication through which thinking comes under the guarantee of factuality and rests in the solitariness of the essence of being. I suppose that had Susan been aware of this comment by Heidegger, she would have consented to his

Facing the Faceless  —  278

evaluation of the poet’s role as a reclusive deploying a common language to mark the ownmost uniqueness of being. Perhaps this is what she intended when she wrote that “it is thought by some that in a great poem the poet is invisible; but there is another kind of poem equally great, that is written with blood.”287 Being scripted in blood signifies the deeply personal and consummately idiosyncratic footprint that marks each poem as differently similar in its being similarly different. Poetry instructs us about the modulation of thought as the retrieval of the origin that always is what was yet to come, the represencing of the presence present only in the absence of being present, the inimitable repetition of the altogether otherwise.288 Every treatise, on this score, can be regarded as ghostly “because there hovers around it a generality which is yet not the authentic generality of science; therefore it is something personal and yet one does not know ‘by whom’ or ‘to whom’ the words are spoken.”289 As poetry exploits language to extend beyond language, to give voice to the genuine reiteration of the same as different, so death is the mark of the threshold of temporality, the time teeming with the emptiness of time, the moment where the different appears always as the same difference that is differently the same. In his later thought, Heidegger articulated a perspective that is closer to what Susan expressed with respect to the poetic declaration as a simulation of death that provides the opening where being shines forth in its inability to shine forth. Heidegger found support for the belonging together of poetry and death in Rilke.290 Death is the cathartic nonevent, an idea to which Susan insinuated in the letter to Jacob written on January 18, 1951: The soul thins out and pales in all this “cosmopolitan” extension and I am hungry for a simple presence. And I wonder if we have the strength of soul to think truly and not drown in the fascinating whirlpool of words and words.291

What Susan wished to convey is well expressed in the poem “Frage” (Question) by Ingeborg Bachmann: Unerläßlich die Schatten die uns umfangen,

Facing the Faceless ­ —  279

einüben der uns einübt schon ins Gewahrsam Tod Das Stichwort uns erlassen. Indispensable is the shadow that embraces us, readying us for what possesses us already, Death, the entry that releases us.292

As the shadow that hovers over each person’s life, death prepares us to take hold of what has already possessed us, the nothingness whence we come and whither we return, and it is thus the portal through which we are discharged to the silence that is the limit of speech. In the poem “Ihr Worte” (You Words), written in honor of the poet Nelly Sachs, Bachmann articulated the point more emphatically: Worte, mir nach, daß nicht endgültig wird –nicht diese Wortbegier und Spruch auf Widerspruch! Laßt eine Weile jetzt keins der Gefühle sprechen, den Muskel Herz sich anders üben. Laßt, sag ich, läßt. Ins höchste Ohr nicht, nichts, sag ich, geflüstert, zum Tod fall dir nichts ein . . . Kein Sterbenswort, Ihr Worte! Words, follow me, so nothing will be final –not this passion for words, nor a saying and its contradiction! Let there be for now

Facing the Faceless  —  2 8 0

no feeling expressed, let the heart’s muscle exercise in another way. Let be, I say, let be. Into the highest ear whisper, I say, nothing, nothing about death . . . Nothing about death, you words!293

The poem, above all, communicates the inability to say anything about death. However, in saying nothing, the poet opens the door to death, providing the breach to let being be in the beingness of its nonbeing. As Susan wrote to Jacob on March 17, 1952, “The ‘truth’ that is revealed once and for all is the truth of death of nought and not the truth of life. For the truth of life we have to sweat and toil.”294 I would submit that this is the esoteric import of Susan’s description of death as the unveiling, the peeling of the face that facilitates the face-to-face encounter with that which has no face. In facing the faceless, one confronts the tragedy of being in the truth of its ontological untruth.

Notes

Introduction 1. In order to avoid confusion, I refer to Susan and Jacob Taubes either by their full names or by their respective first names. Admittedly, the latter choice is a departure from scholarly convention, but it preempts the cumbersome task of repeating the praenomen and the patronym in every instance. 2. Christina Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths of Nomads, Wanderers, Exiles. Stationen einer Korrespondenz,” in Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), pp. 262–264; and in much more detail in Christina Pareigis, Susan Taubes: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020), pp. 79–120. 3. See the letter from September 26, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §6, p. 26: “In my separation from you I need almost more privacy than a pair of lovers and I suffer to be with the ‘Parents’ with ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ although not alone with Father because he is also a good and wise man.” See, by contrast, the fictionalized account of Sophie’s relationship to her father in Susan Taubes, Divorcing, introduction by David Rieff (New York: New York Review of Books, 2020), p. 126: Sophie still hadn’t found any way to disagree with her father openly, except to blurt out her feelings like a child. This did not work. In her father’s universe, emotion, tears, rage discredited you. She retreated into silence. There was only one course left to her, refusal to enter into argument. His premises may be fine for his patients. She had others. No, she was not interested in what motivated people. She didn’t “reject” Freud. She just did not find it as interesting as works of literature. No, she was not interested in explaining people or anything. He persisted in questioning her interests, aims, ambitions. She answered evasively. It was as painful for him to disavow her as for her to be disavowed. The curtain separating fact and fiction is very thin, if it is indeed appropriate to speak of any curtain at all. Consider Sophie’s response, ibid., pp. 131–132, to her father’s question about what kind of book she was writing: “‘It’s not really fiction,’ she is trying to explain to him, ‘it should please you—’ . . . ‘What kind of book are you writing?’ he asks, as they continue walking. ‘Can you explain to me what kind of book this is?’” On a different note, it is worth pondering the comment attributed to Sophie’s father at the trial of her divorce from Ezra, ibid., p. 144: “How can a jury evaluate my daughter’s character without even

281

Notes  —  2 82 touching on the crucial factors of her infantile sexual development? The fact is that a woman’s success as a wife depends entirely on how she has resolved her oedipal conflicts.” 4. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §29, p. 81. See the pejorative depiction of Sophie’s mother in Taubes, Divorcing, p. 135: “There is a commotion as KAMILLA DE VITHEZY, Sophie’s mother, enters, making her way to the coffin carrying a fur coat on each arm. Everyone is scandalized. The rabbis and their wives jeer with disgust at her perfume, jewelry and the fur coats” (emphasis in original). 5. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §29, p. 82. Compare the description of the relationship between Sophie’s parents in Taubes, Divorcing, pp. 128–129: In 1951 her mother came to settle in America, perhaps longing for a reconciliation with her former husband. Nothing of the sort materialized. Her father, while solicitous for her welfare, could not tolerate her manner, and she in turn could not take his chronic annoyance and picking her apart. He did not permit her to visit him in Garfield. Ritual meetings, and then only long-distance calls once or twice a year, were still maintained. But he was pained by the estrangement between mother and daughter. He was anxious that Sophie be on at least civil terms with her mother. Compare the words of Aunt Olga to Sophie in ibid., p. 148: “As for your mother—forget about her. You two have nothing in common.” 6. Ibid., p. 175. 7. Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” pp. 264–272; idem, Susan Taubes, pp. 123–152. For a detailed account of the early relationship of Jacob and Susan leading to their marriage, see Jerry Z. Muller, Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), pp. 134–140. 8. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §4, p. 23; §6, p. 25; §7, p. 31; §29, p. 82; §65, p. 162; §66, p. 164; §82, pp. 189–190; §91, p. 207; §92, p. 209; §94, p. 211; §96, p. 214; §99, p. 218; Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), §202, pp. 145–146. Evidence for the difficulty of Susan’s relation to Stearns may be drawn from disparaging comments found in a number of the letters. See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §8, p. 34: “Miss Stearns is very queer—we talk + talk but don’t really bite into anything.” See ibid., §24, p. 70: “The great ἔρος you have wakened in me passes into ἔργα I work hard on my thesis; and have no one to talk to; and my intellections have no beginning, middle or end, my mind resembles my sex I am an O. (But even that is better than being like a Miss Stearns. [)]” And ibid., §44, p. 119: “The talk with Stearns on Heidegger was very good—she understands quite a lot the poor being and I will go ahead to write a nice paper on the Heideggerian myth.” And ibid., §94, p. 211: “It was a ghostly time talking to Stearns.” On the Whiteheadian influence on Stearns and its impact on Susan, see Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 141. 9. Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” pp. 286–287; idem, Susan Taubes, pp. 223–224. 10. Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” p. 288; idem, Susan Taubes, pp. 282–283. According to the language of Susan’s letter to Jacob written on July 17, 1954, from North Haven, Maine, preserved in the personal archives of Shmuel Hugo Bergmann in the National Library of Israel, she was “finishing off a little book on Simone Weil—a critique of ‘mystical atheism’.” The passage is cited by Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 285, who points out

Notes ­ —  2 83 that the “little book” evolved into her doctoral thesis encompassing 436 pages. For more on the change in the dissertation topic, see ch. 3 n. 5. 11. Susan Taubes, Prosaschriften, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis, translated by Werner Richter (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), pp. 113–231. Since I do not have access to the original English, in this book, I have availed myself of the German translation and have on occasion translated the text back into English. For an analysis of this work, see Pareigis, Susan Taubes, pp. 57–58, 189–190, 350–354. It is worth noting that on January 25, 1966, Susan performed a reading from A Lament for Julia at the Bunting Institute Seminars hosted by Radcliffe College. See https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/ repositories/8/archival_objects/1738704 12. Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journal and Notebooks 1964– 1980, edited by David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 336: “Susan [Taubes]: same name as me, ma sosie [‘my double’], also unassimilable” (emphasis in original). The comment is made in the context of Sontag noting the two deaths in her life: the death of her father in 1938 and the death of Susan Taubes in 1969. On the impact of Susan Taubes’s suicide, see also the entry from July 25, 1974, ibid., p. 375: “All my life I have been thinking about death, + it is a subject I am now getting a little tired of. Not, I think, because I am closer to my own death—but because death has finally become real. (> Death of Susan [Taubes]).” 13. Ibid., p. 108. In the entry written on May 25, 1970, ibid., p. 299, Sontag records her intent to write a “philosophical dialogue” called “Reasons for Being,” which she further describes as a “meditation on suicide, inspired by Susan [Taubes]’s death.” 14. Taubes, Divorcing, p. viii. It is noteworthy, as Rieff recounts, that the working title of Divorcing was To America and Back in a Coffin. 15. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §24, p. 71: “I need not be ashamed to say about my husband that he is a person without whom my own self is inconceivable, that he is more daemon than man and in whom λόγος and ἔρος find their deepest identity.” See ibid., §33, p. 92: “Oh I am so deeply in love, all my spirit, all my logos and eros reaches out to you, opens to you and is full of you.” Consider also the observation of Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” p. 260: “Die Universitätsöffentlichkeit nahm das Paar als faszinierende Verbindung von Intellekt und Eros wahr.” 16. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §28, p. 80, where Susan wrote to Jacob: “I trust you utterly—a poor and prostituted word this ‘trust’—but it was this boundless, terrifying trust I felt when I went on my knees before you and I pray, neither the ‘wisdoms’ of logos nor of eros should ever confound this trust.” Compare Susan’s reflections in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §141, p. 33: “In Paris eros plays a decisive role for one’s philosophy—I mean the young couples I’ve met who love are quite disinterested in existentialism: And—for one who sleeps alone Paris is just a lonely big city. If the heart is aching, Paris, like wine, increases the sadness.” 17. Ibid., §237, pp. 213–214. On another possible echo of the language of Song of Songs, see Susan’s letter to Jacob cited in ch. 5 at n. 7. And compare the image of the lilies of the Galilee in Susan’s lyric cited in ch. 2 at n. 56. See also the passage from Divorcing cited in ch. 1 at n. 211. 18. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §35, p. 99. Compare the words spoken by Ezra in Taubes, Divorcing, p. 138:

Notes  —  2 84 Sophie was raised by an atheist father. She read the books of Moses for the first time in a literature course at Bryn Mawr. . . . She was a virgin. I read to her the book of prophets Hosea: the parable of the sacred marriage between God and Israel, spoke of the sanctification of life, explained to her the paradox of the law Credo quia absurdum. 19. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §158, p. 68. It is of interest to consider if Jacob’s referring to Susan as “his animal” reflects a paradisiacal understanding of animality that was expressed more overtly by Susan. See ch. 1 at n. 80. For a more denigrating use of the term “animal” to denote untoward human sexual behavior, see the passage from Divorcing cited in ch. 1 n. 145. 20. A somewhat humorous expression of Susan’s sadness in being separated from Jacob appears in the letter written on November 3, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §28, p. 78: “Your last letter was so beautiful, full of strength and good cheer—and I am ashamed that for days I miss you so passionately and without peace or comfort that the Indian sages on the way to Nirvana would look at me with scorn.” 21. See the letter to Jacob written on October 30, 1950, ibid., §26, p. 75: “Jacob, every word you write is such a blessing and healing. Like in prolonged physical starvation—absence of you begins to have effects—my soul just aches, like a hungry stomach or a beaten back. Oh my dear, my undefiled one I love you, cherish yourself! your S.” On Susan’s desire and dreaming of being in bed with Jacob, see ibid., §41, p. 113 and §49, p. 133. And compare the letter from February 28, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §187, p. 114, cited in ch. 5 at n. 11. 22. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §6, p. 25. 23. Ibid., §19, p. 60. 24. See Susan’s letter to Jacob written on October 11, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §13, p. 47: “Beloved one, so far so secret—do you love me? How do you love me? Oh tell me how!” See as well Susan’s letter to Jacob written on January 9, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §141, p. 35: “I love you very deeply and long for you. But time is rushing and Paris is very good for me. Goodnight my beloved child. Do you love me? A little?” And in her letter from May 4, 1952, ibid., §237, p. 215: “I love you, yes! and I suffer without you. Do write me what you think about my coming. Write at least that you love me—at least 2 lines.” See also the letter from May 21, 1952, ibid., §246, p. 231: “I long for you so much; sometimes it’s agony and always it’s sad. I’ll take my poor body to the sea. Write to me sometimes that you love me a little.” And in Susan’s letter from May 26–27, 1952, ibid., §249, p. 235: “I count the days till July. Do you love me?” Susan’s insecurity notwithstanding, Jacob is less inhibited about expressing his love and longing for her in some of his letters. See, for instance, ibid., §212, p. 164: “Ach ich sehne mich schon sehr nach dir, die Tage rinnen so leer und freudenlos dahin.” But, on the whole, Jacob is far more reserved about sharing feelings and romantic desires in his letters, a point made by Gregor Dotzauer, “Meine schöner Teufelsknabe. Pariser Erleuchtungen anno 1952: Susan Taubes schreibt Jacob Taubes,” Der Tagesspiegel (February 16, 2014), https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/philosophie-mein-schoenerteufelsknabe/9488286.html 25. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §112, p. 234. On the

Notes ­ —  2 8 5 depiction of Jacob as “more daemon than man,” see the letter cited above, n. 15. The use of the expression “good genius” to refer to Jacob appears in several of Susan’s letters. See ibid., §8, p. 35; §11, p. 42; §15, p. 54; §16, p. 55; §33, p. 91; §51, p. 136; §83, p. 191; §101, p. 221. 26. Ibid., §18, p. 59. 27. Ibid., §115, p. 242. 28. Jacob Taubes, “The Development of the Ontological Question in Recent German Philosophy,” Review of Metaphysics 6 (1953): 651–664. It is noteworthy that Susan translated this essay. See the comments of Pareigis in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §130, p. 13 n. 5, and Susan’s remarks in ibid., §181, p. 105 and §193, pp. 130–131. There are allusions to the essay in other letters. See ibid., §240, p. 218 and §243, p. 225. On Jacob’s producing a Hebrew translation of the essay, see his comments in the letter to Susan from January 14, 1952, in ibid., §145, p. 42. The German version “Die Entwicklung der ontologischen Frage in der jüngeren deutschen Philosophie,” translated from the English by Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, is printed in Jacob Taubes, Apokalypse und Politik: Aufsätze, Kritiken und kleinere Schriften, edited by Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink and Martin Treml, with the collaboration of Theresia Heuer and Anja Schipke (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), pp. 52–66. 29. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §193, pp. 130–131. 30. On Heidegger’s “tortured historical mysticism,” see ibid., §150, p. 54, cited in ch. 2 at n. 75. 31. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §134, p. 19; §149, p. 51; §150, p. 53; §155, p. 61; §186, p. 113. Jacob appropriates the term Teufelsknabe to refer to himself in the letter from December 7, 1951, ibid., §140, p. 32. This locution juxtaposes two ostensibly disparate terms, “Teufel,” which denotes the devil, and “Knabe,” which denotes a young and presumably innocent boy. It seems that Susan was trying to communicate that Jacob embodied simultaneously the qualities of boyishness and devilishness. Compare ibid., §178, p. 100: “I love you terribly, my Jacob, my scheming one, my demonic one. Live at your level and don’t be a schmuli.” On occasion, Susan uses other deprecating terms to poke fun at Jacob, but one can imagine she does so as a gesture of endearment. See, for instance, Susan’s referring to Jacob as a blockhead (dummkopf) in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §33, p. 91. The same term is applied to Kierkegaard, ibid., §32, p. 87, and to herself, ibid., §77, p. 182. And see the use of the term Schnackerl in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §170, p. 87 and §171, p. 89. 32. Ibid., §225, p. 190. 33. Ibid., §235, p. 210. 34. Pareigis, Susan Taubes. The monograph is an expansion of Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths.” 35. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Gnosis and the Covert Theology of Antitheology: Heidegger, Apocalypticism, and Gnosticism in Susan and Jacob Taubes,” in Depeche Mode: Jacob Taubes Between Politics, Philosophy, and Religion, edited by Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink and Hartmut von Sass (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 151–202. 36. To cite one example of Susan’s indebtedness to Jacob, see Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §245, p. 228: “Your two letters on Heidegger came this morning. It is marvelous how you sum up the new Heidegger in a few points* [*which I shall

Notes  —  2 8 6 use with your permission].” On Jacob’s somewhat distinctive interest in Heidegger during the early years when he was in Jerusalem, and it was not fashionable to engage with this philosopher given his links to National Socialism, see Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” p. 278; idem, Susan Taubes, pp. 204–205. And see now the section “Apotheosis and Fall— Heidegger’s Ambivalence in Taubes’s Thought” in Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, “The Boredom of ‘Pure Philosophy’: Jacob Taubes, Academic Philosophy, and the Challenge of Theologico-Philosophical Intervention,” in Depeche Mode, pp. 85–89. 37. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §33, p. 92, cited in this volume, ch. 1 n. 173. A striking example of Jacob’s misogyny is found in a letter he wrote to Tamara Fuchs on September 24, 1955, cited by Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 285: Susan Anima works frantically on her PhD-thesis . . . on Simone Weil, all exams behind her. I marvel the discipline of the “weaker” sex. Taking care of Ethan Josiah would wear me out. But Susan Anima is able to concentrate the minute Ethan Josiah goes out of the house. He stays for three hours in a nursery school. Admittedly, Jacob praises Susan, but he does so within the context of labeling her part of the weaker sex! For a fictionalized description of Susan’s attending to her two young children, see Taubes, Divorcing, p. 35. 38. The structure of my argument, of course, is reminiscent of the analysis in Marlène Zarader, La Dette impensée: Heidegger et l’héritage hébraïque (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990), which explores the manner in which the Hebraic heritage influenced Heidegger’s thought, principally in his appropriation of biblical faith through the medium of Christianity, which, together with Greek thought, comprise the foundations of occidental culture. For the English version, see Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). The unthought in Heidegger’s thought that I have emphasized is related more specifically to traces of medieval kabbalistic ideas. It should be noted, however, that Zarader, The Unthought Debt, pp. 130–138, does compare Heidegger’s conception of nothingness and the domain of being’s withdrawal to kabbalistic speculation on ṣimṣum, the contraction of infinity to create the vacuum within the plenum. For discussion and additional references, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 1–9 and the accompanying footnotes. 39. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §141, p. 34. See ch. 5 n. 185. 40. Ibid., §236, p. 211. A sarcastic rebuke of ethnocentrism on the part of Orthodox Jews can be discerned in the following passage about Sophie’s paternal great-grandfather, Reb Simon of Nyitra, in Taubes, Divorcing, p. 111: When disciples came to ask him what a man needed in order to be happy he answered, “A yid soll man sein und appetit soll man haben.” (One should be a Jew and one should have a good appetite.) He used to say that he couldn’t understand how a goy can be happy: he does not eat kosher food and does not apply tefillin (phylacteries). See ibid., p. 133, where Sophie’s father, Rudolf Landsmann, gives the name of his grandfather as Reb Smuel of Nyitra.

Notes ­ —  2 8 7 41. It is of interest to think about Susan’s negotiating her Jewishness in light of this remark of Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, edited by David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 214: “Impress of Judaism on my character, my tastes, my intellectual persuasions, the very posture of my personality. The continuing effort to justify being Jewish.” 42. Based on Psalms 137:5–6. 43. Taubes, Divorcing, pp. 89–90. 44. The expression “Heimat im Exil” is coined by Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” pp. 282–283. The theme of radical not-belonging (radikal nicht-zugehörig) and being in exile everywhere (überall im Exil) is accentuated by Johanna-Charlotte Horst, “Überall im Exil: Christina Pareigis’ Biografie von Susan Taubes,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (March 3, 2021). 45. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §11, p. 41. 46. Ibid., p. 42. 47. Taubes, Divorcing, p. 14. 48. Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems, translated and introduced by Elaine Feinstein (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 86–87. For a different rendering, see Marina Tsvetaeva, “Poem of the End,” translated by Mary Jane White, The Hudson Review 61 (2009): 713: We’re beyond town now! Beyond town! Do you get it? Out of it! Outside! We’ve crossed a divide! Life is a place no one can live: A Jew—ish ghetto . . . Wouldn’t it be a hundred times more Worthy to be a Wandering Jew? Since for anyone who is not vile, Life is a Jew—ish pogrom, — . . . Ghetto of God’s chosen! A divide And a ditch: Ex—pect no mercy! In this most Christian of worlds All poets—are Jews! 49. I have quoted the text as it is cited in Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History Since Hegel, translated by William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel, preface by Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 146. For the original German, see Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen. Nach den Handschriften des Goethe- und Schiller-Archivs, edited by Max Hecker (Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1907), §199, p. 35: “Das Besondere unterliegt ewig dem Allgemeinen; das Allgemeine hat ewig sich dem Besondern zu fügen.” 50. Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, p. 146. The additional passage cited by Cassirer is from Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, §314, p. 59: “Das ist die wahre Symbolik, wo das Besondere, das Allgemeinere repräsentirt, nicht als Traum und Schatten, sondern als lebendig-augenblickliche Offenbarung des Unerforschlichen.” An English rendering of the text is found in The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, second and revised edition,

Notes  —  2 88 translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders (London: Macmillan, 1908), §202, p. 102: “That is true Symbolism, where the more particular represents the more general, not as a dream or shade, but as a vivid, instantaneous revelation of the Inscrutable.” 51. Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, §257, p. 45: “wenn auch wahrhafte poetische Genies geboren werden sollten, sie doch immer mehr das Gemütliche des inneren Lebens als das Allgemeine des großen Weltlebens darstellen würden.” English translation in The Maxims and Reflections, §423, p. 156: “It is now obvious that when men of truly poetical genius appear, they will describe more of the particular feelings of the inner life than of the general facts of the great life of the world.” 52. Jane K. Brown, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), p. 10. 53. Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, §279, p. 53: Es ist ein großer Unterschied, ob der Dichter zum Allgemeinen das Besondere sucht oder im Besonderen das Allgemeine schaut. Aus jener Art entsteht Allegorie, wo das Besondere nur als Beispiel, als Exempel des Allgemeinen gilt; die letztere aber ist eigentlich die Natur der Poesie, sie spricht ein Besonderes aus, ohne an’s Allgemeine zu denken oder darauf hinzuweisen. Wer nun dieses Besondere lebendig faßt, erhält zugleich das Allgemeine mit, ohne es gewahr zu werden, oder erst spät. English translation in The Maxims and Reflections, §435, p. 159: There is a great difference between a poet seeking the particular for the universal, and seeing the universal in the particular. The one gives rise to Allegory, where the particular serves only as an instance or example of the general; but the other is the true nature of Poetry, namely, the expression of the particular without any thought of, or reference to, the general. If a man grasps the particular vividly, he also grasps the general, without being aware of it at the time; or he may make the discovery long afterwards. Regarding this passage, see Robert Stockhammer, “Spiraltendenzen der Sprache: Goethes ‘Amyntas’ und seine Theorie des Symbols,” Poetica 25 (1993): 135. For a critical assessment, see Karin Schutjer, Goethe and Judaism: The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), pp. 114–115. 54. On homelessness and the fate of a poet, see Marina Tsvetaeva, My Poems .  .  . , translated by Andrey Kneller (Boston: Kneller, 2011), p. 94: “God placed me all alone / In the cosmic universe. / —You’re no woman, you’re a bird, / Therefore—soar and sing.” 55. Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems, pp. 101–102: Homesickness! that long exposed weariness! It’s all the same to me now where I am altogether lonely or what stones I wander over home with a shopping bag to a house that is no longer mine than a hospital or a barracks. It’s all the same to me, captive

Notes ­ —  2 8 9 lion what faces I move through bristling, or what human crowd will cast me out as it must into myself . . . And I won’t be seduced by the thought of my native language, its milky call. How can it matter in what tongue I am misunderstood by whoever I meet . . . People are all the same to me, everything is the same, and it may be the most indifferent of all are these signs and tokens which once were native but the dates have been rubbed out: the soul was born somewhere. 56. Paul Celan, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry, translated by Pierre Joris with commentary by Pierre Joris and Barbara Wiedemann (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), p. 352. See the section “All Dichter sind Juden” in Vivian Liska, “‘Man Kann Verjuden’: Paradoxes of Exemplarity,” in Against the Grain: Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, edited by Ezra Mendelsohn, Stefani Hoffman, and Richard I. Cohen (New York: Berghahn, 2014), pp. 204–206. 57. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 197. The parallel concerning the nexus of the Jew, the other, and the poet in Celan’s notes to the Meridian lecture (see below, n. 72) raise doubt regarding Felstiner’s interpretation. Closer to the mark is the following observation offered in John Felstiner, “Mother Tongue, Holy Tongue: On Translating and Not Translating Paul Celan,” Comparative Literature 38 (1986): p. 120: “Thus Celan’s Cyrillic epigraph also asserts—in a language his German admirers would have trouble perceiving—that his poetry drew its strength from a defiant Jewishness.” 58. Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 50. For other scholarly analyses of Derrida’s use of Tsvetaeva’s claim about Jews and poetry, see the sources cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p. 420 n. 206. 59. Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 397. Original German in Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, Dritter Band: Gedichte III, Prosa, Reden, edited by Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert with assistance from Rolf Bücher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), p. 169. Concerning the historical and literary context of the prose piece “Gespräch im Gebirg,” see Felstiner, Paul Celan, pp. 140–141; Amir Eshel, “Paul Celan’s Other: History, Poetics, and Ethics,” New German Critique 91 (2004): 60–62. 60. Derrida, Sovereignties, p. 50: [T]he incommunicable secret of the Judaic idiom, the singularity of “his name, his unpronounceable

Notes  —  2 9 0 name,” sein Name, der unaussprechliche. The “name,” what is for the Jew “unpronounceable,” his proper name, is it a name? It says so many things . . . it says the name of God, which must not be pronounced by whoever partakes of the covenant or alliance. The Jew can pronounce it but must not; he cannot pronounce it. . . . The unpronounceable keeps and destroys the name; it protects it, like the name of God, or dooms it to annihilation among the ashes (emphasis in original). Regarding Celan’s conception of language deriving from God’s unpronounceable name and the possibility of kabbalistic influence, see Rochelle Tobias, “The Homecoming of a Word: Mystical Language Philosophy in Celan’s ‘Mit allen Gedanken,’” in Placeless Topographies: Jewish Perspectives on the Literature of Exile, edited by Bernhard Greiner (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003), pp. 175–185, and idem, The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 55–66. See ch. 5 n. 193. On Celan’s knowledge and appropriation of the ineffability of the Tetragrammaton as a way to articulate his idea of naming the nameless, see also Hannes Fricke, Niemand wird lessen, was ich hier schreibt: über den Niemand in der Literatur (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998), p. 375. See also the evidence adduced by Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 153, regarding Celan’s inserting three dots in place of writing the letters of the Tetragrammaton when he copied the Hebrew text of Leviticus 22:31–32. On the possible allusion to the Jewish mystical conception of the power of names in Celan, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays, translated and edited by Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 75. See the fuller analysis of Celan and kabbalah in Shira Wolosky, Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 199–263. See also Otto Pöggeler, “Mystical Elements in Heidegger’s Thought and Celan’s Poetry,” in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, edited by Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 89–90, 98–99; Tobias, The Discourse of Nature, pp. 69–73, 81–92; and the speculation about the possible influence of Eckhart and the kabbalah on Celan, likely mediated through the channels of Scholem and Heidegger, in Nitzan Lebovic, “Near the End: Celan, Between Scholem and Heidegger,” German Quarterly 83 (2010): 471–474. With respect to Celan’s identifying namelessness as the inner desire of poetry, see Antti Eemeli Salminen, “No Name: Paul Celan’s Poetics of Naming,” Kritike 4 (2010): 123–137. On the role accorded the Tetragrammaton in Derrida’s deconstructionist hermeneutic as the nameless name that marks the singularity of the absolutely other, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 174–179, 185, 419 n. 189, 420 n. 193, 424 n. 251. 61. Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, p. 397; idem, Gesammelte Werke, p. 169. It is worth recalling here the words in The Anti-Christ: A Curse on Christianity, §24, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 20–21: The Jews are the most remarkable people in world history; when faced with the question of being or non-being, they showed an absolutely uncanny awareness and chose being at any price; this price was the radical falsification of all of nature, all naturalness, all reality,

Notes ­ —  2 91 the entirety of the inner world as well as the outer. They defined themselves in opposition to all the conditions under which peoples so far had been allowed to live, they created from themselves a counter-concept to natural conditions,—they took religion, cults, morality, history, and psychology, and twisted them around, one after the other, to the point where they were in irreversible contradiction to their natural values (emphasis in original). See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, edited by Adrian del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, translated by Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 221 (idem, Also sprach Zarathustra I–IV, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999], p. 339): “I am a wanderer . . . always on my way, but without goal, without home too, such that very little is lacking, truly, and I would be the Eternal Jew—except that I am not eternal and neither am I Jew.” It lies beyond the scope of this note to embark upon a fuller analysis of these passages and to discuss the depiction of Judaism in Nietzsche’s writings. Of the many scholars who have weighed in on this topic, see the discussion in Didier Franck, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, translated by Bettina Bergo and Philippe Farah (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012), pp. 312–317. For a similar characterization of the Jews on the part of Jacob Taubes, see discussion in ch. 3 at nn. 262–265. 62. Marc-Oliver Schuster, “Dismantling Anti-Semitic Authorship in Paul Celan’s ‘Gespräch im Gebirg,’” Modern Austrian Literature 35 (2002): 23–42, esp. 28–30. 63. Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, pp. 74–75. For an alternative rendering as “homeland’s alienness,” see Celan, Memory Rose, p. 145. And compare the brief comment on this expression in Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 54. In that context, I noted the affinity between Celan’s idea of the homeland strangeness and Heidegger’s thinking poetics that celebrates the unhomely as essential for the possibility of being at home in the world. The point is captured succinctly in the observation that the prefix of Unheimische “does not signify the negation of Heimische, the lack of a home, but rather the interplay of presence and absence such that the absence of being at home is the way of being present at home.” See below, n. 104. 64. One can detect a polemical reversal of the stereotype of the itinerant status of the Jew in the statement ascribed to Jesus and directed to the Jews in John 8:23–24, “You belong to this world below, I to the world above. Your home is in this world, mine is not. That is why I told you that you would die in your sins; and you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am what I am.” As opposed to the earthly Jews, Jesus is portrayed as an alien in the spatio-temporal realm. See Jesus’s description of his followers and of himself in John 17:14–16, “I have given them your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I do not pray that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” Just as the Father sent Jesus into the world to glorify the divine on earth, so Jesus sent his disciples into the world, but neither he nor they belong inherently to the world. On the homeless status of Jesus, compare the depiction of the Son of Man (based in part on Psalms 84:4) as having no place to lay his head in contrast to the foxes, who have their holes, and the birds, who have their nests, in Matthew 8:20;

Notes  —  2 9 2 Luke 9:58; Uwe-Karsten Plisch, The Gospel of Thomas: Original Text with Commentary, translated by Gesine Schenke Robinson (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2008), logion 86, p. 196. 65. Amir, “Paul Celan’s Other,” p. 66. 66. Derrida, Sovereignties, p. 50. See Wolfson, Giving, p. 165, and the chapter on “L’idiome de l’étrangèrté” in Hadrien France-Lanord, Paul Celan et Martin Heidegger: Le sense d’un dialogue (Paris: Fayard, 2004), pp. 43–49. 67. The term ivri occurs as well in Genesis 39:14, 41:12; Exodus 2:11, 21:2; Jonah 1:9. 68. Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, edited by Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck (Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1965), 41:8, p. 414. The midrashic gloss on the designation ivri from the expression me-ever ha-nahar is repeated often through the centuries by biblical commentators and homilists. On the interpretation of the name ivri and Abraham’s nomadic status, see the remark of Schelling cited by Taubes in ch. 3 at n. 260, and compare the comment of Hegel paraphrased by Taubes in ch. 3 at n. 265. It is worth contemplating in this context the following remark in the section “God’s Entanglement in the World” in Hans Blumenberg, St. Matthew Passion, translated by Helmut Müller-Sievers and Paul Fleming (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), pp. 90–91: How this world was to be used soon became a matter of life and death between the first pair of brothers—and ultimately in favor of the more radical land use of sedentary agriculture, even though God clearly had preferred the gentler practice of nomadic grazing. This preference was disregarded by the species. It insisted on settlement and land ownership, which alone could justify something like the promised land the God of the covenant was to deliver. 69. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 10–11; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 67–68. 70. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 373. 71. Ibid., p. 21. Compare the passage from Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback cited in ch. 1 at n. 33. A key difference between my argument and the position affirmed by Deleuze and Guattari is that they view the rhizome as antigenealogical and antimemory, or at best expressive of short-term memory, since it operates by “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots.” 72. Paul Celan, Der Meridian: Endfassung—Entwürfe—Materialien, edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull with assistance from Michael Schwarzkopf and Christiane Wittkop (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 130–131; Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials, edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull with assistance from Michael Schwarzkopf and Christiane Wittkop, translated and with a preface by Pierre Joris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 130–131. For an alternate translation of Verjuden as “Judaize,” see Liska, “‘Man Kann Verjuden,’” p. 206, and idem, German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), p. 133.

Notes ­ —  2 93 73. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 131; idem, The Meridian, p. 131. See Eric Kligerman, Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), p. 130: “The Breathturn, which Celan explicitly refers to in his drafts of ‘The Meridian’ as an Umkehr . . . is associated not with a fleeing, but with a going toward the exterminated. This Umkehr is central to his concept of Verjuden, becoming Jewish, which he recommends to his German audience as a means of understanding poetry.” On the identification of poetry as a breathturn (Atemwende), see Celan, Der Meridian, p. 9 (emphasis in original); idem, The Meridian, p. 9. 74. On the possible influence of Heidegger in Celan’s statement, see Gerald L. Bruns, “The Remembrance of Language: An Introduction to Gadamer’s Poetics,” in Gadamer on Celan, p. 25: “Celan’s language is full of Heideggerian nods and winks: ‘The poem is solitary. It is solitary and on the way’ . . . . Nomadic, deterritorialized: always elsewhere, always exterior.” 75. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 9; idem, The Meridian, p. 9 (emphasis in original). I have slightly modified the translation. 76. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 9; idem, The Meridian, p. 9. 77. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 6; idem, The Meridian, p. 6. Celan’s position should be considered in light of the connection between the poet and the state of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) in the thought of Rosenzweig, which bears similarities to Heidegger’s aesthetics. See Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 90–94; Jules Simon, Art and Responsibility: A Phenomenology of the Diverging Paths of Rosenzweig and Heidegger (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 216–218; Wolfson, Giving, pp. 66–67; idem, The Duplicity, p. 74. 78. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 7; idem, The Meridian, p. 7. 79. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 5; idem, The Meridian, p. 5. 80. Derrida, Sovereignties, pp. 124–125. On Derrida’s exegesis of Celan, compare the thorough analysis in Martin Jörg Schäfer, Schmerz zum Mitsein: Zur Relektüre Celans und Heideggers durch Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe und Jean-Luc Nancy (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), pp. 241–305. 81. The quotation is from “Language Is Never Owned: An Interview,” conducted by Évelyne Grossman, in Derrida, Sovereignties, p. 100. While I concur in the main with Derrida’s presentation of Celan, we should consider the aphorism in Paul Celan, “Mikrolithen sinds, Steinchen:” Die Prosa aus dem Nachlaß. Kritische Ausgabe, edited and commentary by Barbara Wiedmann and Bertrand Badiou (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), p. 106: “Denn Sprechen, wie seine Mutter sprechen, heißt Wohnen, auch da, wo’s keine Zelte gibt.” English rendering in Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose, translated with a preface by Pierre Joris (New York: Contra Mundum, 2020), p. 99: “Because to speak, to speak like one’s mother, means to dwell, even there where there are no tents.” According to this text, the Muttersprache of poetic language furnishes a form of dwelling even if not in a physical structure that imparts shelter. 82. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 65.

Notes  —  2 9 4 83. Ibid., pp. 66–67 (emphasis in original). 84. One is reminded of the quintessentially diasporic remark of George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 40: “In dispersion, the text is homeland.” See my exegetical gloss on these words in Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 117: The text of boundary is determined from within the boundary of text. Reading recurringly reshapes the contours of this delimitation, resulting in the ongoing destabilization of the dichotomy between inside and outside. If text is indeed homeland, the line separating indigenous and alien in the mapping of cultural identity must be subject to constant alteration. Compare the remark of Levinas cited in ch. 3 at n. 258. 85. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 67. See my previous analysis of this Derridean text in Wolfson, Giving, p. 188: In his essay on Jabès, Derrida differentiates between rabbi and poet. While both agree about the necessity of exegesis, they reflect two distinct interpretative stances, the former representing heteronomous allegiance to the law and the latter autonomous independence from the law. . . . Poetic autonomy presupposes the shattering of the tablets of law, but this freedom is not absolute, for even the outlaw remains bound to the law—if there were no law, how could one be outside the law and hence an outlaw? For the poet, the lawful breaching of the law is intricately connected to language. 86. Derrida, Sovereignties, p. 101. 87. Ibid., p. 102. 88. William Franke, “The Singular and the Other at the Limits of Language in the Apophatic Poetics of Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan,” New Literary History 36 (2005): 621– 638, esp. 625–628. See ch. 5 n. 163. 89. See above, n. 72. 90. Liska, “‘Man Kann Verjuden,’” p. 206 (emphasis in original), and repeated in idem, German-Jewish Thought, pp. 133–134. 91. Liska, “‘Man Kann Verjuden,’” p. 207; idem, German-Jewish Thought, p. 134. See also Eshel, “Paul Celan’s Other,” pp. 68–75. 92. I am here influenced by the interpretation of Celan’s notion of Judaizing (Verjudung) offered by Kligerman, Sites, p. 131: Becoming Jewish is neither a religious, nor a cultural, nor a political act, but like Lyotard’s concept of “the jews,” Verjuden entails the process of becoming Other. But Celan’s imperative, which obliges the reader to approach the site of catastrophic history, confronts his reader with the impossible tasks of either identifying with the effaced Other or fully incorporating into memory the traumatic time of the Other’s erasure. . . . The process of Verjuden, in essence an ethical category, does not indicate an emphatic identification with the Other; in fact Celan stresses the very disruption of this process.

Notes ­ — 295 93. Cited from a personal interview with Pareigis in Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work (New York: HarperCollins, 2019), pp. 138–139. 94. Taubes, Divorcing, p. 227. 95. Jacques Derrida, “A Testimony Given . . . ,” in Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber, translated by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 41; idem, “Un témoignage donné,” in Questions au judaïsme. Entretiens avec Elisabeth Weber (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1996), p. 76. 96. Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, edited by Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, translated by Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 16 (emphasis in original). I have restored the French based on the original “Abraham, L’Autre,” in Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, edited by Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Galilée, 2003), p. 24, and see the version reprinted in Jacques Derrida, Le dernier des Juifs (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2014), p. 94. Compare my previous discussion of this passage in Wolfson, Giving, p. 165. 97. Jacques Derrida, “Avowing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation,” in Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, edited by Elisabeth Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 21–22 (emphasis in original); idem, “Avouer—l’impossible: ‘Retours’, repentir et reconciliation,” in Le dernier des Juifs, pp. 22–23. 98. Wolfson, Giving, p. 166. 99. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, translated by Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 10. 100. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, edited and with an introduction by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 56 (emphasis in original). See the section of this passage cited in ch. 5 n. 239. And compare the reiteration of this theme in Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 362: To wait without waiting, awaiting absolute surprise, the unexpected visitor, awaited without a horizon of expectation: this is indeed about the Messiah as hôte, about the messianic as hospitality, the messianic that introduces deconstructive disruption or madness in the concept of hospitality, the madness of hospitality, even the madness of the concept of hospitality (emphasis in original). On the concept of messianicity, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 59; Wolfson, Giving, pp. 159–161 (in that context, I noted the affinity between the Derridean notion of waiting without an horizon of expectation and the Levinasian depiction of the diachrony of messianic hope as awaiting without an awaited), p. 169, and references to other scholars cited on p. 406 nn. 30–31. 101. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” p. 12; idem, Judéités, p. 21; idem, Le dernier des Juifs, p. 87. It would be instructive to compare Susan’s idea of the particular as indexical of the universal with the universalism of Judaism promulgated by Benamozegh, in no small

Notes  —  2 9 6 measure based on his reading of kabbalistic sources, but this is a matter that cannot be explored here. See Elijah Benamozegh, Israel and Humanity, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Maxwell Luria (New York: Paulist Press, 1995), pp. 101–117, 142–144; Clémence Boulouque, Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), pp. 51, 88, 93–106. Boulouque’s position is stated succinctly on p. 96: “Benamozegh used this idea of a family of nations to make a case for solidarity through kinship but also to ascribe different responsibilities to each people, according to their status and capacities.” See ibid., p. 157, and the passage from Benamozegh cited in ch. 3 n. 253. 102. Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 4–5. For a more extended discussion of Derrida’s position, see ibid., pp. 43–97. See also Wolfson, Giving, pp. 158–168, and references to other scholars cited on p. 410 n. 63, to which we could add the comparative analysis of the paradoxes of exemplarity from Celan to Derrida in Liska, GermanJewish Thought, pp. 127–136. 103. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 136. Compare the passage from Levinas cited in ch. 3 at n. 258. 104. Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 5. Although Levinas’s criticism of Heidegger is understandable from both a personal and an intellectual standpoint, in my opinion, he did not engage fully with the paradoxical drift of Heidegger’s insight—elicited from his close reading of Hölderlin—regarding the intermingling of the homely and the unhomely to the point that the presence of being at home is experienced most acutely in the absence of not being at home. See Wolfson, The Duplicity, pp. 54–57, 69; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 350–352. And compare the section “Der Kern des Irrtums” in Martin Heidegger, Zum Wesen der Sprache und Zur Frage nach der Kunst [GA 74] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2010), pp. 38–39: Man meint, das, was “das Vaterland” angehen soll, müßte “politisch” sein. Nun aber kann “das Vaterland” nur in seinem Wesen angegangen und getroffen werden, wenn es selbst offen ist gegen seinen Wesengrund. Reicht es zu diesem hin, dann ist es schon im Wesen ein anderes als es selbst und alles “Politische” ist die Einkerkerung des Vaterlandes in sein Unwesen. Um das Vaterland “anzugehen”, muß Etwas weither seinen Gang haben und lange unterwegs gewesen und zu langer Wanderung entschlossen sein. Wo sich Solches nicht ereignet, ist das Wesen des Vaterlandes schon zerbrochen und der Verwüstung durch seine eigene Irre preisgegeben. In addition to questioning the political interpretation of the concept of the Fatherland, Heidegger explicitly notes that to reach that place, one must travel a great distance and for a long time. For a radical reevaluation of Heidegger’s attitude to National Socialism and his notions of deracination, uprootedness, soil, and native ground, see Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann and Francesco Alfieri, Martin Heidegger and the Truth About the Black

Notes ­ —  2 9 7 Notebooks, translated by Bernhard Radloff [Analecta Husserliana 123] (Cham: Springer, 2021), pp. 33–98. 105. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), p. xvi; idem, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), p. 28. See Wolfson, Giving, p. 151 and references cited on p. 400 n. 507, to which many more could have been added. On Rosenzweig’s attempt to establish the foundation for a new kind of universality based on love focused on the singularity of personhood, see Katja Garloff, Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), pp. 147–150. 106. Levinas, Totalité et infini, p. 175; idem, Totality and Infinity, p. 201. 107. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, pp. 137–138. 108. Wolfson, Giving, p. 153. For a fuller discussion of the messianic in Levinas’s writings, especially as it relates to his conception of time as diachrony, see ibid., pp. 113–120, and the references to other scholarly discussions cited on pp. 377–378 n. 202 and 380–381 n. 214. Many scholars have discussed the attempt of Jewish philosophers to attenuate the friction between the particular and the universal. I mention here one relatively neglected monograph that explores this topic with a great deal of theoretical sophistication and historical scope: Svante Lundgren, Particularism and Universalism in Modern Jewish Thought (Binghamton: Global Publications, 2001). Most significantly, in my opinion, is the author’s insight that particularism does not necessarily mean prejudice and universalism does not necessarily mean tolerance (p. 12). 109. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1974), p. 127; idem, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), p. 100. 110. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, p. 127; idem, Otherwise Than Being, p. 101. 111. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, p. 177; idem, Otherwise Than Being, p. 139. 112. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §17, p. 58. 113. Ibid.: “for the ‘beard’ one might just as well ‘assimilate[’].” On Susan’s use of the image of the beard to mark Jewish orthopraxy, see ibid., §26, p. 74 (cited in ch. 1 at n. 12); §37, p. 104 (cited in ch. 1 n. 138); §41, p. 113 (in that context, Susan implicitly rejects Salo Baron’s suggestion that Jacob seek employment at Yeshiva University, writing “If ‘beards’ than [sic] at least the starry sky of Jerusalem”). 114. Ibid., §55, p. 145. 115. Susan Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil,” PhD dissertation, Radcliffe College, 1956, pp. 316–317. 116. Ibid., pp. 317–318. 117. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. 136. 118. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz 1950–1951, §19, pp. 60–61. In the part of the letter that I did not cite, there is more detailed reference to the ancient Chinese cosmological ideal of Yin-Yang, respectively the dark, passive, feminine principle and the light, active, masculine principle, which together constitute the nature of the Tao, the road or the way that is the source and law of being. On Susan’s interest in Buddhism and other forms of Eastern spirituality, see ch. 1 at nn. 18–19, ch. 3 n. 72, and ch. 5 n. 27.

Notes  —  2 9 8 119. Søren Overgaard, Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2004), pp. 111–112; Wolfson, Giving, pp. 94–95, and the references to the work of Dan Zahavi cited on p. 356 n. 34. 120. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), §192, pp. 81–82 (emphasis in original). 121. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, translated by Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 144. 122. Ibid., p. 146. For citation and analysis of this passage, see Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 200–201. The validity of Nietzsche’s perspective has stood the test of time as some have argued that even the most abstract forms of scientific thinking are dependent on a form of metaphorical reasoning both in the conceptualization and in the communication of ideas. See Theodore L. Brown, Making Truth: Metaphor in Science (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 123. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §224, p. 187. The text is cited more fully in ch. 3 n. 73. It is possible that the juxtaposition of saintliness and mysticism on the part of Susan reflects the respective treatments of these two typologies in lectures 11–17 in William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1925), pp. 259–429. Even though James treats the saint and the mystic separately, the fact that he discusses them sequentially may have informed Susan’s identification of the two. 124. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes [Werke 3] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 22; idem, The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated and edited by Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 12. Compare Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars: Le Tor 1966, 1968, 1969, Zähringen 1973, translated by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 15 (idem, Seminare [GA 15] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), p. 295): “There is a need for unity, because unity is never given immediately; otherwise, everything would be engulfed in Schelling’s ‘night where all cows are black.’ In the midst of the highest dichotomy, unity is constantly restored.” And see ibid., p. 29 (Seminare, p. 317): “Sublation [Aufheben] means preserving [bewahren], conserving [erhalten], bringing to a safe place . . . . This preservation is accomplished in the absolute identity where the opposites are conserved, instead of disappearing as the cows do in the night of Schellingian identity.” Heidegger’s acceptance of Hegel’s characterization of Schelling is perplexing given the fact that elsewhere he embraced Schelling’s idea of indifference (Indifferenz), also rendered as the pure equivalence (Gleichgültigkeit), to mark the character of sameness (Selbigkeit) as the bringing near of what remains disparate, the simultaneous holding-together (Zussamenhalten) and keeping-apart (Auseinanderhalten). See Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund [GA 10] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), p. 133; idem, The Principle of Reason, translated by Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 89–90. For citation and analysis of this passage, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp.

Notes ­ —  2 9 9 11–12, and for discussion of Schelling’s concept of indifference as a critique of Hegel in its resistance to the dialectical identity of identity and nonidentity, see ibid., pp. 26–27 n. 118, 168, 208–210, and especially the passage from Martin Heidegger, Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809) [GA 42] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988) p. 19 (idem, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, translated by Joan Stambaugh [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985], p. 12), cited in Wolfson Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 235 n. 63. Compare the Heideggerian text cited in this volume, ch. 5 at n. 272, and the passage from the Beiträge cited in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 213. 125. Paul Tillich, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 26. 126. Ibid., p. 27. 127. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 318. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., p. 319. 130. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Hypernomian Piety and the Mystical Rationale of the Commandments in Nathan of Gaza’s Sefer Haberiya,” El Prezente: Journal for Sephardic Studies 12–13 (2018–2019): 151–152. 131. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, translated by Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 11. For an analysis of this passage and Badiou’s portrayal of Pauline universalism, see David G. Leahy, Beyond Sovereignty: A New Global Ethics and Morality (Aurora: Davies Group Publishers, 2010), pp. 50–51, and compare the comments of Leahy, ibid., p. 70, on the relation of sameness and equality in the universal promulgated by Paul as discussed in Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 109. For discussion of the implicit supersessionism in Leahy’s thought in relation to Badiou’s exegesis of Paul, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Temporal Diremption and the Novelty of Genuine Repetition,” in D. G. Leahy and the Thinking Now Occurring, edited by Lissa McCullough and Elliot R. Wolfson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021), pp. 62–63. See also Audronė Žukauskaitė, “Ethics Between Particularity and Universality,” in Deleuze and Ethics, edited by Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 188–206. 132. Jacob Taubes, Die politische Theologie des Paulus, edited by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, in conjunction with Horst Folkers, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, and Christoph Schulte (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), pp. 37–38; idem, The Political Theology of Paul, edited by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, in conjunction with Horst Folkers, WolfDaniel Hartwich, and Christoph Schulte, translated by Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 24–25. See Taubes, Die politische Theologie, pp. 90–91, where he cites a passage from Schmitt’s Politische Theologie in which the following comment of the “Protestant theologian,” that is, Kierkegaard, is quoted: “Die Ausnahme erklärt das Allgemeine und sich selbst. Und wenn man das Allgemeine richtig studieren will, braucht man sich nur nach einer wirklichen Ausnahme umzusehen. Sie legt alles viel deutlicher an den Tag als das Allgemeine selbst.” English translation in Taubes, The Political Theology, p. 65: “The exception explains the universal and itself. And if one wants to study the universal correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception.

Notes  —  30 0 It reveals everything more clearly than does the universal itself.” The position taken by Taubes should be contrasted with Freud’s view that Paul abandoned the chosenness of the Jewish people and its observable mark in the circumcision of the flesh. See Taubes, Die politische Theologie, p. 127; idem, The Political Theology, p. 92. On Taubes’s view that the election of Israel occupied a special role in Paul’s universal salvation history, see Ole Jakob Løland, Pauline Ugliness: Jacob Taubes and the Turn to Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), pp. 129–130. Regarding Taubes’s presentation of Paul’s counterrevolutionary politics as the perfect representative of Jewish messianism, see also Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, translated by Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 3, 33, 55, 104. On the various scholarly analyses of Jacob’s interpretation of Paul, see ch. 3 n. 135. For additional references to Taubes’s approach to messianism, see ch. 3 n. 119. 133. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §155, p. 60 cited in ch. 2 at n. 78. 134. Ibid., §229, p. 198. For the fuller context of the passage, see the citation in ch. 1 n. 85. 135. Ibid., §267, p. 259. A section of the passage is cited in ch. 1 at n. 91 and another one in ch. 2 at n. 79. The sensitivity of Susan in a post-Holocaust moment to the need to preserve the particularity of the Jewish path vis-à-vis the Christian claim to a universality that subverts and subsumes this particularity bears comparison to Rosenzweig’s wish to accomplish something similar in the decades before the Nazification of Germany. See the discussion of Rosenzweig’s essentializing the Jewish people as the ideal community of humankind in Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness, pp. 172–176. 136. The language is derived from Susan’s letter to her father describing Paul Weiss’s course “Man and Society,” which she took at Bryn Mawr, cited by Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 139: [T]he problem is to find out what is man—what is the particular, unique and precious INDIVIDUAL. You may believe that you are but a passing instance of a bleak phylogenetic current but I believe that that is only one aspect of man—you must admit individuality as achieved in genius. Even if its only ions recirculating, still what makes them whirl in this particular way? 137. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §168, p. 83. After agreeing to Susan’s claim that there is a universality of the personal, Weil nonetheless surmised that “although the poet understands that of which he speaks he doesn’t understand his own understanding.” The Romantic poets, who were influenced by philosophers, “are the exception that proves the rule.” 138. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §127, p. 255. The passage is from Susan’s letter to Hugo Bergmann, which was written on September 18, 1950. A version of the text copied in Jacob’s hand appears in ibid., §13, p. 47. 139. Ibid., §127, p. 255. See also §13, pp. 47–48. 140. The statement is quoted in the name of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, translated by Constance Garnett, with a foreword by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: Modern Library, 1936), p. 425, cited by Pareigis in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §13, p. 48 n. 4.

Notes ­ —  301 141. Ibid., §127, p. 255, and for a slightly different version, §13, pp. 47–48. 142. With respect to Heidegger, see Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” p. 279: “Bei Susan Taubes führte u. a. das Bestreben, gerade in der Heimatlosigkeit Heimat zu finden und einer Verzweiflung niemals zu unterliegen, zu einer zunehmenden Faszination für Heideggers Denken.” Compare idem, Susan Taubes, p. 205. 143. Cited from the Susan Taubes Archiv 150, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, in Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 303. 144. The term “mytheology” is used by Susan in the letter to Jacob written on November 3, 1950. See ibid., §28, p. 78, cited in ch. 1 at n. 182. 145. Ibid., §55, p. 146. 146. For a recent discussion of this phenomenon, see Pascal Massie, “Seeing Darkness, Hearing Silence: Meta-Sensation and the Limits of Perception in Aristotle’s De anima,” Epoché 25 (2020): 81–99.

Chapter 1 1. Christina Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths of Nomads, Wanderers, Exiles. Stationen einer Korrespondenz,” in Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950– 1951, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), pp. 272–276. See especially the language used by Jacob in a letter to Gerda Seligson cited on p. 274: “Susan ist als Arbeitspeitsche gut—und ich verdiene und brauche ja manchmal diese Peitsche. Freilich ist ihr die Gnade versagt sich zu freuen mit den jüdischen Weisen der Existenz und sie ist gezwungen sich in Abstracta zu flüchten.” As Pareigis goes on to say, Susan’s conscious refusal to live a concrete life in accord with the traditional rites and symbols was a source of awe (tremendum) and fascination (fascinosum) for Jacob, and while he admired her lack of Jewish qualities (jüdischen Eigenschaften), this lack was the source for a perpetual conflict between them, reflecting the contemporary debates on the possibility for the persistence of Jewish tradition in a world in which God was experienced as absent. The clash on this matter reached into “the intimate sphere of their relationship.” See also Jerry Z. Muller, Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), p. 136: “Jacob and Susan were united and separated by Jewishness. . . . Though Jacob took pleasure in rattling the cage of the Law, it was the cage that gave him an object to rattle. . . . For Susan, by contrast, the world of traditional Jewish belief and practice was alien. . . . Nor did she have much exposure to Christianity. She was, for all intents and purposes, a pagan, as Jacob put it.” Compare Jacob’s characterization of Susan’s “antijudaism” as essentially paganistic referenced below at n. 206. Muller, op. cit., pp. 164–171, elaborates on the distinction between pagan and heretic, the former applied to Susan and the latter to Jacob. In terms of my own conceptual scheme, in contrast to Jacob’s blatant antinomian disregard for law, Susan’s paganism could be viewed as the hypernomian application of ritual. See, however, Muller, op. cit., p. 426. Based on the reflections of Leon Wieseltier, Muller writes that Jacob’s “antinomian self-conception, paradoxically, demanded an ongoing connection to the tradition. For one cannot rebel against the law unless there is law to rebel against.

Notes  —  302 The result was a kind of arrested spiritual adolescence, in which one can never stop rebelling, since arriving at a new, positive identity would lead to calm.” What Muller here describes accords with my notion of the hypernomian, which is not indicative of an adolescent need to be recalcitrant but rather of the paradoxical understanding that obedience to the law demands its violation, a bending as opposed to a breaking of the rules. Regarding this image, derived from Wittgenstein’s description of tragedy, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 241–242. 2. Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), §268, p. 261. 3. Ibid., p. 262: “Manchmal denke ich: hätte ich Susan die vielen jüdischen Konflikte erspart, die Sammlung der Zweieinheit, dieser Einheit wäre gesammelter gewesen.” 4. See the note in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §1, pp. 16– 17. It is presumed that at the time that Susan wrote this unfinished and undelivered letter, Jacob was either in New York at the Jewish Theological Seminary or on a trip to Toronto in September 1949 to regulate his residence status in the United States. 5. Ibid., p. 15. 6. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 7. Ibid., p. 16. 8. Ibid. See Christina Pareigis, Susan Taubes: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020), p. 187. Susan’s rejection of the tenets of rabbinic orthodoxy and a likely insinuation to Jacob’s desire to force her into some form of observance is given expression in Susan Taubes, Divorcing, introduction by David Rieff (New York: New York Review of Books, 2020), p. 81, cited in ch. 5 n. 27. See also Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, p. 137, who observed that Jacob tried to talk Susan “into sharing a life with him: a Jewish life, albeit one embraced with deep doubt, and a faith always on the edge of vanishing.” 9. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §55, pp. 145–146. 10. Consider Heidegger’s assertion in the Die Spiegel interview in Martin Heidegger, Reden und Andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges [GA 16] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), p. 679: “Denken wird nur durch Denken verwandelt, das dieselbe Herkunft und Bestimmung hat.” For an English translation, see Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, edited by Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, introduction by Karsten Harries, translated by Lisa Harries, French portions translated by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 63: “Thinking will only be transformed by a thinking that has the same origin and destiny.” The idea of the transformation of thought expressed here lends support to the contention that Heidegger’s idea of overcoming (Überwindung) is always a transition (Übergang) that beckons an undergoing (Untergang). See Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 100, 361 n. 177, 385–386 n. 289; idem, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 4; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 72, 88 n. 89.

Notes ­ —  303 11. Cited from the Susan Taubes Archiv 59, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, in Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 199. 12. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §26, p. 74. 13. Ibid., §9, pp. 36–37. Compare Susan’s warning to Jacob in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §172, p. 92, we must remain in the “avant-garde” and not fall back into “jewish community projects”. . . . I warn you: the moment there is a danger of “backsliding” I “convert”: if we are looking for comfort and integration, I am more comfortable + integrated in the protestant community. But the whole thing is too nauseating. A new world cannot be created without sacrifice. The jewish protest against Christianity is not enough. 14. Ibid., §245, p. 229. 15. On Susan’s guidance to Jacob to pray from his flesh, see the passage cited below in n. 55. 16. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §26, p. 74. For Susan’s criticism of Kant’s identification of the noumenon as the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), see ibid., §75, pp. 178–179. On the lack of mystery, and hence a lack of openness to the nothingness of love in Kant, see ibid., §73, pp. 175–176, cited in ch. 3 n. 36. 17. For references, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality (Leiden: Brill, 2021), p. 55 n. 167. 18. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §164, p. 76. 19. On Susan’s interest in Mahāyāna Buddhist logic, see ibid., §141, p. 33. For references to other passages in the letters where Susan mentions Buddhism, see ch. 3 n. 72. 20. On the paradoxical logic of dialethism, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 48–49 n. 10. 21. Jan Westerhoff, The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 102–104. 22. Eldon C. Wait, “Dissipating Illusions,” Human Studies 20 (1997): 221–242, esp. 231–232. 23. Cited from All Dharmas Are Without Actions Sutra in Musō Soseki, Dialogues in a Dream: The Life and Zen Teachings of Musō Soseki, translated and annotated by Thomas Yūhō Kirchner (Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2015), p. 194. Compare Tsangnyön Heruka, The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa: A New Translation, translated by Christopher Stagg (Boulder: Shambhala, 2016), p. 516: “The womb of the impure illusory body / And the form of the pure deity / Are one in the state of the luminous bardo. / Practice this bardo of fruition.” And ibid., pp. 521–522: Son, when you realize your mind is emptiness, Do not differentiate between one and many. There’s danger of falling into nihilistic emptiness. Son, rest in the state free of elaborations . . . . Son, when you have gained certainty in your mind, Do not give rise to attachment and clinging.

Notes  —  304 There’s the danger you’ll be carried off by the demon of conceited joy. Son, rest in the state free of hopes. In the realization of the nondual emptiness of mind, there is no conceptual, linguistic, or experiential basis to differentiate antinomical distinctions even to the point that the impure illusory body is indistinguishable from the pure deity. 24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, edited by Adrian del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, translated by Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 71 (idem, Also sprach Zarathustra I–IV, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999] , p. 119): “And you must be redeemed even from those greater than all redeemers, my brothers, if you want to find your way to freedom!” Compare the discussion of the gnostic motif of the redeemed redeemer in ch. 3 at nn. 224–225. For the demarcation of redemption as revenge against the inability of time to run backwards and as the liberation of the will in its unwillingness (Widerwille) to be bound to the past expressed in its effort to recreate (umzuschaffen) the “it was” (Es war) into “thus I willed it” (So wollte ich es), see Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 110–111; idem, Also sprach Zarathustra I–IV, pp. 179–180. Various scholars have engaged in comparative analyses of Nietzsche and Buddhism. Particularly pertinent to the description of redemption as a state of being redeemed from the redeemers is the chapter on self-overcoming and mind-development in Robert G. Morrison, Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 155–196, and André van der Braak, Nietzsche and Zen: Self-Overcoming Without a Self (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011). For an alternative approach, see the chapter on nirvāṇa and the cessation of suffering in Antoine Panaïoti, Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp.132–170, esp. 157–169. 25. Cited in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §266, p. 255, n. 2. 26. Ibid. 27. Martin Heidegger, Gedachtes [GA 81] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), p. 94: “Das Ereignis reiner / Wiederkehr des Unterschieds / zum Hehl des Heilen” (emphasis in original). After the poem Heidegger offers the following gloss: “Unterschied = Schied—Abschied des Untergangs im Sinne der Verheyterung des aufgehenden Verbergens” (emphasis in original). For a recent rendering into English, see Martin Heidegger, Thought Poems: A Translation of Heidegger’s Verse, translated by Eoghan Walls (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), p. 161: “Difference = split—parting of the downfall in the sense of the brightening of rising shelter.” The part of the poem cited in the beginning of this note is translated as “The claiming / of the pure return of difference / into the hide of healing.” 28. On this Heideggerian motif, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 243–244; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 35–40; idem, Suffering Time, pp. 70, 357–358, 593. For Heidegger, the thinking of the event of appropriation is linked essentially to the irreducible and individualistic nature of being. See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948) [GA 97] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2015), p. 122: “Ins Eigene

Notes ­ —  30 5 des Seyns denken. Das Eigene ist das Ereignis.” See also the section “Das Seyn ist und einzig ist das Seyn” in idem, Zum Wesen der Sprache und Zur Frage nach der Kunst [GA 74] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2010), p. 28. The point is expressed pithily in the second epigraph to Martin Heidegger, Über den Anfang [GA 70] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005): “Alles ist Einzig.” See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 80. 29. My thinking is indebted to a paradox that is especially significant and prominent in Ḥabad-Lubavitch thought even though it can be traced to the attempts to characterize the polyvalent oneness of infinity (Ein Sof) in earlier kabbalistic texts, what I have designated as the infinite fractal curve of differentiable points of nondifferentiability. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 216. Of the many sources that could be cited from this vast corpus, I will mention the interpretation of the passage that begins pataḥ eliyahu printed as one of the introductions in Tiqqunei Zohar, edited by Reuven Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1978), 17a, “For you are one but not in number,” in Dovber Shneuri, Torat Ḥayyim: Bere’shit (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1993), 66d–67a, and its further explication in Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwwa‘aduyyot 5722, volume 2 (Brooklyn: Vaad Hanochos B’Lahak, 2006), pp. 8–11. The gist of the Ḥabad interpretation of the zoharic passage is that the infinite is demarcated as the one beyond number because the array of particulars (ribbuy ha-peraṭim) comprised within and engendered by the universality (hitkallelut) of the incomposite oneness (aḥdut ha-peshuṭah) is inexhaustible and therefore exceeds enumeration. Hence, the unity of the infinite light (or ein sof), which manifests the essence (aṣmut) of the luminescence (ma’or) beyond manifestation, is constituted by the diversity whence it follows that things can be demarcated as principally the same in virtue of their being thoroughly different. For a more detailed analysis of this topic and citation of other sources, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Mysticism and the Quest for Universal Singularity— Post-Subjective Subjectivity and the Contemplative Ideal in Ḥabad,” in Jewish Spirituality and Social Transformation, edited by Philip Wexler (New York: Herder and Herder, 2019), pp. 37–58, and idem, Suffering Time, pp. 423–428, 503–505. For a similar paradox elicited from Ṣūfism, see Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Ṣūfism of Ibn ‘Arabī, translated by Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 203–204: Abstract monotheism and monism, which is its secularization as social philosophy, reveal a common totalitarian trend; the theosophy of Ibn ‘Arabī, on the other hand, proceeds from a theophanic sense of the universe of being, which leaves no room for such possibilities. For though the coherence of theophanies postulates an essential unity of being, one cannot negate the diversity and plurality of theophanies without denying the manifestation of this One Being to Himself and in His creatures. As Corbin sagaciously notes, to comprehend that diversity, plurality, and differentiation are constitutive of the unity of the one true being is to escape the “unilateral monotheism” that “destroys the transparency of symbols, and succumbs to the very idolatry it denounces.” 30. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §217, pp. 171–172. Compare ibid., §191, p. 123:

Notes  —  30 6 Ontologically, I wonder if one can go further than Heidegger, namely, to say that “truth” is the openness of error; it is of the essence of the realm of error, of brokenness, of disequilibrium to be open to truth, atonement, equilibrium. If the absolute would “exist” nothing else could exist. However, the “wrong” of our existence is at once what is most precious, it is all that we have. That is why I object to mysticism. The separation from the absolute is our condition which must not so much be “overcome” as lived. Finally the “Seinsdenken” is as much an evasion of our condition as a blind enchainment in the profane. There are ways of “breaking bounds”, but this not “contemplatively” where there is no resistence but orgiastically where we concretely experience the limit by breaking it. 31. The view I espouse here should be considered in light of the double concealment of the divine according to the teaching of Naḥman of Bratslav as well as the disclosure of secrecy according to the hermeneutic of esotericism propagated by the Ḥabad-Lubavitch masters. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 325–326 n. 174. Particularly pertinent to the idea of brokenness, which I have elicited from Susan Taubes, is the statement attributed to Yiṣḥaq Meir Alter (1799–1866), the first rebbe of the Ger dynasty, in Siaḥ Sarfei Qodesh, volume 1 (Benei Beraq: Sifrayyati, 1989), Bein ha-Meṣarim, §6, p. 241. Commenting on the ruling by Joseph Karo in the Shulḥan Arukh, Oraḥ Ḥayyim, 1.3, “It is appropriate for everyone who fears heaven to be sorrowful and to be anxious about the destruction of the Temple,” the Ḥasidic master remarked that this should apply even more so to one who does not fear heaven, for to such a person is affixed the rabbinic teaching that in every generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt, it is considered as if it were destroyed (Palestinian Talmud, Yoma 1:1). From this dictum we can deduce that a person should not deceive himself by not feeling the loss of the Temple; such a person must be especially sorrowful and anxious that he lacks the sentiment of grief because this deficiency is a sign that he is on the outside until God has the compassion to bring him back into the community of Israel so that he will feel the loss together with his coreligionists and be joyous in their joy. Translated into the idiom of brokenness, the one who does not experience the fracture is the one who is most fractured. And yet, this severest of all experiences of rupture sheds light on the truth that being outside is merely another form of being inside, that darkness is not the absence of but rather the occlusion of a more radiant light awaiting to be manifest. 32. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §217, p. 172. 33. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, “Appearing in Fragility, the Fragility of Appearing,” in Ambiguity of the Sacred, edited by Jonna Bornemark and Hans Ruin (Huddinge: Södertörn University, 2012), p. 165. 34. I have translated into a post-theistic idiom the argument developed in the homily that begins ani le-dodi we-dodi li (Song of Songs 6:3) by Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1998), Deuteronomy, 32b-c. According to this Ḥasidic master, the progenitor of the Ḥabad-Lubavitch dynasty, physical exile is defined as a screen that blocks the light of the infinite. It is the task of every Jew—the name Israel, yisra’el, is decoded as sar el, the archon of divinity, which is linked more specifically to the light of infinity, the perpetuity of which is conveyed by the yod that completes the name—to search for that

Notes ­ —  30 7 light in the place of exile, an idea buttressed by the scriptural admonition u-viqqashtem mi-sham et yhwh eloheikha, “from there you will seek the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 4:29). Expounding these words, Shneur Zalman taught, There is someone who is in the aspect of loss [aveidah] in relation to him and in the aspect of exile. And thus it says “you will seek,” for you must seek and search, and there is no searching except for a loss, that is, a thing that is lost in relation to him in the aspect of exile, which is the spark of divinity . . . . And thus the verse says “from there you will seek” [u-viqqashtem mi-sham], precisely “from there” [mi-sham], for just as it is not possible to search for a loss and to find it except in the place that it was lost, so one will not attain the light of the countenance of the Lord . . . except after a search that begins in the place that it was lost to him. The goal of the spiritual path is to return the lost object, the spark of divinity that is in the soul of the Jew, to its source. The homology between the divine and the human— embodied ideally in the Jewish people according to the kabbalistic anthropology appropriated by the Ḥabad masters—is such that by redeeming oneself, one redeems God, and by redeeming God, one redeems oneself. Despite the efforts of some scholars and contemporary Lubavitchers to narrow the ontological divide separating Jew and nonJew—often by arguing that the scriptural notion of the divine image by which Adam was created is to be applied as well to Gentiles—the ethnocentrism of Ḥabad teaching cannot be denied. See Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 224–264; idem, “To Distinguish Israel and the Nations: E Pluribus Unum and Isaac Hutner’s Appropriation of Kabbalistic Anthropology,” in Kabbalah in America: Ancient Lore in the New World, edited by Brian Ogren (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 331–332 n. 67. I do not deny that the possibility of untying the ethnocentric knot can be elicited from Ḥabad texts, but to bring that potential to fruition would require an undoing of the axiological scaffold that sustains the social fabric of Lubavitch communities. 35. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §217, p. 172. 36. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 43 (idem, Also sprach Zarathustra, p. 75): “Change of values—that is the change of creators. Whoever must be a creator always annihilates.” And ibid., p. 90 (Also sprach Zarathustra, p. 149): “And whoever must be a creator in good and evil—truly, he must first be an annihilator and break values.” For a useful review of the Romantic background of Nietzsche’s aesthetic, see George Mills Harper, “The Creator as Destroyer: Nietzschean Morality in Yeats’s Where There Is Nothing,” Colby Library Quarterly 15 (1979): 114–125. See Susan’s remark about assiduously reading Nietzsche and offering her criticism of his doctrine of the will and the Übermensch in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §73, pp. 174–175, cited in ch. 4 at n. 5. And compare Susan’s letter to Jacob written on July 17, 1954, preserved in the personal archives of Shmuel Hugo Bergmann in the National Library of Israel, cited by Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 285, where she says that she was “trying to weave together some threads of Blake and Nietzsche,—and my own experience.” 37. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §217, p. 172. Part of this passage is repeated in ch. 3 at n. 274.

Notes  —  30 8 38. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §86, p. 200 (emphasis in original). 39. As noted by Pareigis, ibid., p. 201 n. 2. 40. Compare the interpretation of Hölderlin’s poetic statement in Martin Heidegger, Was Heißt Denken? [GA 8] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), p. 22; idem, What Is Called Thinking?, translated by Fred W. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, introduction by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 20–21: We are concerned here with the line “Who has most deeply thought, loves what is most alive.” It is all too easy in this line to overlook the truly telling and thus sustaining words, the verbs. . . . Standing in the closest vicinity, the two verbs “thought” and “loves” form the center of the line. Inclination reposes in thinking. . . . What the line tells we can fathom only when we are capable of thinking. And see Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken” [GA 52] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), p. 146; idem, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), p. 124: The holy, however, is the highest. For this reason, reflection [Besinnen] must be of a higher kind and stem from a thinking whose origin is itself in keeping with the holy that is to come into the word and to presentation [das ins Wort und zur Darstellung kommen soll]. Hölderlin knows of this necessity of such higher reflection and of its origin. 41. For the Greek text and English rendering, see Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 74–75, and the exposition on pp. 240–241. The Heraclitean dictum is cited by Susan in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §2, p. 18. See ch. 3 at n. 64, and compare the interpretation of this statement in Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heraclitus Studies,” in The Presocratics After Heidegger, edited by David C. Jacobs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 215–216. 42. For citation and analysis of some of the relevant texts wherein this distinction is made, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 11–13, 40, 55 n. 102, 265. 43. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §86, p. 200: “Auf dem Wege der durch das Nichts, jenes heilig-öffentliche Geheimnis führt, ist auf und ab nicht das ‘Gleiche’ aber das Selbe, es ist ein Weg des Selbst” (emphasis in original). 44. Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, translated with a preface by David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 193 (emphasis in original); idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, with an afterword by Martin Treml (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2007), p. 257. Part of the passage is cited by Pareigis in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §2, p. 19 n. 5. 45. Wolfson, Suffering Time, pp. 65, 119, 128, 243, 399. 46. I have taken the liberty here to recapitulate my language in Wolfson, Giving, p. 208. 47. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §12, p. 44. 48. The other time that Susan used the expression “good jew” is in a letter to Jacob from October 27, 1950, ibid., §24, p. 70. Responding to a letter from Jacob’s mother, which

Notes ­ —  30 9 irritated her, Susan wrote, “I was on the way of becoming a good jew but such letters bring me back in my old wrath.” 49. Ibid., §17, p. 58. See ibid., §105, p. 227, cited in ch. 3 at n. 116. 50. Ibid., §23, p. 69. Regarding the term “mythologic,” see the comment of Susan cited in ch. 5 n. 67. 51. See the passage cited in the Introduction at n. 112. 52. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §73, p. 175. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., §14, p. 50. 55. Compare ibid., §8, p. 36, where Susan wrote to Jacob, “Go my dear to the services where there are pious people. And try to pray from your own flesh.” In this context, the term “service” denotes public prayer, but suggestively, Susan advised Jacob that his worship should be embodied from his own flesh. This is another illustration of the privileging of the somatic in Susan’s understanding of ritual and spiritual practice. 56. Ibid., §71, pp. 172–173. 57. Ibid., §19, p. 60. 58. Ibid., §29, p. 81. 59. Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, p. 57. There are various translations of this interview, but I have chosen to cite this one as we are apprised that the text was corrected using Heidegger’s own copy (p. 41). I have cited from the original German reprinted in Heidegger, Reden, p. 671. 60. Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, p. 58; Heidegger, Reden, p. 673. 61. See citation and analysis of relevant texts in ch. 4 of this volume. 62. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §62, p. 156. 63. Compare Susan’s description of Romano Guardini’s Theologische Gebete (1944) in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §21, p. 64: Guardini Theol. Gebete—was sind das für Gebete! They are sermons (as boring as Jewish sermons) loaded with bloodless divine appellations, Lord, Allmighty [sic], Creator of All, Merciful etc. etc. words that have become meaningless to me, empty bombast and irrelevant to the Holy that shines not from an “All-” but from the mystery of the “this” and better than praising the “Allmighty” is to praise a leaf or any moment of grace. Again, no presence: all either was or will be done (emphasis in original). 64. Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, p. 57; Heidegger, Reden, p. 672. 65. Martin Heidegger, “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: The Spiegel Interview (1966),” translated by William J. Richardson, S.J., in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, edited by Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), p. 67 n. 27. Consider my own formulation in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 147: The term god, for Heidegger, is a mythopoetic way of naming both the spatial void, marked by the vacillation between proximity and aloofness, and the temporal expanse, marked by the fluctuation between past and future. Those who would try to elicit from Heidegger an argument for the revitalization of theology are at an even greater distance from the gods to whom one can be attached only by being detached.

Notes  —  310 66. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §112, pp. 237–238. 67. Susan Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil,” PhD dissertation, Radcliffe College, 1956, p. 346. 68. Ibid., p. 347. 69. Ibid., p. 348. See ibid., pp. 358–360, where Susan challenges Tillich’s characterization of theology as “the translation of Biblical revelation into the contemporary situation” on the grounds that the philological study of the Bible discloses that the text of Biblical revelation itself consists of layers upon layers of such translations. . . . Biblical theology is possible only on the basis of a spiritual-eschatological interpretation of the text: the Biblical authors themselves set the example for such exegeses. . . . Actually, the philological method brings about the emancipation of primary myths and symbols from the mesh of allegorization and doctrinal constructions. . . . Philology brings about a purification of religious motifs, it is a kind of “negative theology” which breaks down rationalizations and serves as a catalyst for the emergence of archetypal structures in which the encounter between man and the divine can again become manifest. 70. Ibid., pp. 350–351. 71. Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” p. 281. 72. The reference is to Saint-John Perse, Exile and Other Poems (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), p. 69. 73. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §71, p. 170. 74. Ibid., pp. 171–172. 75. Here it is worth considering the following comment in Taubes, Divorcing, p. 113: As long as I lived in my parents’ home, I participated in the performance of several rituals. My father knew how I felt about them. Later on, as an analyst, I wrote several papers on Jewish rituals and have shown that every ritual was a tremendous step forward in harnessing antisocial drives; but that now we can know their meaning and have control by knowing what they are. I do not oppose those who observe them, who obey. 76. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §94, p. 211. 77. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §170, p. 87. On Susan’s disparagement of Paul in contrast to Jacob’s desire to emulate his theological heresy and antinomianism, see Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, p. 171. 78. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §170, p. 87. 79. Ibid., §193, p. 128. 80. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 368. 81. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §193, p. 128. 82. F. W. Beare, “The Sabbath Was Made for Man?,” Journal of Biblical Literature 79 (1960): 130–136; Arland J. Hultgren, “The Formation of the Sabbath Pericope in Mark 2:23–28,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972): 38–43; John P. Meier, “The Historical Jesus and the Plucking of the Grain on the Sabbath,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 66 (2004): 561–581, and see the copious list of other scholarly references on pp. 562–563 n. 3; idem, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, volume 4: Law and Love (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 280–293.

Notes ­ —  311 83. Meier, A Marginal Jew, pp. 281–282; Elliot R. Wolfson, “Inscribed in the Book of the Living: Gospel of Truth and Jewish Christology,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007): 262 n. 86; Yishai Kiel and Prods Oktor Skjærvø, “‘The Sabbath Was Made for Humankind’: A Rabbinic and Christian Principle in Its Iranian Context,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 25 (2011): 1–18. 84. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §207, p. 155. 85. Ibid., §232, p. 205. Compare ibid., §229, pp. 197–198: And Paul! why did he travel so much? What did he want with the world, Romans, Corinthians, Galatians etc.? The crisis within the law was a jewish affair—why drag in people who were outside of the law? A plan for “international religion”—by making the whole world a little jewish + the jews a little less jewish? A tedious story. But so it is. The god who taught the spider how to spin and who put colors in the tail of the paradise bird also taught Paul how to lie and put the idea of a chosen people in the semites’ head. 86. Ibid., §156, p. 64. The continuation of this passage is cited in ch. 2 at n. 80. Camus is criticized in Susan’s undated letter to Jacob in ibid., §155, pp. 59–61, and see Pareigis, Susan Taubes, pp. 203–204. 87. See Susan Taubes, “Review of L’Homme Révolté by Albert Camus,” Iyyun 3 (1952): 173–175 (Hebrew). The publication is credited to Shoshannah Taubes, but for the sake of consistency I have utilized her English name. On the importance of this work of Camus, see Susan’s recommendation to Jacob in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §150, p. 53: “I think I should send you Camus’ L’homme Révolté it has made a revolution in my soul; it is indispensible [sic] for the subject of ‘political theology’—at last a comprehensive and penetrating analysis of the origins of the ‘crisis’ written not by a Jesuit fox or Nandaist liberal but by a man who starts with tabula rasa.” 88. The indexicality of the universal by the particular underlies Susan’s comment in the letter to Jacob written on October 24, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §21, p. 65: But at least our generation can see that the end of “universalism” hastened by television, radio, photo-print (the newest, maybe in 10 years every man will be able to carry the Harvard library in his pocket) H. Bomb etc. etc. is not universal utopia and angel-hood but rather the mountain of rubbish on which the art, and the religion and the knowledge which sought to please all, enlighten all and save all, shall smash itself, and our tower of Babel shall crumble. So be it. See also the description of the situation in the United States in ibid., §23, pp. 68–69: “I am sick of the ‘universalism’ flourishing here, ‘one world[’], ‘tolerance’ ‘breaking down barriers’ ‘humanity standing before catastrophy’ white red witch-hunt and bomb production is in full process. One feels the great impotence in the silence and normalcy of the daily life.” 89. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §267, p. 258. 90. Albert Camus, L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 50; idem, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, with a foreword by Sir Herbert Read, translated by Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 32.

Notes  —  312 91. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §267, pp. 258–259. 92. Ibid., p. 259. For the continuation of this passage, see ch. 2 at n. 79. 93. Ibid., §267, p. 259. 94. Ibid., §217, p. 172. 95. See ibid., §229, p. 197: “From a historical point of view I am more struck by the ‘mysterium’ of Christianity than the mysterium Judaicum. (The survival of Judaism for the past two thousand years belongs to the nature of the Christian farce.)” On Susan’s suspicion of the category of inwardness, see text cited above at n. 35. Also pertinent here is Sophie’s comment about Ezra in Taubes, Divorcing, p. 73: “He loves public occasions—a wedding, a funeral, circumcision, inaugural address or political rally—who cares, as long as it is an occasion. There never were enough occasions for poor Ezra. As he confessed to me sadly, but for the fact that he was born a Jew he would have become Pope.” 96. Regrettably, in a number of letters, we find Susan referring to herself as stupid. See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §156, p. 66 (cited below at n. 216); §237, p. 214. 97. Consider Susan’s suggestion to Jacob in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §1, p. 16: “I want you to be a priest, and I think you must withdraw very far from politics and people in the mass and find your own way with God because otherwise you have no right to talk to the people.” See also her comment in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §193, p. 127, cited in ch. 5 at n. 6. 98. Compare Susan’s observation that we experience the limit by breaking it in the letter cited above, n. 30. The logic of my argument and the rhetoric by which I present it reflect the observation of Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 252, that “philosophy, in completing itself, could both include within itself and anticipate all the figures of its beyond, all the forms and resources of its exterior; and could do so in order to keep these forms and resources close to itself by simply taking hold of their enunciation.” 99. Deuteronomy 14:21. 100. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §15, p. 53. 101. On the use of the term “hypernomianism” to explain the status of the law in Sabbatian thought, as opposed to the term “antinomianism” adopted by many scholars following the lead of Scholem, see Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, pp. 277–284; idem, “Hypernomian Piety and the Mystical Rationale of the Commandments in Nathan of Gaza’s Sefer Haberiya,” El Prezente: Journal for Sephardic Studies 12–13 (2018–2019): 90–98. To the sources discussed in my previous publications, see also the analysis of the motif of redemption through sin in Amir Engel, Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 141–147. Patrick B. Koch, Human Self-Perfection: A Re-Assessment of Kabbalistic Musar-Literature of Sixteenth-Century Safed (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2015), p. 203, and Miguel Vatter, Living Law: Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 146 n. 45, both argue that what I have called “hypernomianism” to mark the suspension of the law for the sake of its fulfilment—in Vatter’s terminology “affirmative nihilism” (Living

Notes ­ —  313 Law, pp. 161–162, 179–180, 181, 183)—is found already in Scholem, but neither scholar has shown any place in Scholem’s oeuvre where he made use of that precise language. The debate is not simply a pedantic terminological squabble; it impinges rather on the substance of the phenomenon of the messianic Torah as the law that trespasses and thereby sustains the law. The category of the hypernomian allows one to account for both the abrogation of the law, as we find in some radical forms of Sabbatianism and Frankism, and the fanatical observance of the law, as we find in some forms of Ḥasidism such as Izbica-Radzin and Ḥabad. Regarding the former, see Shaul Magid, Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica and Radzin Hasidism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), pp. 205–248, and regarding the latter, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 161–199. 102. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §112, pp. 234–235. 103. Ibid., §9, pp. 37–38, cited in ch. 4 at n. 147. 104. Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, translated by Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), pp. 105–106. 105. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §82, p. 190. Compare Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §172, p. 91: “Only a language which is sheer love and which has renounced all coercion all claim to control the object can speak the absolute and the eternal.” Susan restated this point in her doctoral thesis. See Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 346: Religion postulates the division between sacred and profane. The language of religion is sacred language, the language of liturgy, in cultic prayer and ritual and it presupposes a confrontation with sacred or numenous powers. The language of liturgy is not the language of logical—or even commonsense profane discourse. The words in which men express their encounter with the holy and relate its deeds, have no cognitive or even emotional value: they are words spoken in the presence and under the power of the holy (emphasis in original). 106. In addition to the monograph of Huizinga mentioned by Susan (see below, n. 108), consider the phenomenological study by Eugen Fink, Play as Symbol of the World and Other Writings, translated by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), and the essay by Samuel Heidepriem, “Free Play in German Idealism and Poststructuralism,” in Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play Around 1800, edited by Edgar Landgraf and Elliott Schreiber (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2020), pp. 48–71, and in the same volume the essay by Brian Tucker, “Playing with Words in Early German Romanticism,” pp. 260–281. See as well the monograph by David L. Miller, Gods and Games: Toward a Theology of Play (New York: World Publishing, 1969). Miller’s analysis of religion from the vantage point of play is a useful lens through which to examine the perspective of Susan Taubes. Also relevant to appreciating the role of dramaturgy in Susan’s aesthetical sensibility is the study by Aldo Tassi, “Philosophy and Theatre,” International Philosophical Quarterly 38 (1998): 43–54. Mention should be made as well of Derrida’s use of play to depict the nature of writing. The unpredictability of playfulness is sharply distinguished from a game, which is structured by rules. See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, translation, with an introduction

Notes  —  314 and additional notes, by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 156–171, and compare the essay “Structure, Sign and Play on the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in idem, Writing and Difference, pp. 278–293. Finally, I would say that Susan’s reflections on play and the dramatological nature of reality should be distinguished from the theatricality attributed to Jacob Taubes, which was more deceptive and diabolical in nature. See Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, pp. 449–451. 107. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §219, p. 176: “Aber wir werden mit aesth. ‘Spiel’ nicht um den letzten heiligen ‘Ernst’ herum kommen. Das alles ist nur Vorbereitung für das Heilige das im Schatten wächst.” 108. For the English translation, see Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949). 109. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §226, p. 191. As Pareigis explains, ibid., p. 193 n. 4, Susan was referring to Georges Bataille, “Sommes-nous là pour jouer ou pour être sérieux?” The essay was published in two parts in Critique 49 (June 1951): 512–522, and in Critique 51–52 (August–September 1951): 734–748. It is of interest in this context to consider the following passage from A Lament for Julia, which I cite from the German translation in Susan Taubes, Prosaschriften, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis, translated by Werner Richter (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), p. 116: Ich werde endlos veränderlich sein, widerstreitende Rollen übernehmen, und schließlich werde ich verschwinden und sie sich selbst überlassen, wovon niemand je erfahren wird. Ich verspürte die eigenartige Zufriedenheit jenes japanischen Schauspielers, der von frühester Kindheit an zum Frauendarsteller abgerichtet worden ist. Bei Julia fühlte ich mich immer wie ein kindlicher Mime, der eine weibliche Rolle spielt. Tat ich das, um anderen zu gefallen? Was ich wollte, war natürlich, den Akt der Täuschung zu vollziehen. Aber nicht in erster Linie, um andere zu täuschen. Es war schlicht eine Notwendigkeit. . . . Aber ich kann nicht sicher sein, ob es Julia ist, die da außer Kontrolle gerät, oder nicht vielmehr ich. Kaum habe ich mir die Illusion geschaffen, möchte ich mich in der Realität aalen. For the gnostic resonance of the need to perform the act of deception expressed in this passage, see the analysis in ch. 3 at nn. 76–77. In the continuation, Prosaschriften, pp. 116– 118, Susan described the mercurial nature of Julia’s physical image (körperlichen Abbild), clothed in multiple masks, as “a penumbra of incoherent sensations” (einem Halbschatten zusammenhangloser Empfindungen), a kind of madness (Wahnsinn) and becoming monstrous (wenn sie monströs wird), whence she drew the conclusion, “I am real and they are only appearances” (Ich bin real und sie nur Erscheinung), a proposition predicated on the overcoming of the metaphysical distinction between reality and appearance and the collapse of the former into the latter. On the blurring of the line between fact and fiction, compare ibid., p. 123: Das Licht ist gedämpft zu Beginn jener ersten Szene; der Vorhang hebt sich, während die Bühne noch in Dunkel getaucht ist. Erst gegen Ende des ersten Akts oder am Anfang des zweiten wurde mir mit leisem Unbehagen klar, dass sich hier ein Theaterstück abspielte.

Notes ­ —  315 See ibid., p. 132: “Doch ich ging damals so sehr in meinen verschiedenen Rollen auf, dass ich gar keine deutliche Vorstellung von Julias Erscheinung habe.” Ibid., p. 150: Ich spreche ungern über Julias Abwesenheiten. Wenn ich allein bin, möchte ich mich verstecken. Doch ich muss für Julia einspringen; ihr Gesicht aufsetzen, ihre Stimme erzeugen. Auf einmal bin ich bloßgestellt. Julia hat sich in eine fromme Illusion verflüchtigt. Nie hat jemand Julias Lächeln aufgesetzt, die Maske des Fleisches. And ibid., p. 167: “Julia hatte ihre Chance bekommen. Aber was war mit mir? Ich, hinter den Masken von Julia?” See ch. 5 at n. 208. The literary pretense of the novella is that the voice of the narrator bears the split identity of herself and Julia. See Pareigis, Susan Taubes, pp. 57–58, 189–190, 350–351. Especially noteworthy is the comment from Susan’s notes in progress from February 1966, cited by Pareigis on p. 350: “Thematically, the preoccupation with identity and self definition impells [sic] the work. In Lament for Julia this problem is worked out in an abstract comedy and dramatized through the narrator’s self-division into ‘I’ and ‘Julia.’” See ch. 4 n. 86. The obscuring of identity is epitomized in the narrator’s statement that she lives with and through Julia, mysteriously grafted onto Julia, to the point that she should be considered a parasite of Julia. See Taubes, Prosaschriften, p. 124: “Denn es kam die Zeit, da ich mich mit der Tatsache Julia abgefunden hatte, dass ich mit und durch Julia lebte, geheimnisvoll auf Julia aufgepfropft, sozusagen ein Parasit auf Julia.” Compare ibid., p. 168: Nicht mehr als ein Körper wurde sie für mich, ein potenzieller Kadaver, der noch dahinvegetierte, sich in seinen brackigen Säften wälzte; dessen einzige Daseinsberechtigung in meiner unnachgiebigen, anspruchsvollen, körperlosen Gegenwart bestand, um mir als Wirt zu dienen, als Vorratskammer für den fürstlichen Parasiten, als den ich mich gerne sah. Concerning the narrator’s lack of identity or even a name apart from Julia, see ibid., p. 170: “Von jetzt an würde ich ich sein, nicht sie. Aber was war ich? Ich hatte ja nicht einmal einen Namen. Nicht dass ich begierig darauf war, Julia Klopps genannt zu werden, sondern mit meinem eigenen Namen.” On the merging of the two identities and the difficulty of distinguishing historical memory and imaginary confabulation of the past, compare ibid., p. 130–131: Denn ich erinnere mich an Augenblicke aus Julias Sommern, als wären es meine.  .  .  . Meine und doch nicht meine. . . . Nur wenn mir die Vergangenheit ohne Rückgriff auf die Erinnerung gehörte, wie sie nur Gott gehören kann, konnte Julia mir gehören. Denn sie ging mir immer wieder verloren, ihre Augenblicke zerrieben in den Mühlen meiner tagtäglichen Revisionen. . . . Wieder einmal stelle ich eine dieser Fiktionen zusammen, meine Leben der Julia. In der Hoffnung, dabei auf ein verborgenes Detail zu stoßen. Oder weil es meine einzige Möglichkeit ist, mit Julia zusammen zu sein. Oder um mich von Julia zu läutern. Ein weiteres Phantom aus dem versiegelten Schrein ihrer Gegenwart heraufzubeschwören. Compare p. 138:

Notes  —  316 Wenn es doch Gott gefallen hätte, meinen Auftrag zu besiegeln, dann wäre alles anders gekommen. Julia wäre zu Julia geworden, und ich hätte nicht versucht, durch Julia zu leben. Nein, ich wäre zufrieden damit gewesen, ein Engel zu sein, mit einer netten Nische im Himmel, wohin ich jederzeit würde zurückkehren können, wo mein eigener Heiligenschein, Flügel, Harfe und Tunika auf mich warteten, nachdem ich meine Aufgabe bei Julia erfüllt hätte. And see p. 153: Ich wünschte Julia zu sein. So wirklich zu sein, wie ein Baum ist. . . . Mit mir als Ausbilder hätte sie eine große Schauspielerin werden können, eine Malerin, eine Tänzerin, eine Konzertpianistin. . . . Oder Schriftstellerin. Gab es je einen fruchtbareren Ideenquell als mich? Was für Geschichten hätten wir erfunden, Fabeln von Liebe und Betrug! Doch wozu mich auf die Künste beschränken? Sie hätte auch Forscherin werden können, Löwendompteurin, Gründerin einer neuen Sekte. Nichts war unmöglich, wenn ich hinter ihr stand. . . . Denn soweit ich wusste, war dies meine einzige Chance, in einer Frau zu sein. 110. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §226, p. 191. Pareigis, op. cit., p. 193 n. 6, provides the following example in the concluding paragraphs of the address in Heidegger, Reden, p. 117: “Aber wir wollen, daß unser Volk seinen geschichtlichen Auftrag erfüllt. Wir wollen uns selbst.” English translation in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, p. 13: “But we do will that our people fulfill its historical mission. We do will ourselves.” 111. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §226, p. 191. 112. Taubes, Prosaschriften, pp. 130, 133, 135. The narrator is also designated with a touch of irony as Julia’s Schutzengel, that is, guardian angel. See ibid., p. 138 and compare p. 144. 113. Translated from the German translation in ibid., p. 133: “Das Verbotene an unserer Beziehung verstärkte nur noch deren Geruch von Heiligkeit. Ich musste geheim bleiben, nicht aus Scham, sondern aus Vorsicht. Wie bei manch seltenem Juwel, das den begierigen Blicken der Welt zur Schau zu stellen allzu gewagt wäre, zog ich die Verborgenheit vor.” On p. 141, the narrator describes herself as the “jealous husband” (eifersüchtigem Ehemann) from whom Julia could not keep any secrets. The masculine nature of Julia’s alter ego is implied in other passages; for example, see ibid., p. 154. On the narrator’s confession of her unfaithfulness to Julia and her love for others, especially her infatuation with a character named Caroline, see ibid., pp. 139–140. On the blurring of the line between blessedness and sensuality as it pertained to the possibility of viewing Julia as a mystic, see ibid., p. 150: “Ich wusste nicht, was ich mit Julias Fähigkeit, sich in Dingen buchstäblich aufzulösen, anfangen sollte. War das ein Zustand der Gesegnetheit oder von krasser Sinnlichkeit? War sie eine Mystikerin? Ich versuchte sie mit den Werken des Dionysius Areopagita vertraut zu machen. Vergeblich.” On the sacred nature of Julia and the taboo against writing about her as a mundane object, compare ibid., pp. 158–159. 114. Ibid., p. 160. See as well p. 161, where the narrator used the word “rape” in conjunction with her fantasies about Julia. Compare a similar sentiment expressed by the

Notes ­ —  317 personification of Death to his beloved Mary Ann in Susan’s “The Last Dance,” translated into German in Taubes, Prosaschriften, p. 108: “Allmählich glaube ich, du bist die Sorte Frau, die mit Gewalt genommen werden will. Ich aber bin ein scheuer und sanftmütiger Liebhaber.” 115. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, translated by Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), p. 24. On death and the simulation of self-annihilation in Bataille, see Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 46–47, 73–74, 91. 116. Bataille, Erotism, p. 107. It is of interest to consider here the analogy that Jacob made in his letter to Susan from January 14, 1952, between transgression and song as two modalities of existence. See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §145, p. 43: “Sünde ist eine totale Interpretation der Existenz. . . . Vielleicht aber ist Gesang auch ein Dasein. Das Wort könnte ja ‘Fleisch’ werden: alles dreht sich um die Inkarnation” (emphasis in original). 117. Bataille, Erotism, p. 65. Bataille’s idea of sacred eros, excess, and transgression has been discussed by many scholars. I offer a modest sampling of relevant sources: Rocco Ronchi, “Une ontologie de l’excès,” Lignes 1 (2000): 107–124; Melissa M. Russell, “Transgression, Excess and the Sacred: Bataille’s Erotic in Sade,” in Desire, Performance and Classification: Critical Perspectives on the Erotic, edited by Jessica R. Pfeffer (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013), pp. 37–46; Céline Righi, “New Technologies’ Promise to the Self and the Becoming of the Sacred: Insights from Georges Bataille’s Concept of Transgression,” in Religion in Motion: Rethinking Religion, Knowledge and Discourse in a Globalizing World, edited by Julian Hensold, Jordan Kynes, Phillip Öhlmann, Vanessa Rau, Rosa Coco Schinagl, and Adela Taleb (Cham: Springer, 2020), pp. 79–99. See also my brief comments in Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 297. The theme of eroticism, sexuality, and the problem of inner experience in Bataille is discussed by Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 36–42. On Susan’s possible visit with Bataille, see her letter to Jacob from March 8, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §195, p. 134: “Maybe I’ll go and see George Bataille in Orleans who is ‘preoccupied’ with the ‘sacré’ i.e. he has withdrawn into meditation but one can see him.” In another letter, ibid., §241, p. 219, Susan mentioned going to hear Bataille’s lectures at the Collège Philosophique (May 8–9, 1952) on the topic l’enseignement de la mort. She summarized the first lecture as follows: His face says much more than his words. He spoke incoherently (I never saw a Frenchman yet who lacked lucidity!) was silent often during the lecture; strange man; he began speaking of death in tragedy then trailed off on the subject of la mort de la Pensée + contrasted the visionary state of the Christian mystics with the experience of the nothing. Some thoughts similar to what G. Lukacs says in his essay on tragedy: on the negation of the going on of the world, + the continuation of life. It is in the sense in which life “stops” in a tragedy or in a mystical vision that we must think of death. And yet the lie in tragedy + mysticism is that life does go on. 118. Bataille, Erotism, pp. 104–105: Primary anguish bound up with sexual disturbance signifies death. The violence of this

Notes  —  318 disturbance reopens in the mind of the man experiencing it, who also knows what death is, the abyss that death was once revealed. The violence of death and sexual violence, when they are linked together, have this dual significance. . . . Mortal anguish does not necessarily make for sensual pleasure, but that pleasure is more deeply felt during mortal anguish. 119. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 116. 120. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97b. On the rabbinic view that Esther was married to Mordecai, see Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 13b. 121. Babylonian Talmud, Nazir 23b; Horayot 10b. 122. Babylonian Talmud, Nazir 23b. In the parallel version of this teaching preserved in Babylonian Talmud, Horayot 10b, the textual emendation of the dictum of Naḥman ben Isaac is missing. 123. Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, Qin’at ha-Shem Ṣeva’ot, in Ginze Ramḥal, second edition, edited by Ḥayyim Friedlander (Benei Beraq: Sifrayyati, 1984), pp. 95–96. 124. Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel, “‘Gedolah Aveirah Lishmah’: Mothers of the Davidic Dynasty, Feminine Seduction and the Development of Messianic Thought, from Rabbinic Literature to R. Moshe Haim Luzzatto,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues 24 (2013): 38; idem, Holiness and Transgression: Mothers of the Messiah in the Jewish Myth (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2014), p. 146 (Hebrew). 125. Luzzatto, Qin’at ha-Shem Ṣeva’ot, p. 96. 126. On Luzzatto’s relation to Sabbatianism, see the list of scholarly references cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Tiqqun ha-Shekhinah: Redemption and the Overcoming of Gender Dimorphism in the Messianic Kabbalah of Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto,” History of Religions 36 (1997): 292–293 n. 9, to which we can add Jonathan Garb, Kabbalist in the Heart of the Storm: R. Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2014), pp. 57–59, 78–80, 93–95, 125, 129, 153–171 (Hebrew). 127. Luzzatto, Qin’at ha-Shem Ṣeva’ot, p. 98. 128. Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 47b; Sukkah 30a; Bava Qama 94a. 129. Luzzatto, Qin’at ha-Shem Ṣeva’ot, pp. 96–97. 130. Kaniel, “‘Gedolah Aveirah Lishmah,’” pp. 38–41; idem, Holiness and Transgression, pp. 146–150. 131. Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 103b; Avodah Zarah 22b; Shabbat 146a. 132. Luzzatto, Qin’at ha-Shem Ṣeva’ot, pp. 96–97. 133. I am here responding critically to the position championed by Kaniel. See references cited above, n. 130. I will not repeat here texts from Luzzatto that I have discussed in previous publications, which undermine Kaniel’s interpretation, but I will mention one source that I have not analyzed heretofore, the commentary on Judges by Moses David Valle, a colleague and member of Luzzatto’s circle in eighteenth-century Padua. See Moses David Valle, Or Zaru‘a: Be’ur Sefer Shofṭim (Jerusalem: Joseph Spinner, 1998), pp. 177–179. Commenting on “Deliverance ceased, ceased in Israel, until you arose, O Deborah, arose, O mother, in Israel” (Judges 5:7), Valle wrote: At first all the channels were impassable because of the foreskin that obstructs, and now by means of the rectification [tiqqun] that which was closed has been opened . . . And with

Notes ­ —  319 respect to the matter of the doubling [of the word “arose,” qamti, in the verse] “until you arose, O Deborah, arose, O mother,” the secret is that Deborah corresponds to Malkhut, and her arising was through the rectification of Yesod. . . . Thus, as I have already explained above, Deborah is the aspect of Malkhut in the secret of speech [be-sod ha-dibbur]. When she was impure in her fringes, she was in the secret of the “mute righteousness” [elem ṣedeq] (Psalms 58:2), which is the aspect of sleep and diminution, as is known. But now that all the external forces have already been removed from her, therefore she is awakened like a man that is awakened from his sleep. The matter concerns the perfection between Deborah above, which is the aspect of Malkhut, and Deborah below, who was verily a prophetess, for the two of them were aroused to give praise and adoration to the aspect of augmentation that caused their salvation and planted their redemption. And this is the reason for the doubling of what is said “Awake, awake, O Deborah! Awake, awake, strike up the chant” (Judges 5:12). Because the augmentation itself was aroused, it caused the elevation of Yesod, and it was given the power to take out from the hand of the external forces the holy sparks that were previously stolen from it in the time of diminution. Therefore, it is written “Arise, O Barak, take your captives, O son of Avinoam” (ibid). “Arise, O Barak,” to allude to the aforementioned elevation of Yesod. A thorough analysis of the gender symbolism in Valle’s massive corpus is surely warranted, and perhaps I will provide such a study in the future, but for my more limited purposes here what I have cited is sufficient to make the point that the agency accorded to the female—in this case the figure of the prophetess Deborah—is still valorized from within an androcentric and phallocentric worldview. The role of Deborah in bringing about the redemption of the people of Israel is specularized through the prism of her stimulating the phallic potency, represented by Barak, an augmentation (gadlut) that lead to the rectification of the foundation (tiqqun ha-yesod) and the restoration of the holy sparks to this source whence they were confiscated in the time of diminution (qaṭnut), the blocking of the conduits depicted as the foreskin (orlah) covering the covenant (berit) of the membrum virile. 134. For discussion of the subordination of medieval women and their “putative passivity and malleability” rendering them as appropriate sites of divine agency, see the chapter on “Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography” in Amy Hollywood, Acute Melancholy and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 117–127. Relevant here as well is Susan’s referring to herself as a “sacrificial beast” when succumbing to the sexual advances of J.C. as described in the letter from November 12, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950– 1951, §34, p. 96, cited below in n. 180. To elucidate the logic of my argument, consider the statement of Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, introduction and postscript by Gustave Thibon, translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 179: “The master is the slave of the slave in the sense that the slave makes the master” (emphasis in original). Insofar as there could be no master without the slave, the latter is empowered vis-à-vis the former. Nevertheless, the master is still the master and the slave is still the slave, and hence the hierarchy is preserved. My point is corroborated in the following passage in Weil’s “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,” in Simone Weil: An Anthology, edited and introduced by Siân Miles (New York: Grove Press, 1986), p. 169:

Notes  —  32 0 And what does it take to make the slave weep? The misfortune of his master, his oppressor, despoiler, pillager, of the man who laid waste his town and killed his dear ones under his very eyes. This man suffers or dies; then the slave’s tears come. And really why not? This is for him the only occasion on which tears are permitted, are, indeed, required. A slave will always cry whenever he can do so with impunity—his situation keeps tears on tap for him. . . . Since the slave has no licence to express anything except what is pleasing to his master, it follows that the only emotion that can touch or enliven him a little, that can reach him in the desolation of his life, is the emotion of love for his master. The name of the author of the essay, originally published as “L’Ilaide ou le poème de la force,” Cahiers du Sud 19 (December 1940–January 1941), is given as Emile Novis, a pseudonym made up of the letters of Simone Weil’s name. 135. I draw here from the discussion of the genealogy of masochism in Nikolaus Largier, Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), pp. 110–113. 136. Luzzatto, Qin’at ha-Shem Ṣeva’ot, p. 97. On the kabbalistic theme of giving the devil its due, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Light Through Darkness: The Ideal of Human Perfection in the Zohar,” Harvard Theological Review 81 (1988): 87–88. 137. Luzzatto, Qin’at ha-Shem Ṣeva’ot, p. 98. 138. Compare Susan’s comment about Gerda Seligson in the letter to Jacob from November 18, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §37, p. 104: “You see, she is a better jew than your ‘schmalzige’ beards and she drives on Sabbath and last night all the guests were smoking and the conversation was not all vanity.” It appears from the continuation of the letter that Susan viewed kabbalah as embracing the antinomian dimension of Judaism: “Cornford: ‘From Religion to Philosophy’ is excellent material for my Mythos + Logos. He dates the ‘death of the gods’ to the time of Homer and there are interesting discussions of the Olympian—versus the Mystery gods, who stand in an opposition somewhat similar to the Torah vs. the kaballa.” My notion of the hypernomian mitigates against the stark opposition between the law and the esoteric-mystical tradition. 139. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §112, p. 234. 140. Ibid., §112, p. 235. 141. Ibid. Pareigis, op. cit., p. 238 n. 2, assumes that Susan is paraphrasing from Jacob’s letter to Ernst Simon: “‘Entscheidung’ für das Gute [.  .  . ] bleibt blind—wie jede Entscheidung, die nicht aus der Erkenntnis der Totalität quillt. Weil die Entscheidung für das Gute (ohne Offenbarung) ebenso blind wie die Entscheidung für das Böse bleibt hat das gute ‘Werke’ gar keinen metaphysischen Vorteil dem bösen Werk gegenüber.” 142. Ibid., §112, p. 235. Another example to illustrate this principle would be incest. From a societal perspective, incest is clearly a heinous crime, but from the theological, and even more so mystical, perspective, in light of the relatedness of all beings, incest is legitimated as a narcissistic gesticulation that underscores the interconnectivity and unicity of everything. Regarding this theme in the kabbalistic tradition, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 160–162, 329, 499–500 n. 111, 500–501 n. 127, 501 n. 134, and the discussion in Leore Sachs-Shmueli, “The Rationale of the Negative Commandments by R. Joseph Hamadan: A Critical Edition and Study of Taboo in the Time of the Composition of the Zohar,” PhD

Notes ­ —  321 dissertation, Bar-Ilan University, 2018, volume 1, pp. 217–262 (Hebrew). See as well Leore Sachs-Shmueli, “‘The Secret of Incest’—Ms. Cambridge, Cambridge University Library Dd. 4.2.2,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 45 (2019): 49–78, and idem, “Maimonides’s Rationalization of the Incest Taboo, Its Reception in ThirteenthCentury Kabbalah, and Their Affinity to Aquinas,” Harvard Theological Review 114 (2021): 371–392. Compare the discussion of incest implied in the account of the creation of man and woman in the second chapter of Genesis in Michel Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh, volume 4 of The History of Sexuality, translated by Robert Hurley, edited and with a foreword by Frédéric Gros (New York: Pantheon Books, 2021), p. 200: It’s from man and his very flesh that he fashioned woman. Issuing from the same substance, Adam and Eve were substantially unifiable. And their descendants are still of the same substance. . . . In this relation to the original unity, from whence the human race came without ever leaving, incest plays two roles. Unavoidable at the beginning of time, it is valorized ontologically, since it brings back all individuals to the identity of one and the same substance. . . . God constructed mankind like a tree; and he gave it the same beauty as the great trees have: for all the branches, a single root. As scattered as men are today, by this root they remain united and combined. Blessed incest that makes us all relatives. But its prohibition today is not at odds with this first principle. Rather, it only follows from the latter and multiplies its benefits. . . . The primitive kinship tie is, as it were, reactualized with those who are not our immediate relations. Not being able to marry our sisters forces us to form ties with strangers; that is, to renew our ties with unknown relatives. 143. Taubes, Divorcing, p. 143. The fuller context is one in which Ezra enters the bathroom as Elaine is sitting on the toilet, and he proceeds to urinate in front of her. 144. Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 175. 145. Cited from Susan Taubes Archiv 12b, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, in Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 176. Susan returned to blurring the distinction between the holy and the profane, the revered and the blasphemous, in the following words spoken by Ezra about his erotic antics with Sophie in Divorcing, p. 139: I asked her to assume obscene positions. To crawl on all fours and lift her leg like a dog pissing; to bark, moo, bray, bleet, hoot—I wanted her to howl like a demon. I wanted her to be a sacred whore. She was magnificent in her moments of complete abasement. I confess I was not equal to the highest sacrilege. One night when she was performing the sacred office of fellatio I ordered her to say the Pater Noster in my arse hole. Or a Hail Mary at least. Instead she started bellowing the S’ma Yisrael up my bowels. I couldn’t go through with it. . . . She was a great woman. Sophie Blind remains my wife till the Messiah comes. . . . What has been joined in this world cannot be sundered in heaven or hell before the coming of the Messiah and Judgment. The vulgar language placed in the mouth of Ezra, the animality associated with human sexuality, and the submissiveness of Sophie, suggest that Susan came to view sex with Jacob as an assertion of androcentric power, and yet, she somewhat undermined the sexism in emphasizing that by assuming the role of the sacred whore, the woman obfuscates the

Notes  —  32 2 distinction between the untainted and the wanton. On obscenity as a feature of male sexual desire, see ibid., p. 51. The phallocentric and misogynistic perspective is articulated as well in A Lament for Julia. See Taubes, Prosaschriften, pp. 154–155. 146. See Norman J. Cohen, “Shekhinta ba-Galuta: A Midrashic Response to Destruction and Persecution,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 13 (1982): 147–159; Elliot R. Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology,” in Suffering Religion, edited by Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 101–107, and compare the studies of Abraham Joshua Heschel cited on pp. 139–140 nn. 2–3; Adiel Schremer, “Midrash and History: God’s Power, the Roman Empire, and Hopes for Redemption in Tannaitic Literature,” Zion 72 (2007): 5–36, esp. 15–26 (Hebrew). 147. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §6, p. 26. 148. Ibid., §120, pp. 246–247 (emphasis in original). 149. Ibid., p. 247 (emphasis in original). See Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 188. Compare Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §125, p. 251, where in his letter to Susan, written on February 25, 1951, Jacob refers to her as his “most mysterious Queen” (emphasis in original). 150. Ibid., §62, p. 156. Compare ibid., §111, p. 233, cited in ch. 4 at n. 153. 151. Ibid., §7, p. 32. 152. Ibid., §10, p. 39. 153. On the transmutation of writing letters on Sabbath—an explicit breach of Jewish law—into a sign of worship, see Susan’s letter to Jacob from December 15–16, 1950, in ibid., §55, p. 144: Jacob, my beloved, my mysterious lord, on the Sabbath I permit myself the luxury of a letter. I have sat on the ground before the serpent. The difficulty of prayer is somewhat like insomnia, the desperateness of the desire obstructs the attainment of what is desired. One would like to will—almost as in the will to sleep—to become opaque to one’s self, to become visible to no one but God, to lie before him like a thing, like the thing one becomes when one is delivered unto death; one wills to die the death here and now. And then as graciously and simply as sleep overtakes one who is struggling for and against it, and he awakens in the morning to discover that he has slept, so one awakens from prayer knowing that one has prayed. Implicit in this statement is a kenotic understanding of prayer that entails the attainment of self by the purging of self. See Merold Westphal, “Prayer as the Posture of the Decentered Self,” in The Phenomenology of Prayer, edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 13–31, and in the same volume the essay by James R. Mensch, “Prayer as Kenosis,” pp. 63–72. 154. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §10, p. 39. 155. In the letter from October 10, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §12, p. 45, Susan wrote that it is a good feeling to know that Father remembers and blesses me on the Sabbath. Yes, I think the Sabbath besides being a day of rest (this I think is only its most public, popular

Notes ­ —  323 + exoteric meaning) could be a day of the consecration of fire—to consecrate through one day’s abstinence from its secular use, the holy fire that being men and not angels, we desecrate in employing it for our creature needs. 156. See the conclusion of Susan’s letter from November 3, 1950, in ibid., §28, p. 79: “I lit the serpent and wept a little; goodnight my good friend, my priest, my mysterious husband. I embrace you. ΑΩ.” In this case, it appears that the alpha and the omega refer to Jacob and Susan. See below, n. 173. See, however, ibid., §63, p. 158, where the symbol ΑΩ denotes the nature of Reason. 157. Ibid., §79, p. 186. 158. Ibid., §115, p. 242. 159. Ibid., §33, p. 90. 160. Ibid., §17, pp. 57–58. 161. Ibid., §37, p. 104. See ibid., §35, p. 99: “And now I am home, und die alte Drache schläft.” Regarding the special quality of midnight, see Jacob’s remark in ibid., §86, p. 200: “My most beloved Susan, I know this letter will reach you after your birthday but I think it is rather in our way of encountering time that I write to you—in the moment, near to midnight of your day of birth” (emphasis in original). Part of the continuation of this letter is cited below at n. 166. 162. Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” p. 286. See idem, Susan Taubes, p. 188: Der Gebrauch dieser Bezeichnungen verdichtete sich schlieβlich zu einer Privatsprache des frisch verheirateten Paars, in der sich gnostische Symbole wie die Schlange der Erkenntnis, Symbole des Judentums, etwa die Heiligung des Schabbats, und die Form des Rituals miteinander verbanden. See also Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, p. 166. On the possible phallic implications of the image of the serpent, it is noteworthy that Susan ended the letter to Jacob from October 14, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §15, p. 53, “cherish yourself and remember the little snake.” Support for this suggestion may be culled from the instruction to Jacob in the conclusion of the letter written on October 3, 1950, ibid., §8, p. 36: “Cherish your phallus, your heart and your Logos.” It appears that Susan also referred allusively to Jacob’s membrum virile as his “holy place.” See ibid., §21, p. 65. Compare the reference to the “holy places” in ibid., §23, p. 69; §24, p. 70; §32, p. 89; §43, p. 118; §47, p. 128; §71, p. 173; §90, p. 207. On the connection between the serpent and sexual seduction, see the text cited below, n. 180. See also the beginning of the undated letter in ibid., §109, p. 231, written in Hebrew, which I will transliterate in accord with Susan’s somewhat imprecise vocalization: ba‘ali: ani meqawwah / ki shalom lekha. asatti / lekha et naḥash we-et / oketopus. In translation: “My husband: I hope / that all is well with you. I have made / for you the serpent and / the octopus.” From the context it appears that Susan was referring to making images of the serpent and the octopus, which have symbolic import. 163. Ibid., §51, p. 136. See also the line from the rather primitive and grammatically incorrect Hebrew inscription in Susan’s letter to Jacob (addressed as “my husband,” ba‘ali) from February 5–6, 1951, ibid., §105, p. 226: wa-ani roṣah lashevet bekha, “and I wish to dwell in you.” In light of these early hopeful comments about the possibility of establishing

Notes  —  32 4 a home together, it is striking to consider the description of the eventual desolation consequent to the disruption of the marriage in the following passage from Taubes, Divorcing, p. 37: “Ezra has his moments of beauty: just now, staring expressionless, an animal dazed by a sudden blow, he seems so solitary and forlorn—a stranger, as if he were already deserted, the person she cast out into the street, cut out of her life. If he were to walk out now without a word, she could not bear it.” 164. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §9, p. 37. 165. Ibid., §115, p. 242. On the possible sexual implications of the expression “fullness of the nothing,” see below, n. 173. 166. Ibid., §86, p. 200 (emphasis in original). Compare ibid., §117, p. 243, where Jacob writes to Susan: “My most mysterious Lady, When I contemplate your picture . . . a mysterium tremendum and fascinosum befalls me it is for me deeply correlated to what holy means and I feel: The marriage as a contract and contact through the holy became true in my life through you and I pray: not to desecrate the contract” (emphasis in original). It is of interest to recall the words of Jacob in a letter to his parents, written in Hebrew on the eve of Passover 5712 (1952), in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §222, p. 182. Employing kabbalistic symbolism, Jacob writes that when he is in a state of diminished consciousness (qaṭnut de-moḥin), he expressed doubt about his worthiness to be married to Susan and to fulfill his obligation towards her, but when he is in a state of expanded consciousness (gadlut de-moḥin), the doubts are dispelled and he knows with certainty that this is the woman about whom he has dreamt, and the dream has materialized. 167. With respect to the confluence of spatial dislodgment and temporal incorporeity, there is affinity to Buddhist wisdom as we see expressed tersely in the twelfth-century Japanese poet Saigyō, Gazing at the Moon: Buddhist Poems of Solitude, translated by Meredith McKinney (Boulder: Shambala, 2021), p. 34: “Since nowhere / can be home / let me live nowhere / in this scant hut / in this brief world.” See below, n. 192. 168. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §4, p. 22. 169. Ibid., §42, p. 116. 170. Ibid. §47, p. 128. 171. In the directory of names in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950– 1951, p. 351, the reader is told that the initials are used at the request of relatives in lieu of disclosing the full name. The biographical information that we may glean from the letters is that J.C. lived in New York, and he was involved romantically with Andrée Klotz, a French interpreter, who lived in Washington and later in Paris. 172. Ibid., §11, p. 43. 173. The connotation of the ΑΩ as a symbol for man and woman would explain why Susan often used it as part of her signature at the end of many letters to Jacob. The expression is also used sporadically by Jacob as in his letter written on February 22, 1951, ibid., §122, p. 248: “BE BLESSED MY MOST BELOVED OMEGALPHA.” See also the letter dated February 25, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §183, p. 108: “HOLYDAY WHEN MY BELOVED BORN OMEGALPHA.” And in Jacob’s letter written on February 26, 1952, ibid., §185, p. 111: “Liebe Susan, mit deinem wunderschönen Alphaomegasatz habe ich mich wirklich gefreut—und geschämt.” See also

Notes ­ —  325 Susan’s self-deprecation in the letter to Jacob written on November 11, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §33, p. 92: Yes, I have a problem with my work. You know, I am only an Ω a O—and the “ideas” I have only pass through me from you and all I have to say in my thesis is what I know through you. I know you are so rich in seed I cannot “steal your thunder.” Still I feel I am stepping (unworthy that I am) in your domain. In this passage, Susan’s application of the omega to herself indicates that she is a nothing, a zero—signified more accurately by the omicron, literally, the ὂ μικρόν, the “o” that is small in contrast to the omega—for she has no ideas of her own but only what she has received from Jacob. Compare ibid., §24, p. 70: “my mind resembles my sex I am an O.” For a fuller citation of this passage, see the Introduction n. 8. It is possible that in some contexts the alpha refers more specifically to the phallus and the omega to the vagina. This seems to be the intent of the conclusion of the letter written on November 16, 1950, ibid., §35, p. 100: “Ah, my nothingness is so, so empty, Ω ah!” The sexual meaning may be implied in the contrast Susan made between the emptiness of the fullness and the fullness of the nothing in ibid., §115, p. 242, cited above at n. 165. The image is utilized as well in the internalized misogynism expressed lewdly in Taubes, Divorcing, p. 81: “Where my voice comes from? Of body awareness only my cunt curiously, a hole, a nothing, a negativum—it was you who just remarked, waste to give vision drug to women, all they feel is their cunt.” 174. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §12, p. 44. 175. Ibid., §13, p. 46. The amorous tone is confirmed more explicitly in the continuation of the letter, “Tonight I am ill with thirst; it is beyond my will; the arché rises up and shakes my thoughts. And father is good and wise but his rationalism in these hours of drunkenness is disconcerting.” On Susan’s tendency to behave in a coquettish manner, albeit remaining “clean” by not crossing boundaries, see her comment in ibid., §38, pp. 105–106: Most worthwhile of all was meeting Paul Oppenheim, a philosopher of Princeton with whom I spent an hour discussing mysticism and flirting (he is 65)—keeping the two “sauber” without I hope prostituting philosophy or academizing eros. At any rate we got quite intimate and he invited me down to Princeton. He is a good friend of Einstein and also a nice man (German) so, one never knows it might lead to something. Oppenheim did appoint Susan as his research assistant. See Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” p. 260; idem, Susan Taubes, p. 292. 176. See the conjunction “to pray” and “to do service” in Susan’s letter to Jacob from October 6, 1950, ibid., §9, p. 38, cited in full in ch. 4 at n. 147. 177. Ibid., §27, p. 75. See ibid., §101, p. 221: “I went to the Israeli nightclub with J.C. there was a wonderful girl singing Hebrew songs and very good food and we danced and afterwards we had cult, and it was very good.” In this context, dance should be understood literally, but it is interesting to recall the passage in Taubes, Divorcing, p. 115, where dance is interpreted figuratively as “to enjoy intercourse.” For the use of the motif of dance to

Notes  —  32 6 denote an ecstatic moment akin to death or the consumption of wood by fire, see the passage from A Lament for Julia in Taubes, Prosaschriften, p. 153: Tanz war immer eine gewaltige Versuchung. Ich erträumte mir Julia verklärt in pure Bewegung. Ich sah sie springen und umherwirbeln, mit wachsender Aufgeregtheit und wie eine Flamme, die das Holz, auf dem sie lodert, rasch verzehrt, in einem ekstatischen Augenblick noch einmal aufflackert und dann erlischt. Und obwohl Julia nicht tanzte, setzten meine Träume von der tanzenden Julia ihren Körper in Brand, ließen sie mitunter fast ohnmächtig werden. See ibid., p. 173: “Während die Nonnen Julia durch das Kloster führten, tanzte ich auf einmal leicht und taumelig mit den Staubkörnern im Sonnenlicht und war glücklich, so wenig Gewicht zu haben, nahezu keines.” Also relevant is the line uttered by Mary Ann to Death in “The Last Dance,” translated into German in Taubes, Prosaschriften, p. 107: “‘Ich bin ja noch kaum eine Frau’ . . . . ‘Sieh doch, wie klein meine Brüste sind. Ich möchte erst noch tanzen lernen und auf unserer Hochzeit wie eine richtige Dame aussehen.’” As we learn from the continuation of the story, pp. 110–111, the last dance metaphorically signifies the final encounter wherein Mary Ann surrenders to Death. On the role of dance for Susan, see the additional sources discussed in ch. 3 n. 175. 178. Compare Susan’s letter from November 3, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §28, p. 79: “I haven’t yet seen J.C. be with a woman for 10 minutes without touching her—I think the progress is due to the ‘Dionysics’ that we had an experience of togetherness had form, beginning, middle and end and was not merely a haphazard, blundering flirtation. I think it is good.” See also Susan’s negative assessment of J.C. in the letter from November 24, 1950, ibid., §42, p. 116: “J.C. is a poor child, and I think he is heading toward ‘disaster’ with so much eros and no logos and his head full of bio-chemical formulas and surrounded by his ‘diamond’ relatives.” 179. Ibid., §28, pp. 77–78. 180. That the service Susan performed with J.C. was carnal in nature is intimated more clearly in the letter from November 12, 1950, in ibid., §34, p. 96: At 7:00 . . . went back to Hotel, made dinner for J.C. . . . Then, the devil took hold of him and he seduced me, really like a serpent (I saw awful “mythological” spaces open up) and performed a wild almost cruel service—I think before very, very archaic gods. It was a little frightening because for once I was not “priestess” holding “the light” but sheer sacrificial beast. I think it is all right with the gods. I think they (the Chthonic Ones) watch me winding my “geist” through the white silences of “geist” and it is they who bedeviled J.C. toward me. The letter ends with “I embrace you my eternal bridegroom ΑΩ your S.” As odd and unseemly as this might appear, she expresses this deep love for Jacob while recounting to him her sexual adventure with J.C. Consider the letter written on November 13, 1950, ibid., §34, p. 97: A propos “whoredom” . . . Mother is quite unhealthy on this point: e.g. when I brought home the night club foto [sic] with J.C. and was cutting it to letter-size, she said “I see, you

Notes ­ —  327 are sending it to your husband that he should know with whom you are cheating him” an annoying remark by a woman who has lived promiscuously without ever having really known a man, or having anything substantial in her life. 181. The expression is used by Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work (New York: HarperCollins, 2019), pp. 323–324 (based on the observation of Ethan Taubes). Jacob’s philandering, including his relationship with Susan Sontag, his wife’s close friend, is discussed ibid., pp. 176–177. On the possibility of a ménage à trois involving Jacob, Susan Taubes, and Susan Sontag, see Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, p. 298. It is relevant here to mention as well Susan’s tolerance of Jacob’s continued intellectual and erotic relationship with Gerda Seligsohn discussed by Muller, op. cit., p. 133. Throughout his biography, Muller chronicles Jacob’s transgressive sexuality and penchant for womanizing. As Muller judiciously notes, pp. 447–448, for Jacob, there was an intimate connection between intellectual attraction and carnal temptation. Consider also the description of Jacob as an “inveterate womanizer, trumpeting his affairs as if he were counting coup” in Babette Babich, “Ad Jacob Taubes,” New Nietzsche Studies 7 (2007–2008): viii. The infidelity of Jacob is attributed fictionally to the character of Ezra in Susan’s novel. For example, see Taubes, Divorcing, pp. 46, 50–51, 53. 182. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §28, p. 78. 183. It is reasonable to presume the influence of Martin Buber on Susan’s utilization of the language of I and Thou. For a positive assessment of Buber on Susan’s part, see Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §112, p. 237: “B.’s critique of monism is philosophically penetrating—even if it only restates what Plato already brought to light in the ‘Parmenides.’” As Pareigis points out, ibid., p. 239 n. 6, the reference is to Martin Buber, Ereignisse und Begegnungen (Leipzig: Insel, 1917), pp. 22–26. 184. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §31, p. 85. 185. Ibid., §32, p. 89. See, however, Susan’s advice to Jacob in the letter from November 24, 1950, ibid., §42, p. 116: “Be joyful my dear and be chaste as you enter with your spirit the mysteries: there an even greater cleanliness is required than when the body prepares itself for service.” Perhaps a similar caution is implied in Susan’s remark from the letter written to Jacob on March 8, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §195, p. 134: “My beloved child, cherish the holyness of your body and do not fall under your standard.” The caution to be chaste is repeated several times in Susan’s letters to Jacob. See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §3, p. 20; §4, p. 22; §52, p. 138; idem, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §193, p. 131; §230, p. 201; §235, p. 210. Undergirding these warnings was Susan’s suspicion regarding Jacob’s propensity to be unfaithful. See, for instance, the question that Susan addressed to Jacob in the letter written on November 21, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §40, p. 111: “Goodnight my Jacob—are you a clean, good being?” See Susan’s description of herself in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §174, p. 94: “There was a snow storm so Goldman bought some food + we cooked dinner and had a wonderful talk on Marxism. He tried to attack me afterwards (of course) but I explained him that I am chaste to death.” And consider similar language in ibid., §243, p. 225: “If you knew how many people are after me, and think that I am very nice. A painter is doing some sketches

Notes  —  32 8 of me, he thinks I stepped out of the Bible. And I have been faithful + chaste like death. And you are my most beloved.” In this regard, it is of interest to recall the comment of Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journal and Notebooks 1964–1980, edited by David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 87, from May 24, 1965, “Susan T. [Taubes]: rather give up sex—otherwise can’t work, doesn’t want to move outside the eroticized sphere.” On Susan’s desexualization, see as well the comment of Sontag, As Consciousness, p. 371, cited in ch. 4 at n. 42. Consider as well the reference to Sophie’s asceticism in Taubes, Divorcing, p. 38. And see ibid., p. 52: “Her innocence was maddening. Ezra raved. He put her in obscene postures, but whatever she did was hopelessly chaste. ‘A kouros—a chaste boy,’ Ezra called her.” See, however, p. 133, where Rudolf Landsmann, Sophie’s father, says the following to Ezra about his daughter: “They charge her with uncleanness, holding heretical doctrines, practicing abominations, loathsome and abominable forms of copulation. . . . My daughter? Ezra, did you know about this? Are we back in the Middle Ages? My daughter practicing loathsome and abominable forms of copulation? With you perhaps!” Ezra responds, “Narrischkeit. The point is your wife—I mean my wife, your daughter— has no legal status.” 186. Ibid., p. 51. 187. Ibid., p. 52. 188. Ibid., p. 55. 189. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §28, p. 78. On the parallelism between mysticism and madness without an effort to define either term rigidly, see Wouter Kusters, A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking, translated by Nancy Forest-Flier (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2020), pp. 163–172. 190. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §156, p. 62. 191. Ibid., p. 64. 192. Compare the description of Sophie in Taubes, Divorcing, p. 15: Of course most of the things she collected from different places on the way she could not take with her but stored. . . . Everything had to be kept for the time when she would be settled and have a great big house with many wings and floors. . . . In her mind it was all together, she was always in an imagined house, leaving for a trip and choosing one or two things to take with her. But perhaps all she really wanted was that imaginary house and she would always go on traveling and collecting things and living everywhere. The nomadic life is presented as the only credible way to deal with the ephemerality of time. See ibid., pp. 16–17: “Yet she loved traveling. It’s the only way to live. Sophie always said, the only way to live in time: fly right with it. Sophie got nervous when they settled too long in one place.” See the comment from the Susan Taubes Archiv 102, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, cited in Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 83: When the futility of one’s life becomes unbearable, pain and hardship often offer a relief and introduce an element of necessity. Travel is an almost sure (and socially acceptable) way of providing necessities. Lodging must be found from day to day in

Notes ­ —  32 9 strange cities. The bed, the bath, the meal become urgent necessities for the exhausted, hungry traveler. See above, n. 167. 193. My wording reflects the description of the “central point” as it pertains to Mallarmé’s understanding of poetry in Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, translated, with an introduction, by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 44, as “the presence of Midnight,” which is “the point anterior to all starting points, from which nothing ever begins, the empty profundity of being’s inertia, that region without issue and without reserve, in which the work, through the artist, becomes the concern, the endless search for its origin.” See ibid., p. 112, where midnight is depicted as “the evocation of that pure presence where nothing but the subsistence of nothing subsists . . . absence is complete, and silence pure.” On the representation of midnight in light of Blanchot’s ontological characterization of literature as the depth of being’s idleness (désoeuvrement), see Eleanor Kaufman, “Midnight, or the Inertia of Being,” Parallax 12 (2006): 98–111. 194. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §142, p. 49. 195. Ibid., §112, p. 236. 196. Ibid. An additional part of the letter is cited in ch. 4 at n. 69. Compare the description of the role of marriage as a social machination in Taubes, Divorcing, p. 50: Even when Sophie couldn’t bear Ezra, she loved the marriage. It was a many-layered shroud whose weight she relished. To carry it eased, simplified entering a room full of people, it justified her presence in the room. There it was, a costume ready-made for public occasions. Ezra’s wife; this was the answer to anyone who wanted to know her. She was the woman Ezra Blind married. It had weight and power: like an impermeable cloak it warded off the inevitable swarm of prying, talky, argumentative, interrogating people. The shroud served to receive the obligatory marks and tags, it absorbed unavoidable stains, its fabric wrinkled and stretched obligingly. It saved her skin. How not cherish a garment so serviceable? And see ibid., pp. 52–53, where the marriage between Ezra and Sophie is compared figuratively to a comedic performance. 197. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §230, p. 200. 198. Ibid., §193, p. 127. 199. Ibid., §168, p. 84. 200. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §75, p. 179. Compare Barbara Cassin, Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 5. Cassin’s analysis of Homer’s Odyssey as the poem of nostalgia par excellence, inasmuch as it entails an endlessly delayed return based on the interdependence of rootedness and uprootedness (ibid., pp. 7, 18–20), is a useful means through which to view Susan’s perspective. 201. Steven Galt Crowell, “Spectral History: Narrative, Nostalgia, and the Time of the I,” Research in Phenomenology 29 (1999): 83–104, esp. 86. Susan’s reflection on the constructive nature of nostalgia as a disruptive form of pain may be profitably compared to the discussion of the disintegrative and the integrative types of pain related to the identity

Notes  —  330 formation of the self in Ariel Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 33–34. 202. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §215, p. 168. 203. Ibid., §236, pp. 212–213 (emphasis in original). 204. Concerning this rabbinic teaching, see primary and secondary sources cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Coronation of the Sabbath Bride: Kabbalistic Myth and the Ritual of Androgynisation,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 307 n. 19. 205. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §227, p. 195. 206. Ibid., §244, p. 227. The fuller context of the remark is discussed in ch. 3 at n. 143. 207. Ibid., §224, p. 186. 208. Ibid., §156, p. 62. On the guilt, reproach, and unease that Susan felt with respect to her secular Jewish upbringing, consider the words attributed to Ezra at Sophie’s funeral in Taubes, Divorcing, p. 74: “In the end gathered unto her fathers. The great granddaughter of Reb Smuel Nyitra . . . Shame how you lived. The parents, she. Freud. Homer. Joyce. Kultur. Cyclon B. Auschwitz. Holy Land.” His hand rises, a finger wags menacingly. “God will judge us!” The finger grows gigantic. The whole room turns a gangrenous black. Judgment? Not yet. No, it was only a warning. . . . Ezra emphatically denies rumors that I was to be tried as a witch by a council of orthodox rabbis. Susan’s disquiet is presented somewhat humorously at the end of this chapter where there is an allusion to the comment normally uttered at a Christian wedding ceremony—“Should anyone present know of any reason that this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace,” according to the formulation of the matrimonial liturgy in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549—but applied to Sophie’s burial. See ibid., p. 75: “At some moment, just before lowering the coffin, the rabbi will have to turn around and, facing the congregation, ask if anyone present wishes to object. The coffin hangs suspended.” 209. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §227, p. 194. 210. Song of Songs 4:2. 211. Taubes, Divorcing, pp. 88–89. 212. Ibid., p. 16 (emphasis in original). 213. Ibid., p. 8. 214. Ibid., p. 17. The passage is cited more fully above in n. 192. 215. See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, § 156, p. 62: “So, I want to say goodnight again, and tell you how I miss your friendship and how deeply I am with you amidst all the turmoil of ‘ideological’ conflicts. Love must endure the conflict of principles in the name of love itself.” 216. Ibid., p. 66. 217. Ibid., pp. 65–66. 218. Wolfson, “Divine Suffering.” 219. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §127, p. 255 (emphasis in

Notes ­ —  331 original). This part of the letter appears as well in ibid., §13, p. 47. The letter to Bergmann is alluded to as well in ibid., §4, p. 21: Wrote a long, open letter to our saintly walrus on the mysteries: that religion cannot be allegorical, that religion cannot be historical: that the historical religions in breaking the divine presence into a divine past and a divine future, break the ground of the possibility of sacramental life; that the sacramental and the nihilistic are each equally legitimate possibilities neither of which can “refute” the other; that the secular is like a limbo between these 2 worlds, and those who pass their lives in this limbo receive as it were only vague fleeting odours of the 2 worlds but never grasp fully either life or death, that it is partly in our free choice to be won either by the power of the mystery or the power of death. 220. On the privileging of the present, see Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §198, pp. 140–141. The primacy accorded the present that we may elicit from Susan is to be contrasted with the doctrine of presentism, that is, the conviction that everything is present or that only that which is present exists. In Susan’s view of time, the past and the future are real as the presence that persists in the absence of being present. See Wolfson, Suffering Time, p. 11 n. 34. 221. Ray L. Hart, Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a Rhetoric of Revelation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), p. 182. 222. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §127, p. 255. See ibid., §13, p. 47. 223. Ibid., §4, p. 21. The passage is cited above in n. 219. On the use of the expression “strange limbo” to denote a liminal state that is “neither in time nor out of time,” see ibid., §105, p. 227. On the role of the secular as a propaedeutic to approach the sacred, compare Susan’s remarks in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §189, pp. 117–118: I am reading “Le Mythe de l’Éternel Retour” of Eliade an interesting and quite ontological treatment of the problem of history + eternity through an analysis of “sacred societies”. The primitive lives outside of “self” + “history” not simply negatively + passively, not having “discovered” self-history. On the contrary his ritual is an active—if “unconscious” (but who knows!?) effort toward the abolition of time. If he didn’t in some way experience the secular he would not have to “enter” by ritual means into the sacred. However the entrance the initiation into the sacred is self evident + unproblematic, (through “social-solidarity”?). Interestingly, the expression “abolition of time” is used to describe Eliade’s idea of the sacred by Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 161. 224. On the collapse of the distinction between death and life in Heidegger’s thinking, see discussion in ch. 5 at nn. 35–39. 225. Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 24–25. 226. Peter E. Gordon, “Contesting Secularization: The Idea of a Normative Deficit of Modernity After Max Weber,” in Formations of Belief: Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular, edited by Philip Nord, Katja Guenther, and Max Weiss (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 184–201; idem, “Critical Theory Between the Sacred and the

Notes  —  332 Profane,” Constellations 23 (2016): 466–481; and the fuller analysis in idem, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 227. See, most recently, Gordon, Migrants, pp. 96–142, esp. 104–113. 228. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928– 1940, edited by Henri Lonitz, translated by Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 248; Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, edited by Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), p. 323. See Steven E. Aschheim, “The Metaphysical Psychologist: On the Life and Letters of Gershom Scholem,” Journal of Modern History 76 (2004): 910; Ansgar Martins, The Migration of Metaphysics into the Realm of the Profane: Theodor W. Adorno Reads Gershom Scholem, translated by Lars Fischer (Leiden: Brill, 2020), p. 78; Asaf Angermann, “Adorno and Scholem: The Heretical Redemption of Metaphysics,” in A Companion to Adorno, edited by Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2020), p. 533; Gordon, Migrants, p 125. Adorno cited from his letter to Benjamin in “Gruβ an Gershom G. Scholem. Zum 70. Geburtstag: 5. Dezember 1967.” The text, first published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, is reprinted in Theodor W. Adorno, Vermischte Schriften II. Aesthetica, Miscellanea [GS 20.2] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 478–486, esp. 480–482. 229. Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 249; Adorno and Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, p. 323. On Adorno’s relationship to Scholem, see Steven M. Wasserstrom, “Adorno’s Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Observations,” in Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and Its Others, edited by Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 56–64; and the more comprehensive analysis in the monograph by Martins, The Migration. 230. Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, p. 250; Adorno and Benjamin, Briefwechsel, p. 324. The passage is cited by Adorno himself in “Gruβ,” p. 481. On the migrating of the theological into the secular and the profane, see also Theodor W. Adorno, “Vernunft und Offenbarung,” in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II. Eingriffe, Stichworte [GS10.2] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 608: “Nichts an theologischem Gehalt wird unverwandelt fortbestehen; ein jeglicher wird der Probe sich stellen müssen, ins Säkulare, Profane einzuwandern.” For the English version “Reason and Revelation,” see Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford, introduction by Lydia Goehr (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 136: “Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the realm of the secular, the profane.” Compare the related formulation in Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 403 (idem, Negativ Dialektik [GS 6] [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970], p. 395): “The thesis of positivism is that even a metaphysics that has escaped to profanity is void [von der Nichtigkeit auch der in Profanität geflüchteten Metaphysik].” 231. Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Briefwechsel 1939–1969, edited by Asaf Angermann (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015), §140, p. 308; Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Correspondence 1939–1969, edited and with an introduction by Asaf

Notes ­ —  333 Angermann, translated by Paula Schwebel and Sebastian Truskolaski (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), p. 231. 232. Adorno, “Gruβ,” p. 485. On the implication of the locution Nachtgeschichte in Adorno’s account of Scholem’s secularizing mysticism, see Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion, pp. 55–56. The term is translated—somewhat questionably—as “dark history” in Martins, The Migration, pp. 84, 85, and 86. See also the description of Scholem’s historical research of the kabbalah as entailing a “complete secularization” (vollendeter Säkularisierung) in Adorno, “Gruβ,” pp. 484–485. The passage is translated in Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion, p. 124, and compare the response of Scholem from a letter to Adorno written on December 8, 1967, partially translated on p. 276 n. 28. The original German appears in Adorno and Scholem, Briefwechsel 1939–1969, §199, pp. 440–441. A fragment of the letter was translated in Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 426, and for a complete translation, see Adorno and Scholem, Correspondence 1939–1969, pp. 332–333. It is beyond the scope of this note to discuss either Scholem’s own reflections on the topic of secularization or the various scholars who have addressed the issue. For four representative scholarly analyses, see Avraham Shapira, “The Symbolic Plane and Its Secularization in the Spiritual World of Gershom Scholem,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 3 (1994): 331–352; David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 51–56, 154–157; Shaul Magid, “Mysticism, History, and a ‘New’ Kabbalah: Gershom Scholem and the Contemporary Scene,” Jewish Quarterly Review 101 (2011): 511–525, esp. 513–519; Zohar Maor, “Death or Birth: Scholem and Secularization,” in Against the Grain: Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, edited by Ezra Mendelsohn, Stefani Hoffman, and Richard I. Cohen (New York: Berghahn, 2014), pp. 64–85. Compare the comments of Scholem cited in ch. 2 n. 38. 233. On Scholem’s melancholic and demonic orientation, see Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 138–145; Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 102–105; idem, Saturn’s Jews: On the Witches’ Sabbat and Sabbateanism (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 91–95; Vivian Liska, “Against Melancholy: On the Demonic in Gershom Scholem,” in Das Dämonische: Schicksale einer Kategorie der Zweideutigkeit nach Goethe, edited by Lars Friedrich, Eva Geulen, and Kirk Wetters (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. 2014), pp. 311–324, reprinted in idem, German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), pp. 114–124. See also Enrico Lucca, “Translating, Interpreting the Bible, Fighting Satan: Rosenzweig, Scholem, and the End of Their Correspondence (with Three Unpublished Letters from Scholem to Rosenzweig),” in “Into Life”: Franz Rosenzweig on Knowledge, Aesthetics, and Politics, edited by Antonios Kalatzis and Enrico Lucca (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 11–14. I regret neglecting to mention these studies in my own reflections on the melancholic import of Scholem’s theopolitical Zionism in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Melancholic Redemption and the Hopelessness of Hope,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 30 (2022): 323–342.

Notes  —  33 4 234. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 112; idem, Negativ Dialektik, p. 118. 235. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 133; idem, Negativ Dialektik, pp. 118–119. 236. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 200; idem, Negativ Dialektik, p. 200. 237. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 360 (translation slightly modified); idem, Negativ Dialektik, p. 353. 238. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 360; idem, Negativ Dialektik, p. 353. 239. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 10, 12, 15, 149, 154–155; idem, Negativ Dialektik, pp. 21, 23–24, 27, 152, 157. For citation and discussion of these passages as well as references to secondary literature, see Wolfson, Suffering Time, pp. 642–644 nn. 224–225, 229. Compare the passage from Kierkegaard cited in ch. 5 n. 15. 240. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 407; idem, Negativ Dialektik, p. 399. 241. Martins, The Migration, p. 58. 242. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 408; idem, Negativ Dialektik, p. 400. On the possible trace in this passage of the Lurianic myth of the shattering of the vessels, see Martins, The Migration, p. 142; Gordon, Migrants, p. 127. On the intellectual kinship of the kabbalah to Adorno’s negative dialectics, see also Wasserstrom, “Adorno’s Kabbalah,” pp. 74–75. 243. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” pp. 348–350. 244. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 376; idem, Negativ Dialektik, p. 369. 245. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 381; idem, Negativ Dialektik, p. 374. 246. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §189, p. 117. 247. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” pp. 362–363. 248. On Susan’s advocacy for secrecy as the appropriate form of communication due to the widespread mistrust in human society, see Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §193, pp. 126–127, cited in ch. 5 at n. 5. 249. Susan would have concurred with Scholem’s depiction of nihilism as a religious phenomenon. See Gershom Scholem, “Der Nihilismus als religiöses Phänomen,” Eranos Jahrbuch 43 (1974): 1–50, and the analysis in Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion, pp. 227–230. 250. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §156, p. 64. 251. Compare Hart, Unfinished Man, p. 223, who argued that within the intentional imagination the present is “made possible by the future it anticipates and the past it gathers up. . . . In every step, imagination is renewed as the present is made thick by anticipation.” 252. I have taken the liberty to repeat in abbreviated fashion my argument in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 43–45. 253. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §19, p. 61. 254. Ibid., §80, p. 187. 255. Ibid., §99, p. 218. 256. Ibid. 257. See the references cited in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 19 n. 51.

Chapter 2 1. Christina Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths of Nomads, Wanderers, Exiles. Stationen einer Korrespondenz,” in Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951,

Notes ­ —  335 edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), pp. 276–281; idem, Susan Taubes: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020), pp. 195–226. 2. See Susan’s letter to Jacob written on April 11, 1952, in Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), §225, p. 189, where she expressed her desire not to return to Jerusalem and mentioned Scholem as a detrimental presence for Jacob. A portion of the letter is cited below at n. 17. See also the letter of Susan cited below at n. 33. The antagonism between Scholem and Taubes was mutual. See the comment reported by Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journal and Notebooks 1964–1980, edited by David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 367: “[The historian of kabbalistic Judaism, adversary of Hannah Arendt, and friend of Walter Benjamin, Gershom] Scholem said it was Jacob Taubes [Scholem’s student in Jerusalem in the late-1940s and Susan Taubes’s husband] who revealed to him the existence of moral evil. He paled when I mentioned Jacob’s name. (The evening D[avid] + I spent with him in Jerusalem [in October 1973].)” In a letter, written on October 7, 1951, Scholem expressed his desire to sever all contact with Taubes and advised him not to return to Jerusalem because of the breach in trust related to Joseph Weiss. See Gershom Scholem, Briefe II, 1948–1970, edited by Thomas Sparr (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), §15, pp. 25–28. The letter is reproduced in Jacob Taubes, Der Preis des Messianismus: Briefe von Jacob Taubes an Gershom Scholem und Andere Materialien, edited by Elettra Stimilli (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), pp. 127–129, and is partially rendered into English in Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 363–364. And see discussion in Gershom Scholem and Joseph Weiss: Correspondence 1948–1964, edited by Noam Zadoff (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2012), p. 21 (Hebrew); Noam Zadoff, “The Archive, the Students, and the Emotions of a German Israeli Intellectual,” Jewish Quarterly Review 103 (2013): 422–424; Martin Treml, “Reinventing the Canonical: The Radical Thinking of Jacob Taubes,” in “Escape to Life”—German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile After 1933, edited by Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel assisted by Jerome Bolton, Tine Kutschbach, and Chadwick Smith (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), pp. 462–463; Shaul Magid, “Between Zionism and Friendship: The Correspondence Between Gershom Scholem and Joseph Weiss,” Jewish Quarterly Review 107 (2017): 434. Taubes’s response, written on October 11, 1951, is printed in Taubes, Der Preis, pp. 111–113. Scholem referred to “his former student Taubes” as “good for nothing” (nichts taugt) in a letter to George Lichtheim written on January 28, 1968, in Scholem, Briefe II, §129, p. 200; idem, A Life in Letters, p. 432. Scholem elaborated on his unfavorable assessment of Taubes in a second letter to Lichtheim, dated October 10, 1968, in Scholem, Briefe II, §137, pp. 215–216. See also the attempted letter of reconciliation written by Taubes to Scholem on March 16, 1977, in Taubes, Der Preis, pp. 117–123. Defiantly, Taubes signed the letter by referring to himself as Scholem’s “everlasting student” (immerwährender Schüler). Scholem’s brief and dismissive response written on March 24, 1977, is printed in Taubes, Der Preis, p. 130. A partial English translation of Taubes’s letter and Scholem’s rejoinder appear in Scholem, A Life in Letters, pp. 467–468.

Notes  —  336 For a more positive assessment of Taubes on the part of Scholem, see the comment of Karl Löwith reported in Susan’s letter to Jacob from November 12, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §34, p. 96, that “he saw Scholem who praised you very much.” And see Jacob’s own conciliatory words in a letter to Scholem written on October 8, 1968, in Taubes, Der Preis, p. 122: “Was sonst noch—nachträglich—zwischen uns kam, gehört zu den Eitelkeiten des akademischen Lebens. Zwischen uns und um uns stehen auch Tote, gerade solche die freiwillig aus dem Leben geschieden sind.” The complex relationship between Scholem and Taubes at the various stages of their lives, including the controversy surrounding Joseph Weiss, is now discussed with ample documentation by Jerry Z. Muller, Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), pp. 148–149, 171–179, 414–416, 431–437. 3. Christina Pareigis, “Letter from Susan Taubes to Jacob Taubes April 4, 1952,” Telos 150 (2010): 112. On Jacob’s depression and loneliness during his time in Jerusalem, see the comment of Pareigis, ibid., n. 2. 4. Ibid., p. 114. See Susan’s letter to Jacob written on September 26, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §6, p. 27: “Send yourself meat. Send me your Israel address as soon as possible. And work Baby, you must work; and think things through: don’t make hasty generalizations even though they sound good” (emphasis in original). 5. Ibid., §31, p. 85. 6. Ibid., §37, p. 104. 7. Ibid., §45, p. 122. The continuation of the letter is cited and discussed in ch. 5 at n. 189. Consider also Susan’s expression of self-doubt regarding her own studies in the letter to Jacob from December 18, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §58, p. 149, cited in ch. 4 n. 81. 8. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §146, pp. 44–45. Bergmann’s colloquium on Husserl’s phenomenology as metaphysics and Jacob’s participation are also mentioned in the letter to Susan from January 14, 1952, ibid., §144, p. 41. 9. Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, with an introduction by Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Wolf-Daniel Hartwich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 297–298; idem, Vom Kult zur Kultur: Bausteine zu einer Kritik der historischen Vernunft, edited by Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, and Winfried Menninghaus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), p. 335. The original German was published in Universitätstage 1963: Universität und Universalität (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1963), pp. 36–55. On Jacob’s ambiguity about the academic vocation, consider his comment in the introduction to the lectures on Paul held at the Forschungsstätte der evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft in Heidelberg, February 23–27, 1987, a short time before his death, in Jacob Taubes, Die politische Theologie des Paulus, edited by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, in conjunction with Horst Folkers, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, and Christoph Schulte (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), p. 11: “Und so bin ich—armer Job—zum Römerbrief gekommen—als Jude und nicht als Professor, worauf ich auch nicht sehr viel gabe, es sei denn, daß es mich anständig nährt.” English translation in Jacob Taubes, The Political

Notes ­ —  337 Theology of Paul, edited by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, in conjunction with Horst Folkers, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, and Christoph Schulte, translated by Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 3: “And this is how I—a poor Job—came to the Letter to the Romans: as a Jew and not as a professor (which, actually, I’m not all that invested in, except that it should provide me a decent living).” 10. Taubes, From Cult, p. 298; idem, Vom Kult, p. 336. Noteworthy is the criticism of Heidegger’s infamous 1933 rectoral address offered by Taubes, From Cult, p. 299; idem, Vom Kult, p. 337. By retreating to a knowledge born by the Volk, Heidegger negated “the idea of science as a universal power and the idea of a society emancipated from the compulsions of nature.” Consider the similar incredulity expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78), translated, with an afterword, by Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 381: The exceptional uncertainty of all systems of instruction has its basis in the fact that no generally acknowledged foundation any longer exists, and that now neither Christianity nor antiquity nor the natural sciences nor philosophy has overruling and prevailing power. We move unsteadily among quite various demands: in the end, the national state still wants a “national” culture, thereby bringing the lack of clarity to its peak—for national and culture are contradictions. Even in the universities, the fortresses of science, there are people who, with the secretiveness of traitors, acknowledge religion or metaphysics as still-higher powers above science (emphasis in original). Compare the criticism of nationalism in Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human II and Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human II (Spring 1878–Fall 1879), translated, with an afterword, by Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 381: One more owl to Athens.—We know that science and nationalist feeling are contradictions, even if political counterfeiters occasionally deny this knowledge: and finally! the day will also come when we comprehend that all higher culture can only damage itself now by surrounding itself with a national picket fence. It was not always so: but the wheel has turned and continues to turn (emphasis in original). 11. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §156, p. 65. 12. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §2, p. 18, cited in ch. 3 at n. 64. 13. Ibid., §60, p. 153. 14. As Pareigis remarks, ibid., §62, p. 157 n. 2, the reference is to the column “Die schrecklichen Flüche des Reb Menachem Cziczesbeiszer” published in the Hungarian journal Borsszem Jankó. 15. Ibid., §62, p. 156 (emphasis in original). 16. Ibid., §92, p. 209. 17. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §225, p. 190. 18. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §22, p. 66.

Notes  —  338 19. Ibid., §14, p. 50. 20. Many scholars have written on this topic. For a useful summary, see Barbara E. Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), pp. 58–77. 21. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §27, p. 77. 22. Ibid., §60, p. 153. Compare Susan’s remark in ibid., §62, p. 156: “Liberalism is rotten; it lives in a vacuum which it ‘denies’ and refuses to come to terms with it and pretends it is ‘not’.” 23. Ibid., §65, p. 161. 24. See ibid., §33, p. 92: “I wore my arab-coin jewelry—the salesman asked me if I am from Israel and a conspiratorial gleam flushed his face and he asked ‘what is it like there?’—it happens to me quite often—the old ‘bearded’ soul awakens in the amerikan [sic] faces—I tell them all to go.” 25. Ibid., §4, p. 23. 26. Ibid., §4, pp. 21 and 23; §6, p. 27; §8, p. 33; §11, p. 42; §35, p. 99. 27. Ibid., §50, p. 133; Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §136, p. 22; §147, p. 46; §164, p. 75; §174, p. 95; §186, p. 114; §188, p. 116; §235, p. 210 (in that context, the image of the tail is combined with that of the lion); §243, p. 225. 28. See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §161, p. 71. 29. Ibid., §175, p. 95. 30. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §44, pp. 119–120. Compare Susan’s comment about Louis Finkelstein, talmudic scholar and chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1940–1972), in the letter to Jacob from October 24, 1950, ibid., §21, p. 63: “Finkelstein is thank God not as schmalzig zionistic, nationalistic etc. as Zurich or Scholems; that, in fact, he seems a bit disinterested.” 31. Ibid., §46, p. 124. 32. Compare Susan’s disparaging remarks about America in ibid., §114, p. 240: “Had thick discussions about ‘American values’ (the poor people try desperately to convince themselves that they are ‘at home’ in USA) about how jews ruined America.” A similar vilification of American society was incorporated into Susan Taubes, Divorcing, introduction by David Rieff (New York: New York Review of Books, 2020), p. 164: Sophie’s roommate in college, Jessica Lipsky, complained of suffocating in American materialism and soullessness. Her mother, in whose Manhattan townhouse Sophie spent many weekends, similarly deplored the philistinism of the land. Of Europe as the fountain of art and culture, Mrs. Lipsky spoke rhapsodically to both “daughters” (having some time ago adopted Sophie as her spiritual child). “There are no good men in America,” lamented her friend Jessica. “America is hopeless.” Sophie agreed, even if she couldn’t share her friend’s idealism about Europe. It is of interest to note Susan’s disapproving remarks about the decidedly American character of the poetic creations of Walt Whitman in her letter to Jacob written on February 9, 1951, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §110, p. 232: I am reading Walt Whitman, the great pagan voice of America at the time when the land

Notes ­ —  339 was yet dream and vision; but the possibility of the shining West that Whitman saw as the final communion of the peoples of all the continents, where the princes of the east will come and drink and build with the black men + the brawny Welsh—the possibility of a new era was choked in the chains of puritan capitalism—the puritan sin of moneygreed that goes with the sin against Dionysus. Whitman wrote the boldest “love” poems I have ever read phallic hymns—praises of the body and of the union of bodies—not in the “sensitive” way of D.H. Lawrence or the “spiritual” way of Rilke but in a loud bold voice, in a crude prosaic verse—a man who did not write “poems”—and most of his writing reads “banal” to the “epicurean connoisseur”—a man who was always in conversation with Nature. 33. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §128, p. 257. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., §16, p. 55. It would be beneficial to analyze Susan’s early disappointment with the political realities of the state of Israel in light of the discussion in Nitzan Lebovic, Zionism and Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), of left-wing political despair in the generations of Israelis in the second half of the twentieth century arising from the gap between the utopian hope of Zionist ideology and the stark reality of the realpolitik of the state. 36. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §268, p. 261. On Zionism and Palestine in Jacob’s early life, see Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, pp. 90–92. 37. Christoph Schmidt, “The Leviathan Crucified: A Critical Introduction to Jacob Taubes’ ‘The Leviathan as Mortal God,’” Political Theology 19 (2018): 181. 38. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §268, p. 262. See the conclusion of Jacob’s letter to Susan, ibid., §231, p. 202: “Mir liegt nichts am Krieg, an den Russen[,] eine Heimat ist wert verteidigt zu werden. Aber was wäre mit dir geschehen? Die du nicht in Jerusalem Heimat gefunden. Vielleicht aber hättest du doch Heimat gefunden.” Jacob’s own position can be compared to his evaluation of Scholem’s view regarding the culture war in Israel and the emergency for the spiritual and political potential of the Jewish religion that demands a position beyond the schism of the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular. See Taubes, “Walter Benjamin—ein moderner Marcionit? Scholems Benjamin-Interpretation religionsgeschichtlich überprüft,” in Der Preis, p. 53: Auch im unterschwelligen, aber bis aufs Messer geführten Kulturkampf im Staate Israel, der den Ernstfall für das spirituelle und politische Potential der jüdischen Religion darstellt, wußte Scholem sich jenseits der Fronten von “sakral” und “profan”, weil er an Gott glaubte, aber das jüdische Religionsgesetz wie es letztlich im Schulchan Aruch des Josef Karo kodifiziert ist, für sich nicht als bindend erklärte, also sich weder als säkularistisch noch religiös verrechnen läßt. An welchen Gott glaubte Scholem? Auch der Teufel glaubt an Gott! Doch wohl an den Gott Israels, der uns, wie Schrift und Tradition—Krisis der Tradition hin oder her—bezeugen, berufen und “geheiligt” hat, durch seine “Gebote” ein “heilig Volk” zu werden. Dann aber ist “Theokratie” wenigstens virtuell in Sicht. The essay is printed as well in Jacob Taubes, Apokalypse und Politik: Aufsätze, Kritiken und kleinere Schriften, edited by Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink and Martin Treml, with the

Notes  —  3 40 collaboration of Theresia Heuer and Anja Schipke (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), p. 286. The position that Taubes is criticizing was expressed clearly by Scholem in the interview he granted to Muki Tsur, the managing editor of Shdemot, first published in the Spring 1975. I cite the relevant text from Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, edited by Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), p. 42: “In my fifty years living in Eretz Yisrael, I have identified fully with both the land’s secularism and its religiosity. There is nothing Jewish that is alien to me. I accept the secularistic processes, just as I hope for opposite processes.” And ibid., p. 46: “My secularism fails right to the core, owing to the fact that I am a religious person, because I am sure of my belief in God. My secularism is not secular.” See the studies on the dialectical nature of Scholem’s secularism cited in ch. 1 n. 232. On the utopian dimensions of Scholem’s thinking and the nationalistic return to the homeland of Zion, see Taubes, Der Preis, pp. 59–60; idem, Apokalypse, pp. 292–293. See also Taubes, “Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail. Gershom G. Scholem und die messianische Verheißung,” in Der Preis, pp. 25–31; idem, Apokalypse, pp. 410–416. 39. The letter is cited in Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, pp. 154–155. 40. Cited from the Susan Taubes Archiv 59, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, in Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 199. 41. It is worth considering the words of Susan’s father concerning the state of Israel in a letter to Jacob from October 14, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §15, p. 53: “I have and want to give money for the cause of Israel. It is my archaic heritage to love the state of Israel, right or wrong. You are my sentimental representative there.” On Sándor Feldmann’s desire to emigrate to Israel, see ibid., §73, p. 176: Father is wonderful and we have good talks and jokes. He is beginning to think to settle in the Holy Land . . . Anyway he dreams about it and says he might make a trip in the summer depending on world situation and where we are. He would like a house with a big garden where he can grow vegetables and keep goats, sheep, a mule and a cat. It would be very nice. Also relevant is the observation in Susan’s letter to Jacob from February 2, 1951, ibid., §103, p. 224: “Father is very well and enjoys life and looks into the hebrew book with me with great nostalgia. He says he fears in a few years he shall become as wise as he was at the age of 5 and become reconciled with ‘religion’.” 42. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §237, p. 215. 43. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §41, p. 114. 44. Ibid., §66, pp. 163–164. 45. Ibid., p. 164. On the comparison of German and Jewish superciliousness, see Susan’s comment in the letter to Jacob written on May 12, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §243, p. 225: “Tried to read Balthasar ’s Prometheus; Impossible. Besides I don’t care for this morbid German self-probing + self-glorification. Can you imagine a Apokalypse der Französische Seele—or the English or Italian? Only the Germans + the Jews are capable of taking themselves so seriously.” 46. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §149, p. 52. 47. Ibid., §139, p. 30: “Das Geschehen des Nationalsozialismus gehört mit zum Kreuz

Notes ­ —  3 41 unserer Zeit und es spricht auch an uns. Ich stehe noch ohne einen Schatten von Antwort—all mein Kompass ist zerstört, denn der Riss zwischen ‘Europa’ und meinem Volke ist ein Riss durch mich hindurch. Die in der Kirche haben es leicht!” 48. Ibid., §142, pp. 38–39. Compare Jacob’s brief comment in the letter to Susan from February 7, 1951, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §107, pp. 229–230: “The ‘economic’ categories of: Entfremdung - Verdinglichung of Marx - Lukacz are ontologically more important than a lot post Hegelian philosophy” (emphasis in original). 49. Compare Susan’s comment in the letter to Jacob written on March 15, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §200, p 142: “I read a long article on the KZ camps in Temps. Mod. the testimony of a Jewish doctor Nyiszli. It made me quite ill. But rather than being ‘shocked’ one should realize that in our present society there is no reason why such things shouldn’t happen.” Miklós Nyiszli was a pathologist who served under Mengele in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the article to which Susan refers appeared in Temps Modernes 65 (March 1951): 1654–1675 and 66 (April 1951): 1855–1886. See Pareigis, op. cit., p. 143 n. 1. 50. Ibid., §149, p. 50. 51. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, introduction by Samantha Power (New York: Schocken, 2004), p. 155; idem, The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), pp. 372–373, 384–385, 389–390, 393– 394, 401. On the effect of the establishment of the state of Israel as a challenge to the alleged open-mindedness and absence of prejudice related to the Jewish people’s sense of worldlessness—presented as the price that Jews had to pay for their liberation and the transition from a national religion to a political entity—see Arendt’s response to a conversation with Günter Gaus, which took place on October 28, 1964, in Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2013), p. 29, as well as her comments in the interview with Roger Errera conducted in October 1973, ibid., pp. 125–126. See Susie Linfield, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), pp. 17–79. The author’s perspective to which I am indebted is summarized on pp. 28–29: Arendt’s polemics extolling Jewish settlement in Palestine, independent Jewish politics, and Jewish self-defense can only be termed Zionist. Despite this, she was a scathing critic of the Zionist movement and Zionist politics, which she deemed insufficiently revolutionary and overly fixated on statehood. Regarding Arendt’s view on Zionism and its relationship to Bernard Lazare, see David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 118–129. For more detailed studies, see Norma Claire Moruzzi, Speaking Through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 82–85; Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Binationalism and Jewish Identity: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Palestine,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, edited by Steven E. Aschheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 165–180; idem, “Jewish Peoplehood, ‘Jewish Politics,’ and Political Responsibility: Arendt on Zionism and Partitions,” College Literature 38 (2011): 57–74; Moshe Zimmerman,

Notes  —  3 4 2 “Hannah Arendt, the Early ‘Post-Zionist,’” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, pp. 181–193; Gil Rubin, “From Federalism to Binationalism: Hannah Arendt’s Shifting Zionism,” Contemporary European History 24 (2015): 393–414; Shmuel Lederman, “Parting Ways Too Soon: Arendt Contra Butler on Zionism,” The European Legacy 25 (2020): 248–265. See also the discussion of Arendt’s view on language and homeland in Barbara Cassin, Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 41–63. On the comparison of Heidegger’s longing for the “lost paradise” of being at home in the earth and Zionism, see the letter of Jacob Taubes referred to in ch. 3 n. 258. 52. Consider the discussion of the phenomenon of “Holocaustia”—the anxiety of the threat of annihilation that serves as the template for Jewish life in a gentile world—as the justification for the prejudicial and genocidal leanings of the state of Israel’s ethnonationalism in Ian Lustick, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 27–53. 53. On the term “Holocaust-centrism,” see the discussion in Berel Lang, “On Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life,” Jewish Social Studies 7 (2001): 149–158. Novick’s thesis in That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), regarding the harm caused by the overemphasis on the Holocaust for both historians and American Jewry, is discussed as well in Berel Lang, Post-Holocaust Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 128–136. 54. Omri Boehm, Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel (New York: New York Review of Books, 2021), pp. 64–96, esp. 70, 75, 77–78. Also of relevance is the discussion of memory as a moral dictate in Jewish history discussed by Mikhael Manekin, The Dawn of Redemption: Ethics, Tradition, and Jewish Power (Jerusalem: Ivrit Publications, 2021), pp. 11–30 (Hebrew). 55. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §186, p. 113. 56. Ibid., §241, p. 220. 57. On the image “lilies-of-the-valley” connected to the Song of Songs, see the passage cited in the Introduction at n. 17. 58. Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 162–163. 59. Susan Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil,” PhD dissertation, Radcliffe College, 1956, p. 91. 60. The specific passage, partially quoted and analyzed by Susan, is from Simone Weil, Oppression et liberté, first published in 1955, one year before the doctoral thesis was completed. For a more recent English rendering, see Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty, translated by Arthur Wills and John Petrie (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 13: The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it. The rationalized factory, where a man finds himself shorn, in the interests of a passive mechanism, of everything which makes for initiative, intelligence, knowledge, method, is as it were an image of our present-day society. For the bureaucratic machine, though composed of flesh .  .  . is none the less as

Notes ­ —  3 43 irresponsible and as soulless as are machines made of iron and steel. The whole evolution of present-day society tends to develop the various forms of bureaucratic oppression and to give them a sort of autonomy in regard to capitalism as such. That is why it is our duty to define this new political factor more clearly than Marx was able to do. 61. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 97. Compare Susan’s remarks in a letter to Jacob from December 29, 1951, occasioned by her reading Lukács’s Existentialisme ou marxisme? (1948), in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §131, p. 14: But Lukacs can only rave against the inner contradictions of the capitalist society. I rather consider these contradictions a virtue: better an ambivalent and inconsistent attitude toward the reality of an industrial mass society than a total surrender to its logic. Maybe Marx is right and communism is the end of human history—and so it is, in the bad sense. And see the continued criticism of Lukács in Susan’s letter from December 30, 1951, ibid., §131, p. 15: He speaks of myth and mythification constantly with naïve disparagement but without explaining how unreality can at all enter reality. If the aim of man—or rather human history is the gradual resolution of the struggle against nature and the class struggle (not unsimilar to the Freudean [sic] “removal of tension” as the basic principle of the psychic mechanism) then man is indeed ein misgelungener Affe, and what is most characteristically human in him, that he can laugh and dream and dissimulate, is a shortcoming of nature. 62. Ibid., §171, p. 89. 63. See reference above at n. 25. 64. Jacob added here the words “= ‫ אתה בחרתנו‬complex.” The words in Hebrew, which lionize God for having chosen the people of Israel, are taken from the prayers for the festivals including the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. See the comment of Pareigis in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §225, p. 190 n. 2. Jacob’s gloss seems to suggest that he connected the entitlement on the part of academics in Jerusalem, exemplified by Scholem, to the ethnocentrism expressed in the liturgical refrain “You have chosen us from all the nations,” attah veḥartanu mi-kol ha-ammim. 65. Ibid., §225, p. 189 (emphasis in original). 66. Compare Susan’s letter to Jacob from February 18, 1952, ibid., §175, p. 96: I finished the “review” of L’Homme Révolté and will type it out now. Spent the weekend at Andrée reading La Peste. It makes me quite “nostalgic” after Palestine. Not only the description of Algiers, the tyranny of the sun, the dust, the odours but the atmosphere in a city where the plague rules. The causes are of course different, but the psychology is the same: quarantine isolation, exile, cessation of private life, the necessity of absolute regimentation. 67. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §128, p. 256. The letter was also published in Taubes, Der Preis, pp. 125–126. For a more placating tone, see Susan’s addition to Jacob’s letter to Scholem from October 2, 1949, in Taubes, Der Preis, p. 106: “We are very excited to come and to be with you again. I was very much moved by Reneé’s

Notes  —  3 4 4 letter! Warmest regards to you and your wife—Susan Taubes.” See also Susan’s marginal gloss to Jacob’s letter to Scholem written on September 27, 1951, op. cit., p. 110: Dear Professor Scholem, as usual Jacob did not leave me any space. I hope that you will not consider it an evil tiding for the New Year that I intend to study history of religion with your guidence [sic] and under the tutelage of the god of your library. Best regards to Mrs. Scholem and to you—Susan. 68. Compare the language of Taubes, Der Preis, p. 53: Großartig der Gestus wissenschaftlicher Askese in der Antwort Gershom Scholems an einen Studenten, der just sein “historisch-rationales” Instrumentarium für die Brücke hielt, über die suchende säkularistische Studenten den Weg zu den “nichtrationalen” Inhalten der jüdischen Mystik und ihrer dämonischen Konsequenz im Satyrspiel des Messianismus des 17. Jahrhunderts: Sabbatai Zwi und Jakob Frank, antreten können. In the same passage, Taubes insinuates that Scholem can be compared to the devil. The text is cited above, n. 38. It is of interest to note Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, p. 298, reports that, according to Susannah Heschel, the moniker for Jacob amongst the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary was “the sitra achra—a kabbalistic designation for one who came from the opposite side of heaven—from the realm of evil.” 69. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §47, p. 128. 70. Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” p. 281. 71. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §23, pp. 68–69. 72. Ibid., §42, p. 116. 73. Ibid., p. 117. For a particularly blatant expression of Susan’s sense of the futility of living and the pettiness of human beings, see the letter from December 18, 1950, ibid., §58, p. 149. 74. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §150, p. 54 (emphasis in original). 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., §193, p. 131, cited in the Introduction at n. 29. 77. Ibid., §159, p. 69 (emphasis in original). 78. Ibid., §155, p. 60. 79. Ibid., §267, p. 259. See the discussion in the Introduction at n. 135, and the citation of another part of this passage in ch. 1 at nn. 91–92. 80. Ibid., §156, p. 64. Compare the previous part of this letter cited in ch. 1 n. 86. For a parallel criticism of Weil’s failure to appreciate the interplay of oral law and written scripture in Judaism, see Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 138–139. 81. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §267, pp. 257–258.

Chapter 3 1. Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), p. 15. Jerry Z. Muller, Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022),

Notes ­ —  3 45 p. 136, notes that Susan shared Jacob’s “Gnostic view of the world as fundamentally evil, not to speak of banal.” And see ibid., p. 165: “Jacob was fascinated by the Gnostic conception of the world as a fallen realm, and by the echoes of that conception in Heidegger’s description of contemporary life as marked by inauthenticity—all of which Jacob conveyed to his young wife.” While I do not deny that the impact that Jacob had on Susan was formidable, my argument in this chapter is that the influence was more reciprocal and dialogical, and that many of the insights of Susan were eventually appropriated by Jacob. See Muller’s comment, p. 160, “Jacob’s growing disenchantment with Heidegger betrayed the influence of Susan upon his own intellectual development.” On Jacob’s engagement with Heidegger in his early years and his effort to replicate the Heideggerian attempt to recapture the primary experience behind religious and philosophical texts, see Muller, op. cit., pp. 58–59. 2. For a concise description of this correspondence, see Ole Jakob Løland, Pauline Ugliness: Jacob Taubes and the Turn to Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), pp. 25–26. 3. On Susan Taubes’s interest in vestiges of gnostic themes in the German philosophical tradition and in nonconfessionally bound Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century, see Sigrid Weigel, “Zwischen Religionsphilosophie und Kulturgeschichte. Susan Taubes zu Geburt der Tragödie und zur negativen Theologie der Moderne,” in Sigrid Weigel, Literatur als Voraussetzung der Kulturgeschichte. Schauplätze von Shakespeare bis Benjamin (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004), pp. 127–145; English translation: “Between the Philosophy of Religion and Cultural History: Susan Taubes on the Birth of Tragedy and the Negative Theology of Modernity,” Telos 150 (2010): 115–135. It is of interest to note the inclusion of Susan Taubes in the tenth chapter of Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work (New York: HarperCollins, 2019), which is entitled “The Harvard Gnostics.” 4. Susan A. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism,” Journal of Religion 34 (1954): 155; idem, “The Absent God,” Journal of Religion 35 (1955): 6. 5. See Weigel, “Between the Philosophy,” pp. 128–129. According to Weigel, Susan’s two essays from 1954 and 1955 “announce her decision to change her dissertation project.” I am not sure why Weigel made this assertion unless what she intended by the word “announce” is that the published essays are evidence that the original focus was modified. In any event, Weigel provides no explanation for the change. Christina Pareigis, “Letter from Susan Taubes to Jacob Taubes April 4, 1952,” Telos 150 (2010): 113 n. 7, also comments on the change of the dissertation topic. In the letter published by Pareigis, p. 113, Susan’s original plans are clear, “Otherwise I am preparing the documentation of the gnosis which I can do better in Zürich since I can take out the books from the library.” On the change in the topic of the doctoral thesis, see also Christina Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths of Nomads, Wanderers, Exiles. Stationen einer Korrespondenz,” in Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), p. 288, and now in much greater detail in idem, Susan Taubes: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020), pp. 265–300, esp. 273–281. Consider also Susan’s reporting in the letter to Jacob written on January 24, 1952, that Jean Wahl told her that she should not be wasting her time continuing to work seriously on

Notes  —  3 46 Heidegger, and that he suggested she should work directly on the relation between poetry and philosophy or on Simone Weil. See Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), §156, pp. 62–63. A preview of the dissertation was published as Taubes, “The Absent God.” Especially relevant for this study is the discussion of the “Gnostic traits of Simone Weil’s mysticism” on p. 12, and see the expanded discussion of the “Gnostic Revolt and Amor Fati” in Susan Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil,” PhD dissertation, Radcliffe College, 1956, pp. 235–251. On the gnostic leanings of Weil, see also Louis Dupré, “Simone Weil and Platonism: An Introductory Reading,” in The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, edited by E. Jane Doering and Eric O. Springsted (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), pp. 20–21. Dupré approvingly cites the essay on Weil by Susan Taubes, but he qualifies her position to some extent by emphasizing the Christian and the Platonic elements that are to be distinguished from the “gloomy picture” of Gnosticism. I note, finally, that according to Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journal and Notebooks 1964–1980, edited by David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 371, Susan Taubes left behind a manuscript on Simone Weil that she kept in a closet in New York. Sontag claimed that she did not read the manuscript, and its existence was not known by anyone. The passage is cited in ch. 4 n. 44. 6. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §34, p. 95. 7. Ibid., §43, p. 118. 8. Ibid., §44, p. 119. 9. Ibid., §54, p. 143. 10. Ibid., §57, p. 148. Note in the morning addendum to this letter Susan inquired if Jacob had access in Jerusalem to books on gnosis that he recommended “in case I work on Heidegger-Gnosis instead Mythos-Logos.” Regarding the latter topic, see the letter from October 26, 1950, ibid., §23, p. 69. 11. Ibid., §65, p. 162. In the continuation, the superiority of the treatment of myth in Plato and/or Heidegger is noted in comparison to contemporary works described as the “pseudo-mytho-cosmo-biologies of all the Nazi literature.” 12. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 155. 13. See Susan Taubes, “Review of Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate by Herbert Weisinger,” Ethics 64 (1954): 324 n. 3; Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §132, p. 16, §224, p. 187; Weigel, “Between the Philosophy,” pp. 124–125. 14. For references in Jonas’s own writings to parallels between Heidegger and gnostic sources, as well as to scholarly analyses of the impact of Heidegger on Jonas’s study of Gnosticism, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 25–26 n. 97. To the sources mentioned there, one could add Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 58; Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination Between the Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 35, 46–48, 121; Daniel M. Herskowitz, Heidegger and His Jewish Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 103–108; idem, “Reading Heidegger Against the

Notes ­ —  3 47 Grain: Hans Jonas on Existentialism, Gnosticism, and Modern Science,” Modern Intellectual History 19 (2022): 527–550. On pp. 547–548, Herskowitz cites Jonas’s evaluation of Susan’s essay wherein he expressed skepticism regarding her thesis concerning the gnostic foundation of Heidegger’s ontology, even as he noted that she relied heavily on his own work for her understanding of Gnosticism. See also Christian Wiese, The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions, translated by Jeffrey Grossman and Christian Wiese (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2007), p. 60. Wiese duly noted that in Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (1934), Jonas “focused on describing the nihilism inherent in Gnostic mythology,” and to that end he availed himself of Heideggerian forms of thinking, whereas his “later reflections on Gnosticism were meant to expose the Gnostic nihilistic character of existential philosophy, mainly in its Heideggerian version.” 15. See the analysis of this letter in Pareigis, Susan Taubes, pp. 277–278. 16. The citation is taken from the paraphrase of a passage from Heidegger’s “Der Spruch des Anaximander”(1946) in Karl Löwith’s essay “Martin Heidegger. Denker in dürftiger Zeit,” first published in Die Neue Rundschau 63 (1952). The study is mentioned explicitly by Susan in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §230, p. 199. I will cite the version found in Karl Löwith, Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1953), p. 51: “Das Sein entzieht sich nämlich gerade dann, wenn es sich in das Seiende entbirgt, und beirrt so das Seiende; gehört doch die ‘Irre’ überhaupt mit zum Wesen der Wahrheit.” See the English rendering in Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, edited by Richard Wolin, translated by Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 76: “For Being withdraws precisely when it reveals itself in beings, and it thereby confuses [beirren] beings; indeed this ‘error’ [Irre] is part of the very essence of truth!” For the original text, see Martin Heidegger, Holzwege [GA 5] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), p. 337: “Das Sein entzieht sich, indem es sich in das Seiende entbirgt. Dergestalt beirrt das Sein, es lichtend, das Seiende mit der Irre.” And the English version in Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, translated and edited by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 253–254: “By revealing itself in beings, being withdraws. In this way, in its illuminating, being invests beings with errancy” (translation slightly modified). 17. The reference is to a passage in Heidegger’s “Brief über den ‘Humanismus’” (1946) in Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken [GA 9] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), p. 331: “Der Mensch ist der Hirt des Seins.” See Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 252: “The human being is the shepherd of being.” 18. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §230, pp. 199–200 (emphasis in original). 19. Heidegger explains his use of the term “eschatology” in “Der Spruch des Anaximander” as the “departure of the long-concealed destiny of being,” the end, the “once of the latest” (das Einst zur Letze), which is symmetrical with the beginning, the “once of the dawn of destiny” (das Einst der Frühe des Geschickes). The gathering of this departure is not to be construed either theologically or philosophically but rather in terms of the

Notes  —  3 48 “eschatology of being” as such, that is, the “absolute subjectivity of the will to will.” See Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, pp. 246–247; idem, Holzwege, p. 327. 20. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §230, p. 200. 21. Ibid. The passage is cited in ch. 1 at n. 197. 22. Ibid., §233, p. 206. Concerning this comment, see Herskowitz, Heidegger, p. 106 n. 50. The lecture was published as Hans Jonas, “Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism,” Social Research 19 (1952): 430–452, and then reprinted as the epilogue “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism” in Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, third edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 320–340, and again in idem, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, with a foreword by Lawrence Vogel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), pp. 211–234. On the relationship between Arendt and Susan, see Sigrid Weigel, “Hannah Arendt und Susan Taubes. Zwei jüdische Intellektuelle zwischen Europa und den USA, zwischen Philosophie und Literatur,” in Jüdische Intellektuelle im 20. Jahrhundert. Literatur- und kulturgeschichtliche Studien, edited by Ariane Huml and Monika Rappenecker (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), pp. 133–149; Pareigis, Susan Taubes, pp. 221, 231, 252–253. 23. The expression “atheistic theology” was coined by Franz Rosenzweig and appropriated by Jacob Taubes, “Notes on an Ontological Interpretation of Theology,” Review of Metaphysics 2 (1949): 104. Compare the insightful comment of Jacob in a letter to Susan from January 6–7 1952 in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §138, p. 27: Einige kritische Bemerkungen gegen Heidegger eingestreut, das Werk ist als Gegenstück gedacht—um die Endlichkeit des Menschlichen aufzusprengen für das Ewige—ein von Buber, Marcel und anderen variiertes Thema. Die theistische “Phänomenologie” wirkt peinlich unsauber sowohl philosophisch (die Engel werden “bewiesen”) wie theologischchristlich wenn die “Weisheit dieser Welt” so ausgewortet wird um die “Weisheit Gottes” zu explizieren. Der atheistische Existenzialismus ist sicher im Recht in der “tabula rasa”— dadurch bereitet sich eher (nicht sicher!) eine Offenbarkeit dessen was an Wahrheit ist an. Offenbarkeit ist ohne Entleerung nicht möglich. Jacob’s reservation about “theistic phenomenology” anticipates the critique of more recent attempts to combine phenomenology and theology, for example, Dominique Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 16–103. See also my criticism of Marion’s idea of the gift in Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 227–260. For a more sanguine evaluation, see Emmanuel Falque, “Phenomenology and Theology: An Essay on Borders,” in Mysticism in the French Tradition: Eruptions from France, edited by Louise Nelstrop and Bradley B. Onishi (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 101–118. Particularly interesting is Jacob’s positive assessment of “atheistic existentialism” as providing a method that proves that revelation is not possible without an emptying; that is, something can be exposed only within the framework of the nothing that he calls the tabula rasa. 24. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §233, p. 206 (emphasis in original).

Notes ­ —  3 49 25. Ibid., §237, p. 214. 26. See the letter of Susan to Jacob from April 6, 1952, ibid., §220, p. 177. Studying Bultmann’s commentary to the Gospel of John occasioned this reflection: “Maybe instead of the ‘gnostic fundamentals of H.’s ontology’ one should study the heidegerian [sic] fundaments of gnosis interpretation. What kind of conspiracy!” For the continuation of this letter, see below at n. 48. 27. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 163. 28. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §77, p. 182. Regarding the Husserlian epochē, see ch. 5 n. 98. 29. Heidegger, Holzwege, pp. 321–322, offers two German translations. The first is from Nietzsche’s Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen (1873): “Woher die Dinge ihre Entstehung haben, dahin müssen sie auch zu Grunde gehen, nach der Notwendigkeit; denn sie müssen Buße zahlen und für ihre Ungerechtigkeiten gerichtet werden, gemäß der Ordnung der Zeit.” The second is from Diel’s Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903): “Woraus aber die Dinge das Entstehen haben, dahin geht auch ihr Vergehen nach der Notwendigkeit; denn sie zahlen einander Strafe und Buße für ihre Ruchlosigkeit nach der festgesetzten Zeit.” The English translations appear in Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 242. The former is rendered as “Whence things have their coming into being there they must also perish according to necessity; for they must pay a penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.” And the latter is rendered as “But where things derive their coming into being, there their passing away also occurs according to necessity; for they pay each other punishment and penalty for their dastardliness according to firmly established time.” For discussion of Heidegger’s reading of this Anaximander fragment, see Charles Bambach, Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice: Hölderlin—Heidegger—Celan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), pp. 155–172. 30. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 275 (emphasis in original); idem, Holzwege, p. 364. 31. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 275; idem, Holzwege, p. 364. 32. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §77, p. 182. 33. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §224, p. 186. 34. Ibid., §232, p. 204 (emphasis in original). 35. I have in mind the essay “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” included in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, edited and with an introduction by Allan Stoekl, translated by Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 45–52. The leitmotif of Gnosticism, according to Bataille, is the conception of matter as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkness . . . and as evil (which would not be the absence of good, but a creative action). This conception was perfectly incompatible with the very principle of the profoundly monistic Hellenistic spirit, whose dominant tendency saw matter and evil as degradations of superior principles (emphasis in original). Bataille discerns in the gnostic aversion to the material world an attraction to the obscene

Notes  —  350 and ominous love of darkness. The privileging of a preoccupation with evil on the part of gnostics—a characterization that can be traced to Plotinus—is also affirmed by Albert Camus, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, epilogue by Rémi Brague, translated with a preface and introduction by Ronald D. Srigley (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), pp. 67–87. According to Camus, p. 72, the fixation on the problem of evil “is the same in all Gnostic sects.” Consider the summation of his presentation on p. 86: It is evil that obsessed the Gnostics. They are all pessimists regarding the world. It is with great ardor that they address a God whom they nevertheless make inaccessible. . . . Historically, Gnosticism reveals to Christianity the path not to follow. The centrality of despair and the negative view of the world in Gnosticism is repeated in Camus, L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 51; idem, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, with a foreword by Sir Herbert Read, translated by Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), pp. 32–33. On the one hand, Camus identified Gnosticism, “the fruit of Greco-Christian collaboration,” as a concerted effort to promote the notion that to become human the divine had to despair, a stance that he deemed a “reaction against Judaic thought” (p. 32). On the other hand, Camus shrewdly argued that inasmuch as “the children of Cain have triumphed, increasingly, throughout the centuries, the God of the Old Testament can be said to have been incredibly successful. Paradoxically, the blasphemers have injected new life into the jealous God whom Christianity wished to banish from history” (p. 33). In this respect, Gnosticism is both an attack upon and a perpetuation of the Jewish heritage. 36. Compare Susan’s critique of Kant in her letter to Jacob from January 1, 1951, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §73, pp. 175–176: You will say I miss the point in Kant; but the most important point in Kant is a point that Kant himself never realized and that would not have interested him, a point that a gnostic or mystic mind gleams and not the cathedral builder. Nor would Kant let the noumenon be a nihil; he never tires of finding “uses” for it and putting it to work in practical reason (I dare you to dig up a gnostic meaning in the Ethics! or the ideals of speculative reason). Nor can there be a nihil because Kants [sic] incurable rationalism prevents him from even conceiving that the “unknown” ground may not be the “intelligible” ground and what is the intelligible? I think Kant is quite clear: the fetters of reason, reason the Dictator who puts all of creation including the creator in its place, who dictates the laws of nature and the laws of the soul . . . A mystic may be able to draw important consequences—but ones that Kant himself would never have drawn . . . The man will not have any mysteries (except for the “blind” mysterious syntheses themselves). And where there is no mystery there is no openness (or love) and where there is no openness there is no nothing and where there is no nothing there is no man. See ch. 5 n. 34. 37. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §85, pp. 198–199 (emphasis in original). 38. Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, translated with a preface by David

Notes ­ —  351 Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 40 (emphasis in original); idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, with an afterword by Martin Treml (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2007), p. 58. 39. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §232, p. 205: “The ‘eschatologischer Geist’ in all its forms is a sickness of the spirit, a puerility a not-coming-to-terms with human life such as it is. It has almost achieved the impossible: to glut + spoil the limitless thirst.” 40. Both essays were printed in Terror und Spiel: Probleme der Mythenrezeption, edited by Manfred Fuhrmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971): Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos,” pp. 11–66, and Jacob Taubes, “Der dogmatische Mythos der Gnosis,” pp. 145–156, reprinted in Jacob Taubes, Vom Kult zur Kultur: Bausteine zu einer Kritik der historischen Vernunft, edited by Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, and Winfried Menninghaus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), pp. 99–113, and the English version, “The Dogmatic Myth of Gnosticism,” in Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, with an introduction by Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Wolf-Daniel Hartwich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 61–75. On the intellectual exchange between these two thinkers, see Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, “Between Terror and Play: The Intellectual Encounter of Hans Blumenberg and Jacob Taubes,” Telos 158 (2012): 119–134; Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment, pp. 214–222. On the role of ancient Gnosticism in Blumenberg’s construal of the Neuzeit, see Daniel Weidner, “The History of Dogma and the Story of Modernity: The Modern Age as ‘Second Overcoming of Gnosticism,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 80 (2019): 75–90. For a comparison of the interpretations of Gnosticism in Jonas and Blumenberg, see Elad Lapidot, “Legitimacy of Nihilism: Blumenberg’s Post-Gnosticism,” in Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg, edited by Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel Whistler (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 37–59. I am grateful to the author for drawing my attention to his study. 41. Taubes, From Cult, p. 73; idem, Vom Kult, p. 111. On Bultmann and Gnosticism, see the comment of Voegelin reported by Eliade cited below in n. 200. 42. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, pp. 26–40; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, pp. 40–58. 43. Taubes, From Cult, p. 137; idem, Vom Kult, p. 173. On the impact of Weimar Marcionism, see Løland, Pauline Ugliness, pp. 65–68, and the specific influence of Heidegger noted on p. 67. See also Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity: A Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion, and ‘Overcoming’ the Past,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8 (2007): 591–608; Lazier, God Interrupted, pp. 27–36; Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions: World Denial and World Redemption (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 15–50; Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Gnostic Anxieties: Jewish Intellectuals and Weimar Neo-Marcionism,” Modern Theology 35 (2019): 71–80; Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment, pp. 28–60. 44. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 157 (emphasis in original). 45. For references to scholarly analyses of the Christological elements in Heidegger’s thinking, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 309 n. 57, 310–311 n. 58, 352–353 n. 391, 437 nn. 29

Notes  —  352 and 31. To these we could add the more recent studies by Jason W. Alvis, The Inconspicuous God: Heidegger, French Phenomenology and the Theological Turn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018); Jonathan Lyonhart, “Being and Time-less Faith: Juxtaposing Heideggerian Anxiety and Religious Experience,” Open Theology 6 (2020): 15–26; Adam J. Graves, The Phenomenology of Revelation in Heidegger, Marion, and Ricoeur (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021), pp. 23–76. In my previous discussions, I neglected to mention the remark of Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 51, that Heidegger “seems unable to stop either settling accounts with Christianity or distancing himself from it—with all the more violence in so far as it is already too late, perhaps, for him to deny certain proto-Christian motifs in the ontological repetition and existential analytics” (emphasis in original). The approach of Susan and the scholars mentioned in this note stands in sharp contrast to the conclusions reached by Hans Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology,” in The Phenomenon of Life, pp. 235–261. According to Jonas, Heidegger’s thought is not atheistic but incorrigibly paganistic insofar as it deifies the world, and hence the theological appropriations of his thought are misguided. 46. See reference in Wolfson, Giving, p. 310 n. 58. 47. With respect to seeking the Jewish origins of Gnosticism based on cognate concepts between Judaism and Christianity, Susan’s view is reminiscent of the position taken by Benamozegh. Regarding the latter, see Clémence Boulouque, Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), p. 124. 48. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §220, p. 177 (emphasis in original). See the letter of March 26, 1952, ibid., §210, pp. 160–162, which includes a portion of Susan’s working notes in German on the “theological frame” of Heidegger’s ontology. Compare the criticism of Heidegger and mysticism in the letter from Susan to Jacob, dated March 4, 1952, ibid., §191, pp. 122–123 (partially cited below in n. 95). See also Susan’s comments about Heidegger’s Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung in ibid., §134, p. 18, cited in ch. 5 n. 109. 49. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §244, pp. 226–227: 1. Heidegger hat keinen Ort für die ‘Natur’, antikosmologisch . . . 2. “Seinsgeschichte” hat nichts mit Weltgeschichte zu tun, sondern kann nur als neutralisierte “Heilsgeschichte” verstanden werden. H. ist in fast naiver Weise saekularisierter Theologe, er “übersetzt” einfach das theolog. Vokabular. H. gehört in die Reihe des deutsch. Idealismus vor Nietzsche, der die christliche (und alle Filiationen) Interpretation überwinden wollte (emphasis in original). On Heidegger’s blurring the distinction between historical consciousness and myth, see Jacob Taubes, Apokalypse und Politik: Aufsätze, Kritiken und kleinere Schriften, edited by Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink and Martin Treml, with the collaboration of Theresia Heuer and Anja Schipke (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), pp. 241–242. 50. The reference is to Löwith, “Martin Heidegger. Denker in dürftiger Zeit.” See above, n. 16. 51. The short piece “Der Feldweg” is included in Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1910–1976 [GA 13] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), pp. 87–90, and it is translated into English as “The Pathway” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, pp. 69–72.

Notes ­ —  353 52. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §207, p. 155 (emphasis in original). It is of interest to compare Susan’s intuition regarding the status of prayer in Heidegger’s hermeneutical ontology and the study by Benjamin Crowe, “Heidegger and the Prospect of a Phenomenology of Prayer,” in The Phenomenology of Prayer, edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 119–133. 53. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 12. There is affinity between this statement and Altizer’s surmise that inasmuch as absolute negation passes into absolute affirmation, the death of God pronounced by Nietzsche can be transformed into the hope of resurrection. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Apotheosis of the Nothing in Altizer’s Kenotic Atheology,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 19 (2019–2020): 56. 54. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, edited by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, in conjunction with Horst Folkers, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, and Christoph Schulte, translated by Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 66; Jacob Taubes, Die politische Theologie des Paulus, edited by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, in conjunction with Horst Folkers, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, and Christoph Schulte (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), p. 91. I note the irony that Jacob himself was sometimes described by others in terms not unlike those that he used to describe Heidegger. For instance, see Arendt’s letter to Scholem from April 9, 1953, in The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, edited by Marie Luise Knott, translated by Anthony David (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), §106, p. 176, and the letter from July 8, 1954, §110, p. 180. See Scholem’s response in a letter from August 3, 1954, ibid., §111, p. 183. On the negative appraisal of Heidegger and his triangulation with Schmitt and Hitler, see Taubes, The Political Theology, pp. 103–105; idem, Die politische Theologie, pp. 140–142. On Taubes’s stupefaction over the Nazi flirtation on the part of Heidegger and Schmitt, see ibid., pp. 99–100, and parallel text with slight variations in Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, translated by Keith Tribe, with an introduction by Mike Grimshaw (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 50. See also the letter of Jacob to Armin Mohler from February 14, 1952, in Taubes, The Political Theology, pp. 107–108. For discussion of Jacob’s engagement with Schmitt, see Bruce Rosenstock, “Palintropos Harmoniê: Jacob Taubes and Carl Schmitt ‘im liebenden Streit,’” New German Critique 121 (2014): 55–92; Martin Treml, “Paulinische Feindshaft. Korrespondenzen von Jacob Taubes und Carl Schmitt,” in Jacob Taubes—Carl Schmitt: Briefwechsel mit Materialien, edited by Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, Thorsten Palzhoff, and Martin Treml (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2012), pp. 273–299; idem, “Secularization and the Symbols of Democracy: Jacob Taubes’s Critique of Carl Schmitt,” in Genealogies of the Secular: The Making of Modern German Thought, edited by Willem Styfhals and Stéphane Symons (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), pp. 159–178; Sigrid Weigel, “Between Fascination and Compulsive Schmittian Reading,” in Depeche Mode, pp. 102–128, esp. 120–124; Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, pp. 453–476. 55. The possible influence of Heidegger on Taubes’s Abendländische Eschatologie is discussed by Romano Pocai, “Die Angst und das Nichts. Überlegungen zu Heideggers ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’” in Abendländische Eschatologie. Ad Jacob Taubes, edited by Richard Faber,

Notes  —  35 4 Eveline Goodman-Thau, Thomas Macho (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), pp. 331–340. 56. On Jacob’s interest in Heidegger during his time in Jerusalem in the early 1950s, see Pareigis, “The Conflicting Paths,” p. 278; idem, Susan Taubes, pp. 204–205. If my supposition is correct, it would be another example of Jacob eclipsing the influence that Susan had on his intellectual curiosity. An additional example would be his account in a conversation with Peter Sloterdijk in January 1987 of how Scholem drew his attention to Simone Weil and then eventually Susan wrote a dissertation on her. See Thomas Macho, “Der intellektuelle Bruch zwischen Gershom Scholem und Jacob Taubes. Zur Frage nach dem Preis des Messianismus,” in Abendländische Eschatologie. Ad Jacob Taubes, p. 541; English translation: “On the Price of Messianism: The Intellectual Rift between Gershom Scholem and Jacob Taubes,” in Messianic Thought Outside Theology, edited by Anna Glazova and Paul North (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p. 39. For a more extensive analysis, see Thomas Macho, “Moderne Gnosis? Zum Einfluβ Simone Weils auf Jacob und Susan Taubes,” in Abendländische Eschatologie. Ad Jacob Taubes, pp. 545–560. See also Weigel, “Between the Philosophy,” pp. 130–132. As the author duly notes, p. 132, there is a clear proximity between Susan Taubes’s writing from the 1950s, Jacob Taubes’s preceding dissertation on occidental eschatology, and his later work from the 1960s to the 1980s—above all in respect to Gnosticism, in both his fascination with the “prince of the world” and his discussion of Marcion. Here Jacob Taubes’s Heidegger essay of 1975 and his Marcion essay of 1984 are of special interest. Finally, consider the somewhat disparaging remarks about Simone Weil and Susan Taubes in Jacob Taubes’s letter to Arthur A. Cohen from November 3, 1977, published by Jerry Z. Muller, “‘I Am Impossible’: An Exchange Between Jacob Taubes and Arthur A. Cohen,” Jewish Review of Books (Summer 2017), https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2672/iam-impossible-an-exchange-between-jacob-taubes-and-arthur-a-cohen/ The specific reference of Jacob’s diatribe against his ex-wife is to Susan Taubes, “The Riddle of Simone Weil,” Exodus 1 (1959): 55–71. According to Jacob’s rehashing of Susan’s argument, she displayed empathy with Weil’s criticism of Judaism as promoting a worldly and legalistic particularism in contrast to Christianity’s embrace of a universalistic spirituality. See Helen Thein, “Das Rätsel um Susan Taubes—eine Spurensuche,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 59 (2007): 378. As I have shown in several places in this monograph, Susan’s position is far more complex than what Jacob offered in his caricature; in fact, she was overtly critical of Weil’s promotion of a universal Catholicism that suppressed the particularity of Judaism. 57. Compare Susan’s comment in the letter to Camus, written on February 2, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §267, p. 257: “But the opposition between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, which you seem to accept, is a paulinic [sic] creation. The old Moloch as opposed to the new god of love is not a jewish invention—unless you wish to argue that christianity as such is a jewish heresy.” 58. For a partial list of scholars who have discussed this topic, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Along the Path: Studies in Kabbalistic Myth, Symbolism, and Hermeneutics (Albany: State

Notes ­ —  355 University of New York Press, 1995), p. 195 n. 20. It goes without saying that since that publication many more have weighed in on the relation of Gnosticism and Judaism in Late Antiquity, but this is not the place to elaborate. 59. Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 278–279, 289–296. See also the critical review of the question of the relationship of Gnosticism and Judaism in Hans Jonas, “Response to G. Quispel’s ‘Gnosticism and the New Testament,’” in The Bible in Modern Scholarship: Papers Read at the 100th Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, December 28–30, 1964, edited by J. Philip Hyatt (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1965), pp. 279–293; and compare Wiese, The Life, pp. 40, 60–65. 60. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 155. 61. In the letter of Susan to Albert Camus from February 2, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §267, p. 257, the classification “Old Testament” is said to have been “created in the split between judaism and christianity, and expresses the christian, and already anti-jewish interpretation of judaism.” For more on this letter, see ch.1 at nn. 85–89. For an elaboration of the taxonomic distinction between Jewish and Greek elements in Christianity, see Susan Taubes, “Review of L’Homme Révolté by Albert Camus,” Iyyun 3 (1952): 174 (Hebrew). 62. See especially the comment of Susan cited in ch. 1 at n. 105. Compare as well the reference cited in ch. 1 n. 30, where Susan wrote about concretely experiencing the limit by breaking it. 63. See Moser, Sontag, pp. 139–140: “In this shattered world, there was new interest in heterodoxies. In Susan’s circle of exiles, the ancient heresy of gnosticism offered a compelling alternative. . . . This shaded into an antinomianism, disdain for all convention, including sexual: a theoretical source of the libertinism the Taubeses practiced.” I prefer the word “hypernomianism” to antinomianism to name this licentiousness as it better captures the paradox of fulfilling the law by extending beyond the law. 64. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §2, pp. 17–18. 65. Harry A. Wolfson, Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, volume 1, edited by Isadore Twersky and George H. Williams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 583–618. 66. For references to this numerology, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 142 n. 53. 67. See ch. 1 n. 41. 68. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 157. For discussion of Heidegger’s emphasis on the “individual’s experience of his infinite solitude” in relation to Kierkegaard’s “Christian experience,” and the possibility that the former is rooted in the latter, see Susan’s letter to Jacob in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §55, pp. 144–145. See ch. 5 n. 274. 69. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 157. 70. Ibid., pp. 156–157 (emphasis in original). 71. Ibid., p. 158. 72. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit 1952, §172, p. 91. Compare the letter from April



Notes  —  356 21, 1952, ibid., §232, p. 204, where Susan pointed out that the gnostic judgment on reality contains an implicit affirmation of the world it negates. Susan contrasted the “sentimentality of gnostic (pseudo)-nihilism” and “Buddhist nihilism.” See also the letter from Susan to Jacob cited in the Introduction at n. 118. Various other letters attest to her interest in Buddhism. For instance, see the references to Nishida and Suzuki in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §6, p. 27, §34, p. 97, and §51, p. 137. Compare ibid., §20, p. 63: “I find a great deal of hints, bibliography on the nothing in Buddhism.” See also §34, p. 97; §51, p. 137; §92, p. 209; Taubes, Die Korrespondenz Jacob Taubes 1952, §141, p. 33. In A Lament for Julia, Susan compared the mystical dark night of the soul and the path of distinction described by the Eastern sages. See Susan Taubes, Prosaschriften, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis, translated by Werner Richter (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), p. 168. And compare the passage about the Eastern doctrine of reincarnation from A Lament for Julia cited in ch. 5 n. 27. 73. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 158. For Susan’s personal disapproval of this gnostic or mystical portrayal of the self, see the letter of April 9, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §224, p. 187: The “self” is just part of the furniture of the gnostic experience; it has no meaning or reality outside of the gnosis. The “self” is ultimately a very colorless and impersonal entity. Personality means a formation of abysmal + noumenal forces in contact with reality. One “saint” is like another. Therefore there is one mysticism. (In die Nacht sind alle Kühe schwarz). The conclusion of this passage is discussed in the Introduction at nn. 123–124. 74. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” pp. 158–159. 75. Ibid., p. 159. 76. The passage is translated from the German translation in Taubes, Prosaschriften, p. 115: Doch wie soll ich meine eigene Rolle in dieser tragischen Farce verstehen? Soll ich sagen, dass ich eine Art wissendes Wesen bin? Mitunter habe ich mich als himmlischen Funken begriffen. Als gefallenen Engel, wenn man will; ohne jedoch in die Einzelheiten zu gehen, also von wo, wie oder warum gefallen, und ohne über die himmlische Heimstatt zu fabulieren, der ich dann wohl angehören müsste. Denn wenn ich gefallen bin, so hat der Sturz meine Erinnerung vollends getilgt. See ibid., p. 119, where Susan described the gnostic drama in the image of the dark waters of the sea, the proper place for Julia’s soul to drift unseen and unrecognized before she emerged into the alienating light of the world: Besser wäre es gewesen, sie hätte das Licht der Welt nie erblickt, kein Fischernetz hätte sie je vom Grund heraufgezerrt. Und so wäre sie weiter durch die dunklen Wasser getrieben, ungesehen, unerkannt, dort unten in ihrem Element, hätte die Finsternis vor sich hergeschoben, auf ihrem Pfad ohne Spur, ohne Laut, unerkannt und nichts wissend hätte sie sich von der Fülle des Meeres ernährt, um dann beizeiten ihrerseits das Wasser mit dem eigenen Zerfall anzureichern. Jetzt aber ist sie draußen, sie ist im Licht. Es gibt kein Zurück.

Notes ­ —  357 And compare the narrator’s revolting and misogynistic description of Julia’s corporeal being in ibid., p. 168: Zu denken, dass ich, ein Geist, in irgendeiner Bindung zu ihr stehen oder tatsächlich in dieser Kloake leben könnte! Jedes Mal wenn ich wegnickte, wurde ich gebeutelt von Albträumen, in denen ich sumpfige Gewässer durchschwamm, randvoll mit gedunsenen Kaulquappen und grauen Brocken Leichenfleisch, das an verwesenden Algen hing. . . . Ich sehnte mich danach, in einem vollkommenen Kristall, einer Schneeflocke, einem Tautropfen zu wohnen. . . . Vergeblich versuchte ich, ihren Körper von seiner Saftigkeit zu kurieren, ihn zu einer Mumie schrumpfen zu lassen, wenigstens hätte diese Fassade besser zu meinem Temperament und meinen Gewohnheiten gepasst. . . . Ich vergaß sogar, dass sie eine Frau war. Ihr Fleisch kam mir so obszön vor, dass ihr Geschlecht völlig gleichgültig wurde. 77. Ibid., pp. 115–116. Compare ibid., p. 119, where the personal selves (Ichs) are described as ensouled bodies (beseelten Körpern) and embodied souls (verkörperten Seelen). 78. Ibid., pp. 115–116. For the continuation of this passage, see ch. 1 n. 109. 79. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 200; idem, Holzwege, p. 269. 80. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 200; idem, Holzwege, pp. 269–270. 81. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 58; idem, Holzwege, p. 76. 82. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §209, pp. 158–159. 83. Ibid., §224, p. 187. The source for Susan’s description of gnostic soteriology is the “book” by Simone Pétrement, which she mentions in the letter. Pareigis, op. cit., p. 189 n. 5, identified the reference as Le dualisme chez Platon: les gnostiques et les manichéens, published in 1947. 84. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 156. 85. Ibid., p. 157. 86. Ibid., p. 162. On the connection between ontology and temporality, particularly as it is to be elicited from the perspectives on the past in Heidegger and Benjamin, compare Jacob Taubes, “Seminar Notes on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’” in Walter Benjamin and Theology, edited by Colby Dickinson and Stéphane Symons (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 194–195: What does ontology mean here? Inquiring after the status of what-is-past. What-is-past is not past. Heidegger articulates history into past, present, and future: history becomes ontologized as historicity, which is always already prior to this articulation. In Benjamin, the ontologizing is not very conspicuous; while Heidegger freezes what has happened, in Benjamin’s theory what has happened, what-has-been flashes up in a messianic theory. The original German appears in Jacob Taubes, Der Preis des Messianismus: Briefe von Jacob Taubes an Gershom Scholem und Andere Materialien, edited by Elettra Stimilli (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), p. 79. The intellectual relationship of Heidegger and Benjamin is discussed by Taubes, “Seminar Notes,” pp. 190–191; idem, Der Preis, pp. 75– 76. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 512 n. 23, 611–612 n. 129. 87. This strikes me as a typographical error that should be corrected to “apotheosis.”

Notes  —  358 88. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 168. 89. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §71, p. 171. On Heidegger’s affiliation with Nazism, see Susan’s comments in her letter to Jacob written on February 8, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §168, p. 84: Spoke briefly about Heid. with Weil who thinks he is a bastard, not very intelligent but profound. . . . He agreed with me that H.’s nazism does not follow from the philosophy— he added not even that follows. Lowith afterwards wrote to Weil that he agrees with him (emphasis in original). On Löwith’s attitude to Heidegger’s relationship to National Socialism, see Wolfson, The Duplicity, pp. 11, 25–27, and references to primary and secondary sources cited on pp. 185 n. 50 and 193 n. 136. 90. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 313: “Die Sprache ist das Hause des Seins. In ihrer Behausung wohnt der Mensch.” See idem, Pathmarks, p. 239: “Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell.” 91. For discussion of “negative ontology” as it applies to the thought of Jacob Taubes, see ch. 4 at n. 137, and compare the references to Susan’s use of the expression cited in ch. 4 n. 144. 92. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” pp. 168–169. 93. Jacob Taubes, “The Development of the Ontological Question in Recent German Philosophy,” Review of Metaphysics 6 (1953): 662. For the German version, see Taubes, Apokalypse, p. 64. Regarding this essay, see Introduction n. 28. 94. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Existenz Philosophy?,” Partisan Review 1 (1946): 49–50. A comparison of part of Arendt’s passage and Jacob Taubes’s argument in “The Development of the Ontological Question in Recent German Philosophy” was made by Herskowitz, Heidegger, p. 225. Herskowitz cites the version in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), p. 180: The ideal of the Self follows as a consequence of Heidegger’s making of man what God was in earlier ontology. A being of this highest order is conceivable only as single and unique and knowing no equals. What Heidegger consequently designates as the “fall” includes all those modes of human existence in which man is not God but lives together with his own kind in the world. On the possibility of viewing Arendt’s own political thought as indebted to but also departing from Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, see Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, “In Heidegger’s Shadow: Arendt’s Phenomenological Humanism,” Review of Politics 46 (1984): 183–211. 95. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §46, p. 125 (emphasis in original). Susan returned to this characterization of Heidegger in the letter to Jacob, written on March 4, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §191, p. 122.

In the context of describing the relation of the sacred and the profane, Susan proposed that faith may be

Notes ­ —  359 a euphemism for profound trembling in uncertainty—an ultimate abandon to uncertainty: Angst. . . . As you see we’re back with Heidegger. But curiously his insight into the sacrum is purer in SuZ where he speaks out of the dimension of the profane, than in all the romantic and mystical speculation about das Heilige in the later works. Insofar as the sacred becomes problematic it must be treated negatively: not from the side of the sacred as in religion but from the side of the profane. By eliminating “god” and “eternity” Heidegger can show more clearly than Augustine that it is in the essence of the self to open the dimension of the profane: temporality, nothingness a morselled, wasted, senseless, lost existence. There may be some “pride” in all this “selbst sein koennen” but actually it is just in its “authenticity” that the self is most damned. At least an authentic damnation. 96. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §48, p. 129. 97. Ibid. For an elaboration on the theme of fallenness and Dasein’s mode of being-inthe-world, see Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” pp. 162–163. 98. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §87, p. 202. For the fuller context of this letter, see ch. 4 n. 151. 99. Arendt seems to have in mind the concluding part of the following passage in Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), §40, p. 189: Die Angst dagegen holt das Dasein aus seinem verfallenden Aufgehen in der “Welt” zurück. Die alltägliche Vertrautheit bricht in sich zusammen. Das Dasein ist vereinzelt, das jedoch als In-der-Welt-sein. Das In-Sein kommt in den existenzialen “Modus” des Unzuhause. Nichts anderes meint die Rede von der “Unheimlichkeit” (emphasis in original). In a state of “average everydayness” (durchschnittliche Alltäglichkeit), Dasein experiences a “tranquillized self-assurance” of “Being-at-home” (Zuhause-sein), but with the fall of anxiety Dasein is pulled back from its absorption in the world, and hence, in a state of authenticity, “Being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-Sein) becomes a form of “uncanniness” (Unheimlichkeit) or “not-being-at-home” (das Nicht-zuhause-sein). See below, n. 128. 100. Arendt, “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” p. 49. 101. Ibid., p. 50. On nothing and death, see Richard Regvald, Heidegger et le problème du néant (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 18–31, and the discussion on nothing, anxiety, and temporality in ibid., pp. 44–58. See the more recent discussion of the Heideggerian notion of angst and its indebtedness to Kierkegaard and Husserl in Bettina Bergo, Anxiety: A Philosophical History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 339–360. 102. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §7, pp. 27–28, 34, 38 n. 1; idem, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), pp. 26, 32, 36 n. 5. On Heidegger’s hermeneutical application of the Husserlian adage zurück zu den Sachen selbst, see Peter Willis, “The ‘Things Themselves’ in Phenomenology,” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 1 (2001): 1–12, esp. 5; Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 42; Fredrik Westerlund, Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 67–70, 180–183. For an alternate approach to Heidegger’s adoption of Husserl’s directive to get back to the things themselves, see Søren Overgaard, “Heidegger’s Early Critique of Husserl,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11 (2003): 162–163; idem, Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World (Dordrecht:

Notes  —  36 0 Kluwer Academic, 2004), pp. 14–15, 75–77; Lilian Alweiss, The World Unclaimed: A Challenge to Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. xxvii, 10–11, 72, 106. 103. It is of interest to ponder the following remark in Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V, p. 132: “Das Ende der Philosophie ist der An-fang in das Denken. Das Denken betrachtet nicht die ‘Welt’, aber es verändert die Welt, indem es ihr erst die Gelassenheit zu ihrer Wahrheit bereitet” (emphasis in original). Also relevant is the following diary account, written on May 28, 1943, describing the experience of neurasthenia produced by metaphysical melancholy, in Mircea Eliade, The Portugal Journal, translated with a preface and notes by Mac Linscott Ricketts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), p. 84: For the first time, I doubt—during such attacks—the postmortem existence of the human personality. If, indeed (to take one example), Heidegger is right, then nothing in the world seems significant any longer, nothing has any reason to be. If we came from nothing and return to nothing, then death has no meaning, nor does creation or effort. If this is the truth, then there’s nothing left for me to do but to kill, rape, and lounge around sunning myself. Without a spiritual unity destined to continue its experiences after death—when the great verification and valorization of deeds begins—everything seems useless to me. See also Eliade’s respect for combined with his misgivings about Heidegger expressed in the entry from late June 1944, ibid., p. 114: Back in Heidegger (Vom Wesen des Grundes), whom I decipher with considerable difficulty. I can’t help but admire Heidegger’s philosophical genius. But oftentimes I feel like crying out: where do all these analyses, so stunningly precise and exhaustive, lead?! You have set out on a hard road, which is blocked. Man can reveal to himself more deeply and more fully the mysteries—even the meaning of his own temporal existence—if he looks in a different place. Examine, for instance, the Symbol (emphasis in original). Compare the diary entry from October 12, 1963, in Mircea Eliade, No Souvenirs: Journal, 1957–1969, translated by Fred H. Johnson, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 200: Admirable response from Heidegger to Carnap’s attacks . . . being, nonbeing, must not be understood “logically,” but in relation to the meanings they have in a human existence— for example, in the experience of anguish and finitude which causes the shock of the possibility of nonbeing, and the astonishment that this shock arouses, the astonishment that something exists, that there is not only nothing, nonbeing (emphasis in original). See the chapter on “Thanatologies: Apotheoses and Triumphs of Death” in Moshe Idel, Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 104–134. Eliade’s reaction to Heidegger’s conception of death (including the aforecited passage from No Souvenirs) is discussed on p. 122, and see the references to other scholars listed on p. 132 n. 136. 104. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §48, p. 129. 105. Ibid., p. 130. 106. Catherine Malabou, The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy, translated by Perter Skafish (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), p. 138, noted that, for Heidegger, “time itself, as being, in fact undergoes a profound metamorphosis.” Malabou goes on to say that Heidegger grounds his conception of temporality as

Notes ­ —  361 the originary gift of change—the Zeitigung (see below, nn. 107–109)—in the philological derivation of “presence” from the Greek parousia, which means to endure. There is thus a “secret kinship” that “ties substitution together with duration. To endure is to change: what endures only lasts for a time, and is, as such, destined to lose its place. . . . To endure means to remain for a certain time” (emphasis in original). My own approach to Heidegger similarly underscores the paradox that the metrics of immobility is flux. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 3–11. 107. Martin Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle—Zwiesprache—Briefe, edited by Medard Boss (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006), p. 203. 108. For a different rendering, see Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols— Conversations—Letters, edited by Medard Boss, translated with notes and afterwords by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 158: “Temporalizing as letting [Da-sein’s] temporality come forth is an unfolding and emerging and, thus, as appearing.” The translators note that Zeitigung, which they rendered as “temporalizing,” literally means “ripening” or “bringing to fruition,” and hence it denotes “Dasein’s temporality [Zeitlichkeit] appearing in the unity of the ‘ecstases’ of the future, the having been, and the present.” Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), p. 97, proffers that Zeitigung signifies “an opening up as an intrinsic unfolding.” See ibid., pp. 139 n. 35, 140, 153, 234 n. 16. 109. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §45, p. 235; §61, p. 304; §65, p. 331; §67, p. 335; §68, p. 350; §69, pp. 353, 365; §72, pp. 375–376; §79, p. 410; §80, pp. 414–415, 420; §81, p. 427; §82, p. 436. 110. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §48, p. 130. See the analysis of Heidegger’s notion of angst, the temporalization of Dasein, and the temporality of life in Bergo, Anxiety, pp. 361–396, and especially the discussion of the origin of negation in anxiety and the confrontation with finitude on pp. 379–384. 111. Wolfson, Suffering Time, pp. 394–395 n. 67. On the role of the nonconceptual in Adorno, see ch. 1 at n. 239 and the references cited there. For discussion of Heidegger’s use of the musical image of the fugue, see Iain Thomson, “The Philosophical Fugue: Understanding the Structure and Goal of Heidegger’s Beiträge,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 34 (2003): 57–73; Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 75–77, 228, 255. 112. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §48, p. 130. 113. Ibid., §37, p. 105. 114. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 159. 115. On the identification of Entweltlichungstendenz as the most basic characterization of Gnosticism according to Jonas, see the succinct analysis in Lapidot, “Legitimacy,” pp. 40–42. 116. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §105, pp. 226–227. Compare ibid., §17, p. 58, cited in ch. 1 at n. 49. 117. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” pp. 243–244 (emphasis in original). 118. Compare the reference to “the gnostic heretical (both Christian and Jewish) doctrine of redemption through sin, of sin as a necessary phase in redemption,” in Taubes,

Notes  —  362 “Review of Tragedy and the Paradox,” p. 324. Insofar as Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is mentioned there explicitly, we can assume that Susan was influenced by him in her formulation of the “antinomistic” idea of transgression for the sake of salvation and the related image of the coincidence of saint and sinner. An echo of Scholem’s language can be heard in Susan Taubes, Divorcing, introduction by David Rieff (New York: New York Review of Books, 2020), p. 139. Resisting the idea of divorcing his already deceased spouse, Ezra proclaims, “Sophie Blind remains my wife till the Messiah comes. Brothers, sons of the Torah, we are all awaiting the day of Judgment, united in the hope of the coming of the Messiah. We are children of calamity. What has been joined in this world cannot be sundered in heaven or hell before the coming of the Messiah and Judgment.” Sophie responds to Ezra’s contrived theological rationale, “You miserable ideologue! You know I never swallowed that rot about redemption through sin.” Finally, let me call attention to the gnostic denial of history ascribed to the Jewish esoteric ideal by Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1956), p. 20. After conceding that the kabbalah comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought in positing the rhythm of the life of the universe as a single movement characterized by the dialectic of procession and reversion, also marked by the diastolic and systolic phases of the cardiac cycle, Scholem concluded: But the cosmogonic and the eschatological trend of Kabbalistic speculation . . . are in the last resort ways of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical understanding; that is to say, they do not help us to gauge the intrinsic meaning of history. On the world-negating orientation in Scholem’s apocalyptic pessimism and gnostic messianism, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 319–321. The influence of the formulation of gnosis in Jonas’s early work on Scholem, and particularly in his essay on “Redemption Through Sin,” is duly noted by Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 190. In the continuation of the aforementioned passage from Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Scholem does retrieve a historical dimension of the kabbalah, which he relates to the paradoxical idea of the writing down of oral traditions dedicated to the communication of secrets that cannot be communicated publicly. The very term qabbalah, therefore, denotes the irony of being a tradition about the transmission of truths that defy transmissibility. Concerning this dimension of Scholem’s kabbalah scholarship, see the references cited and discussed in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Metaphor, Dream, and the Parabolic Bridging of Difference: A Kabbalistic Aesthetic,” Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 14 (2021): 84 n. 9. 119. Taubes, From Cult, pp. 4–5; idem, Vom Kult, pp. 44–45. See also Taubes, The Political Theology, pp. 10, 24–25; idem, Die politische Theologie, pp. 21, 37–38; idem, “Scholem’s Theses on Messianism Reconsidered,” Social Science Information 21 (1982): 670, and the German translation “Scholems Thesen über den Messianismus überprüft,” in Taubes, Der

Notes ­ —  363 Preis, p. 46. See Elettra Stimilli, “Der Messianismus als politisches Problem,” in Taubes, Der Preis, pp. 131–179, especially the section on the law and messianic time, pp. 148–155, and the section on the catechontic form of existence and the messianic logic of Paul, pp. 155–164; Agata Bielik-Robson, Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 167–174; Løland, Pauline Ugliness, pp. 112–113, 115–117; Christoph Schmidt, “The Leviathan Crucified: A Critical Introduction to Jacob Taubes’ ‘The Leviathan as Mortal God,’” Political Theology 19 (2018): 181–182; Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment, pp. 113–119; Clemens Klein, “Jacob Taubes (1923–1987): The Messianic Legacy,” in The Lost Mirror—Education in the Hebrew Tradition, edited by Ralf Koerrenz and Friederike von Horn (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 118–130. Taubes’s interest in the antinomian spirit of messianism is part of his well-known disagreement with Scholem. Concerning this matter, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 332 n. 197, and references to other scholars cited there, to which we could add Miguel Vatter, Living Law: Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 152 n. 60, 174–175, 177–178; Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, pp. 431–437. 120. Agata Bielik-Robson, “Tarrying with the Apocalypse: The Wary Messianism of Rosenzweig and Levinas,” in The Messianic Now: Philosophy, Religion, Culture, edited by Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 70. 121. Taubes, The Political Theology, p. 103 (emphasis in original); idem, Die politische Theologie, p. 139. It is noteworthy that the statement I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is appeared in English in the original German text. The continuation of this passage is cited below at n. 242. For a more positive interpretation of this passage, see BielikRobson, Jewish Cryptotheologies, pp. 168–169. 122. Bielik-Robson, “Tarrying,” p. 70. 123. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §51, p. 136. Compare ibid., §59, p. 151. 124. Ibid., §99, p. 218. 125. Bloom, Agon, p. 59. 126. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 72; idem, Holzwege, p. 96. The nature of the between is described concisely by Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 85 (idem, Holzwege, p. 113): “This open in-between is the being-there [Da-sein], understanding the word in the sense of the ecstatic region of the disclosure and concealment of being.” 127. Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 201. The language of Bloom is derived from his analysis of the bleakly negative stance in Beckett’s mature fiction about which we can say that “its images are Gnostic but not its program, since it lacks all program.” 128. The reference is to a passage in the section on anxiety as the disclosedness of Dasein in Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §40, p. 186; idem, Being and Time, p. 180. See also Susan’s letter to Jacob written on December 29, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §71, p. 171: Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wonder; but it seems not so; it seems that philosophy begins with “Angst” H. writes, “das wovor die Angst sich ängstet, ist das

Notes  —  364 In-der-Welt-sein selbst” (SZ 187). And the question of metaphysics is why there is something rather than nothing; the answer: because of no-thing, nothing. See ch. 4 at n. 160. 129. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §40, p. 189; idem, Being and Time, p. 183. The passage is cited above in n. 99. For Heidegger, Unzuhause, “not-being-at-home,” is synonymous with Unheimlichkeit, “uncanniness,” but literally “unhomeliness.” On the use of the category “mythical” in relation to Heidegger’s discussion of angst and the myth of the Nichtung des Nichts, related to Husserl’s idea of the fragility of being (Brüchigkeit), see Taubes, “The Development,” p. 661; idem, Apokalypse, p. 63. 130. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §136, p. 21. See Susan’s letter to Jacob from late January 1951, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §99, p. 217, on the matter of angst in Heidegger’s thought, and compare the discussion of Sein zum Tode in the letter of Susan to Jacob from March 12–13, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §198, pp. 140–141. 131. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §136, p. 21. 132. In fairness to Heidegger, the centrality of the question is essential to the path of his thinking, a point overlooked by the criticism of Susan. For a representative list of relevant studies, see Musa Duman, “Questioning and the Divine in Heidegger’s Beiträge,” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 4 (2014): 14–38; Vincent Blok, “Heidegger and Derrida on the Nature of Questioning: Toward the Rehabilitation of Questioning in Contemporary Philosophy,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 46 (2015): 307–322; Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 78–79, and references cited on p. 92 nn. 145–150. 133. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §142, pp. 37–38. 134. That dislodgment applies even to living in the state of Israel may be gathered from the letter Susan wrote to Jacob, dated February 26–27, 1952, cited in ch. 2 at n. 55. 135. Hent de Vries, “Inverse Versus Dialectical Theology: The Two Faces of Negativity and the Miracle of Faith,” in Paul and the Philosophers, edited by Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 466–511, esp. 480–483. On Taubes’s reading of Paul, see Larry L. Welborn, “Jacob Taubes—Paulinist, Messianist,” in Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers: The Apostle and Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), pp. 69–89; Gordon Zerbe, “On the Exigency of a Messianic Ecclesia: An Engagement with Philosophical Readers of Paul,” in Paul, Philosophy and the Theopolitical Vision: Critical Engagements with Agamben, Badiou, Žižek, and Others, edited by Douglas Harink (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2010), pp. 268–271; Daniel Colucciello Barber, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2011), pp. 62–87; Sigrid Weigel, “In Paul’s Mask: Jacob Taubes Reads Walter Benjamin,” in Genealogies of the Secular, pp. 193–216; Martin Treml, “Reinventing the Canonical: The Radical Thinking of Jacob Taubes,” in “Escape to Life”—German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile After 1933, edited by Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel assisted by Jerome Bolton, Tine Kutschbach, and Chadwick Smith (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), pp. 467–472; Elettra Stimilli, “Jacob Taubes: Messianism and Political Theology After the Shoah,” in Depeche Mode, pp. 68–81; Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, pp. 34–40, 76–77, 89–90, 107–108, 129–130. See also the study of Congdon cited below, n. 205. For

Notes ­ —  36 5 the appropriation of Taubes’s interpretation of Paul in Badiou, Agamben, and Žižek, see Muller, Professor of Apocalypse, pp. 508–513. On Taubes’s Marcionism, see Bielik-Robson, Jewish Cryptotheologies, pp. 178–182, and the criticism of Massimo Cacciari, The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology, translated by Edi Pucci, introduction by Howard Caygill (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 24 n. 17. 136. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §128, pp. 256–257. On the detrimental impact of America, see ibid, §60, p. 153. 137. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, fourth edition, translated by Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 168; idem, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik [GA3] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), p. 246. 138. It seems that this is an error—either due to misspelling or a typographical slip— that should be corrected to “angels.” 139. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §40, pp. 110–111 (emphasis in original). 140. Ibid., §41, p. 114. 141. Ibid. 142. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §241, p. 219. For further remarks on the characterization of Joyce as a gnostic, see the letter of Susan from April 21, 1952, ibid., §232, p. 205. 143. Ibid., §244, p. 227. 144. Weigel, “Between the Philosophy,” p. 126 (emphasis in original). With regard to this issue, it is worth noting again affinities between Susan and Arendt. On the role of secularization in Arendt’s thought, see Samuel Moyn, “Hannah Arendt on the Secular,” New German Critique 105 (2008): 71–96; Shira Kupfer and Asaf Turgeman, “The Secularization of the Idea of Ahavat Israel and Its Illumination of the Scholem-Arendt Correspondence on Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Modern Judaism 34 (2014): 188–209; Vivian Liska, “Tradition and the Hidden: Hannah Arendt’s Secularization of Jewish Mysticism,” in Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times, edited by Ari Joskowicz and Ethan B. Katz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 65–76. 145. Taubes, From Cult, p. 72; idem, Vom Kult, p. 110. 146. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §37, p. 104. For Heidegger’s identification of nature as the concealing unconcealment, often linked exegetically to fragment 123 of Heraclitus (according to the Diels-Kranz edition), physis kryptesthai philei, see Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, translated by Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 217; idem, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz [GA 26] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), p. 281; idem, Einführung in die Metaphysik [GA 40] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), pp. 122–123; idem, Introduction to Metaphysics, new translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 121–122; idem, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 27; idem, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit [GA 29/30] [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983], p. 41; idem, The Essence

Notes  —  36 6 of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, translated by Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 9–11; idem, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet [GA 34] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988), pp. 13–15; idem, Early Greek Thinking, translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 113–114; idem, Vorträge und Aufsätze [GA 7] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), pp. 277–279; idem, Pathmarks, pp. 229–230; idem, Wegmarken, pp. 300–301; idem, Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, translated by Julia Goesser Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 83–86, 90–91, 131–132; idem, Heraklit. 1. Der Anfang des Abendländischen Denkens. 2. Logik. Heraklits Lehre vom Logos [GA 55] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979), pp. 110, 121, 175–177. For discussion of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Heraclitean saying and the selfconcealing of nature, see Charles E. Scott, “Appearing to Remember Heraclitus,” in The Presocratics After Heidegger, edited by David C. Jacobs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 249–261, esp. 252–257; Daniel O. Dahlstrom, “Being at the Beginning: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Heraclitus,” in Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays, edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 142–143, 150–151; Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, translated by Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 303–307; W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz, The Presocratics in the Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), pp. 118–122; Wolfson, Giving, pp. 51–52, 316–317 n. 129; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 5, 115, 174 n. 14, 328 n. 148. 147. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §31, p. 84. On the pairing of Plato and Kafka with respect to the nature of the parable, see the letter from December 26, 1950, in ibid., §66, p. 164, cited in ch. 5 at n. 224. Kafka and Heidegger are briefly compared with regard to the question of alienation (Entfremdung) in the world by Jacob in a letter to Susan from March 21, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §206, p. 152. 148. Wolfson, The Duplicity, pp. 131–136. 149. That Susan was familiar with Vom Wesen der Wahrheit is verified in a letter from December 7, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §51, p. 136. 150. Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 165; idem, Wegmarken, p. 216. 151. Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 166; idem, Wegmarken, p. 217. 152. Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 167; idem, Wegmarken, p. 218. 153. Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 168; idem, Wegmarken, p. 218. Already in Sein und Zeit, § 7, pp. 29–30 (Being and Time, pp. 28–29), Heidegger opined that the self-showing (Sichzeigen) of a phenomenon coincides with a presence that does not show itself. Appearing is thus “a not showing itself [Sich-nicht-zeigen].” In its self-showing, the appearance makes manifest the nonmanifest (Nichtoffenbare). See below, n. 157. Compare GertJan van der Heiden, The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), pp. 152–155. Implicit in this section of Sein und Zeit is a theme that edified all stages of Heidegger’s thinking. Inasmuch as concealment belongs essentially to unconcealment, untruth as un-disclosedness (Un-entborgenheit)

Notes ­ —  36 7 is indissolubly bound to the comportment of truth as disclosedness (Entborgenheit). See Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, p. 66; idem, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, pp. 91–92; idem, Pathmarks, p. 148; idem, Wegmarken, p. 193. 154. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44, p. 219; idem, Being and Time, p. 211. 155. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44, p. 220; idem, Being and Time, p. 211 (emphasis in original). 156. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44, p. 220; idem, Being and Time, p. 211. 157. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, § 7, p. 29; idem, Being and Time, p. 28: Appearance, as the appearance “of something,” thus precisely does not mean that something shows itself; rather, it means that something which does not show itself announces itself through something that does show itself. . . . What does not show itself, in the manner of what appears, can also never seem (emphasis in original). 158. Heidegger, Pathmarks, pp. 169–170; idem, Wegmarken, pp. 220–221. See Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, pp. 20–21; idem, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, p. 26. 159. Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 171; idem, Wegmarken, p. 223. 160. Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, p. 65; idem, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, p. 89. Compare the recently published analysis “Seeing Sun and Shadow: The Metaphorics of Vision in the Cave” in Gregory Fried, Towards a Polemical Ethics: Between Heidegger and Plato (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), pp. 104–132. 161. Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 182; idem, Wegmarken, p. 238. 162. Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, p. 66; idem, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, p. 92. For more extensive discussions of the inseparability of truth and untruth in Heidegger’s idea of alētheia, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 48–52, 130–131; idem, The Duplicity, pp. 6, 131–145; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 4, 17 n. 31, 20 n. 61, 39, 94 n. 170, 120, 158, 266, 304–305, 324 nn. 66 and 72. For previous studies on Heidegger’s notion of truth, see the references cited in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 314–315 n.106, 316 n. 128, 347 n. 339; idem, The Duplicity, pp. 251–252 n. 1; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 17 n. 29. To the sources mentioned in my previous publications, I would add Rudolf Bernet, “Phenomenological Concepts of Untruth in Husserl and Heidegger,” in Husserl: German Perspectives, edited by John J. Drummond and Otfried Höffe, translated by Hayden Kee, Patrick Eldridge, and Robin Litscher Wilkins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), pp. 239–262; and Westerlund, Heidegger, pp. 96–101. 163. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44, p. 222; idem, Being and Time, p. 213. 164. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44, p. 222; idem, Being and Time, p. 213. 165. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44, p. 222; idem, Being and Time, pp. 213–214. 166. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 168; idem, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, p. 246. 167. Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. xii, repeated in idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 122–123, and see the additional comments on p. 136 nn. 229–230. 168. Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Briefwechsel 1939–1969, edited by Asaf Angermann (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015), §1, pp. 10–11; Adorno and Scholem, Correspondence 1939–1969, edited and with an introduction by Asaf Angermann, translated

Notes  —  36 8 by Paula Schwebel and Sebastian Truskolaski (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), p. 2. For references to Scholem’s characterization of Kafka’s writings espousing either a secularized or heretical kabbalah, see Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, p. 260, and other scholars mentioned in n. 291. Scholem’s Kafkaesque vision of kabbalistic symbolism is criticized by Idel, Old Worlds, pp. 66–67, 118–119. 169. Adorno and Scholem, Briefwechsel 1939–1969, §1, pp. 9–10; Adorno and Scholem, Correspondences 1939–1969, p. 1. 170. In a letter written to Scholem on December 18, 1962, Adorno himself had the humility to acknowledge his deficiency in dealing with kabbalistic material in the context of mentioning that he was intensively engaged in studying Scholem’s “Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala,” first published in 1938 and then in a revised version in 1973. Adorno characterizes this work as “an inhumanly difficult text” (ein unmenschlich schwerer Text) and confesses that he did not presume to have completely understood it, a feat, he admits, that “is also probably not possible without knowledge of the original texts [Es ist das vermutlich doch auch ohne Kenntnis der originalen Texte gar nicht möglich].” See Adorno and Scholem, Briefwechsel 1939–1969, §125, p. 278; Adorno and Scholem, Correspondence 1939–1969, p. 207. I would like to take the opportunity to correct my error in Wolfson, Suffering Time, p. 649 n. 241, where I carelessly and inexplicably listed the date of this letter as December 19, 1952. I also neglected to mention Adorno’s blunt confession about his lack of philological and historical knowledge to study Jewish texts that he made in his salutation to Scholem on his seventieth birthday. See Adorno, “Gruβ an Gershom G. Scholem. Zum 70. Geburtstag: 5. Dezember 1967,” pp. 482–483: Auch das Handicap wird er mir vergeben, an dem nichts sich änderte: meine Unkenntnis nicht nur der Kabbala, der Tradition der jüdischen Mystik, sondern der Hebraistik ingesamt, von der ich nie mehr lernte, als was ich in Scholems Schriften, insbesondere in dem großen Werk über die Hauptströmungen der jüdischen Mystik. The passage is translated in Steven M. Wasserstrom, “Adorno’s Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Observations,” in Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and Its Others, edited by Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 57–58. 171. See ch. 1 n. 146. 172. The interpretation of the word mi-meqomo, “from his place,” in Ezekiel 3:12, as the place that no one knows is derived from the Babylonian Talmud, Ḥagigah 13b. It is found in a second bahiric passage. See The Book Bahir: An Edition Based on the Earliest Manuscripts, edited by Daniel Abrams (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 1994), §61, p. 153. 173. The Book Bahir, §90, p. 175. For discussion of this passage in light of ancient Gnostic symbolism, see Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, edited by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, translated by Allan Arkush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 94–96, and idem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Schocken, 1991), pp. 166–167. For my own attempts to explicate the symbolism utilized in this passage, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Hebraic and Hellenic Conceptions of Wisdom in Sefer ha-Bahir,” Poetics Today 19 (1998): 164–165, and idem, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 152–153.

Notes ­ —  36 9 174. See, however, Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 176: “Distance is part of Kafka’s crucial notion of the negative, which is not a Hegelian nor a Heideggerian negative, but is very close to Freud’s negation and also to the negative imaging carried out by Scholem’s Kabbalists.” On the gnostic nature of Kafka’s negative and its contrast with Hegel and Heidegger, see ibid., pp. 180–181. 175. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §52, p. 139. In several other letters, Susan extolled the virtue of dance. A particularly interesting example in found in the letter to Jacob from January 15, 1951, ibid., §90, pp. 206–207: We just returned from the Israeli concert—it was great and the old man Koussowitsky danced like a priest of Dionysos—it was a great event all the jews—including our grocer presented themselves, clapped shouted milled around “schmoosing” long after the concert—it was quite riotous and I enjoyed it. This comment supports my suggestion that Susan was influenced by the Nietzschean understanding of dance. See also ibid., §109, p. 231: Because I am weary of thoughts and do not know what a human being (i.e. Susan) “ought” to do. I am very poor and I am ashamed before the gods and I would like to dance or sing or play the zither (perhaps someday I shall try to learn it)—so I try to draw a little. The Hebrew inscription contained in this letter is cited in ch. 1 n. 162, and concerning the importance of dance for Susan, compare the sources cited in ch. 1 n. 177. On Susan’s interest in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, see ibid., §26, p. 74: “I think of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra who promises to return with the ‘same eagle’ the ‘same serpent’—the world eternally repeated with the same ‘particular fault’.” 176. The motif of dance recurs in many of Nietzsche’s writings. For the purposes of this analysis, consider Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996), p. 96 (idem, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999], p. 170): Books which teach one to dance.—There are writers who, by representing the impossible as possible and speaking of morality and genius as though both were merely a matter of wanting them, a mere whim and caprice, evoke a feeling of high-spirited freedom, as though man were standing on tiptoe and compelled to dance for sheer joy (emphasis in original). Ibid., pp. 130–131 (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, pp. 228–229): Parable of the dance.—Nowadays it is to be regarded as the decisive sign of greater culture when anyone possesses sufficient strength and flexibility to be as clear and rigorous in the domain of knowledge as at other times he is capable of as it were giving poetry, religion and metaphysics a hundred paces advantage and entering into their power and beauty. Such a situation between two so different demands is very hard to maintain, for science presses for the absolute dominance of its methods, and if this pressure is not relaxed there

Notes  —  370 arises the other danger of a feeble vacillation back and forth between different drives. To indicate the way towards a resolution of this difficulty, however, if only by means of a parable, one might recall that the dance is not the same thing as a languid reeling back and forth between different drives. High culture will resemble an audacious dance: which is, as aforesaid, why one needs a great deal of strength and suppleness (emphasis in original). See also ibid., pp. 343 and 358 (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, pp. 612 and 637). Nietzsche described the prophet of the new dawn of humanity, Zarathustra, as striding like a dancer. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, edited by Adrian del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, translated by Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 4 (idem, Also sprach Zarathustra I–IV, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999], p. 12), and p. 239 (Also sprach Zarathustra, p. 366): “Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one who waves with his wings, the flightworthy, waving to all birds, worthy and ready, a blissful lightweight.” See ibid., p. 29 (Also sprach Zarathustra, pp. 49–50): “I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance. . . . Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath me, now a god dances through me.” And ibid., p. 79 (Also sprach Zarathustra, p. 131): “Indeed, Zarathustra is no tornado or whirlwind; and if he is a dancer, nevermore a tarantella dancer!” See “The Dance Song,” ibid., pp. 83–85 (Also sprach Zarathustra, pp. 139–141), and “The Other Dance Song,” pp. 181–184 (Also sprach Zarathustra, pp. 282–286). Compare ibid., p. 87 (Also sprach Zarathustra, p. 144): Only in dance do I know how to speak the parables of the highest things—and now my highest parable remained unspoken in my limbs! My highest hope remained unspoken and unredeemed! And all the visions and comforts of my youth died. Ibid., p. 158 (Also sprach Zarathustra, p. 247): “Where all becoming seemed to me the dance of gods and the mischief of gods, and the world seemed unloosed and frolicsome and as though it were fleeing back to itself.” Ibid., p. 186 (Also sprach Zarathustra, p. 290): If my virtue is a dancer’s virtue and I often leaped with both feet into golden emerald delight . . . . And if that is my alpha and omega, that all heaviness becomes light, all body dancer, all spirit bird—and truly, that is my alpha and omega! Ibid., p. 240 (Also sprach Zarathustra, p. 367): You higher men, your worst part is that all of you have not learned to dance as one must dance—dance over and past yourselves! What does it matter that you didn’t turn out well? How much is still possible! So learn to laugh over and past yourselves! Lift up your hearts, you good dancers, high! higher! And don’t forget good laughter either! For an analysis of this Nietzschean theme, see especially the essay “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought” in Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, translated by Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 57–71. I note, finally, that Susan Taubes’s comments can be compared to the pertinent discussion of Herder’s understanding of dance as a realm of figuration before meaning emerges in Nikolaus Largier, Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), pp. 214–217.

Notes ­ —  371 177. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §66, p. 164. The passage is cited more fully in ch. 5 at n. 224. The description in this letter of speaking silently can be profitably compared to Heidegger’s view of language as the poiēsis through which one speaks what cannot be spoken, not by not speaking, but by unspeaking what is spoken. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Heidegger’s Apophaticism: Unsaying the Said and the Silence of the Last God,” in Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy, edited by Nahum Brown and J. Aaron Simmons (New York: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 185–216; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 299–334. On the poet’s use of language to overcome language, see Susan’s letter to Jacob written on January 9, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz Jacob Taubes 1952, §141, p. 35, cited in ch. 5 at n. 220. Heidegger’s “romantic” theory of poetry is criticized by Susan in the letter to Jacob from February 12, 1952, in ibid., §172, p. 92. See also the letter from March 12–13, ibid., §198, p. 140. And compare the letter from December 20, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §60, p. 153, and Jacob’s response in the letter from December 28, 1950, ibid., §68, pp. 166–167. 178. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §74, p. 177. In the letter to Jacob from March 4, 1952, Susan questioned if Heidegger had gone far enough in discerning the disequilibrium of the brokenness of our existence that allows us to grasp that truth is the openness of error. See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §191, p. 123, cited in ch. 1 n. 30. 179. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Suffering Eros and Textual Incarnation: A Kristevan Reading of Kabbalistic Poetics,” in Towards a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline, edited by Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 342–343; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 6, 120, 158, 317. 180. Hans Blumenberg, “Licht als Metapher der Wahrheit. Im Vorfeld der philosophischen Begriffsbildung,” Studium Generale 10 (1957): 432–447, reprinted in Hans Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, selection and afterword by Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 139–171. English version: “Light as a Metaphor for Truth at the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 30–62; slightly revised translation in History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), pp. 129–169. 181. I would thus take issue with Blumenberg’s suggestion, History, Metaphors, Fables, p. 137, “The skeptic is the negative version of the mystic: he too closes his eyes, not against the dazzling abundance of absolute light, but against the questioning and confusing urgency of obscuritas rerum.” The entanglement of truth and untruth gives way to the insight that every translucence is opaque and every opacity is translucent. Nothing is shown that is not at the same time withheld from being shown. I surmise this is the intent of Heidegger’s metaontological identification of Seyn and Nichts. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 106, 197–199, and compare the text cited in ch. 5 n. 83. 182. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 169. 183. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 253; idem, Holzwege, pp. 336–337.

Notes  —  37 2 184. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 170. The Shakespearian expression is used as well in Susan Taubes, “The Nature of Tragedy,” Review of Metaphysics 7 (1953): 195. 185. Martin Heidegger, Die Metaphysik des Deutschen Idealismus. Zur Erneuten Auslegung von Schelling: Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit und die Damit Zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (1809) [GA 49] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006), p. 159: “Das Sein ist da Nichts: das ‘ist’ keine Seiendes, so wie wir Seiendes kennen und zu kennen meinen” (emphasis in original). English translation in Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysics of German Idealism: A New Interpretation of Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and the Matters Connected Therewith (1809), translated by Ian Alexander Moore and Rodrigo Therezo (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), p. 130: “Being is the nothing; the ‘is’ not a being, in the way we know and believe we know beings” (emphasis in original). Compare the various discussions of this identification in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 106, 197–198, 230–231, 309. 186. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 171. 187. For example, see Heidegger, Die Metaphysik des Deutschen Idealismus, pp. 127–130; idem, The Metaphysics of German Idealism, pp. 105–107. For fuller documentation of the evidence of kabbalistic motifs, especially the doctrine of ṣimṣum, discernible in Schelling, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 8, 18–19 n. 40, 170–171, 193–194 n. 279, 209–211, and for the residual of the myth of ṣimṣum in Heidegger’s Lichtung and the bestowing refusal of being, see ibid., pp. 137–196. Susan Taubes would have known the idea of ṣimṣum from Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, a work she most certainly had read by the time she wrote this essay. See above, n. 118, and below, n. 235. 188. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 275; idem, Holzwege, p. 364. The text is cited above at n. 30. 189. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” pp. 169–170 (emphasis in original). 190. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 321, and references on p. 334 n. 205. 191. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymne “Andenken,” p. 149; idem, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” p. 127. The passage is discussed in more detail in ch. 5 at n. 183. 192. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 3; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 11. 193. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, pp. 3–4; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 11. 194. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 4; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 12. 195. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 159; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 211. Heidegger’s idea of “immanent transcendence” and his rejection of the traditional notion of eternal and transcendent truth is discussed by Taubes, “The Development,” pp. 662–664. 196. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I. Erster Teil: Die objective Logik. Erstes Buch [Werke 5] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986) p. 83; idem, The Science of Logic, translated and edited by George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 59. 197. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 158 (emphasis in original); idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 211. 198. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion I [Werke 16] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014), p. 316. See the discussion of

Notes ­ —  373 Hegel’s annihilation of finitude in Alex Dubilet, The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), pp. 123–147. And compare Angelica Nuzzo, “How Does Nothing(ness) Move? Hegel’s Challenge to Embodied Thinking,” in The Movement of Nothingness: Trust in the Emptiness of Time, edited by Daniel Price and Ryan Johnson (Aurora: Davies Group, 2013), pp. 89–105. 199. Hegel, Vorlesungen, p. 312. Compare Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, volume 1: Introduction and the Concept of Religion, edited by Peter C. Hodgson, translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with the assistance of J. P. Fitzer and H. S. Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 305. Whereas Hegel’s dialectic proposes the twofold negation, the negation of negation that is the affirmation, Heidegger’s thinking ventures beyond that dialectic to the threefold negation, the negation of the negation of negation that is neither negation nor affirmation. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 79–80, 109–110, 336. 200. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, pp. 35–40, 160–161; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, pp. 52–58, 213–215. Here it is pertinent to mention the following comment of Susan in a letter to Jacob written on December 8, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §52, p. 138: I sense some deep and important relation (in my deep ignorance) between the thought of Heidegger and of Hegel which I would like to fathom. The self objectification of the Spirit progressively through nature, man[,] the family, and finally at its highest in the state, isn’t this the loving giving of itself[,] of Being to world, of losing itself in the world, till at the moment when Being has almost emptied itself in the world it begins to withdraw leaving the world deserted bringing an ever wider gap, chaos, between itself and the world, the objective spirit, so that state, family[,] consciousness, nature putrefy and disintegrate, so that all the parts are turned against each other and poison each other as in a dead body. I feel very deeply this withdrawal of being, of the “to be” of its leaving the world alone, leaving it “free” to its own devices, and this withdrawal of the divine necessity and of letting the world do as it pleases is the coming into power of Satan. Consider the remark recorded on November 3, 1960 by Eliade, No Souvenirs, p. 116, that Eric Voegelin is astonished that no one has yet written on the gnosticism of Hegel, for example, or of Heidegger. Bultmann seems to him just as influenced by gnosticism as Jung. And he can’t get over the fact that no one has ever seen these things up to now. On Hegel’s relation to Gnosticism, hermetism, and the occult, see the references to the studies of Cyril O’Regan and Glenn Alexander Magee cited in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 19 n. 40. 201. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 4; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 12. 202. For discussion of the ambivalence toward time in Taubes’s apocalyptic eschatology, see Agata Bielik-Robson, “Jacob Taubes, the Jewish Hegelian,” in Depeche Mode, pp. 59–62. On the meshing of the political, eschatological, and gnostic in Taubes, see

Notes  —  374 Carsten Colpe, “‘Das eschatologische Widerlager der Politik’. Zu Taubes’ Gnosisbild,” in Abendländische Eschatologie. Ad Jacob Taubes, pp. 105–129. 203. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, pp. 4–5 (emphasis in original); idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 13. 204. Consider the description of Sabbatai Ṣevi in Taubes, The Political Theology, p. 9 (idem, Die politische Theologie, pp. 19–20): He has descended to the abysses of impurity [die Abgründe der Unreinheit], which is the world, so that he can there gather in the sparks of purity. That is the Kabbalistic vision: the world lives off the sparks of purity, and when these are scattered throughout the world and when they are gathered, the world of impurity collapses into itself. Taubes’s identification of the world as the abysses of impurity to which the messiah descends is a reformulation of Scholem’s account of the Lurianic basis for what he considered the antinomian doctrine of pious transgression implemented by Sabbatai Ṣevi and some of his followers. See Agata Bielik-Robson, “Modernity: The Jewish Perspective,” New Blackfriars 94 (2013): 191–198, 201–202; idem, Jewish Cryptotheologies, pp. 182–186. On the gnostic negation and the exodus from nature into history, see now idem, “Jacob Taubes,” pp. 47–54. 205. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, pp. 9–10 (translation slightly modified); idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, pp. 19–20. Compare David W. Congdon, “Eschatologizing Apocalyptic: An Assessment of the Present Conversation on Pauline Apocalyptic,” in Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn, edited by Joshua B. Davis and Douglas Harink (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2012), pp. 128–131. 206. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 10; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 20. 207. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 5; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 14. 208. Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, Erster Teil, Vierte Auflage (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), pp. 214–251; idem, Philosophical Essays, pp. 276–277. 209. See Tsutomu Haga, Theodizee und Geschichtstheologie: Ein Versuch der Überwindung der Problematik des Deutschen Idealismus bei Karl Barth (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), pp. 24–27. 210. See above, n. 162. Regarding Heidegger’s Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, see the comments of Taubes, The Political Theology, p. 3; idem, Die politische Theologie, p. 11. 211. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 6; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 14. 212. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 7 (emphasis in original); idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 16. 213. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), translated by Peter Heath, with an introduction by Michael Vater (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), p. 231. Taubes cited the passage from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, volume 3 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1858), p. 628. For a more recent edition, see Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, System des Transscendentalen Idealismus 1800, edited by Harald Korten and Paul Ziche [Werke 9] (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2005), p. 328. 214. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 7 (emphasis in original); idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 16. 215. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, pp. 30–31 (emphasis in original); idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 46. 216. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 31; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 46. For

Notes ­ —  375 discussion of the figure and the voice in Taubes’s apocalyptic-gnostic understanding of the messiah, see Bielik-Robson, Jewish Cryptotheologies, pp. 174–177. 217. Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations,” pp. 164–165. 218. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §56, pp. 272–273; idem, Being and Time, pp. 262–263. 219. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 8; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 17. 220. Martin Heidegger, Ponderings VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), VIII, §19, p. 93 (emphasis in original); idem, Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39) [GA 95] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), p. 120. See Wolfson, The Duplicity, pp. 94–97. 221. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §181, p. 102. 222. Ibid., p. 103. 223. Ibid. 224. See Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 143–144. It is worth comparing Susan’s use of this motif and its resonance in Heidegger. Concerning the latter, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 312–313, 337. 225. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 369. Compare Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §181, p. 104: “Judgement is illumination, a wonderful illumination which nevertheless makes us weep with shame and remorse. But the world is mostly in darkness, and judgement does not illuminate it. If there is a supreme judge he is waiting for us to enter into judgement freely. And this for me is the meaning of the day of the Messiah, when we shall all sit around a table, and all will be told and each man shall understand in his way. But this day is everyday, wherever two men understand their relation in judgement which does not mean ‘an eye for an eye’, but wisdom and love.” 226. See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §2, p. 18. For citation of a different part of this letter and discussion of the poetic task to name the holy, see ch. 5 at n. 66. 227. Compare Susan’s comment in ibid., §83, p. 195: In conclusion—having “diatribed” against Kant I must confess that the idea is great even if it is not true and it is even greater if there is no truth at all . . . I am always on the side of Prometheus who is nearer and dearer to the heart of the terrible One then all his angels. 228. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §181, pp. 102–103 (emphasis in original). 229. The passage from Leisegang is cited by Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, pp. 34–35; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, pp. 51–52. 230. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 35; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 52. 231. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §235, p. 210. 232. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 37; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 55. 233. Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 54. 234. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 36; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 54. 235. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 38; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 55. The argument I have advanced dovetails in some measure with the section on “A Failed Sublation” in Bielik-Robson, “Jacob Taubes,” pp. 62–67. The Hegelian explanation works better with the brief description in the 1942 essay “Kabbala,” which first appeared in Le Monde Religieux and is reprinted in Taubes, Apokalypse, p. 14: Die Kabbala sagt: die Welt ist polar gebaut, sie besteht aus entgegengesetzten Kräften, aus

Notes  —  37 6 positiven und negativen, aus männlichen und weiblichen. Es handelt sich darum, diese auseinanderstrebenden Kräfte zu vereinigen und damit das Gleichgewicht herzustellen: die Harmonie der Kräfte (emphasis in original). In the continuation of the essay, Taubes contrasts the biblical idea of creation and the kabbalistic conception of ṣimṣum, which he rendered as die Einschränkung des Göttlichen, “the limitation of the divine.” Elaborating on the Lurianic idea, Taubes wrote, Die Kabbala fragt: wie ist die Welt entstanden? Und antwortet: die Welt entsteht dadurch, dass sich Gott so selbst beschränkt, dass aus dem Teil, um den er sich gewissermassen verkürzt, die Welt wird. Also ist die Welt ein Stück von Gott. Daher: Gott ist zwar nicht die Welt, wohl aber die Welt ein Teil Gottes.” According to what is presumed to be the scriptural account, the world is not an aspect of God, since it was created out of nothing by divine omnipotence, whereas, according to the kabbalah, the emanation of the world from the infinite through an act of contraction results in the paradox that God is not the world even though the world is part of God. 236. Jonas, “Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism,” p. 442. The passage appears as well in Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 332, and idem, The Phenomenon of Life, p. 225. 237. Taubes, The Political Theology, p. 103; idem, Die politische Theologie, p. 139. See above, n. 121. 238. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 38; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 56. 239. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 39 (emphasis in original); idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, pp. 57–58. 240. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 39; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 58. My criticism of Jacob Taubes’s reading of Hegel is supported by Heidegger’s comment in “Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung,” written in 1942–1943, on the process of secularization (Prozeß der Säkularisierung) implied in Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, that is, the making worldly of the Christian theological absolute. See Heidegger, Holzwege, pp. 202–203: Die Wissenschaft der Phänomenologie des Geistes ist die Theologie des Absoluten hinsichtlich seiner Parusie im dialektisch-spekulativen Karfreitag. Hier stirbt das Absolute. Gott ist tot. Das sagt alles andere, nur nicht: es gibt keinen Gott. Die “Wissenschaft der Logik” aber ist die Wissenschaft des anfänglich bei sich anwesenden Absoluten in seinem Sichwissen als der absolute Begriff. Sie ist die Theologie der Absolutheit des Absoluten vor der Schöpfung. Die eine und die andere Theologie ist Ontologie, ist weltlich. Sie denken die Weltlichkeit der Welt, insofern Welt hier bedeutet: das Seiende im Ganzen, welches Seiende den Grundzug der Subjektität hat. Die so verstandene Welt bestimmt ihr Seiendes dahin, daß es präsent ist in der Repräsentation, die das Absolute repräsentiert. Die Wissenschaft des absoluten Wissens ist jedoch nicht deshalb die weltliche Theologie der Welt, weil sie die christliche und kirchliche säkularisiert, sondern weil sie zum Wesen der Ontologie gehört. English translation in Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 152: The science of the phenomenology of spirit is the theology of the absolute as regards its parousia within a dialectical-speculative Good Friday. The absolute dies here. God is dead. This means everything except that there is no god. The “science of logic,” in contrast, is the

Notes ­ —  377 science of the absolute which comes to presence originally with itself in its self-knowledge as the absolute concept. It is the theology of the absoluteness of the absolute before creation. Both theologies are ontologies, are secular [weltlich]. They think the worldliness [Weltlichkeit] of the world, if we take “world” to mean here: beings in their entirety, beings that have the fundamental trait of subjectivity. The world, understood in this way, determines its beings so that they are present in the representation that represents the absolute. However, the reason that the science of absolute knowledge is the secular theology of the world is not that it secularizes Christian and ecclesiastical theology but rather that it is part of the essence of ontology. 241. Taubes, To Carl Schmitt, 30. 242. Taubes, The Political Theology, p. 103 (emphasis in original); idem, Die politische Theologie, p. 139. 243. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 15 (emphasis in original); idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 26. 244. For a different assessment of Taubes’s relationship to Hegel, see Bielik-Robson, Jewish Cryptotheologies, pp. 169–172. 245. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 12; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 22. 246. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 12; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 23. 247. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 13; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 24. 248. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 21; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 34. 249. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 13; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 23. 250. “Jacob Taubes,” in Denken, das an der Zeit ist, edited by Florian Rötzer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), p. 317, translated in Joshua Robert Gold, “Jacob Taubes: ‘Apocalypse From Below,’” Telos 134 (2006): 145. 251. Taubes, The Political Theology, p. 25; idem, Die politische Theologie, p. 38. 252. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 16; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 27. 253. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 17; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 29. Compare the rationale for the inconceivability of a national god in Judaism provided by Elijah Benamozegh, Israel and Humanity, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Maxwell Luria (New York: Paulist Press, 1995), p. 141: The religion of the God of Israel has no territorial homeland, unless we think of the place where mankind originated. According to its sacred Scriptures, this religion began with the creation of the world and of mankind—a conception which is in itself a decisive argument against any sort of localization. But even if we concern ourselves only with the history of the Jewish people, we see this history begin with a family of nomads whose descendants are enslaved in Egypt. 254. Alexander Altmann, “Franz Rosenzweig on History,” in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), pp. 124–137; Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Franz Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism,” in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, pp. 138–161; Amos Funkenstein, “An Escape from History: Rosenzweig on the Destiny of Judaism,” History and Memory 2 (1990):

Notes  —  378 117–135; David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 68–101. 255. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, translated by Barbara Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 318; idem, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften II. Der Stern der Erlösung (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 332. See Peter E. Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 210–214. I have elaborated on Rosenzweig’s position in Wolfson, The Duplicity, pp. 71–76. 256. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 233, 263–264; idem, Proper Names, translated by Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 44–45; idem, Of God Who Comes to Mind, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 193 n. 6. See also the essay “Promised Land or Permitted Land” in Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, translated and with an introduction by Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 51–69. Compare the summation of Levinas’s position in Wolfson, The Duplicity, p. 75. For references to other discussions of the Levinasian view on Zionism and the status of the land, see ibid., p. 223 n. 238. 257. Løland, Pauline Ugliness, p. 38. See also the analysis of the idea of strangeness as the archetypal word in Taubes’s eschatology and apocalyptic thinking in Asher D. Biemann, “Imagining a Homeland: The Election of Place and Time,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry: An Annual 30 (2018): 113–128. 258. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. 137. Compare the Levinasian text cited in the Introduction at n. 103. On the comparison of the myth of origin and the romantic longing for an earthly paradise in Heidegger and Zionist ideology, see Jacob’s letter to Susan from April 16, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §228, p. 196: “Den Mythos vom Ursprung als letzter Bindung hat dein ‘Lehrer’ Heidegger ebenso aufgetischt wie die Zionisten—weil alle beide ‘Romantik’ sind, d. h. Sehnsucht nach dem ‘verlorenen’ Paradies, nach der Heimat, die eben doch irdisch-ursprünglich gemeint ist (trotz gegenteiliger Behauptung).” See also Susan’s reference to the Zionist defenders of the state of Israel as “national-socialist” in the letter cited in ch. 2 at n. 81. And compare the analysis of the “Ethnolinguistic Enrootedness and Invocation of Historical Destiny” in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 335–381, and the discussion of the problem of the homeland in Buber and Heidegger in Vatter, Living Law, pp. 244–259. See also Yemima Hadad, “Fruits of Forgetfulness: Nationalism and Politics in the Philosophy of Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger,” in Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, edited by Elad Lapidot and Micha Brumlik (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), pp. 201–220, and Buber’s critique of Volkstum and hypernationalism discussed in Yemima Hadad, “Hasidic Myth-Activism: Martin Buber’s Theopolitical Revision of Volkish Nationalism,” Religions 10 (2019): 1–33. Particularly relevant is the section on people and land in Buber’s theopolitics and Volkish ideology, pp. 15–22. 259. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, volume 2, part 1 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856), pp. 157–158: “Abraham der Ibri heiβt also: Abraham, der zu den

Notes ­ —  379 Durchziehenden, an keinen festen Wohnsitz Gebundenen, nomadisch Lebenden gehört, wie der Erzvater in Kanaan auch stets der Fremdling, ein Wanderer.” See the English version in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, translated by Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger, with a foreword by James M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), p. 111: Thus Abraham the Ibri means: Abraham, who belongs to those who pass through, to those bound to no permanent residence, those who live nomadically, like the patriarch also in Canaan is consistently called the foreigner, for he who tarries nowhere is everywhere only a foreigner, a wanderer. 260. I have followed the translation in Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 17; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 29. For a different rendering, see the previous note. Regarding the midrashic source of this explanation of the name ivri applied to Abraham, see Introduction n. 68. 261. Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie, in Sämmtliche Werke, volume 2, part 1, p. 157; idem, Historical-Critical Introduction, p. 111. 262. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 12; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, pp. 22– 23. On the lack of territorial roots of the Jewish God and the people of Israel, see the section “Jewish Theocracy: Nomos without Land” in Stimilli, “Jacob Taubes,” pp. 71–73. 263. In light of the critique of indigeneity, it is of interest to consider the comment of Taubes, The Political Theology, p. 7 (idem, Die politische Theologie, p. 16): “Now I have no patience, neither with respect to Heidegger nor with respect to Buber, for this apotheosis of the early. Why the early should be better than the later I simply don’t understand.” The specific issue at hand is the relationship of apocalypticism and prophecy, but I think it is reasonable to apply Taubes’s rebuff of privileging what is considered early to a broader critique of the idea of the arche-logos. 264. Rosenzweig, The Star, p. 319; idem, Der Stern, p. 333. On the nexus between the uncanny and poetry in Rosenzweig, see references cited in Introduction n. 77. Interestingly, the innately exilic nature of Jewish existence, related to the more general existential claim regarding the unheimlich character of humanity, anchored scripturally in Adam’s expulsion from Paradise, was affirmed as well by Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Synagogue as an Institution and as an Idea,” in Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein Memorial Volume, edited by Leo Landman (New York: Ktav 1980), p. 326, cited and analyzed by Herskowitz, Heidegger, pp. 68–69. 265. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 17; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, p. 29. The passage paraphrased by Taubes is from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Theologische Jugendschriften nach den Handschriften der Kgl. Bibliothek in Berlin, edited by Herman Nohl (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1907), p. 247; English rendering: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Early Theological Writings, translated by Thomas Malcolm Knox, with an introduction and Fragments translated by Richard Kroner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 187. Prior to this passage, Hegel, much like Schelling, emphasized the peripatetic nature of Abraham’s existence, wandering from place to place without becoming attached. To be worthy of divinity, Abraham had to be a stranger to the soil as well as to other people. See Hegel, Theologische Jugendschriften, p. 246; idem, Early Theological Writings, p. 186.

Notes  —  38 0 Compare Peter Wake, Tragedy in Hegel’s Early Theological Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 112–114. 266. By underlining the affinity between Rosenzweig and Taubes, I do not intend to collapse the differences between them, nor am I ignoring Taubes’s criticism of Rosenzweig, which in my view is not always accurate. See Taubes, From Cult, pp. 48–52; idem, Von Kult, pp. 88–92, and my brief remarks in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Rosenzweig on Human Redemption: Neither Nothing nor Everything, but Only Something,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 29 (2021): 148. 267. The classification of exile as an ontological condition is borrowed from Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, pp. 218–220. See especially p. 220, where Gordon elucidates the implications of Rosenzweig’s assertion that for the Jews, the “people of God” (Gottesvolk), the eternal is already present in the midst of time (Rosenzweig, The Star, p. 352; idem, Der Stern, p. 369): Exile thus became for Rosenzweig a constitutive feature of Jewish identity.  .  .  . Here Rosenzweig’s philosophical defense of exile represents a dramatic departure from the Jewish tradition. Redemption no longer signified the overcoming of exile. On the contrary, redemption was only possible within exile, which Rosenzweig now regarded as constitutive of Jewish life (emphasis in original). For discussion of the eternalization of the temporal and the temporalization of the eternal in Rosenzweig, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 61, 70–71; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 44– 45; idem, “Rosenzweig on Human Redemption,” pp. 139–146. See also Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 176–180. 268. Wolfson, “Rosenzweig on Human Redemption,” p. 147. 269. Taubes, From Cult, pp. 72–73; idem, Von Kult, pp. 110–111. The Jewish roots of Gnosticism may also be implied in the praise for Moritz Friedländer in Taubes, The Political Theology, p. 24; idem, Die politische Theologie, p. 37. In his book Der vorchristliche jüdische Gnosticismus, Friedländer argued that Gnosticism originated in antinomian Jewish circles in Alexandria. For a thoughtful assessment of Friedländer’s hypothesis, see Birger A. Pearson, Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 10–28. Compare Jacob’s letter to Susan from April 3, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §216, p. 170: “Auch die Gnosis ist ‘Produkt der römischen u. hellenistischen’ Zivilisation, Gnosis in Alexandria.” 270. Taubes, From Cult, p. 73; idem, Von Kult, p. 111. 271. Taubes, From Cult, pp. 73–74; idem, Von Kult, pp. 111–112. 272. See above at n. 178. 273. Taubes, From Cult, pp. 74–75; idem, Von Kult, pp. 112–113. 274. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §217, pp. 171–172. Part of the passage is cited and discussed in ch. 1 at n. 37. In the beginning of the letter, Susan engaged the question of the Kehre in Heidegger’s thinking and the problem of ontologizing in light of the categories of Sein und Zeit. 275. Based on the statement in Jacob’s letter to Susan written on April 6, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §219, p. 176, cited in ch. 1 at n. 107.

Notes ­ —  381 276. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §68, p. 166.

Chapter 4 1. Susan Taubes, “The Nature of Tragedy,” Review of Metaphysics 7 (1953): 197–198. 2. Ibid., p. 198. 3. Ibid., p. 203. 4. Ibid., p. 204. 5. Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), §73, pp. 174–175. In fairness to Nietzsche, it must be said that Susan’s presentation of his views neglects to take into account that he emphasized that the supreme expression of will is realized through the negation of one’s own willfulness, and that self-overcoming (Selbst-Überwindung) consists of mastery through submission. For instance, see Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, edited by Adrian del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, translated by Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 89 (idem, Also sprach Zarathustra I–IV, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999]), pp. 147–148): Wherever I found the living, there I found the will to power; and even in the will of the serving I found the will to be master. . . . And as the smaller gives way to the greater, in order for it to have its pleasure and power over the smallest, so too the greatest gives way, and for the sake of power it risks—life itself. . . . And where there are sacrificing and favors and love-looks, there too is the will to be master. See Pippin, “Introduction,” in Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. xxv–xxix. 6. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly revised edition, edited by David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 490. Compare the description of the last judgment, ibid., p. 560: “.” On Susan’s interest in Blake, see reference in ch. 1 n. 36, and Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), §245, pp. 228–229. 7. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §241, p. 219, cited in ch. 1 n. 117. Compare Susan’s objection to mysticism for denying our separation from the absolute in the letter to Jacob, written on March 4, 1952, ibid., §191, p. 123, cited in ch. 1 n. 30. See also ibid., §164, p. 76: “The term ‘mysticism’ annoys me a little. In any case if I am a mystic it is only in protest against the vulgar discourse of the world: there is nothing ‘beyond’ the ‘reality’, but there is a truth and many shades of truth that remain unsaid in ‘positive’ discourse, and that today are even denied.” And see ibid., §202, p. 146. After referring to the exposition of the technique of Heidegger’s word-mysticism in Yvon Belaval’s “Les Philosophes et leur Langage,” Susan commented: “Let’s grow up and stop this ‘thumb-sucking’ there is no mystical shortcut to creating anything of value, whether a house, a poem or a philosophy. Constructing a philosophy or a poem should take more work and should entail more difficulties than building a house or the poets and philosophers are really loafers and escapists.” 8. Taubes, “The Nature of Tragedy,” p. 199.

Notes  —  382 9. Ibid., p. 201. 10. Ibid., p. 193. See Sigrid Weigel, “Between the Philosophy of Religion and Cultural History: Susan Taubes on the Birth of Tragedy and the Negative Theology of Modernity,” Telos 150 (2010): 116–121. 11. Taubes, “The Nature of Tragedy,” p. 193 (emphasis in original). 12. Ibid., p. 195. 13. Ibid. It is of interest to keep in mind Susan’s position when considering the working model for the understanding of culture in general and of religion in particular as moving “in the register of the tragic, of the limited and constrained,” which is considered the “real,” offered by Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 170–171. Susan’s ruminations on the intersection of the religious and the tragic can shed light on Orsi’s proposal to approach religion from the vantage point of entering into “the dialectic of the possible and the impossible, to acknowledge limits, to recognize the tragedy of meaning.” 14. Taubes, “The Nature of Tragedy,” pp. 196–197. 15. Ibid., p. 201. 16. Ibid., p. 197. 17. Ibid., p. 199. 18. Ibid., p. 203. 19. Ibid., p. 204. 20. Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 212. Susan reiterated the confluence of belief and unbelief in A Lament for Julia. See Susan Taubes, Prosaschriften, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis, translated by Werner Richter (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), pp. 170–171. After rejecting Descartes’s dictum cogito, ergo sum as the only certainty that allows consciousness to escape a radical epistemological skepticism, the narrator reports continuing the search for truth by turning to the writings of theologians and the testimonies of mystics and saints, but this only increased the despair. The more that these religious works were consulted, the more the horrible belief dawned that the narrator was a cancer and a flaw in God’s creation. The only solace was to meditate on scriptural passages that dealt with casting out spirits, since the narrator harbored the conviction of being an evil demon (üble Dämon) that emerged from its unfortunate host [unseligen Wirt] and stood dazed [benommen] and squirming [windend] before Christ. The humiliation of that unclean spirit [unreinen Geistes] that crept out of its hiding place, and its stunned wonder as it withers under the Savior’s steady gaze, were the only bliss [Glückseligkeiten] I could imagine at that time. 21. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Heeding the Law Beyond the Law: Transgendering Alterity and the Hypernomian Perimeter of the Ethical,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 14 (2020): 216–217, and references to the studies of Scholem cited in nn. 2 and 4. 22. See ch. 3 n. 118. 23. See Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, translated with a preface by David

Notes ­ —  383 Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 87; idem, Abendländische Eschatologie, with an afterword by Martin Treml (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2007), p. 118; idem, From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, with an introduction by Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Wolf-Daniel Hartwich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 3, 6–8; idem, Vom Kult zur Kultur: Bausteine zu einer Kritik der historischen Vernunft, edited by Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, and Winfried Menninghaus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), pp. 43, 46–47; idem, “Scholem’s Theses on Messianism Reconsidered,” Social Science Information 21 (1982): 669, 671–673; German translation “Scholems Thesen,” in idem, Der Preis des Messianismus: Briefe von Jacob Taubes an Gershom Scholem und Andere Materialien, edited by Elettra Stimilli (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), pp. 45, 47–49. 24. Text cited from Susan Taubes Archiv 172, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, in Christina Pareigis, Susan Taubes: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020), p. 156. 25. Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), p. 313. 26. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §11, p. 41, cited in the Introduction at n. 45. 27. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §11, p. 42, cited in the Introduction at n. 46. 28. Susan Taubes, Divorcing, introduction by David Rieff (New York: New York Review of Books, 2020), p. 164. 29. See the text cited in ch. 1 at n. 165. 30. Translated from the German translation in Taubes, Prosaschriften, p. 172: “Niemand hatte mich entdeckt. Ich hätte es dabei belassen können, meinen geraubten Schatz an mich reißen und ihn im Verborgenen verschlingen. Aber ich war besessen, vom Drang erkannt zu werden.” 31. Taubes, Divorcing, p. 53. 32. Ibid., p. 28. 33. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §187, p. 115. 34. Numerous scholars have opined on this anthropological dimension of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology. See, for instance, Irene McMullin, Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), and other relevant references cited in the review by Robert D. Stolorow, “Fleshing out Heidegger’s Mitsein,” Human Studies 37 (2014): 161–166. See also Jonathan Salem-Wiseman, “Heidegger’s Dasein and the Liberal Conception of the Self,” Political Theory 31 (2003): 533– 557, esp. 549–553. 35. Based on the language of the text written by Susan when she was a student at Bryn Mawr from the Susan Taubes Archiv 125, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, cited in Pareigis, Susan Taubes, pp. 134–135. 36. Susan Taubes, “Resolutions and a Pink Hat,” The Harlequin (1945): 5, cited in Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 118.

Notes  —  384 37. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §82, p. 190. 38. Ibid., §55, p. 145. 39. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §193, p. 130. 40. Ibid., p. 129. 41. See ch. 1 n. 42. 42. Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journal and Notebooks 1964– 1980, edited by David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 371. 43. Particularly insensitive is Sontag’s remark that Susan could not accept the love of women and preferred to be hurt and dominated by men. For an assessment of Susan Taubes’s sexuality, see Sontag, As Consciousness, p. 87: “Susan T. [Taubes]: rather give up sex—otherwise can’t work, doesn’t want to move outside the eroticized sphere.” See as well Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, edited by David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 303: “Susan Taubes: sex is sacred. The rationalization of willed ignorance. (Don’t profane the mystery by looking.)” I surmise that the unkind psychological evaluations of Susan Taubes are a projection of Sontag’s own sexual proclivities. Consider the grappling with her privileging lesbianism over heterosexuality in Sontag, Reborn, p. 221: My desire . . . to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me—I feel—a license. I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer. . . . I connect my fear and my sense of guilt with Philip, with his publicizing it to everyone all over the world, with the prospect of another custody suit next summer. But perhaps he only makes it worse. Thus, why do I continue the deception with Jacob [Taubes]? Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable. It increases my wish to hide, to be invisible—which I’ve always felt anyway. It is of interest to compare Sontag’s comments about her affair with Jacob Taubes incorporated in the analysis by Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work (New York: HarperCollins, 2019), pp. 376–377: The next week, Susan went to bed with Jacob Taubes (“unexpectedly good + sensitive sexually”), feeling no apparent guilt about sleeping with her best friend’s husband but sounding almost relieved that the experience gave her the “feeling of being totally queer.” 44. The unsympathetic nature of Sontag’s postmortem assessment of Susan Taubes is illustrated in the continuation of the passage in As Consciousness, p. 371: “What is left of Susan? A novel nobody read and a manuscript on S.W. that I keep in a closet in NY (unread) whose existence nobody knows.” 45. Another callous recounting of Susan Taubes’s death can be found in the description of Julia in Sontag’s fictionalized story of their friendship in “Debriefing” (Sontag, As Consciousness, p. 371). See Susan Sontag, Debriefing: Collected Stories, edited by Benjamin Taylor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), p. 294: That late Wednesday afternoon I told Julia how stupid it would be if she committed suicide. She agreed. I thought I was convincing. Two days later she left her apartment again and killed herself, showing me that she didn’t mind doing something stupid. 46. Susan Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil,” PhD dissertation, Radcliffe

Notes ­ —  38 5 College, 1956, pp. 282–287. Significantly, Susan compared Weil’s perspective with Walter Benjamin’s critique of historicism, but this is a matter that cannot be pursued here. See Sigrid Weigel, “In Paul’s Mask: Jacob Taubes Reads Walter Benjamin,” in Genealogies of the Secular: The Making of Modern German Thought, edited by Willem Styfhals and Stéphane Symons (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), p. 194. For discussion of the view of Benjamin on messianic time, futural remembering, and historical disjointedness, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 608–640. 47. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 286. 48. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §193, p. 130. The full passage is cited in ch. 5 at n. 54. 49. Ibid., §136, p. 21, cited in ch. 3 at n. 130. Compare Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §50, pp. 134-135: “Man has deprived himself of his most mysterious possession, time—Time that is openness toward the divine—that possibility of a ‘space’ where our fleeting existence becomes coincident with an ‘always’.” 50. Sontag, As Consciousness, p. 108: “Now I have really known suffering. And I have survived. I am alone—unloved + w[ith]o[ut] someone to love—the thing I feared most in the world. I have touched bottom. And I survive.” See ibid., p. 384: “But I don’t want to fail, I said. I want to be one of the survivors. I don’t want to be Susan Taubes.” 51. Françoise Dastur, Hölderlin, le retournement natale: Tragédie et modernité, nature et poesie & autres essais (La Versanne: Encre Marine, 1997), p. 57, cited in Peter Wake, Tragedy in Hegel’s Early Theological Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), p. 237 n. 56. 52. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §28, p. 79. 53. Ibid., §32, p. 87. 54. Ibid., §45, p. 122. 55. Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, translated by David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 141: In short, we are always faced with a human reality in which social reality (the social dimension of reality) covers almost all of the psychical reality. In a first sense, the “subject” presents itself as this strange totality, a totality that is not one and is one at the same time, a paradoxical compound of a biological body, a social being (a socially defined individual), a more or less conscious “person” and, finally, an unconscious psyche (a psychical reality and a psychical apparatus), the whole being supremely heterogeneous in makeup and yet definitely indissociable in character. Such is how the human phenomenon presents itself to us, and it is in the face of this cluster [nebuleuse] that we have to think the question of the subject. 56. Ibid., pp. 149–150. 57. “Translator’s Foreword” in ibid., p. xxvi (emphasis in original). 58. See ch. 1 at nn. 88–89. 59. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §21, p. 65. 60. See the comment from Susan’s dissertation cited in ch. 2 at n. 59. In her analysis of Weil’s social theory, Susan used the word “specialization,” but the connotation is a collective networking that undermines individual distinctiveness. See Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” pp. 98–99:

Notes  —  38 6 The rise of a bureaucratic caste in industry is only the most striking aspect of a general phenomenon, whose essence is specialization. The tendency toward specialization is not restricted to factory labor, but on the contrary develops with greater intensity in the theoretical and administrative sphere, and the power of bureaucracy increases in direct proportion with the specialization of its own functions. Bureaucratic growth thus leads toward the systematic elimination of qualified men in all spheres; the scientist is replaced by the team of specialized technicians just as the qualified laborer is replaced by the type of assembly line worker who functions as a wheel in the productive machine. 61. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §2, p. 18, cited in ch. 5 at n. 95. 62. See my description of the kabbalistic infinity in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 174. Also helpful in understanding my view is the analysis of the distinction between infinite number and infinite being in Ohad Nachtomy, Living Mirrors: Infinity, Unity, and Life in Leibniz’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 14–34. 63. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §31, p. 84. 64. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §170, p. 87. 65. Ibid., §187, p. 115. 66. Ibid. 67. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §6, p. 27. 68. The language I deploy here to describe the position of Susan Taubes is indebted to the analysis in Necip Fikri Alican, One Over Many: The Unitary Pluralism of Plato’s World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021). 69. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §112, p. 236. 70. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §217, pp. 171–172, cited in ch. 1 at n. 30. 71. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §112, p. 237. 72. Ibid., §41, p. 114. 73. In Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, p. 39 n. 5, Pareigis suggests that the reference here is to the analysis of the ontological foundations of the concept of truth in Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), §44, pp. 214– 225. For the corresponding pages in the English translation, see idem, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), pp. 206–216. 74. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §142, p. 38. 75. Heidegger considered the saying of the same thing twice an “empty tautology,” which is characterized further as “thoughtlessness” (Gedankenlosigkeit). See Heidegger, Die Metaphysik des Deutschen Idealismus. Zur Erneuten Auslegung von Schelling: Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit und die Damit Zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (1809) [GA 49] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006), p. 35; idem, The Metaphysics of German Idealism: A New Interpretation of Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and the Matters Connected Therewith (1809), translated by Ian Alexander Moore and Rodrigo Therezo (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), p. 28. The tautological statement is thoughtful if it

Notes ­ —  38 7 says the same thing differently. On the role of tautology and hermeneutic circularity in Heidegger’s thinking, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 37–38, 263, 308. See also François Courtine, “Phenomenology and/or Tautology,” in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, edited by John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 241–257; O. Bradley Bassler, “The Birthplace of Thinking: Heidegger’s Late Thoughts on Tautology,” Heidegger Studies 17 (2001): 117–133. 76. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44, p. 214; idem, Being and Time, p. 206. 77. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44, p. 218; idem, Being and Time, p. 209. 78. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44, p. 218; idem, Being and Time, pp. 209–210. 79. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44, p. 221; idem, Being and Time, p. 212. 80. Taubes, Divorcing, p. 28. 81. See Susan’s reflections in the letter from December 18, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §58, p. 149: I am afraid I hear too loudly and constantly the call of “care” and feel the sad waste of time in much of my studies—the logic problems in particular. Considering one has this one life one could really spend it better. The stupidities of nature that give one work I can yet accept but then the sillyness of man—especially when he takes himself seriously is too much. 82. Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row,” available at http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/desolation-row/ 83. The expressions are appropriated from Mara van der Lugt, Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021) pp. 152, 172–178. 84. Compare the letter from Susan to Jacob written on September 21, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §4, p. 22: “I try to be cheerful which is for me very very difficult.” And see the letter from November 30, 1950, ibid., §46, p. 126: “I am sad. I have one life + I want to live and have many children.” Perhaps Susan would have concurred with Nietzsche’s observation in Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996), p. 342: “Melancholy and serious authors.—He who reduces to paper what he is suffering will be a melancholy author. A serious author, however, is one who tells us what he has suffered and why he is now reposing in joy” (emphasis in original). On the link between skepticism and melancholia, see the analysis in Alina N. Feld, Melancholy and the Otherness of God: A Study of the Hermeneutics of Depression (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011), pp. 83–103, and compare the discussion on psychic pathos and creative insight in ibid., pp. 151–168. 85. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §15, p. 53. 86. Taubes, Prosaschriften, p. 122: “Habe ich den Zyniker gespielt, obwohl es doch eine Sache von Verderben oder Errettung war? Aber ich habe beide Pferde geritten, das tragische und das komische.” Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 57, notes that Susan once described A Lament for Julia as an “abstract comedy.” The passage is cited more fully in ibid., p. 350. See ch. 1 n. 109. 87. See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §99, p. 219 n. 1, where Pareigis alerts the reader to the fact that Susan was alluding to Jacob’s study “The

Notes  —  388 Development of the Ontological Question in Recent German Philosophy.” Regarding this essay, see Introduction n. 28. See especially Jacob Taubes, “The Development of the Ontological Question in Recent German Philosophy,” Review of Metaphysics 6 (1953): 661: Heidegger’s intention can perhaps best be understood by watching for his implicit polemics against Husserl’s method of reduction in his essay on the nature of metaphysics (1929). Here Heidegger tries to show that what the method of reduction should accomplish through a methodological trick actually happens to the concrete man in his experience of anxiety. Whereas by the method of reduction the faith in the world is supposedly suspended, leaving the thinker in the neutral role of a spectator, in anxiety the thinker himself is suspended in the suspension of faith. In the experience of anxiety the totality of being is thrown in doubt. 88. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §99, p. 217. 89. On the centrality of the act of questioning to the Heideggerian path of meditative thinking in contrast to the science of calculative thinking, and its affinity to the Jewish penchant to respond to a question with a question, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 77–78. 90. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 381; idem, Negativ Dialektik (GS 6) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 374. Adorno suggests that “Beckett has given us the only fitting reaction to the situation of the concentration camps.” That is, for Beckett, the nature of being—“what is”—is “like a concentration camp” or like “a lifelong death penalty.” The only “dawning hope,” therefore, is that “there will be nothing any more.” But this, too, he rejects in favor of “carrying-on” in spite of the apparent futility, whence Adorno draws the conclusion that Beckett’s nihilism implies the contrary of identification with nothingness. To Beckett, as to the Gnostics, the created world is radically evil, and its negation is the chance of another world that is not yet. As long as the world is as it is, all pictures of reconciliation, peace, and quiet resemble the picture of death. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 380–381; idem, Negativ Dialektik, pp. 373–374. I concur that for the Gnostics the world is radically evil, but I do not think it is correct to say that the negation of the world is the possibility of another world that has not yet been created. The escape is from all worldliness and temporal-spatial being. 91. Taubes, “The Nature of Tragedy,” p. 206. 92. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §172, p. 91. 93. Ibid., §230, p. 199. 94. Susan Anima Taubes, “The Absent God,” Journal of Religion 35 (1955): 6 (emphasis in original). The passage is repeated in Susan’s doctoral thesis. See Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 1. And see the analysis of Christian Pareigis, “Searching for the Absent God: Susan Taubes’s Negative Theology,” Telos 150 (2010): 97–110. See also Weigel, “Between the Philosophy,” pp. 115–135. For a critical and disapproving assessment of Susan’s analysis of Weil’s mystical atheism, see Wayne R. Sheppard, “The Idea of the Absence

Notes ­ —  38 9 of God in Simone Weil,” PhD dissertation, McMaster University, 1982, pp. xxxv–xxxviii. Curiously, Sheppard refers to Susan’s essay on Weil published in the Journal of Religion, but he makes no reference to the fuller treatment in her doctoral thesis. 95. Taubes, “The Absent God,” p. 6; idem, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 2. 96. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §267, p. 259. 97. Ibid., §200, p. 143. 98. A similar critique could be leveled against Tillich’s paradoxical statement that God does not exist. Concerning this subject, see Robert R. N. Ross, “The Non-Existence of God: Tillich, Aquinas, and the Pseudo-Dionysius,” Harvard Theological Review 68 (1975): 141–166. 99. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §149, p. 51. See below at n. 130 where a longer portion of this passage is cited. For the use of the term Teufelsknabe to refer to Jacob, see additional sources cited in the Introduction n. 31. 100. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §149, p. 50 (emphasis in original). For discussion of Weil’s notion of prayer as an incarnational venture provoking the appearance of the divine presence in the world from the destitution of the void, see Lissa McCullough, “Prayer and Incarnation: A Homiletical Reflection,” in The Phenomenology of Prayer, edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 209–216. 101. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §29, p. 81. 102. Ernst Bloch, Atheismus im Christentum: Zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), p. 10; idem, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, with an introduction by Peter Thompson, translated by J. T. Swann (London: Verso, 2009), p. viii. 103. Jacob Taubes, Apokalypse und Politik: Aufsätze, Kritiken und kleinere Schriften, edited by Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink and Martin Treml, with the collaboration of Theresia Heuer and Anja Schipke (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), p. 287. 104. Thompson, “Introduction,” in Bloch, Atheism, p. xxi. 105. Taubes, “The Absent God,” p. 9. 106. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, introduction and postscript by Gustave Thibon, translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 114–115. This passage and other applicable sources were previously cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 266–267 n. 38. 107. Lissa McCullough, “The Void: Simone Weil’s Naming of Evil,” in Wrestling with God and with Evil: Philosophical Reflections, edited by Hendrik M. Vroom (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 36–39; idem, The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), pp. 171–212. 108. McCullough, “The Void,” pp. 33–34; idem, The Religious Philosophy, pp. 51–84, esp. 66–69. 109. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 27: Redemptive suffering. If a human being who is in a state of perfection and has through grace completely destroyed the “I” in himself, falls into that degree of affliction which

Notes  —  39 0 corresponds for him to the destruction of the “I” from outside—we have there the cross in its fullness. Affliction can no longer destroy the “I” in him for the “I” in him no longer exists, having completely disappeared and left the place to God. But affliction produces an effect which is equivalent, on the plane of perfection, to the exterior destruction of the “I”. It produces the absence of God. “My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” See below at n. 191. 110. Ibid., p. 13. 111. Ibid., pp. 94–95: “Desire is impossible: it destroys its object. . . . Because to desire something is impossible, we have to desire what is nothing.” 112. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” pp. 192–193. 113. On the motif of waiting for God in Weil’s mystical atheism, see McCullough, “The Void,” pp. 35–36; idem, The Religious Philosophy, pp. 69–74. 114. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 22. 115. Ibid., p. 12. 116. Ibid., pp. 89–90. 117. Simone Weil, “Human Personality,” in Simone Weil: An Anthology, edited and introduced by Siân Miles (New York: Grove Press, 1986), pp. 49–78, esp. 54–59. 118. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 41. 119. Ibid., p. 46. See ibid., p. 89: In order that we should realize the distance between ourselves and God it was necessary that God should be a crucified slave. For we do not realize distance except in the downward direction. It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified. 120. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” pp. 180–181, 197–198; idem, “The Absent God,” p. 15. See the passage from Weil cited below in n. 189. 121. Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, translated by Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 148 (emphasis in original). 122. Weil, The Notebooks, p. 149. Compare idem, Gravity and Grace, p. 23: We must not seek the void, for it would be tempting God if we counted on supernatural bread to fill it. We must not run away from it either. The void is the supreme fullness, but man is not permitted to know it. The proof is that Christ himself was at one moment completely unaware of it. One part of the self should know it, but not the other parts, for if they knew it in their base fashion, there would no longer be any void. 123. Weil, The Notebooks, pp. 148–149. For discussion of the paradox in Weil’s thinking of the manifestation of the divine in the world from which the divine is hidden, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. xix–xx. See also Sheppard, “The Idea of the Absence,” pp. 208–209. 124. Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, translated by Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 103. 125. A number of scholars have noted that Weil’s explanation of creation coming to be as a consequence of the withdrawal of God bears an interesting affinity with the kabbalistic idea of ṣimṣum. See Wladimir Rabi, “La conception weilienne de la création: Rencontre avec la kabbale juive,” in Simone Weil: Philosophe, historienne et mystique, edited by

Notes ­ —  391 Gilbert Kahn (Paris: Éditions Aubier Montaigne, 1978), pp. 141–160; Richard A. Freund, “La tradition mystique juive et Simone Weil,” Cahiers Simone Weil 10 (1987): 289–295, esp. 292–293; Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, translation and foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 116–118; Thomas R. Nevin, Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self-Exiled Jew (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 249–250; Henry Leroy Finch, Simone Weil and the Intellect of Grace, edited by Martin Andic, foreword by Annie Finch (New York: Continuum, 1999), pp. 108–109; McCullough, The Religious Philosophy, pp. 86–91. See, however, the critique of Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 140–141. The kabbalistic idea of God emptying himself is related to the creation of the human being whose face is the medium through which the invisible becomes visible and enters into commerce with what is other than himself. I note, finally, that one can detect the influence of other kabbalistic ideas in Weil. For instance, see Weil, First and Last Notebooks, p. 87: Harmony here is unity between contraries. Contraries: myself and the other. Unity only in God. Justice and love (of one’s neighbor) identical. God is the mediation between God and God, between God and man, between man and man. Unique harmony. The account of the harmony between justice and love as two aspects of the divine—the mediation between God and God—is analogous to the kabbalistic symbol of the central pillar of mercy (raḥamim), which is the balance between the right side of lovingkindness (ḥesed) and the left side of stern judgment (din). 126. Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 38–39. 127. Taubes, “The Absent God,” p. 6. On the nothingness of God in Weil, see McCullough, “The Void,” pp. 39–41; idem, The Religious Philosophy, pp. 183–187. 128. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 109. 129. Taubes, “The Absent God,” p. 6; idem, “The Absent God: A Study,” pp. 1–2. Compare Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §184, p. 110: S. Weil has deep intuitions, she is the greatest when she strikes into an experience and shows that truth is reality and in some sense even the good. And she fights for the reality which is contained in the most negative situations, and which we would throw away for illusions. Thus the real pain of any grief is better than an act of violence or an imaginary revolt into which we would like to transform it in order to get rid of it. However, consider the criticism of Weil in ibid., §164, p. 76: “A mystic like S. Weil says that when the soul is void god enters it. But god is not something other than the void; god is the void, god tastes like nothing in the mouth of mortals. But is it necessary then to speak of god? I think it is rather an abuse of the word.” 130. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §149, p. 51 (emphasis in original). In the concluding part of the letter, Susan speculated about Weil’s “real affinity to Jewish mysticism,” and the “secret bridge between jewish + christian gnostic mysticism.” Susan admitted, however, that the proper explication of this matter would depend on her knowing more about Jewish mysticism. We can presume that Jacob introduced Susan to

Notes  —  39 2 the thought of Naḥman of Braslav. Concerning Jacob’s interest in Naḥman, see Jerry Z. Muller, Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), p. 161, and see especially p. 165: In the early years of their marriage, both Jacob and Susan were attracted to thinkers who suggested—paradoxically, and perhaps absurdly—that recognizing the absence of God from the world was a step toward faith (as in the case of Simone Weil), or that doubt was at the heart of faith (as in the case of Nachman of Breslov). 131. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 109: “This world, in so far as it is completely empty of God, is God himself.” The passage is cited by Taubes, “The Absent God,” p. 10, and in idem, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 16. 132. See my more expanded discussion of this point in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 160. The explanation of ṣimṣum in light of the Hegelian dialectic was championed by Scholem, and it has been repeated by other scholars of kabbalah following in his wake. For the contrast of Scholem’s view to my own, see Wolfson, op. cit., pp. 4, 18 n. 38, 82 nn. 10–11, and esp. p. 157, where I note that Scholem emphasized that ṣimṣum is not a one-time event but rather constantly repeats itself, the dialectic of expansion (hitpashsheṭut) and withdrawal (histallequt) that corresponds to the “two tendencies of perpetual ebb and flow,” which “continue to act and react upon each other. Just as the human organism exists through the double process of inhaling and exhaling and the one cannot be conceived without the other, so also the whole of Creation constitutes a gigantic process of divine inhalation and exhalation” [Scholem, Major Trends, p. 263]. I would modify Scholem’s view, however, by noting that it is not only that the “perpetual tension” of the cosmic process dialectically entails that every expansion is preceded by withdrawal, but rather, more paradoxically, that the expansion is itself a withdrawal in the same manner that every disclosure (gilluy) is a concealment (he‘lem), since what is disclosed is the concealment and the concealment cannot be disclosed as concealment unless it is concealed. See the passage from Scholem cited in the concluding part of ch. 3 n. 118. 133. For a still valuable presentation of Naḥman’s utilization of the Lurianic myth of ṣimṣum to substantiate the paradox that the presence of God is discerned precisely in the void from which God is absent—a belief that stimulated the dialectical coalescing of faith and doubt—see Arthur Green, Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1979), pp. 311–314. On Naḥman’s doctrine of ṣimṣum and the void, which served as the theoretical basis for the pietistic mode of worship that exceeds reason and language, see Zvi Mark, Mysticism and Madness: The Religious Thought of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 155–158, 168–170. 134. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §62, p. 157. On the identification of being and nothing in Heidegger, see ch. 3 n. 185. 135. Ibid., §26, p. 73. On p. 75 n. 1, Pareigis refers to Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B294-B315/A235-A260, the third chapter of “the transcendental doctrine of the power of judgment,” which deals with the distinction of all objects into phenomena and noumena. 136. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §138, p. 27, cited in ch. 3 n. 23.

Notes ­ —  393 137. Jacob Taubes, “Notes on an Ontological Interpretation of Theology,” Review of Metaphysics 2 (1949): 98. 138. Ibid., p. 100. 139. Ibid., p. 101. 140. Ibid., p. 103 (emphasis in original). 141. Ibid., p. 104. 142. A similar point is made in passing by Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 379–380 (idem, Negativ Dialektik, p. 372): “The indignation at nihilism that has today been turned on again is hardly aimed at mysticism, which finds the negated something even in nothingness, in the nihil privativum, and which enters into the dialectics unleashed by the word nothingness itself.” 143. Taubes, Die Preis, p. 106. See below at n. 156. The essay to which Taubes refers is Gershom Scholem, “New Fragments from the Writings of Azriel of Gerona,” in Sefer Zikkaron le-Asher Gulak we-li-Shemu’el Klein (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1942), pp. 202–222 (Hebrew). It is of interest to note here Susan’s description of Jacob’s philosophical position to Jean Wahl in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §174, p. 94: “I stammered about kabala, mysticism, Heidegger, Transcendental ontology, ‘nothing’—perhaps you will make an official statement.” 144. The expression “negative ontology” is applied to Heidegger in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §71, p. 171 (cited in ch. 3 at n. 89). See also ibid., §81, p. 188, where Susan refers to “Die NOTES ON MYTHOS, NEGATIVE ONTOLOGY and gnosis.” For the use of this term in more recent scholarship, see the chapter on Adorno in Piotr Jaroszyński, Metaphysics or Ontology? translated by Hugh McDonald (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 166–175; Przemyslaw Tacik, The Freedom of Lights: Edmond Jabès and Jewish Philosophy of Modernity, translated by Patrycja Poniatowska (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019), pp. 135–177; Babette Babich, “Nietzsches negative Ontologie,” in Handbuch Ontologie, edited by Jan Urbich and Jörg Zimmer (Frankfurt am Main: Metzler, 2020), pp. 155–164. 145. A Pareigis remarks, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, p. 30 n. 8, Susan’s comment is an adaptation of the well-known statement of Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 39: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Pareigis, op. cit., pp. 30–31, also mentioned a similar reworking of Whitehead’s remark in a letter from Jacob Taubes to Gershom Scholem written on October 2, 1949: “Denn die Philosophie hat vom Augenblick ihrer Geburt an, seit Parmenides (und ist die Philosophie nicht am Ende eine Fussnote, ein Commentar zu Parmenides?) das Nichts verworfen.” See Taubes, Der Preis, p. 106. Based on this source, I corrected the date of the letter to October 2 rather than October 22 as Pareigis recorded it. See also Susan’s letter to Jacob written on November 9, 1950, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §31, p. 85: “I think you are right: all Western philosophy is a footnote to Parmenides.” For the continuation of this letter, see below at n. 152. On Susan’s interest in and study of Whitehead’s process philosophy under the tutelage of Paul Weiss

Notes  —  39 4 and Isabel Stearns at Bryn Mawr, see Pareigis, Susan Taubes, pp. 139, 141, 204. For Susan’s criticism of Whitehead, see the passage cited below in n. 151. 146. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §6, p. 27. 147. Ibid., §9, pp. 37–38. On the locution of doing service, see the passage cited in ch. 1 at n. 175 and my comments in n. 180. 148. In the letter to Jacob written on November 11, 1950, after saying that all she has to say in her thesis has been taken from him (ibid., §33, p. 92), Susan offered the following summary of her argument: I want to stress that the “nothing” is not a wild idea of 20th Century depravity but a very solid archaic “world-order” that the first “philosophers” in becoming philosophers fought against and had to overthrow. The “being is + not-being is not” and the “ex nihilo nihil fit” are battle cries against a real foe that had to be overthrown. And if you ask, why did Thales and Parmenides come along . . . ? Why did not the archaic order continue . . . ? How does the appearance of the Olympians fit into the “order of things”? (Or if there is no order we might as well stop talking.) And I can answer only by referring back to the mythos: because “first there was chaos . . . and then Kronos reigned . . . and Zeus overthrew him[”]. In other words: “history” (—of man and thus “philosophy”, institutions etc.) did not take place in vacuo: the development of thought is not simply the self-unfolding of thought against a cosmos that remains as it was, constant; but history belongs to Cosmogony: because “new gods” had overthrown the old gods. Parmenides had to speak; and if today we want to “correct” Parmenides it is because a “new order” (which may be “simply” death—actually not so simple) is struggling with the Old—a new god has been born threatening the old god. 149. There are many sources that I could have cited, but for a succinct exposition of the kabbalistic teaching, see Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2001), 73d–74a. 150. It is worth recalling the following words of Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), §142, p. 207 (idem, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [GA 65] [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989], p. 263): The appropriating event [Er-eignis] and its joining in the abyss of time-space form the net in which the last god is self-suspended in order to rend the net and let it end in its uniqueness, divine and rare and the strangest amid all beings. The sudden extinguishing of the great fire—this leaves behind something which is neither day nor night [weder Tag noch Nacht], which no one grasps, and in which humans, having come to the end, still bustle about so as to benumb themselves with the products of their machinations, pretending such products are made for all eternity, perhaps for that “and so forth” which is neither day nor night. For discussion of this passage, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “‘To Stand in Relation with Something Which Is Neither Day nor Night’: Temporal Overcoming and Heidegger’s Notion of Destiny,” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 10 (2020): 207–210. On the Heideggerian

Notes ­ —  39 5 idea of the last god, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Gottwesen and the De-Divinization of the Last God: Heidegger’s Meditation on the Strange and Incalculable,” in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Future of Theology, edited by Mårten Björk and Jayne Svenungsson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 211–255, and idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 98–99, 140–155. 151. Compare Susan’s reflections on Kant’s transcendental idealism in the letter to Jacob from January 12, 1951, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §87, pp. 201–202: I struggle for days to collect my thoughts on the “Dialectic” (there will be a question: “discuss one of the antinomies[”]) but I can’t find anything “interesting” to hold onto—and then I get lost in all the technical subtleties of the arguments. However it is not out of “dogmatic ignorance” that the Greeks never discovered the antinomies. There [sic] mind was not yet poisoned with the idea of “cosmos” as “the-object-of-natural-mechanical-science” + soul as the abstract “ego” and therefore they were not just “naïvely” speaking about the “absolute”—only a man who believes in natural science as our ultimate “experience” can fall into “dogmatic fallacy” (i.e. Whitehead but not Plato). But where is it written that the relation of the soul to cosmos—the sensuous manifestation is primarily “epistomological” [sic]–now if we create the world in the image of our own soul—reason—the Kantian world-of-experience is indeed a poor reflection on the “divine” reason—who wants it? Whom does it satisfy? What have I to do in this mechanical contraption? Our idea of both the soul and the world depends on our pre-conception of the relation between them— whether we seek a “coercive” knowing that wants to fix into objects that is just so and so—or whether we seek a “loving” knowing that delights in the inexhaustible mystery of the “other” and prays that the mysterious life whereby it cannot be fixed shall never cease. The continuation of this letter is cited in ch. 3 at n. 98. 152. Ibid., §31, p. 85. 153. Ibid., §111, p. 233. 154. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 107–108. 155. Taubes, From Cult, pp. 133–134; idem, Von Kult, pp. 169–170. In my own work, I have pursued the line of inquiry neglected by Taubes by comparing Heidegger’s identifying nothingness and being and the kabbalistic construal of the infinite as the being that is nothing in the nothingness of its being beyond being and nonbeing. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 197–202. On the nothing and the thought of the ground, see Richard Regvald, Heidegger et le problème du néant (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 93–130. 156. Cited in Taubes, From Cult, p. 133; idem, Von Kult, p. 169. Scholem’s essay “Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes” was published originally in the Eranos Jahrbuch 25 (1956): 87–119. Taubes cites the version that was included in Gershom Scholem, Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 53–89. For a comparison of Heidegger and Scholem, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Anxiety, Lament, and the Language of Silence: Poetic Redemption and Gnostic Alienation,” in All Religion Is Inter-Religion: Engaging the Work of Steven M. Wasserstrom, edited by Kambiz

Notes  —  39 6 GhaneaBassiri and Paul Robertson (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 17–37, and the revised version in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 299–334, esp. 311–321. 157. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §139, pp. 29–30. 158. Ibid., p. 30 n. 2. 159. Pareigis, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §71, p. 173 n. 3, identified the passage from Heidegger’s essay “Nietzsches Wort ‘Gott ist tot,’” in Holzwege, p. 264: “Aus dem Geschick des Seins gedacht, bedeutet das nihil des Nihilismus, daß es mit dem Sein nichts ist.” 160. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §71, p. 171. For the fuller argument undergirding this passage, see the part of the text cited in ch. 3 n. 128. 161. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §141, p. 34. 162. Wolfson, Suffering Time, p. 504. 163. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 16. 164. Ibid., p. 2. 165. Ibid., p. 36. See ibid., p. 35, where Susan reports that Marcel Moré in a warning to Christian followers, exposes Simone Weil’s mysticism as a “gnosis in decomposition” impregnated by demonic Manichaeism and the aesthetic intellectualism of the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition. Moré’s attack is not altogether unjustified from a Catholic point of view, and shows a deeper understanding of Simone Weil than the kind of enthusiastic appraisal that would put her writings on the shelf of mystical literature for devotional reading. See, however, the more reserved assessment in Susan’s letter to Jacob, written on January 26, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §157, p. 67: About S. Weil. Since on the most important points we have only haphazard notes of a highly contradictory nature—[it] might really be good to talk to people who knew her to find out her “point of departure”. I suspect she is not a Christian + even a gnostic au fond. 166. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” pp. 289–290. 167. Ibid., p. 373. 168. Ibid., pp. 25–26. Consider the praise offered by Susan in the letter to Jacob from January 14, 1952, in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §143, p. 40: Was reading S. Weil’s l’Enracinement and I admire her courage in saying what “ought” to be, almost with a childish naivité, in the midst [of the] Kingdom of Moloch. She might be wrong on many points, but she was without doubt an utterly uncorrupted human being and that is a great deal. 169. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 28. 170. Ibid., pp. 31–32. 171. Ibid., pp. 26–27. 172. Ibid., pp. 32–33. 173. Ibid., p. 95. 174. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 27. 175. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 219.

Notes ­ —  39 7 176. Taubes, “The Absent God,” p. 13. Compare Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 77–78: Evil has to be purified—or life is not possible. God alone can do that. This is the idea of the Gita. It is also the idea of Moses, of Mahomet, of Hitlerism . . . But Jehovah, Allah, Hitler are earthly Gods. The purification they bring about is imaginary. That which is essentially different from evil is virtue accompanied by a dear perception of the possibility of evil and of evil appearing as something good. The presence of illusions which we have abandoned but which are still present in the mind is perhaps the criterion of truth. And see ibid., p. 79: “God has created a world which is not the best possible, but which contains the whole range of good and evil. We are at the point where it is as bad as possible; for beyond is the stage where evil becomes innocence.” Consider also Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, translated by Arthur Wills, with a preface by T. S. Eliot (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 217: Our conception of greatness is the most serious defect of all, and the one concerning which we are least conscious that it is a defect: at least, a defect in ourselves; for in our enemies it shocks us. . . . Our conception of greatness is the very one which has inspired Hitler’s whole life. When we denounce it without the remotest recognition of its application to ourselves, the angels must either cry or laugh, if there happen to be angels who interest themselves in our propaganda. For a detailed historical analysis of the precursor to Hitler’s authoritarianism in Caesar’s rule over ancient Rome, see “The Great Beast: Some Reflections on the Origins of Hitlerism 1939–1940,” in Simone Weil, Selected Essays 1934–1943, chosen and translated by Richard Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 89–144. Part of the essay appeared originally as “Quelques réflexions sur les origins de l’hitlérisme,” Nouveaux Cahiers 53 (1940): 14–21. The complexity of Weil’s position is demonstrated in the following comment in “The Great Beast,” p. 115: In reality might is nearly always in the wrong if it is silent when the victim appeals to his rights. Therefore it is necessary for might to disguise itself with plausible pretexts; on the other hand, even if the pretexts are grossly contradictory and hypocritical they are plausible enough when used by the stronger. In fact, even if they are so blatantly false and transparent that no one could believe them, it would still be a mistake to assume that they are useless. They give cowards an excuse for flattery and the indifferent an excuse for inertia; and they allow the conqueror to forget that he is a criminal; but in the absence of any pretext at all none of this would be possible, and the conqueror might come to grief. 177. Thibon, “Introduction,” in Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. xxx. 178. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, pp. 133–141. 179. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 29. 180. Ibid., pp. 24–25. Compare the reference to Weil’s “concentration-camp-ethics” in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §175, p. 96. 181. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 27.

Notes  —  39 8 182. See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §29, p. 81, cited in ch. 1 at n. 58. 183. Taubes, “The Absent God,” p. 9. In fairness to Weil, it must be said that there are passages in her writings that suggest a closer proximity to the perspective of the dark night of the soul of St. John of the Cross. For instance, consider Simone Weil, La connaissance surnaturelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 59: “Pour devenir enfant de Dieu, il faut mourir et renaître. Etre engendré par la semence de Dieu.” 184. Louis Dupré, “Simone Weil and Platonism: An Introductory Reading,” in The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, edited by E. Jane Doering and Eric O. Springsted (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), pp. 20–21. 185. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 12. 186. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 186. 187. Taubes, “The Absent God,” pp. 12–13. 188. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 88: One cannot choose the cross. One might choose no matter what degree of asceticism or heroism, but not the cross, that is to say penal suffering. Those who can only conceive of the crucifixion under the aspect of an offering do away with the salutary mystery and the salutary bitterness of it. To wish for martyrdom is far too little. The cross is infinitely more than martyrdom. It is the most purely bitter suffering—penal suffering. This is the guarantee of its authenticity. 189. Weil, Selected Essays, p. 143. In the continuation of this passage, Weil states that this view of barbarism is perfectly in accord with the materialism upon which Marxists pride themselves; but it is not in accord with Marxism itself, that messianic faith which believes that a particular social class is, so to speak, predestined as the one and only bearer of civilization. Though Marxism believes it has found the key to history in its idea of class, it has never even begun to make effective use of this key; and indeed it is unusable. On the messianic and mythological foundations of Marx’s social thinking, see Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, translated by Hugh Price with an introduction by Peter Winch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 142–143. 190. The obvious echoes of Nietzsche in the notion of a religion of a dead God notwithstanding, I do not agree with Bataille’s application of the term “hyperchristianity” to Weil’s utilization of the symbol of the cross, but an adequate discussion of this matter demands a treatment that is beyond the confines of this note. On the use the aforementioned term to name the condition wherein the divine separates from the human as opposed to the human separating from the divine, see Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, translated and with an introduction by Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), p. 77. And see the passage from Nietzsche’s Der Wille zur Macht cited on p. 134, which corresponds to Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884–1885, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), p. 682: “alles Christliche durch ein Überchristliches überwinden und nicht nur von sich abthun—denn die

Notes ­ —  39 9 christliche Lehre war die Gegenlehre gegen die dionysische.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments (Spring 1885–Spring 1886), translated, with an afterword, by Adrian Del Caro (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), p. 232: “overcome everything Christian through something supra-Christian and not only cast it off—for the Christian doctrine was the counterdoctrine to the Dionysian” (emphasis in original). For an earlier rendering, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, a new translation by Walter Kaufmann and Reginald John Hollingdale, edited, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), §1051, p. 542. The position that I am challenging is expounded at length in Jeremy Biles, Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), pp. 95–123. 191. Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 87–88. See above, n. 109. 192. The reference is to Luigi Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore. 193. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §164, p. 75. 194. Jean-Luc Nancy, Sexistence, translated by Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), p. 4. 195. Taubes, “The Absent God,” p. 12. 196. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §176, p. 98. 197. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 157. 198. Taubes, “The Absent God,” p. 12. 199. Weil, The Notebooks, p. 345. 200. Taubes, “The Absent God: A Study,” p. 82.

Chapter 5 1. Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, Correspondence, edited and commentaries by Bertrand Badiou, Hans Höller, Andrea Stoll, and Barbara Wiedemann, translated by Wieland Hoban (London: Seagull Books, 2019), p. 292. 2. Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), §226, p. 192. 3. Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), §32, p. 88. 4. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §131, p. 15. The passage is cited more fully in ch. 2 n. 61. 5. Ibid., §193, pp. 126–127. 6. Ibid., p. 127. 7. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §19, p. 60. 8. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §141, p. 33. 9. Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 15. Compare the lines from the poem “Lieder auf der Flucht” in Ingeborg Bachmann, Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems, translated and with an introduction by Peter Filkins, foreword by Charles Simic (Brookline: Zephyr Press, 2006), pp. 236–237: “Love has its triumph and death has one, / in time and the time beyond us. / We have none” (Die Liebe hat einen Triumph und der Tod hat einen, / die Zeit und die Zeit danach. / Wir haben keinen).

Notes  —  40 0 10. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §187, pp. 114–115. The connection between eros and thanatos, expressed as the deferral of desire on the part of Mary Ann and her wish to succumb finally to being kissed by and united for eternity with her true lover personified as Death, is explored by Susan in “The Last Dance,” translated into German in Susan Taubes, Prosaschriften, edited and commentary by Christina Pareigis, translated by Werner Richter (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), pp. 107–111. 11. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §187, p. 114. See Introduction n. 21. 12. The language here reflects the description of the Cartesian idea of infinity in Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, translation and foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 53: The finite self thinks the infinite. In this thought, thought thinks what goes infinitely beyond it and what it cannot account for on its own; it thinks, therefore, more than it thinks. A unique experience. When I think the infinite, I think what I am not able to think (emphasis in original). And compare ibid., p. 209: Thus the limit-experience is experience itself: thought thinking that which will not let itself be thought; thought thinking more than it is able by an affirmation that affirms more than can be affirmed. This more itself is the experience: affirming only by an excess of affirmation and, in this surplus, affirming without anything being affirmed—finally affirming nothing. See the brief discussion of these passages in Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 287 and 289, and the comment of Kierkegaard cited below in n. 15. 13. Wouter Kusters, A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking, translated by Nancy Forest-Flier (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2020), pp. 233–264. 14. Darian Leader, Jouissance: Sexuality, Suffering and Satisfaction (Cambridge: Polity, 2021). For my own engagement with Lacanian jouissance as an analytic tool to describe the conjunction of the noetic and the erotic in kabbalistic ascesis, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Phallic Jewissance and the Pleasure of No Pleasure,” in Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Aharon Shemesh, Moulie Vidas, in collaboration with James Adam Redfield (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 295–313, 325–332; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 98–104. 15. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §32, p. 87. The source to which Susan referred is Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments / Johannes Climacus, edited and translated with introduction and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 37: But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow. But the

Notes ­ —  401 ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding [Forstand] to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think. For a detailed study of this theme, see Peter Kline, Passion for Nothing: Kierkegaard’s Apophatic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017). It would be worthwhile comparing the apophatic motif in Kierkegaard to Naḥman of Bratslav’s claim that the purpose of knowledge is to know that we do not know. For discussion of this directive in Naḥman, see Zvi Mark, Mysticism and Madness: The Religious Thought of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 218–246. 16. Susan Taubes, Divorcing, introduction by David Rieff (New York: New York Review of Books, 2020), p. 10. 17. Ibid., pp. 72–75. 18. Ibid., p. 150. 19. Christina Pareigis, “Purim-Spiele und die Masken der Marx Brothers. Auf der Schwelle von Identität und Nicht-Identität,” in Der jüdische Witz: Zur unabgegoltenen Problematik einer alten Kategorie, edited by Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek and Gunnar Och (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), p. 258, describes the literary artifice in Divorcing as an example of a humorous and grotesque staging of nonidentity. Compare Christina Pareigis, Susan Taubes: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020), p. 394: “Bei Taubes indes gibt es weder eine Wirklichkeit außerhalb der Literatur noch ein Vermächtnis des Autors. Stattdessen ist, wie in Divorcing, der Tod des Autors die Voraussetzung für die Entstehung des Romans.” 20. Taubes, Divorcing, p. 9. 21. Ibid., p. 10. 22. Compare the statement of Auguste Comte cited by Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, translated by Hugh Price with an introduction by Peter Winch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 143: “The silent influence of the dead more and more rules the lives of the living.” On the narrowing of the boundary separating life and death, consider the remark of Paul Celan, “Mikrolithen sinds, Steinchen”: Die Prosa aus dem Nachlaß. Kritische Ausgabe, edited and commentary by Barbara Wiedmann and Bertrand Badiou (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), p. 122: “Ich schreibe auch nicht für die Toten, sondern für due Lebenden—freilich für jene, die wissen, daß es auch die Toten gibt.” English translation in Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose, translated with a preface by Pierre Joris (New York: Contra Mundum, 2020), p. 117: “I don’t, in fact, write for the dead, but for the living—though of course for those who know that the dead too exist.” Notably, this comment succeeds an aphorism in which Celan responds to Adorno’s renowned statement about the impossibility of writing poetry subsequent to Auschwitz. See Celan, “Mikrolithen,” p. 122: Kein Gedicht nach Auschwitz (Adorno): Was wird hier als Vorstellung vom “Gedicht” unterstellt? Der Dünkel dessen, der sich untersteht hypothetisch-spekulativerweise

Notes  —  402 Auschwitz aus der Nachtigallen—oder Singdrossel-Perspektive zu betrachten oder zu bedichten. English translation in Celan, Microliths, p. 116: No poem after Auschwitz (Adorno): What concept of the “poem” is being presented here? The arrogance of the one who dares hypothetically-speculatively to contemplate or poetically describe Auschwitz from the nightingale- or lark-perspective. 23. Cited from the Susan Taubes Archiv 101, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, in Pareigis, Susan Taubes, p. 393. The wish of the writer to die—and perhaps we should relate this to Susan’s own suicide—may be elucidated from the narrator’s desire to kill the main protagonist of A Lament for Julia. See Taubes, Prosaschriften, pp. 142–143, and see especially on p. 143: Und für jedes Mal, da ich sie henkte, ertränkte, in den Abgrund stieß, bereute ich tausende Male. Ich saß in der Asche, ich beichtete, ich sagte, ich wolle sterben, auf dass Julia leben dürfe. Ich willigte ein. Willigte ein zu sterben, damit sie lebt. Julia, meine Fleischwerdung, meine Passion, meine Buße. 24. Taubes, Divorcing, pp. 10–11. 25. This point is noted in the review of Divorcing by Leslie Jamison, “The Self Unmoored,” New York Review of Books (May 13, 2021). According to Jamison, Given that Sophie is in the midst of ending her marriage, this dream of death suggests itself as a metaphor for divorce: the death of an old self suddenly confronting the vertigo of freedom. And given the biography of Sophie’s creator, it feels less like metaphor and more like warning. It strikes me that the homology suggested by Jamison obscures the tension between death and divorce that may be evoked from the novel. For instance, see the passage from Taubes, Divorcing, p. 73, cited below, n. 29. 26. Taubes, Divorcing, p. 81. See also the conversation between Sophie and Ivan, ibid., p. 64: “Why is everything so strange?” she asks, “Why?” “Because you’re dead,” he says simply, his voice quiet and comforting. “Dead, dearest.” And rising with sudden energy he strides to his desk. “Sleep, Sophie,” he says, his voice far away, and writes: Day is breaking. 27. Ibid., p. 81: “Gentlemen, why are you so old and ugly? Good grief, if I should need further proof that this whole thing is a fraud, it’s your presence. You who said we’d meet in the next world. Afterlife, soul, Judgment, God, One People, One Law: never believed a word of it. So now. Greatly regret, infinitely sorry, unspeakably ashamed of stupidities I got enmeshed in some particle of belief in your lies. Enough.”

Notes ­ —  403 And see the account of Ezra’s dealing with the burial of Sophie retold by the latter in ibid., p. 68: Required to bury his wife within forty-eight hours according to Jewish Law. Why this comedy? Wants body—body of his wife, mother of his children; recites my genealogy to the seventh generation, raves about resurrection and Judgment. Wonder myself why the comedy. Always this embarrassing business of the body. Should be possible to disappear clean and simple. Whisk one’s self out of the world whole—dress, shoes, gloves, purse and all. So heavy-handed, the way God— In A Lament for Julia, Susan similarly rejected the idea of reincarnation and affirmed her belief that we each have one cycle of life in this world. See Taubes, Prosaschriften, p. 122: Ich muss gestehen, die Idee der Reinkarnation hat mich nie gereizt. Ich bin mir der Vorzüge dieser östlichen Doktrin durchaus bewusst: der Zufall hat weniger Bedeutung; man setzt nicht alles auf einmal aufs Spiel. Ich gebe zu, es ist ein weiser und tröstlicher Denkansatz, stufenweise voranzukommen, auf einer allmählichen Steigung, nicht den steilen Hang hinauf. Man bewegt sich vorwärts oder man rutscht zurück, kaum ein Unterschied. Der Sturz ist weder abgrundtief noch endgültig. Eine zeitweilige Degradierung vom Vogel zum Fisch, schlimmstenfalls zurück zur untersten Sprosse der Leiter, und es bleibt die ganze Ewigkeit, um erneut nach oben zu klettern. Doch woher stammt bei mir diese Leidenschaft für das einmal und nur einmal; jetzt oder nie, auf immer und ewig? Aber vielleicht ist es einfach meine aufbrausende Art, meine Ungeduld, die mich ein für allemal damit fertig sein lassen will. Denn ich hatte nie einen Zweifel daran, dass es jetzt oder nie hieß. In the continuation, pp. 122–123, Susan entertained the possibility that the narrator of the novella did have a past existence, and she proffered several different scenarios, the most interesting of them being that of an “ashen scholar” (blassen Gelehrten), a “brooding seminarian” (grüblerischen Seminaristen), or a “heretical monk” (ketzerischer Mönch). 28. Taubes, Divorcing, pp. 134–135. 29. Ibid., p. 145 (emphasis in original). Compare Sophie’s statement in ibid., p. 73, that her death protected Ezra from the dubious status of the divorce. It feels great to be a widower. He has forgiven me, forgiven himself. God has forgiven us all. Once more I am the woman of his dreams, the bride of his youth. . . . I am dead. They can all relax and celebrate. A challenge to the absurdity of Sophie’s being dead at the trial recounting her divorce action against Ezra is placed in the mouth of her son Joshua, ibid., p. 140: “Are you having a good time? Come on, Mum, you can tell me the truth. You’re not really dead are you? You know there was this woman who pretended to be a ghost in a TV show—” Interestingly, the child’s question is not answered. 30. Here my thinking is in accord with the description of the imaginal landscape in

Notes  —  404 Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Ṣūfism of Ibn ‘Arabī, translated by Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 35–36. The events that constitute that realm, which may be discerned from a disciple’s relationship to his or her personal invisible guide, do not fall within quantitative physical time; they cannot be measured according to homogeneous, uniform units of time and chronology regulated by the movements of the stars; they find no place in the continuous chain of irreversible events. These events, to be sure, are enacted in time, but in a time that is peculiar to them, a discontinuous, qualitative, pure, psychic time, whose moments can be evaluated only according to their own measure, a measure which in every instance varies with their intensity. And this intensity measures a time in which the past remains present to the future, in which the future is already present to the past, just as the notes of a musical phrase, though played successively, nevertheless persist all together in the present and thus form a phrase. In contrast to Corbin, I do not affirm the noetic capacity of the imagination to expose the existence of an independent spiritual and invisible world (ibid., pp. 3, 131–132, 180, 235, 339–340), but I do apply to our temporal experience in the phenomenal plane his understanding of the reversibility of time whereby the past is as present to the future as the future is present to the past in the same manner that the notes of the musical phrase are concurrently successive and synchronous. Rather than setting lived psychic time in opposition to objective physical time, I characterize the latter in terms of the former, and hence the texture of the temporal pliancy of the profane is made up of discontinuous and heterogeneous moments—the tempus discretum of the angelic world of soul (malakūt) or the ‘ālam almithāl, the mundus imaginalis—that Corbin ascribed to the sacred time of the theophanic angelology exemplified in the meeting between Khiḍr-Elijah and Moses (ibid., pp. 53, 66– 67). With the disbanding of the distinction between the interiority of the sacred and the exteriority of the secular, the synchronism of the three temporal modalities is conceivable in this world without recourse to a suprasensible world, and thus history itself is transfigured into the means by which time can be overcome through its perpetual undergoing. Accordingly, there is no need to posit a theophanic historicity (ibid., p. 81)—an invisible history of the celestial and spiritual archetypes always enacted in the present (ibid., p. 92)—that does not coincide with historical time; on the contrary, it is phenomenologically possible within the latter to experience what Corbin called the “unity of qualitative time, in which past and future are simultaneously in the present” (ibid., p. 91 n. 34; emphasis in original). See Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shī‘ite Iran, translated by Nancy Pearson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 249: This world of ours is the place in which the Souls and eternal higher Forms become dependent on corporeal, accidental, and perishable matters, and are henceforth connected with them and bound to them. However, there temporal matters of our world, in their totality, are nonetheless an accident with respect to the eternal Forms. . . . Every form, during a definite period, remains “on the surface” of this accidental matter. This duration is what is called time, the limit of this form. Night and days, hours and minutes, are simply means of determining the measure of time; but these measurements are not time itself. In itself, time

Notes ­ —  40 5 is the limit of the persistence of the eternal Form “on the surface” of the accidental matter of this world (emphasis in original). Compare the discussion of Corbin below in n. 200, and the comment of Deleuze and Guattari cited in n. 170. Although I do not embrace Corbin’s idea of an imaginal realm, the imago templi, and the consequent distinction between the continuous time of secular history and the discontinuous time of sacred history, I do accept his contention that the truth of history shines forth and is liberated and transmuted into parable through the rupturing of time. See Henry Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, translated by Philip Sherrard with the assistance of Liadain Sherrard (London: KPI Limited, 1986), p. 268. The passage is cited and analyzed briefly in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Imago templi and the Meeting of the Two Seas,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 51 (2007): 124–125. 31. Taubes, Divorcing, p. 88. 32. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §127, p. 255. 33. Ibid., p. 256. 34. Ibid., §73, p. 176: “And where there is no mystery there is no openness (or love) and where there is no openness there is no nothing and where there is no nothing there is no man.” For the fuller citation of this passage, see ch. 3 n. 36. 35. Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, translated by Keith Hoeller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), p. 189; idem, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung [GA 4] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), p. 165. The line Leben ist Tod, und Tod ist auch ein Leben appears in the conclusion of “In lieblicher Bläue . . . ” and not “Griechenland” as one might assume from Heidegger’s presentation. See Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, translated by Michael Hamburger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 604. 36. Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, p. 568. The passage can be found as well in Heidegger, Elucidations, p. 180; idem, Erläuterungen, p. 156. 37. Heidegger, Elucidations, p. 190 (emphasis in original); idem, Erläuterungen, p. 165. I have taken the liberty to repeat my analysis of this passage in Elliot R. Wolfson, Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 580–581. 38. As we find, for example, in the line “life and death are brothers / they dwell together” (we-ha-ḥayyim we-ha-mawet aḥim / shivtam yaḥat) in Baḥya Ibn Paquda’s tokheḥah, the poem of reproof, which begins with the words barkhi nafshi et yhwh we-khol qeravai et shem qodsho (Psalms 103:1). The poem has appeared in various publications, but I cite it from Baḥya Ibn Paquda, Sefer Torat Ḥovot ha-Levavot, edited, translated, and annotated by Joseph Kafiḥ (Jerusalem: Aqiva Yosef, 1973), p. 433. See ibid., Sha‘ar ha-Teshuvah, ch. 7, p. 319, where Baḥya refers to the poem. Compare Aharon Mirsky, From Duties of the Heart to Songs of the Heart: Jewish Philosophy and Ethics and Their Influence on Hebrew Poetry in Medieval Spain (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1992), pp. 201, 272, 277 (Hebrew). For discussion of this motif in kabbalistic texts, see Moshe Ḥallamish, “‘Life and Death Are Brothers’ or ‘Death and Life’: Death That Is Life,” in Death and Philosophy of the Halakhah, edited by Avinoam Rosenak (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2022), pp. 64–99 (Hebrew). 39. Martin Heidegger, Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic:

Notes  —  40 6 Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, translated by Julia Goesser Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 15, 21; idem, Heraklit. 1. Der Anfang des Abendländischen Denkens. 2. Logik. Heraklits Lehre vom Logos [GA 55] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979), pp. 18, 26. 40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, edited by Adrian del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, translated by Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 55; idem, Also sprach Zarathustra I–IV, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), p. 95. 41. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §48, p. 129. It goes without saying that there are copious essays and monographs on the topic of death in Heidegger’s thought. Here I mention only a handful of relevant studies: James M. Demske, Being, Man, and Death: A Key to Heidegger (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970); Paul Edwards, Heidegger on Death: A Critical Evaluation (La Salle: Hegeler Institute, 1979); George Pattison, Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013); Cristian Ciocan, Heidegger et le problème de la mort: existentialité, authenticité, temporalité (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014); Johannes Achill Niederhauser, Heidegger on Death and Being: An Answer to the Seinsfrage (Cham: Springer, 2021). 42. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 107; idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache [GA 12] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), p. 203. See the extended philosophical meditations on this Heideggerian motif in Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, translated by Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 43. Niederhauser, Heidegger, pp. 197–202. 44. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, translation and introduction by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 222; idem, Vorträge und Aufsätze [GA 7] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), p. 200. 45. On the role of measure and the morphetic configuration of being in Heidegger’s poetics, see David Nowell Smith, Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 40–44, 53–57, 169–173. See the brief but insightful discussion of Heidegger’s notion of dwelling in Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 94–97. 46. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), §281, p. 40; idem, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [GA 65] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), p. 510. For citation and analysis of this passage, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 311. Many have written on the theme of silence in Heidegger’s musings on language and poetry. See, for instance, Robert Bernasconi, The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1985), pp. 53, 58–63, 91–95; Walter Brogan, “Listening to the Silence: Reticence and the Call of Conscience in Heidegger’s Philosophy,” in Heidegger and Language, edited by Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 32–45; Smith, Sounding/Silence; Ilit

Notes ­ —  40 7 Ferber, Language Pangs: On Pain and the Origin of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 111–116; Wanda Torres Gregory, Heidegger’s Path to Language (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), pp. 58–61, and in more detail in idem, Speaking of Silence in Heidegger (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021). 47. Cited from the Susan Taubes Archiv 101, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, in Pareigis, Susan Taubes, pp. 395–396. 48. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 91 (emphasis in original). 49. Martin Heidegger, Zum Wesen der Sprache und Zur Frage nach der Kunst [GA 74] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2010), p. 38: Maß: Jeder Menschengeschichte und alles in ihr offenbaren Seienden Maß ist das Seyn, indem es schon bestimmt, warum und wie hier ein Maß ist und wie “das Maß” dem Seyn gemäß zu denken sei. Inwiefern der Mensch μέτρον ist: Maß—maßgebend Mäßigung (emphasis in original). Heidegger’s statement can be read as an interpretation of the dictum attributed to Protagoras, Πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἂνθρωπος, τῶν μὲν ὂντων ὡς ἒστιν, τῶν δέ οὐκ ὂντων ὡς οὐκ ἒστιν, translated in Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 125: “Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.” See the discussion of the statement of Protagoras in Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, translated and edited by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 78–80; idem, Holzwege [GA 5] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), pp. 103–106; and the analysis in Philippe Casadebaig, “Heidegger et Protagoras,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 85 (2015): 3–42. Also relevant to understanding Heidegger’s engagement with Protagoras is the hint of the aforementioned dictum in the definition of truth offered by Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1011b26–27, and the more explicit citation in 1053a35–b3. See Mark R. Wheeler, Being Measured: Truth and Falsehood in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), pp. 71–72, 245–248. 50. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 104; idem, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” [GA 53] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), p. 129. On the relation of the unhomely and the homely in Heidegger’s thinking, see Introduction nn. 63 and 104. 51. Taubes, Prosaschriften, p. 131. 52. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §170, pp. 87–88. 53. I have taken the liberty to repeat my formulation in Wolfson, Suffering Time, p. 383. In n. 23 ad locum, I drew the reader’s attention to the elaboration of this theme in Raymond Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation: Reflections on Transience (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2017). However, I neglected to mention Paul Marshall, The Living Mirror: Images of Reality in Science and Mysticism (London: Samphire Press, 2006),

Notes  —  40 8 pp. 92–100. See also the identity of time and suffering in Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell (New York: Riverhead, 2018), p. 190: Buddha summed this up in a few maxims that millions of human beings have adopted as the foundation of their lives: birth is suffering, decline is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering, union with that which we hate is suffering, separation from that which we love is suffering, failure to obtain what we desire is suffering. It’s suffering because we must lose what we have and are attached to. Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering. This citation could have well served as the epigraph to my collection of essays on the nature of temporality; the expression “suffering” in the title likewise connotes both enduring and agonizing. Compare Christopher Dutton, Political Moments (Las Vegas: Broken Walls Publishing, 2014), p. 54: “Time and suffering are inseparable. In life, as in physics, they are the common denominators of all experiences.” 54. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §193, p. 130 (emphasis in original). 55. Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, translated by Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 71. Compare idem, Gravity and Grace, introduction and postscript by Gustave Thibon, translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 52: “We are really bound by unreal chains. Time which is unreal casts over all things including ourselves a veil of unreality.” Weil’s thinking about time is colored by the presumed polar opposition between the temporal and the eternal. See ibid., p. 39: “Time in its course tears appearance from being and being from appearance by violence. Time makes it manifest that it is not eternity.” 56. Wolfson, Suffering Time, p. 3. 57. Ibid., p. 9. The point was well expressed in the description of finitude in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, translated and edited by George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 101: “The finite does not just alter . . . but perishes, and its perishing is not just a mere possibility, as if it might be without perishing. Rather, the being as such of finite things is to have the germ of this transgression in their in-itselfness: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death” (emphasis in original). The German word translated as “transgression” is Vergehen, which also can mean passing away or elapsing. 58. Rachel Aumiller, “Dasein’s Shadow and the Moment of Its Disappearance,” Human Studies 40 (2017): 25–41, esp. 26–27: In the following pursuit of Heidegger’s Moment, I explore how Dasein’s shadow is the being that is always closest-at-hand, the being in whom I lose myself in everyday care. In caring for its shadow, which Heidegger identifies with the natural justification for ordinary public time, Dasein loses sight of a more originary temporalization of time, which appears as nothingness or timelessness against the regulated succession of organized time. However, the character of the shadow is double: for while Dasein forgets itself in inauthentically

Notes ­ —  40 9 securing its identity in what it cares for, that which it is not, darkness, it also confronts its own finitude in witnessing the daily dwindling of its shadow—the everyday passing away of time. In fleeing its finitude in the infinity of the public time of the shadow, Dasein runs into the certain and yet indeterminate possibility of its own death, realized fully in the Moment of the shadow disappearance (emphasis in original). 59. Martin Heidegger, Die Metaphysik des Deutschen Idealismus. Zur Erneuten Auslegung von Schelling: Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit und die Damit Zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (1809) [GA 49] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006), p. 46; idem, The Metaphysics of German Idealism: A New Interpretation of Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and the Matters Connected Therewith (1809), translated by Ian Alexander Moore and Rodrigo Therezo (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), p. 36 (emphasis in original). See the citation and analysis of some other relevant Heideggerian texts in Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 49, 94–97. Consider the succinct formulation in idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 40: Conspicuously suggestive of both Kierkegaard’s idea of eternity as the movement of becoming, which is the fullness of time, and Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, Heidegger insists that eternity is not set in opposition to time; it is rather that which withdraws each moment to recur again in the future. What recurs, however, is not the identical but the same, that is, the unique being that is always—originarily—different. Compare the incisive articulation of this paradox in Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same proffered by Karmen MacKendrick, “Always Already New: The Possibilities of the Enfolded Instant,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2 (2011): 339–349. The comparison of the Heideggerian conception of temporal eternity and Kierkegaard is supported by the brief comment in Heidegger, Die Metaphysik des Deutschen Idealismus, pp. 47–48; idem, The Metaphysics of German Idealism, p. 37: Yet Kierkegaard also deals with the “temporality” of the human, indeed, constantly; and by this he means that the sojourn of the human as a “creature” on earth is temporally delimited and that this temporality is the “narthex” of eternity in the sense of beatitudo, of “eternal blessedness,” as understood by Christianity. On the similarity between Heidegger and Rosenzweig with regard to understanding eternity as the simultaneity and elongation of time in the recycling of what is to come, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 44–45, 57 n. 121, 334 n. 201. A different perspective is offered by Karl Löwith, “F. Rosenzweig and M. Heidegger on Temporality and Eternity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3 (1942): 53–77. For the revised version, see Karl Löwith, Nature, History, and Existentialism, edited by Arnold Levison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), pp. 51–78, and the German version with significant variations, Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger und F. Rosenzweig. Ein Nachtrag zu ‘Sein und Zeit,’” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 12 (1958): 161–187. See also the discussion of time and eternity in Schelling’s thought in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 207–208,

Notes  —  410 282–283, 292–293 n. 148, 298 n. 228, and the analysis of this motif in kabbalistic sources, op. cit., pp. 257–259, 271–272. 60. Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, translated and with an introduction by Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), p. 181 (emphasis in original). For the original Sur Nietzsche: volonté de chance, see Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, tome 6 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 203: Le néant est pour moi la limite d’un être. Au-delà des limites définies—dans le temps, dans l’espace—un être n’est plus. Ce non-être est pour nous plein de sens: je sais qu’on peut m’anéantir. L’être limité n’est qu’un être particulier, mais la totalité de l’être (entendue comme une somme des êtres) existe-t-elle? La transcendance de l’être est fondamentalement ce néant. C’est s’il apparaît dans l’au-delà du néant, en un certain sens comme une donnée du néant, qu’un objet nous transcende. Dans la mesure au contraire où je saisis en lui l’extension de l’existence qui m’est d’abord révélée en moi, l’objet me devient immanent (emphasis in original). 61. Kusters, A Philosophy of Madness, p. 111. 62. Pattison, Heidegger on Death, pp. 54, 97–98, 145–154. 63. Taubes, Divorcing, p. 33. 64. Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 237; idem, Wegmarken [GA 9] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), p. 311. The citation comes from the “Postscript” added to the 1949 edition of “Was ist Metaphysik?” The juxtaposition of poetizing and thinking is justified by the assumption that their proximity in essence is predicated on the distance by which they are separated. The poetic understanding of language offered by Heidegger after the Kehre is consistent with his earlier view of language, and it is one of the crucial points that seems to have drawn him to the bombastic jargon of Hitler. See Vincent Blok, “Naming Being—Or the Philosophical Content of Heidegger’s National Socialism,” Heidegger Studies 28 (2012): 101–122. 65. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” p. 151; idem, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” pp. 188–189. See Smith, Sounding/Silence, pp. 71–75. 66. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §2, pp. 17–18. Compare the portion of this letter cited in ch. 3 at n. 226. In addition to the affinity between Susan’s description of language as a dialectical act of naming and Heidegger, there is a strong resemblance to Scholem’s view influenced by his study of Jewish mysticism. See Gershom Scholem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala,” Diogenes 79 (1972): 59–80; 80 (1972): 164–194. Already in “Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache,” a letter that Scholem wrote to Rosenzweig on December 12, 1926, he proclaimed about Hebrew, “The power of the language is hidden within the name; its abyss is sealed therein.” See Gershom Scholem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time & Other Essays, edited with an introduction by Avraham Shapira, translated by Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1997), p. 28, and discussion in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 316–317, and references to other scholars cited on p. 329 n. 165, to which I would add Elad Lapidot, “Fragwürdige Sprache: Zur modernen Phänomenologie der heiligen Zunge,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 12 (2013): 271–298, esp. 284–289.

Notes ­ —  411 67. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken” [GA 52] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), p. 146; idem, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), p. 124, cited in ch. 1 n. 40. Compare Susan’s attempt to clarify Heidegger’s view on the basis of a passage from Ernst Hoffman, Die Sprache und die archaische Logik (1925) in her letter to Jacob in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §23, p. 69: Hoffman explains Archaic as that in which “die Gestalt erscheint nicht vom Stoffe befreit, sondern bleibt in ihm gebunden” i.e. archaic logic is bound to language—in this sense “Logic” is used as in Mytho-logic, the kind of logic Hoffman finds in pre Soc. utterances and also the presocratic “philosophy of language” or conceptions of the relation of language to Logos or Being. A verbal quibble. The assertion that “the figure does not appear to be liberated from matter, but remains bound to it” can be applied to the understanding of the relationship of language and being in Heideggerian and kabbalistic poetics. 68. Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik [GA 40] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), p. 16; idem, Introduction to Metaphysics, new translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 15. On the tension between technē and poiēsis in Heidegger, and the role of the latter in his critique of aesthetics indebted to Nietzsche’s understanding of power, see Krzysztof Ziarek, “Powers to Be: Art and Technology in Heidegger and Foucault,” Research in Phenomenology 28 (1998): 162–194. See also Joanna Hodge, “Against Aesthetics: Heidegger on Art,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 23 (1992): 263–279. On language as the naming of being in Heidegger’s thought, see Dieter Thomä, “The Name on the Edge of Language: A Complication in Heidegger’s Theory of Language and Its Consequences,” in A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, edited by Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 103–122; Blok, “Naming Being,” pp. 114–120. 69. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 60. The German text appears in idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 153. 70. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), pp. 185–194. 71. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 65; idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, pp. 157– 158. On the privileging of the inner world of the imagination over the external world, which is presumed to be the projection of thought in the words that create reality as a form of imitatio dei, see the description of the presumed author of the zoharic anthology offered by Yehuda Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, translated by Arnold Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 55–56, and the discussion of ars poetica in idem, “Zohar and Eros,” Alpayyim 9 (1994): 78–79 (Hebrew). The creative role of the imagination and language in kabbalistic thought has been the focus of many of my own studies. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 270–325; idem, Language, pp. 1–45.

Notes  —  412 72. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 66; idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 159. 73. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 202–203, 207 (emphasis in original); idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, pp. 22–23, 27. Significantly, in the same essay, Heidegger elicits from Trakl’s line “Pain has turned the threshold to stone” (Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle) the insight that pain is the difference that simultaneously tears asunder and draws together. See Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 204 (Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 24): Pain is the joining agent in the rending that divides and gathers. Pain is the joining [die Fuge] of the rift. The joining is the threshold [die Schwelle]. It settles the between [das Zwischen], the middle [die Mitte] of the two that are separated in it. Pain joins the rift of the difference. Pain is the dif-ference [Unter-Schied] itself. Compare Heidegger’s interpretation of Trakl’s line “Mighty the power of silence in the rock” (Gewaltig ist das Schweigen im Stein) in On the Way to Language, p. 166 (Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 41): “The rock is the mountain sheltering pain. The stones gather within their stony shelter the soothing power, pain stilling us toward essential being.” See Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 183 (Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 60): Pain is thus neither repugnant nor profitable. Pain is the benignity in the nature of all essential being. The onefold simplicity of its converse nature determines all becoming out of concealed primal earliness, and attunes it to the bright serenity of the great soul. In that essay, “Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht,” Heidegger turns his attention more specifically to the matter of sexual difference, which implies a “gentler twofold” predicated on the unifying force of one kinship elicited from the middle that gathers together and enfolds the discord of the generations by keeping them apart. The unity envisioned by Heidegger, as he makes clear, does not imply “the monotony of dull equality” or the positing of a “single” and “identical” gender à la the mythology of androgyny or hermaphroditism. See Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, pp. 46, 63, 74; idem, On the Way to Language, pp. 170–171, 185, 195; and the pertinent comments in Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity, edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, and Rodrigo Therezo, translated by Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), pp. 46–50, 63–70, 125–129. 74. Celan, Microliths, p. 139; idem, “Mikrolithen,” p. 143. On the felicitous formulation of Celan reading Heidegger against Heidegger, see Martin Jörg Schäfer, Schmerz zum Mitsein: Zur Relektüre Celans und Heideggers durch Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe und Jean-Luc Nancy (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), p. 179. See also James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 9–91, and Hadrien France-Lanord, Paul Celan et Martin Heidegger: Le sense d’un dialogue (Paris: Fayard, 2004), pp. 67–74. My Heideggerian interpretation of Celan’s idea of the thingness of the poem raises some question about the criticism of Heidegger’s poetics offered by Nikolaus Largier, Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), pp. 160–162, 173–174.

Notes ­ —  413 75. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 151; idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 220. 76. Ziarek, “Powers to Be,” p. 167. 77. Peter Szondi, Celan Studies, translated by Susan Bernofsky with Harvey Mendelsohn, edited by Jean Bollack, with Henriette Beese, Wolfgang Fietkau, Hans-Hagen Hildebrandt, Gert Mattenklott, Senta Metz, and Helen Stierlin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 31. 78. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 123; idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 242. See John Sallis, “Towards the Showing of Language,” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 4 (1973): 75–83. 79. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 46; idem, Holzwege, p. 61. 80. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 46; idem, Holzwege, p. 62. 81. Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 255; idem, Wegmarken, p. 335. See the previous citation and analysis of this passage in Wolfson, Suffering Time, pp. 584–585. 82. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 87; idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 182. 83. Heidegger, Zum Wesen der Sprache, p. 24: “Nichts ist so schon das Wort des Seins. Aber damit steht das Denken nur im vorläufigsten Beginn der Erdenkung des Wesens des Nichts.” On the metaontological identification of Seyn and Nichts, see ch. 3 n. 181. And compare the analysis of the nothing and speech in Richard Regvald, Heidegger et le problème du néant (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 165–185. 84. Heidegger, Heraclitus, p. 21; idem, Heraklit, p. 27. 85. Heidegger, Elucidations, p. 61; idem, Erläuterungen, p. 43. 86. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §189, p. 117. 87. Wolfson, The Duplicity, p. 117. See Bernasconi, The Question, p. 42, and more recently, Sazan Kryeziu, “The Unsayable Mystery of the Holy: Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Heidegger and the Holy, edited by Richard Capobianco (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), pp. 27–43, and in the same volume the essay by Elias Schwieler, “Tracing the Holy in Heidegger’s Hölderlin’s Hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine,’” pp. 85–103. 88. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 46; idem, Holzwege, pp. 61–62. 89. Susan Bernstein, “Correspondances—Between Baudelaire and Heidegger,” MLN 130 (2015): 610. 90. Wystan Hugh Auden, Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (New York: Modern Library, 2007), p. 622. 91. See reference cited above, n. 66. 92. Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, translated by Donald M. Leslie (New York: Zone Books, 1993), pp. 163–182, esp. 177–181. See also the discussion on the figuring dimension of language in Taylor, The Language Animal, pp. 129–176. 93. See Introduction at n. 48. 94. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly revised edition, edited by David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 39 See my previous citation and discussion of the statements by Blake and Tsvetaeva in Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p. 187.

Notes  —  414 95. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §2, p. 18. 96. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §193, p. 129. Daniel M. Herskowitz, Heidegger and His Jewish Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 142 n. 54, cites this passage in conjunction with Buber’s criticism that the invocation of the gods on the part of Heidegger does not stem from a mutual encounter between human and divine. 97. See ch. 1 at n. 41. 98. In his letter to Susan written on March 11, 1952, Jacob suggested that her notion of descent brings to mind Husserl’s phenomenological reduction (ἐποχή). See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §197, p. 139: Die Frage lautet banal aber vielleicht nicht ganz ohne Wert: ist Chaos nicht auch ein Symbol? “Gibt” es etwas was voraus den significativen Akten, allen significativen Akten liegt? Wie du die “Reduktion” beschreibst: “descent”, erinnert an den Versuch Husserls: im transzendentalen Ego das Prius zu allen significativen symbolsetzenden Akten zu “fassen”. For Susan’s response, see her letter from March 18, 1952, ibid., §203, p. 147: I don’t know if I like your comparison between old man Husserl’s ἐποχή and my “descent”. For I do not mean a descent into the “self”—or the contemplation of the absolute zero—but a descent into things—not for the sake of a mystical intuition but in order to establish a “right” relation with things which is always a useful relation. On the epochē, see also Susan’s letter cited in ch. 3 at n. 28. 99. See discussion of this topic and references to other scholars in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 55 n. 102. 100. See ch. 3 n. 176. 101. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 46 (emphasis in original); idem, Holzwege, p. 61. 102. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 43; idem, Holzwege, p. 57. The Heideggerian perspective on the language of the art of poetry giving shape to the world combined with the insight regarding the relationship between that language and the distinctive experience of human finitude has been expounded by Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, translated by John Llewelyn (London: Athlone, 1996); idem, À la naissance des choses. Art, Poésie et philosophie (La Versanne: Encre Marine, 2005); idem, How Are We to Confront Death? An Introduction to Philosophy, translated by Robert Vallier, foreword by David Farrell Krell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). See the brief summary in Françoise Dastur, “Negative Philosophy: Time, Death and Nothingness,” Research in Phenomenology 50 (2020): 321–328. 103. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 48; idem, Holzwege, p. 64. 104. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, pp. 44–45 (emphasis in original); idem, Holzwege, pp. 59–60. 105. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 280; idem, Holzwege, p. 372. Compare Heidegger’s discussion of thinking about the site of Trakl’s poetic work in “Die Sprache im Gedicht,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 33, translated in Heidegger, On the Way to Language, pp. 159–160:

Notes ­ —  415 Our discussion, as befits a thinking way [Denkweg], ends in a question. That question asks for the location of the site [der Ortschaft des Ortes]. . . . Originally the word “site” suggests a place in which everything comes together, is concentrated. The site gathers unto itself, supremely and in the extreme. Its gathering power penetrates and pervades everything. The site, the gathering power, gathers in and preserves all it has gathered, not like an encapsulating shell but rather by penetrating with its light all it has gathered, and only thus releasing it into its own nature. See the analysis of this passage and the theme of the unspoken place whence Trakl’s poems were spoken in Derrida, Geschlecht III, pp. 11–16. 106. On Susan’s poetic creativity, see Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §180, p. 101, and §237, p. 214. Examples of her poetry can be found in a letter to Jacob from June 14, 1952, ibid., §266, p. 254 and see p. 255 n. 2. 107. Compare the passage from Schelling’s Philosophie der Mythologie, in Sämmtliche Werke, volume 2, part 1 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856), pp. 195–196: “Die Mythologie ist nicht allegorisch, sie ist tautegorisch.” For the English version, see Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, translated by Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger, with a foreword by James M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), p. 136. In Sämmtliche Werke, volume 2, part 1, p. 196 n. 1 (Historical-Critical Introduction, p. 187 note e), Schelling acknowledged that he appropriated the term “tautegorisch” from Coleridge. Susan may have had in mind the following explication of Schelling in Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History Since Hegel, translated by William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel, preface by Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 298: In place of the allegorical explanation of myth given previously—so Schelling expressed the idea—must come the “tautegorical” interpretation, that it means exactly what it says. We must cease to see myth only as the husk concealing another sort of truth, whether this be regarded in the sense of an “explanation” of definite natural phenomena or as a moral truth. See also Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, volume 2: Mythical Thought, translated by Ralph Manheim, with an introductory note by Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 4: Like Herder in the philosophy of language, Schelling in his philosophy of mythology discards the principle of allegory and turns to the fundamental problem of symbolic expression. He replaces the allegorical interpretation of the world of myths by a tautegorical interpretation, i.e. he looks upon mythical figures as autonomous configurations of the human spirit, which one much understand from within by knowing the way in which they take on meaning and form. See ibid., p. 38, and Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, volume 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, translated by Ralph Manheim, with an introductory note by Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 62:

Notes  —  416 Consequently, if the philosophy of mythology is to meet the fundamental demand first made by Schelling, if it is to understand myth not only allegorically as a kind of primitive physics or history, but tautegorically as a symbol of independent significance and form, it must do justice to the form of perceptive experience in which myth is originally rooted and from which it forever draws new nourishment (emphasis in original). 108. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §40, pp. 109–110 (emphasis in original). 109. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §193, p. 131, cited in the Introduction at n. 29, and see the reference to Heidegger’s “historical mysticism” in ibid., §150, p. 54, cited in ch. 2 at n. 75. See also ibid., §134, p. 18, where Susan wrote the following about Heidegger’s Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung: “I was trying to read the Heid. book—it is not sane—a mysticism of words accomplished with such passion it is almost worthwhile. It would be interesting to make an analysis.” 110. Many have written on Heidegger’s interpretation of the role of metaphor. For instance, see Tony O’Connor, “Poetizing and Thinking in Heidegger’s Thought,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 23 (1992): 252–262, esp. 254–258; Giuseppe Stellardi, Heidegger and Derrida on Philosophy and Metaphor: Imperfect Thought (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), pp. 127–191. Mention should be made of the study of Annabelle Dufourcq, “Happy Existentialist Metaphors: Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh of the World and the Chandos Complex,” Humanities 11 (2022): 1–11. The essay positions Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world between the gnostic approach of Heidegger and Sartre and the more positive metaphors of light and magic realism applied to the experience of reality. The Chandos complex is a form of ambivalence and alternation between these two poles that renders each on its own terms as fake and hollow. To be perfectly in unison with the world is as equally staged as the sense of estrangement from the world. The key to a proper ontological understanding is the recognition of the imaginary as an essential dimension of being. There is thus an essential link between ontology and metaphoricity expressed in the construction of myth and narrative. The thesis articulated by Dufourcq can be applied to Susan Taubes. 111. Heidegger, Elucidations, p. 136; idem, Erläuterungen, p. 113. It is worth comparing Hölderlin’s comment to the following passage in “The Dionysiac World View” on the relationship of art, dreaming, and the veil of semblance in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, translated by Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 119–120: Every human being is fully an artist when creating the worlds of dream, and the lovely semblance of dream is the father of all the arts of image-making, including . . . an important half of poetry. We dream with pleasure as we understand the figure directly; all forms speak to us; nothing is indifferent or unnecessary. Yet even while this dream-reality is most alive, we nevertheless retain a pervasive sense that it is semblance . . . Thus, whereas in dream the individual human being plays with the real, the art of the image-maker . . . is a playing with dream. As a block of marble the statue is something very real, but the reality of the statue as a dream figure is the living person of the god. As long as the statue hovers

Notes ­ —  417 as an image of fantasy before the eyes of the artist, he is still playing with the real; when he translates this image into marble, he is playing with dream (emphasis in original). See the analysis of Nietzsche’s view on the connection between the creative inclination, manifest paradigmatically in poetry, and the dream imagination in Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 43–45. Finally, let us recall Heidegger’s words in “Der Feldweg,” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1910–1976 [GA 13] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), p. 88: “Die Weltfahrten der Spiele kamen noch leicht an ihr Ziel und fanden wieder an die Ufer zurück. Das Träumerische solcher Fahrten blieb in einem ehemals noch kaum sichtbaren Glanz geborgen, der auf allen Dingen lag.” English translation in Heidegger, “The Pathway,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, edited by Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), pp. 69–70: “On these journeys of play you could still easily get to your destination and return home again. The dream-element in such voyages remained held in a then hardly perceptible luster which lay over everything.” It is notable that Heidegger described the call of the pathway as awakening a sense of the free and open that “leaps over sadness and into a final serenity.” However, he immediately added that the “wise serenity” presents itself in the mien of melancholy, a “serene wisdom” that “is at once ‘playful and sad, ironic and shy.’” On the pathway of mournful tranquility, there is a coalescence of the “child’s game” and the “elder’s wisdom.” See Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung, pp. 89–90; idem, “The Pathway,” p. 71. Compare the discussion of Andenken and the poetic subject in Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 134–143. The bibliography on Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of melancholia—for the most part focused on the treatment of the topic of boredom in his early work—is considerable. For a sampling of relevant studies, see Espen Hammer, “Being Bored: Heidegger on Patience and Melancholy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (2004): 277–295; David J. Rosner, “Anti-Modernism and Discourses of Melancholy,” E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone 4 (2006): 1–9; Alina N. Feld, Melancholy and the Otherness of God: A Study of the Hermeneutics of Depression (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011), pp. 125–135; Emily Hughes, “Melancholia, Temporal Disruption, and the Torment of Being Both Unable to Live and Unable to Die,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 27 (2020): 203–213; Kevin Aho, “Heidegger on Melancholia, Deep Boredom, and the Inability-to-Be,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 27 (2020): 215–217; and the rejoinder by Emily Hughes, “Heidegger and the Radical Temporalities of Fundamental Attunements,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 27 (2020): 223–225. Also relevant to the phenomenology of melancholy are the reflections on Heidegger’s discussion of moods—linked philologically to his use of the terms Stimmung and Befindlichkeit—offered by Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s Early Reflections on Theater and Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 5–8, 55–56, 190–194, 196 n. 11, 197 n. 20, 222 n. 35. 112. Heidegger, Elucidations, pp. 136–137; idem, Erläuterungen, pp. 113–114. I have here abbreviated my lengthier analysis in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 115–118. 113. Heidegger, Elucidations, p. 62; idem, Erläuterungen, p. 45.

Notes  —  418 114. Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 46–57. On Sartre’s use of the Husserlian notion of the irreal to name the imaginary that surpasses the real, the negation of the positivity offered to sense perception, see Kathleen Lennon, Imagination and the Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 34–36, 38, 40, 43–45, 57–58, 96. 115. For an analysis of the oneiric phenomenon along analogous lines, see Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 89. 116. Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 32–33. 117. The description of the liar is taken from the posthumously published fragment of Nietzsche, Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, translated by Andrew Keith Malcolm Adam (Oxford: Quadriga, 2019), p. 3. Compare Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Spring 1884–Winter 1884/85), translated, with an afterword, by Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), p. 100: On the origin of art. The ability to lie and to dissemble has been developed the longest: feeling of security and of intellectual superiority in the deceiver during this. . . . In the case of poets, we often find self-alienation: they feel themselves “transformed.” Likewise in dancers and actors, with nervous breakdowns, hallucinations etc. Artists now also still deceitful and resembling children. Inability to differentiate between “true” and “illusion” (emphasis in original). See below, n. 209. 118. See the passages from Nietzsche’s oeuvre cited and discussed in Wolfson, Language, pp. 43–45. On the role of untruth as integral to Nietzsche’s critique of the will to truth and the ensuing revaluation of values, see Scott Jenkins, “Nietzsche’s Questions Concerning the Will to Truth,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50 (2012): 265–289, esp. 283–286. 119. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie, p. 7. 120. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884–1885, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), p. 506; idem, Writings from the Late Notebooks, edited by Rüdiger Bittner, translated by Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 16. 121. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996), p. 358; idem, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), p. 639. For citation and analysis of some other relevant Nietzschean material, see Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 44–45. 122. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, translated, with an introduction, by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 268. Regarding Blanchot’s

Notes ­ —  419 reflections on the nature of the dream, the process of writing, and the nonpresence of time, see the texts cited and analyzed in Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 17–18, 79–80, 136. 123. Maurice Blanchot, Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 142. 124. Blanchot, The Space, p. 267. 125. Ibid., p. 34 n. 3. 126. Ibid., p. 263 n. 1. See the analysis of hiding in William S. Allen, Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language After Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 59–89. 127. Blanchot, The Space, p. 44. See Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida’s Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 80–81. 128. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas, foreword by Etienne Gilson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. xxxi; idem, La poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), p. 17. On the theme of silence and the dream in Bachelard, see the analysis in Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought: The Radical Unspoken (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 53–70. 129. Taubes, Divorcing, p. 185. 130. Ibid., pp. 8, 60, 63–64, 151, 174, 185. 131. Ibid., pp. 94–95. The full passage is cited as the third epigraph at the opening of this monograph. 132. Ibid., p. 265. 133. For a more comprehensive discussion of this theme, see Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 255–274. See also Patricia Feise-Mahnkopp, “Transliminality: Comparing Mystical and Psychotic Experiences on Psycho-Phenomenological Grounds,” Open Theology 6 (2020): 720–738. The oneiric phenomenon is not discussed in this study, but the author’s comparison of the effects of the transliminal experience on the respective psyches of the mystic and the psychotic is germane to the claim I have made regarding the phenomenological disorientation and the blurring of the line between sanity and madness as it pertains to the dream. See Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 64, 67–69, 188, 326–327 nn. 98–99, 328 n. 110. 134. Martin Heidegger, Gedachtes [GA 81] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), pp. 88–89: Dichtend ist da Denken das Gedicht, die figura, des Seyns, Ihm fern im Abschied zum Unterschied aus dem Riß der Freye der Freyheit. Ver-scheinen: gefreyt aus Freyheit Sichlassen in die Gelassenheit des Gehörens in den An-fang zur Vollendung als Ereignis der Enteignung. The passage is translated as follows in Heidegger, Thought Poems: A Translation of Heidegger’s Verse, translated by Eoghan Walls (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 149: To be a poet here is thinking the poem, the figura, of beyng, gone far in departure to the difference out of the rift of the freeness of freedom. Dis-appear: freed by the freedom of releasing itself into the acquiescence of belonging in the on-set of fulfillment as the claiming of dispossession.

Notes  —  4 2 0 Prior to the citation of this text, a note refers the reader to “Anmerkung II.22,” which appears in GA 97. Part of the passage is cited below at nn. 231–232. 135. Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948) [GA 97] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2015), p. 123. 136. Françoise Dastur, Telling Time: Sketch of a Phenomenological Chrono-logy, translated by Edward Bullard (London: Athlone, 2000), pp. 28–35. Dastur’s discussion is an explication of Heidegger’s assertion in the Zähringen seminar of 1973 that the primordial sense (ursprüngliche Sinn) of phenomenology is a “tautological thinking,” which is a path (Weg) as opposed to a method (Methode) appropriate for science, that leads to the disclosure that phenomenology should be understood as a phenomenology of the inapparent (Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren). See Heidegger, Four Seminars: Le Tor 1966, 1968, 1969, Zähringen 1973, translated by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 80; idem, Seminare [GA 15] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), p. 399. This formulation is the logical culmination of the idea already expressed in Being and Time that every self-showing (Sichzeigen) is an appearance of a phenomenon that does not show itself (Sich-nicht-zeigen). The very term “appearance” connotes that which comes to presence as the nonmanifest (Nichtoffenbare), and hence being covered up (Verdecktheit) is the counter-concept that is essential to a proper apprehension of the notion of the phenomenon that is uncovered. See Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), §7, pp. 28–29; idem, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), p. 30. Compare the brief discussion of this Heideggerian theme in ch. 3 at n. 157, and the fuller analysis in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 94–102. See also my remarks on Heidegger’s use of the term Unscheinbaren in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 85 n. 41. On the role of tautological thinking in Heidegger, see the succinct description in Derrida, Geschlecht III, p. 129, that a tautology also signifies, more profoundly, that we are dealing here with the signification of that which cannot leave room for a metalanguage, which cannot let itself be defined by anything other than itself, except if the signification to be defined was introduced into the defining signification. 137. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 62. 138. For a more extensive discussion and references to the philosophical sources that have informed my perspective on transcending transcendence, see Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 35–41. 139. See the text cited in the Introduction at n. 75. 140. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 114. On the double bind of secrecy in Derrida, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 157, 181–185, 189–195. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays, translated and edited by Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 82, who duly commented on the poet’s quest to attain the true word that is unattainable. And compare Otto Pöggeler, “Mystical Elements in

Notes ­ —  4 21 Heidegger’s Thought and Celan’s Poetry,” in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, edited by Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 98–99; Aris Fioretos, “Nothing: History and Materiality in Celan,” in Word Traces, pp. 295–341, esp. 318–321. 141. I have cast the Heideggerian meontology, appropriated by Celan, in terms of the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist wisdom concerning the meaning of the reality realm attributed to Vajradhara, The Vajra Rosary Tanta (Śri Vajramālā Tantra): An Explanatory Tantra of the Glorious King of Tantras, The Esoteric Community Tantra (Śri Guhyasamāja Tantrarājā), With Annotations and Explanations from Alaṁkakalasha’s Commentary, introduction and translation by David R. Kittay with Āchārya Lozang Jamspal (Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2020), pp. 285–286: The state of the reality realm is supreme. The element pervading all things Is expressed as “the reality realm.” . . . The element located in the center of these Pervades yet is not an object to engage . . . Just as sesame oil is in a sesame seed, And just as fire is in the wood, Likewise, it pervades all things but is not seen. . . . Know reality as the singular ultimate. Like myrobalan placed on the palm of the hand, So supreme reality appears. Self-knowing, very stainless, Having exhausted things and nonthings, One always appears seeing reality. The comparison of Heidegger’s path of thinking to Taoist and Buddhist teachings has been explored by numerous scholars. See the analysis and citation of references in Wolfson, Language, p. 415 n. 182; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 26 n. 108, 54 n. 86, 87 n. 71, 106–107, 128–129 n. 94, 167, 175 n. 18, 232–233 n. 10. To the sources that I have previously mentioned, one should add the fact that the essay by Nishitani Keiji, “Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart” (June 1938) was first presented in one of Heidegger’s classes. See Ian Alexander Moore, Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), pp. 15–17, and the translation of the text, ibid., pp. 195–218. 142. On the Kantian teaching that links the imagination to the absent present, see Lennon, Imagination, pp. 19–22, 32–51. To some degree, this construal can be traced to Plato’s contention in the Sophist 240b–c that the image is a combination of being and nonbeing, and hence insofar as the object we imagine is mentally present but somatically absent, it is, at once, real and unreal. See The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, with introduction and prefatory notes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 983; Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sun and Substance (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), pp. 389–396; idem, What, Then, Is Time? (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. xii; Wolfson, Suffering

Notes  —  4 2 2 Time, pp. 351–353. See also the discussion of the imagination and the transformation from nonappearing to appearing within consciousness in Gosetti-Ferencei, The Life, pp. 26–31. 143. Wolfson, A Dream, p. 100. 144. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1974), p. 124; idem, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), p. 97. My reducing the gap between Levinas and Heidegger parallels the argument with respect to the former’s view of revelation and transcendence as the epiphany of the saying in the one who receives it offered by Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response, translated by Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 29–30. 145. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 265. 146. Compare the meditation on memory, time, and the midpoint of the present in A Lament for Julia, translated into German in Taubes, Prosaschriften, p. 121: Immer wieder blicke ich auf die frühen Jahre zurück . . . und wer weiß, ob der wahre Mittelpunkt ihres Lebens nicht in einem künftigen Ereignis verwahrt ist, mit Menschen und Orten, die noch vor ihr liegen, denn nur die Zeit kann es an den Tag bringen, und es wird dann und erst dann sein, dass ihr Leben erzählt werden kann. Egal wo der Mittelpunkt liegt, ich kann ihn nur zu finden hoffen, indem ich weitergehe. Finde ich ihn nicht heute, so muss ich morgen wiederkommen, immer wiederkommen bis zu jenem Tag, an dem ich vor der richtigen Tür stehe. Immer vor und wieder zurück, oder versuchen stillzustehen; denn jeder Schritt vorwärts vermehrt die Schritte hinter mir, die ich zurückverfolgen muss. . . . Julia folgt dem Weg, wohin auch immer er führt, während ich im Kreis gehe. Sie ist nicht in meinem Netz gefangen. . . . Im Dunkeln versuche ich mich an Julia zu erinnern. On the possibility of reshaping the past through a narrative retelling compared metaphorically to completing and to restoring a canvas, a single painting even if painted by several hands, see ibid., p. 144: Als Julia noch bei mir war, konnte ich ihr Leben von einem Augenblick auf den anderen revidieren. War das unredlich von mir? Aber ich sah die Vergangenheit nicht als abgeschlossen an. Julias Jugend durfte wieder und wieder erblühen, sie durfte auch Schaden erleiden, und ein Detail konnte verstärkt, einzelne Falten geglättet oder vertieft werden. Ihre Geschichte lag ausgebreitet vor mir wie ein riesengroßes Gemälde, das ich dauernd zu vervollständigen und zu restaurieren hatte. . . . Das Gemälde ihres Lebens. Noch eine Metapher. Es konnte nur eine solche Leinwand geben. Bemalt von mehreren Händen; das könnte ich einräumen, aber trotzdem ein einziges Gemälde. 147. Paul Celan, Der Meridian: Endfassung—Entwürfe—Materialien, edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull with assistance from Michael Schwarzkopf and Christiane Wittkop (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 8–9; idem, The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials, edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull with assistance from Michael Schwarzkopf and Christiane Wittkop, translated and with a preface by Pierre Joris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 8–9.

Notes ­ —  4 23 148. Lyon, Paul Celan, pp. 117–118, 147–151. 149. Ibid., p. 147, and see p. 230 n. 3. 150. Ibid., pp. 148–149. 151. Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Sprache: Die Metaphysik der Sprache und Die Wesung der Worts zu Herders Abhandlung “Über den Ursprung der Sprache” [GA 85] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), p. 5; idem, On the Essence of Language: The Metaphysics of Language and the Essencing of the Word Concerning Herder’s Treatise On the Origin of Language, translated by Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 5. 152. See Mafalda Faria Blanc, “The ‘Leap’—Another Way of Grounding in the OntoHistorical Thought of Heidegger’s Beiträge,” in From Kierkegaard to Heidegger: 2nd Workshop of the Project Experimentation and Dissidence, edited by José Miranda Justo, Fernando M. F. Silva, and Paulo Alexandre Lima (Lisbon: Centre for Philosophy at the University of Lisbon, 2017), pp. 159–173. The view approved by Blanc is consistent with the terminology “linear circularity” that I have used to depict the nature of time. 153. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, translated by Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 20 (emphasis in original). 154. See Introduction n. 74. Especially significant is the collection of essays published as Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache. The first edition appeared in 1959, a year before Celan’s Meridian lecture. English versions of all the contents of this volume with the exception of the 1950 essay “Die Sprache” were published in Heidegger, On the Way to Language. 155. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 9; idem, The Meridian, p. 9. For fuller citation of this passage, see Introduction at n. 75, and compare Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Catastrophe,” in Word Traces, pp. 143–145; idem, Poetry as Experience, pp. 18–19. 156. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 9; idem, The Meridian, p. 9. 157. For discussion of the significance of creatureliness in Celan’s Der Meridian, see Natalie Lozinski-Veach, “Embodied Nothings: Paul Celan’s Creaturely Instincts,” MLN 131 (2016): 791–816. Compare also the discussion of the poem as the project of existence in France-Lanord, Paul Celan, pp. 80–86. 158. Lyon, Paul Celan, p. 149. 159. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 11; idem, The Meridian, p. 11 (translation modified). Compare Schäfer, Schmerz zum Mitsein, pp. 226–229. On Heidegger’s critical response to Celan’s description of poetry as an infinite speaking, see Lyon, Paul Celan, pp. 150–151. Lyon, p. 151, records Heidegger’s marginal note to Celan’s identification of poetry as an endless speaking about mortality and purposelessness, “Why not say ‘finite’? From that which remains? [Warum nicht ‘endlich’ sagen? Aus des Bleibenden?]” Following the suggestion of Otto Pöggeler, Lyon proposes that Heidegger’s gloss intimates that he thought Celan did not emphasize the temporality of the poem sufficiently. However, the expression used by Celan Unendlichsprechung denotes an endless speaking, which is to say, a speaking endlessly in time. Lyon surmises that the import of Celan’s remark may be clarified from a comment in his Bremen speech cited below at n. 175. Heidegger’s negative response is indeed curious insofar as the dependency that Celan established between poetry and mortality is in fact in accord with a central premise of Heideggerian poetology as is Celan’s

Notes  —  4 2 4 insistence that poetic speech assumes shape in the present moment of time. Moreover, the infinity of which he speaks in conjunction with the poem is an infinity that is reached through time, and not in opposition to time, which parallels Heidegger’s affirmation of the eternalization of the temporal by way of the temporalization of the eternal. See above at n. 59 and compare the chapter “Eternity and Remembering: Representations of Time, Persons, and Action” in Clarise Samuels, Holocaust Visions: Surrealism and Existentialism in the Poetry of Paul Celan (Columbia: Camden House, 1993), pp. 58–75. Mention should be made finally of the essay by Tobias Keiling, “Ort und Zeit im Meridian: Heidegger in Derrida’s Celan-Interpretation,” in Schreiben. Dichten. Denken. Zu Heideggers Sprachbegriff, edited by David Espinet (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2011), pp. 177–195. Against Derrida’s tempocentric interpretation of the Meridian, Keiling argues that Celan develops his poetology based mostly on metaphors of space, and thus his perspective is structurally closer to Heidegger’s later philosophy of language. I am not in agreement with this characterization of Heidegger, but this is not the place to elaborate. 160. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 9; idem, The Meridian, p. 9. For a different interpretation, see Derrida, Sovereignties, p. 118. 161. Amir Eshel, “Paul Celan’s Other: History, Poetics, and Ethics,” New German Critique 91 (2004): 65–66, relates Celan’s affirmation of the origins of poetry in the language of a singular human being to his establishing the poem as a figure of the other that addresses those marked as others. The relationship between the poem and the heterogeneity of the singular is elaborated by Timothy Clark, The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). See also Birgit Mara Kaiser, “Singularity and Transnational Poetics,” in Singularity and Transnational Poetics, edited by Birgit Mara Kaiser (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 3–24. 162. Celan, Der Meridian, pp. 9–10; idem, The Meridian, p. 9. On the relevance of the temporality of the moment in Celan’s poetics, see Gerald L. Bruns, “The Remembrance of Language: An Introduction to Gadamer’s Poetics,” in Gadamer on Celan, p. 27; GertJan van der Heiden, “An ‘Almost Imperceptible Breathturn’: Gadamer on Celan,” in Philosophers and Their Poets: Reflections on the Poetic Turn in Philosophy Since Kant, edited by Charles Bambach and Theodore George (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), pp. 217–225. It would be worthwhile comparing Celan’s idea of the temporal space of the poem as the momentary present in which past and future are intermingled with T. S. Eliot’s celebrated reference in the beginning of “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Four Quartets, to the “still point of the turning world,” which he compared to the circulation of dance that is “neither arrest nor movement,” the present wherein “past and future are gathered.” See the analysis in Karmen Mackendrick, “At the Still Point: The Heart of Conversion,” Religions 10 (2019): 1–16. 163. Celan, Der Meridian, pp. 74–75; idem, The Meridian, pp. 74–75. Numerous scholars and thinkers have commented on the role of silence in Celan’s poetic speech. For instance, see Corbet Stewart, “Paul Celan’s Modes of Silence: Some Observations on ‘Sprachgitter,’” Modern Language Review 67 (1972): 127–142; Leonard Olschner, “Poetic Mutations of Silence: At the Nexus of Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam,” in Word Traces,

Notes ­ —  4 25 pp. 369–385; Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 322; Kristin Rebien, “Politics and Aesthetics in Postwar German Literature: Henrich Böll, Hans Erich Nossack, Paul Celan,” PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2005, pp. 175–178; Eshel, “Paul Celan’s Other,” pp. 65–66. And compare the discussion of mystical language and mystical silence in Celan in Shira Wolosky, Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 219–226. See the additional reference cited in Introduction n. 88. 164. Celan, Der Meridian, pp. 3–4; idem, The Meridian, pp. 3–4. 165. See Introduction n. 60. 166. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 108; idem, The Meridian, p. 108. 167. Compare Celan, Der Meridian, p. 131: “In Jüdischen: Gott nicht als der Gekommene und Wiederkommende, sondern als der Kommende; damit ist die Zeit bestimmend, mitbestimmend; wo Gott nahe ist, geht die Zeit zu Ende.” Translation in Celan, The Meridian, p. 131: “In Jewishness: God, not as the one who came and is coming back, but as the coming one; given that, time becomes determining, co-determining, where God is near, time comes to an end.” 168. See Amy Colin, “Review: Jewishness in Paul Celan’s Work,” The German Quarterly 70 (1997): 183: Celan conceived poetic images as containing the seed of their own destruction which, in turn, engendered other images. Time and again his poems first inscribe their tropes in order to gradually annihilate them and reconstruct other images out of their residues. All tropes and metaphors of Celan’s poetry are subject to this constant oscillation from an “already-no-more” into a “still-here.” A similar connection between images and time is offered by Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, p. 93: The images are both concealed and concealing in relation to the numbers, time, and unrelenting expiration. As in “allied with images,” this is not only an incessant pounding of ephemerality, but also a veil that lies over the present; in order to forget it, another veil is lowered, the colorful tapestry of images. Time is the inner sense in which the succession of ideas [Vorstellungen] is found. 169. Heidegger, Being and Time, §65, p. 314; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 329. 170. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 106 (translation slightly modified); idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, pp. 201–202. It is of interest to compare Heidegger’s idea of the equiprimordiality of the three temporal ecstasies and the following observation in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 59: Philosophical time is thus a grandiose time of coexistence that does not exclude the before and after but superimposes them in a stratigraphic order. It is an infinite becoming of philosophy that crosscuts its history without being confused with it. The life of philosophers,

Notes  —  4 2 6 and what is most external to their work, conforms to the ordinary laws of succession; but their proper names coexist and shine either as luminous points that take us through the components of a concept once more or as the cardinal points of a stratum or layer that continually come back to us, like dead stars whose light is brighter than ever. Philosophy is becoming, not history; it is the coexistence of planes, not the succession of systems (emphasis in original). 171. Celan, Microliths, pp. 98–99 (emphasis in original); idem, “Mikrolithen,” p. 105. 172. Paul Celan, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry, translated by Pierre Joris with commentary by Pierre Joris and Barbara Wiedemann (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), pp. 36–38. 173. Celan, “Mikrolithen,” p. 146. 174. Celan, Microliths, p. 143. 175. Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 396; idem, Gesammelte Werke, Dritter Band: Gedichte III, Prosa, Reden, edited by Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert with assistance from Rolf Bücher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), p. 186. 176. See Jane Carroll, “Timelessness and Time,” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 29 (2001): 78: At the intersection of timelessness with time the past is not behind and the future is not ahead: all exists in the moment. What happened to other people in another time and another place happens to us here an now. “The past is never dead,” says William Faulkner, “it is not even past.” So the study of history becomes the study of ourselves. The view expressed by Carroll resonates with my argument in Wolfson, Suffering Time, p. 398: Building on the insights of Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, the scholarly reconstruction of history should be construed as a futural remembering, or a remembering expectation, an act of recollecting that has the capacity to redeem the past, not by describing how the past really was but by imputing to it meaning that it never had except as the potential to become what it is not. The radical possibility of time as future implies that the past itself is only past insofar as it is the reiteration of what is yet to come, the recurrence of the similar that is entirely dissimilar. What is required . . . is a variant construal of historicity . . . an idea of history that is not beholden to a linear historicism, which is predicated, in turn, on a chronoscopic conception of time made up of discrete points such that the present at hand, as it were, is positioned between a present that is no longer and a present that is not yet (emphasis in original). For a reiteration of this passage with slight variation, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 10. Benjamin’s idea is discussed in more detail in Wolfson, Suffering Time, pp. 608–640. 177. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 59 (emphasis in original). 178. Ibid. (emphasis in original).

Notes ­ —  4 27 179. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, p. 19, and see my comparison of Heidegger’s idea of the activity of no-activity to the Taoist wu-wei in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 194–195 n. 296. To the sources mentioned there, one could add the monograph by Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 180. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 59 (emphasis in original). 181. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken,” pp. 149–150; idem, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” pp. 126–127. I cite the German from Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken,” p. 142: “Es reiche aber, / Des dunkeln Lichtes voll, / Mir einer den duftenden Becher, / Damit ich ruhen möge.” See the English translation in Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” p. 121: “Yet may someone reach me, / Full of dark light, / The fragrant cup; / That I may rest.” Regarding the terminology “dark light,” see Herbert Leerink, Das dunkle Licht: Gnosis, Irrsinn und Genialität im Werk Friedrich Hölderlins (Varik: De Betuwsche Morgen, 2019). 182. See ch. 3 at n. 191. 183. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken,” p. 149; idem, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” p. 127. Compare Blanchot, The Space, p. 112: “It is the absolute presence of this disappearance, its dark glistening, which alone permits him to die.” See the passage cited below at n. 241. 184. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 48; idem, Holzwege, p. 65. On the idea of Gestalt in Heidegger’s thinking, see Smith, Sounding/Silence, pp. 35–36, 41, 44–48, 130–133, 140–141. It is worth considering Heidegger’s reflections on life (das Leben) in Contributions, § 154, pp. 217–218 (Beiträge, pp. 276–277) as a “mode” of the beingness [Seiendheit] (beyng) of beings. The initial opening [Eröffnung] of a being toward itself in the preservation of the self. The first darkening [Erdunkelung] in the preservation of the self grounds the stupor [Benommenheit] of the living being, and in this stupor all stimulation [Aufregung] and stimulatability [Erregbarkeit] are carried out, and so are various levels of darkening and of its development [die verschiedenen Stufen des Dunkels und seiner Entfaltung] (translation slightly modified). The initial opening of life, a mode of beingness, is the self-preservation that assumes the form of the darkening that is the stupor that contains the impulsiveness of all that exists, and hence Heidegger juxtaposed the darkening with the essence of instinct (Die Erdunkelung und das Wesen des Instinktes). See the analysis of this passage in Bettina Bergo, Anxiety: A Philosophical History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 388–389. My translation of Benommenheit as “stupor” in place of “absorption” is beholden to Bergo’s rendering the term as “numbness.” 185. Compare Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §141, p. 34, where Susan coined the expression “Heidegerian [sic] Kabbala” in her description of Jean Wahl’s lecture on Heidegger. See below, n. 255. 186. For references to Scholem’s understanding of the symbol, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 402–403 n. 57, 407 n. 88. 187. See ibid., pp. 31–42.

Notes  —  4 2 8 188. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §66, p. 164, cited below at n. 224. 189. Ibid., §45, p. 122. The criticism of academic professionalism as a form of prostitution in the previous part of the letter is cited in ch. 2 at n. 7. 190. For citation and analysis of this passage, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Becoming Invisible: Rending the Veil and the Hermeneutic of Secrecy in the Gospel of Philip,” in Practicing Gnosis: Ritual, Magic, Theurgy and Liturgy in Nag Hammadi, Manichean and Other Ancient Literature: Essays in Honor of Birger A. Pearson, edited by April D. DeConick, Gregory Shaw, and John D. Turner (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 125–126. 191. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Bifurcating the Androgyne and Engendering Sin: A Zoharic Reading of Gen 1–3,” in Hidden Truths from Eden: Esoteric Interpretations of Genesis 1–3, edited by Caroline Vander Stichele and Susanne Scholz (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), pp. 88–95. 192. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §40, p. 113 n. 6. 193. For the variant formulations of this theme, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 25, 27, 64, 96, 99, 113, 115, 118, 122, 126–127, 177, 212, 245, 274; idem, Giving, pp. 47, 53, 94, 101, 181–182, 192, 451 n. 242; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 5, 7, 68, 107, 157–158, 305–306, 317; idem, Suffering Time, pp. 3, 310–311, 442. In my previous discussions, I neglected to mention the following pertinent comment of Rochelle Tobias, The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 75: “In much the same way that the Kabbalists argued that God’s name is unpronounceable, Heidegger argues that God’s face is invisible. Each time God appears, he consequently does so behind a veil, even if that veil is something as open as the sky, which is familiar to all who dwell on earth.” 194. Henry Corbin, “The Jasmine of the Fedeli d’Amore: A Discourse on Rûzbehân Baqlî of Shîrâz (522/1128–606/1209),” Sphinx: A Journal for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts 3 (1990): 209–211. For the French version “Le Jasmin des Fidèles d’amour,” see Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, Tome 3: Les Fidèles d’amour Shî’isme et soufisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 80–81. See also Corbin’s essay “L’ennuagement du cœur et l’épreuve du Voile,” op. cit., pp. 30–44, esp. p. 40, where the theophanous nature of creation is expressed metaphorically as the eye of God (œil de Dieu) and as the test of the veil (l’épreuve du Voile). Compare Daryush Shayegan, Henry Corbin: Penseur de l’islam spirituel (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011), pp. 309–313. 195. Corbin, Creative Imagination, p. 187. Regarding the theme of theophany in Corbin’s writings, see Christian Jambet, Le Caché et l’apparent (Paris: L’Herne, 2003), pp. 43–100. 196. Corbin, Creative Imagination, p. 273. 197. See above, n. 136. 198. Corbin, Creative Imagination, p. 187. 199. Ibid., p. 275. 200. Ibid., p. 187. Corbin interpreted the Ṣūfi distinction between fanā’ and baqā’,

Notes ­ —  4 2 9 passing away and persisting, in light of the cosmological paradox of the concomitant concealment and unconcealment. See ibid., pp. 202–203: Since Creation is a concatenation of theophanies (tajalliyāt), in which there is no causal nexus between one form and another, each creation is the beginning of the manifestation of one form and the occultation of another. This occultation (ikhtifā’) is the fana’ of the forms of beings in the One Divine Being; and at the same instant their baqā’, their perpetuation, is their manifestation in other theophanic forms, or in nonterrestrial worlds and planes of existence. Compare Wolfson, Language, p. 207; idem, Suffering Time, p. 113, and the sources cited and analyzed on pp. 544–545 n. 100. See also Adriana Berger, “Cultural Hermeneutics: The Concept of Imagination in the Phenomenological Approaches of Henry Corbin and Mircea Eliade,” Journal of Religion 66 (1986): 141–156, esp. 144–148; Daniel Proulx, “L’Imagination selon Henry Corbin,” in Os Trabalhos da Imaginação: Abordagens teόricas e modelizações, edited by Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Alberto Filipe Araújo, and Rogério de Almeida (João Pessoa: Editora da UFPB, 2017), pp. 421–437. Consistent with the approach of Corbin, I have embraced the dialetheic paradox of concealment and unconcealment such that every manifestation is at the same time an occlusion and every occlusion is a manifestation. I deviate from Corbin’s phenomenology inasmuch as the paradox for me does not necessitate positing a nonterrestrial world. See above, n. 30. 201. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 30. 202. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, edited and with an introduction by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 54–55 (emphasis in original). Interestingly, in the continuation of this passage, Derrida conjectures if what he has articulated as the event of revelation revealing the revealability that is invisible and therefore not revealed is “what the believer or the theologian might say here, in particular the Christian of originary Christendom, of that Urchristentum in the Lutheran tradition to which Heidegger acknowledges owing so much” (emphasis in original). 203. Ibid., p. 100. 204. Jean-Luc Nancy, Sexistence, translated by Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), p. 10. 205. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §119, p. 245: “The ‘poetic’ nihilism of french literature is the ouverture of our century.” On p. 246 n. 3, Pareigis draws the reader’s attention to the letter of Jacob to Scholem written on January 29, 1949, in Taubes, Der Preis, p. 105: “Es handelt sich um den ‘poetischen’ Nihilismus der Spätromantik, der aber deutlich und einsinnig auf den ‘realen’ Nihilismus der Gegenwart vorausweist.” 206. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 5, 68, 305–306; idem, Suffering Time, pp. 2–3, 551. 207. See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §209, pp. 158–159, cited in ch. 3 at n. 82. 208. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §75, p. 178. On the

Notes  —  430 overcoming of the distinction between reality and appearance, see the passage from A Lament for Julia cited in ch. 1 n. 109. 209. See ch. 4 at n. 69. It is reasonable to suppose that Susan was influenced by Nietzsche’s portrait of the artist as one who lies. For instance, see Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human II and Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human II (Spring 1878–Fall 1879), translated, with an afterword, by Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 83: “The muses as liars.— ‘We know how to speak many lies’—so the muses once sang as they revealed themselves to Hesiod.—It leads to essential discoveries if for once we conceive of the artist as deceiver.” See above, n. 117. 210. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §33, p. 93. Compare Susan’s comment to Jacob in the letter from February 10, 1951, ibid., §112, p. 234: “I understand more and more your thoughts of being-nothing, of silence and word, κόσμος, λόγος, θεός and feel that they are thought in participation—and contemplation of the breathing of the Holy.” The letter is cited more fully in ch. 1 at n. 102. 211. Ibid., §22, p. 67 (emphasis in original). 212. Ibid., §75, p. 179: “reveal—revelare (—)—draw back the veil (vellum).” 213. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 36; idem, Holzwege, p. 48. 214. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, translated by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 69; idem, Zur Sache des Denkens [GA 14] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), p. 86. 215. Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 71; idem, Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 88. 216. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” pp. 106–107; idem, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” p. 133. In support of his emphasis on the self-concealing concealment and the nature of truth, Heidegger refers to the Heraclitean fragment 93 (according to the DielsKranz edition) cited by Plutarch, “The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither declares nor conceals, but gives a sign.” See Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, pp. 42–43, 123–124. 217. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 155–159, 305–306. For a related argument with regard to the retraction of form in ancient Chinese painting and in Greek philosophy as interpreted in Continental thought, see John Sallis, “Effacements of Form,” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 8 (2013): 641–654. See below, n. 248. 218. For a broader discussion of the phenomenology of the nonphenomenalizable, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 94–102; idem, “Imagination, Theolatry, and the Compulsion to Worship the Invisible,” in Religion in Reason: Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in Hent de Vries, edited by Tarek R. Dika and Martin Shuster (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 50–79. Many scholars and philosophers have discussed this topic. For a recent analysis, see Martin Nitsche, “The Invisible and the Hidden Within the Phenomenological Situation of Appearing,” Open Theology 6 (2020): 547–556. 219. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §193, p. 129. 220. Ibid., §141, p. 35. In this letter, Susan referred to the “Heidegerian Kabbala.” See above, n. 185. 221. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by Charles K. Ogden, with introduction by Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge, 1995), §7, pp. 188–189.

Notes ­ —  431 In the Preface, ibid., p. 27, Wittgenstein wrote that the whole meaning of the book could be summed up as follows: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” 222. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §60, p. 153. 223. Alexander Altmann, “Symbol and Myth,” Philosophy 20 (1945): 162–171. Susan’s view on mythos as the more archaic layer of Jewish religiosity is at odds with Altmann’s conclusion in this study (p. 171): This does not mean that Judaism has remained entirely immune against mythical thinking. In fact, the whole history of the Jewish religion and of Jewish philosophical and mystical speculation represents a continuous struggle against the mythical elements from Babylonia, later from the Gnostic world, which tended to overlay its monotheistic and ethical structure. On the whole, Judaism was successful in combating the mythical influences from without. The prophetic message of social and individual ethics has remained predominant in Jewish thought. Christianity bears witness to the ethical heritage of the Jewish religion from which it sprang. Our Western Civilization is based on this heritage which is being put to a new test in our generation. That Altmann’s view is, in part, a response to Scholem is validated by the fact that he cites Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism in the note accompanying this passage. 224. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §66, p. 164. 225. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, §6.522, pp. 186–187. 226. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 124; idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, pp. 243– 244. See Chrétien, The Call, pp. 27–28; Wolfson, The Duplicity, pp. 120–121. 227. The essay “Le Langage indirect et les voix du silence” was first published in Les Temps Modernes (June-July 1952) and then included in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 49–104. For the English rendering, see idem, Signs, translated with an introduction by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 39–83. An alternate version appeared posthumously in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La prose du monde, text established and presented by Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 66–160; idem, The Prose of the World, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 47–113. Regarding this essay, see Galen A. Johnson, “Structures and Painting: ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,’” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited with an introduction by Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 14–34. On the theme of silence and language in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, see Stephen A. Noble, Silence et langage: Genèse de la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty au seuil de l’ontologie (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 125–197; Patrick Leconte, “Deux lectures de MerleauPonty,” Revue l’enseignement philosophique 65 (2014): 2–14; Galen A. Johnson, “From the World of Silence to Poetic Language: Merleau-Ponty and Valéry,” in Merleau-Ponty’s Poetic of the World, edited by Galen A. Johnson, Mauro Carbone, and Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), pp. 68–98. In the letter to Jacob written on January 11, 1952, Susan records that she went to hear Merleau-Ponty’s lecture on “l’Autrui.” See Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §142, p. 37.

Notes  —  432 228. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours 1959–1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 377–378. Especially applicable to our analysis is the study by Jean-Pierre Cometti, “Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and the Question of Expression,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 56 (2002): 73–89. See also the discussion of the gestural-linguistic model in Merleau-Ponty offered by Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian, pp. 194–201. 229. Merleau-Ponty, Signes, p. 104; idem Signs, p. 83. Compare the version in idem, The Prose of the World, p. 112 (idem, La prose du monde, pp. 158–159): “In speaking or writing, we do not refer to some thing to say which is before us, distinct from any speech. What we have to say is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said” (emphasis in original). 230. Heidegger, Elucidations, p. 216; idem, Erläuterungen, p. 189. 231. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V, p. 123. In the continuation of this passage, Heidegger writes about being able to hear the “simple law” (einfaches Gesetz) from this silence, “which is an event and not the ordinance of a calculation and command” (das Ereignis ist und nicht Ver-ordnung eines Rechnens und Befehls). 232. Ibid.: “Den Rückzug—der Rückzug des Lassens aus dem Mut zum weiten Vermuten des Rätsels!—erst lichtet sich der Ansturm der Verweigerung.” 233. The expression is borrowed from Sylvie Le Poulichet, “L”Effraction du silence,” in Le silence en psychanalyse, edited by Juan-David Nasio (Paris: Payot, 1998), pp. 127–140. 234. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 8; idem, The Meridian, p. 8. On silence and the poetic word in Celan, see the discussion and citation of sources in Wolfson, Language, pp. 431–432 n. 362, and idem, Giving, pp. 336–337 n. 268. See also France-Lanord, Paul Celan, pp. 55–57. 235. Celan, Der Meridian, p. 74; idem, The Meridian, p. 74. 236. Weil, The Notebooks, p. 63: “Highest art, order without form or name. Negation of form in all great art. . . . Poetry. Images and words that reflect the mental state without sounds. Words and sounds equivalent to silence.” Weil refers to the reading connected with this pronouncement of silence—the obtaining of the without-form that is above form—as nonreading. See ibid., p. 120: “Poetry; passing through words into silence, into the nameless. Mathematics; passing through forms into the formless.” And compare idem, Gravity and Grace, p. 97: “The beautiful poem is the one which is composed while the attention is kept directed towards inexpressible inspiration, in so far as it is inexpressible.” 237. Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, preface by Geoffrey Hartman, translated by Lydia Davis, edited with an afterword by P. Adams Sitney (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1981), p. 55. 238. The unequivocal focus on the finitude of human existence and the lack of release from the fate of mortality is epitomized in the verse “Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might. For there is no action, no reasoning, no learning, no wisdom in Sheol, where you are going” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). See also Ecclesiastes 2:14–16; Mark K. George, “Death as the Beginning of Life in the Book of Ecclesiastes,” in Strange Fire: Reading the Bible After the Holocaust, edited by Tod Linafelt (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 280–293. The interpretation of Ecclesiastes 7:1 that I have offered resonates with the exegeses of a number of traditional commentators to the effect that the day of death is better than the day of birth because with the termination of earthly life there is no more

Notes ­ —  433 opportunity to transgress, which is the inescapable lot of humankind in this physical world (Samuel ben Meir), or because at the time of death the person’s reputation has been formed on the basis of a lifetime of actions, and thus the person can perish with a good name for which he or she will attain a state of repose and reward in the hereafter, which is the telos and perfection of the soul (Joseph ben Simeon Qara, Abraham Ibn Ezra, Levi ben Gershon, Obadiah ben Jacob Sforno). The seeds for the commentarial explanations, and especially the second approach, can be found in the Aramaic Targum on the verse, ṭav shema ṭava deyiqnon ṣaddiqayya be-alma ha-dein yattir mi-meshaḥ revuta da-hawah mitrabbei al reishei malkhin we-khohanin, we-yoma de-yishkov gevar u-mippeṭar le-veit qevurteih beshum ṭav u-vi-zekhuta min yoma de-ityelid rashshi‘a be-alma, “Better is a good name that the righteous acquire in this world more than the anointing oil that overflows on the heads of the kings and the priests, and the day that a person is laid to rest and departs to his grave with a good name and merit more than the day that the wicked one is born in the world.” For an interesting attempt to interpret the perspective of death in Ecclesiastes in light of Heidegger’s account of being-toward-death in Sein und Zeit, see Martin Shuster, “Being as Breath, Vapor as Joy: Using Martin Heidegger to Re-read the Book of Ecclesiastes,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 33 (2008): 219–244. My gratitude to Aubrey Glazer for drawing my attention to this essay. 239. I am here paraphrasing the language of Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 47. For Derrida, the prospect of an incalculable future is associated with the ideal of Jewish messianism, even though he argues that the phenomenon of which he writes should not be limited to or marked by the historical manifestations of any of the Abrahamic religions. See ibid., p. 56: First name: the messianic, or messianicity without messianism. This would be the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration. The coming of the other can only emerge as a singular event when no anticipation sees it coming, when the other and death—and radical evil—can come as a surprise at any moment. . . . The messianic exposes itself to absolute surprise and, even if it always takes the phenomenal form of peace or of justice, it ought, exposing itself so abstractly, be prepared . . . for the best as for the worst, the one never coming without opening the possibility of the other. . . . This messianic dimension does not depend upon any messianism, it follows no determinate revelation, it belongs properly to no Abrahamic religion (emphasis in original). See Wolfson, Giving, pp. 159–161, and references to other scholars cited on p. 406 n. 31. 240. Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 54. 241. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 34. See the passage from Blanchot cited above, n. 183, and compare Betty Rojtman, The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought: A Longing for the Abyss, translated by Bartholomew Begley (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 61–78, esp. 76–77. On the notion of the beyond and the limits of the word in Heidegger and Blanchot, see Allen, Ellipsis, pp. 91–120. 242. Blanchot, The Space, p. 38. 243. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §266, p. 255 n. 2. 244. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 68.

Notes  —  43 4 245. Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, edited by David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 178. 246. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §156, pp. 62, 64. 247. Expressed in the mythos of Lurianic kabbalah, the generation and destruction of all being can be explained by the dynamic of the primal withdrawal that engenders the emergence of the other from that which has no other, a process that does not occur only at the beginning but is repeated ceaselessly through time as beings appear in the disappearance of their nonappearance. See ch. 3 n. 187. In Heideggerian terms, a similar structure is evident in his idea of ruinance (Ruinanz), the movement of the collapse (Sturz) formed by the emptiness (Leere) in which it moves, occasioning thereby the temporal rhythm of the motion of factical life (der Bewegtheit faktischen Lebens) that manifests by its very essence a countermotion (Gegenbewegtheit). See Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die Phänomenologische Forschung [GA61] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), pp. 131–132; idem, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 98–99. And compare the discussion of this motif in Scott M. Campbell, The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity, Being, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp. 94–99; Hans Ruin, “Thinking in Ruins: Life, Death, and Destruction in Heidegger’s Early Writings,” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 4 (2012): 15–33. 248. A position similar to my own can be found in the explication of the Lurianic cosmology based on the triadic process of contraction/withdrawal (ṣimṣum), breaking of the vessels (shevirat ha-kelim), and rectification (tiqqun), in Rojtman, The Fascination, pp. 119–120: For every configuration is already loss, every effective presence a decrease of being, the breakdown of a radiant but misdirected potentiality. In taking form, in stopping, the protean energy is degraded, to the degree that it reveals itself. The actual restrains, adulterates, constricts. . . . This bottomless dialectic knows neither synthesis nor totalization. The spiral of approximations, emerging out of absence, sustained by negations, transcends eternity: it goes toward the greater, in the name of a truth always more eminent and unrepresentable, whose image dissipates as it draws near. There is no end to this lack, no summit or Hegelian plentitude. To live implies failure, a continuous amputation, wherein takes root redemptive becoming. Rojtman’s differentiating the Lurianic myth from Hegel accords with my own approach, but I have replaced the word “dialectic” with “dialetheism” in order to convey this crucial distinction. See ch. 1 n. 20. Another noteworthy correspondence is our emphasis on the inherent brokenness of existence implied by the Lurianic doctrine—at the core of being is the void (ḥalal), the nothingness of the empty space (maqom panuy) that came forth as a consequence of the withholding of light that was necessary to enable its bestowal—but a critical difference is my contention that the discernment that the world (ha-olam) is a place of concealment (he‘lem) leads philosophically to the conclusion that redemption involves being redeemed from the hope of redemption, whereas Rojtman affirmed that the failure and continuous amputation lead to a never-ending redemptive becoming. 249. See ch. 4 at n. 140.

Notes ­ —  435 250. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, p. 73; idem, Otherwise Than Being, p. 57. 251. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §266, p. 254. Susan referred to this fragment as the “first line” of a long poem entitled “In the absence of God.” As Pareigis comments, p. 255 n. 2, the middle verses were reworked by Susan in the poem “Post Apocalypse.” 252. Compare Susan’s comment about Thomas Merton’s Figures for an Apocalypse (1947) in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §13, p. 46: “the poetry is tremendous but the epilogue where he discusses the relation of the poet and the mystic before God, though good in content, is written in a nauseating sweety-christian style.” On the pejorative use of the term “sweetness” to depict Christianity, see ibid., §106, p. 229: “This morning two Christian missionaries came to my door and stammered about sweetness and light and it was awful.” 253. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §181, p. 105. See ibid., pp. 103– 104, where Susan proposed that beyond a “dialectical faith,” there may be a “dumb faith,” which “means to renounce our image of the divine, to empty our soul of all that we might expect of that unknown that we address—be it nothingness—and to lay our soul naked before it. . . . Prayer is ineffable. Theology be damned.” 254. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 204; idem, Holzwege, p. 273. Commenting specifically on Hölderlin, Heidegger writes, “However, there would be and there is the single necessity: by thinking soberly in what is said in his poetry, to experience what is unsaid [das Ungesprochene zu erfahren]. That is the course of the history of being.” Compare Heidegger, Zum Wesen der Sprache, p. 58: “Die Sprache aus dem Wort durch die Sage im Ungesprochenen bereiten.” 255. Compare the summary of Jean Wahl’s lecture on Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §141, p. 35. And see the misgivings about this “blind poet-worship” in ibid., §142, p. 37. 256. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V, p. 149. Compare the distinction between stillness (Stille) and soundless (Lautlose) made by Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 206– 207; idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, pp. 26–27. Stillness is linked to the dif-ference, the inbetween, which stills in a twofold manner such that things are stilled in their thinging and the world is stilled in its worlding: Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. . . . In stilling things and world into their own, the dif-ference calls world and thing into the middle of their intimacy. . . . The dif-ference gathers the two out of itself as it calls them into the rift that is the dif-ference itself. . . . Language speaks as the peal of stillness [Die Sprache spricht als das Geläut der Stille] (emphasis in original). Many have written on the theme of the sigetic source of speech in Heidegger. See, for instance, Niall Keane, “The Silence of the Origin: Philosophy in Transition and the Essence of Thinking,” Research in Phenomenology 43 (2013): 27–48; Richard Polt, “The Secret Homeland of Speech: Heidegger on Language, 1933–1934,” in Heidegger and Language, pp. 63–85, esp. 65–70; idem, Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), pp. 92–103; and see my own reflections in Wolfson, The Duplicity, pp. 109–130, and additional references cited on pp. 243 n. 25 and 245 n. 42.

Notes  —  436 257. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 117; idem, Also sprach Zarathustra, p. 189. 258. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), p. 108; idem, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” [GA 39] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), p. 119. For my previous discussions of Heidegger’s apophaticism, see references cited in ch. 3 n. 177. 259. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 46; idem, Holzwege, pp. 61–62. 260. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, pp. 150–155; idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, pp. 218–224. 261. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns, p. 108 (emphasis in original); idem, Hölderlins Hymnen, p. 119. Compare the citation and analysis of this passage in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 306. 262. Heidegger, Elucidations, p. 43 (emphasis in original); idem, Erläuterungen, p. 24. On the affinity of Heidegger’s words to the doubling of secrecy in the kabbalistic hermeneutic of esotericism, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 348. 263. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Zweiter Band [GA 6.2] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), pp. 442–443. The passage is cited by Charles Bambach and Theodore George, “Introduction: Poeticizing and Thinking,” in Philosophers and Their Poets, p. 7. 264. Young and Haynes (see reference in the next note) translate Schwärmerei as “mysticism.” This connotation can be traced to Kant’s use of the term to convey the mood of mystical exaltation. See Immanuel Kant, “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy,” in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, edited by Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 62, and discussion in Niklaus Largier, “Mysticism, Modernity, and the Invention of Aesthetic Experience,” Representations 105 (2009): 54–56. Notwithstanding this philological trajectory, I have rendered Schwärmerei as “mania” based on the fact that the term Schwärmer—the underlying verb schwärmen denotes the swarm-like behavior of bees—was used derogatorily from the sixteenth century (including by Luther; see Largier, “Mysticism,” p. 42; Amy Hollywood, “Enthusiasm,” Frequencies: A Collaborative Genealogy of Spirituality [September 1, 2011], http://frequencies.ssrc.org/2011/09/01/enthusiasm/) to describe the predilection of spiritualists for matters fantastic or unrealistic. While the choice of “mysticism” to render Schwärmerei is understandable based on Kant, I think that “mania” better captures the fervor of the pietistic rapture intended by Heidegger. On the pairing of Schwärmerei and Schwermut to denote religious or mystical melancholy, see Christina Kotchemidova, “From Good Cheer to ‘Drive-by Smiling’: A Social History of Cheerfulness,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005): 6. 265. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 204; idem, Holzwege, p. 274. 266. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §237, p. 214. 267. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V, p. 198: “Eine Sache gut denken, heißt schon, alles Denkwürdige erfahren lernen. Indes gelangt das halbe Denken, das sich in allem umtreibt, nie zum Einen. Sache des Denkens ist die Sache” (emphasis in original). Although the matter cannot be pursued here, it is possible that Heidegger’s accentuating the task of thinking one thing well may be a philosophical adaptation of the pietistic theme of

Notes ­ —  437 Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession, translated with an introductory essay by Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper & Row, 1948). Also pertinent is Heidegger’s view—inspired in no small measure by Nietzsche—that every essential thinker thinks one thought essentially and that every great poet creates his or her poetry out of one single poetic insight. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, translated by Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi, edited with notes and analysis by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 4 (idem, Nietzsche: Erster Band [GA 6.1] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), p. 427): Nietzsche belongs among the essential thinkers. With the term thinker we name those exceptional human beings who are destined to think one single thought [einen einzigen Gedanken], a thought that is always “about” beings as a whole. Each thinker thinks only one single thought (emphasis in original). And see Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, translated by Fred W. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, introduction by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 50 (idem, Was Heißt Denken? [GA 8] [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002], p. 53): Every thinker thinks only one thought. Here, too, thinking differs essentially from science. The researcher needs constantly new discoveries and inspirations, else science will bog down and fall into error. The thinker needs one thought only. And for the thinker the difficulty is to hold fast to this one and only thought as the one and only thing that he must think; to think this One as the Same; and to tell of this Same in the fitting manner. To think the same (das Selbe) implies to contemplate the single thought repeatedly from different vantage points, and thus we see again an application of the Heideggerian understanding of sameness (Selbigkeit)—in contrast to identicalness (Gleichheit)—as the articulation of difference (see below, n. 271). Compare Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 160 (idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 33): Every great poet creates his poetry out of one single poetic statement [einzigen Gedicht] only. The measure of his greatness is the extent to which he becomes so committed to that singleness that he is able to keep his poetic Saying wholly within it. The poet’s statement remains unspoken. None of his individual poems, nor their totality, says it all. Nonetheless, every poem speaks from the whole of one single statement, and in each instance says that statement. See Derrida, Geschlecht III, pp. 19–20. For other references to these Heideggerian themes, see Wolfson, Language, p. 480 n. 97, and see the brief revisiting of this topic in idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 71. 268. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §99, p. 218. 269. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V, p. 190. 270. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 72 and 88 n. 89. 271. See ch. 1 n. 42. See also Introduction n. 124. 272. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 312. Compare the rendering in Heidegger, Pathmarks,

Notes  —  438 p. 237: “that which is like is so only as difference allows.” There are passages in his oeuvre where Heidegger distinguishes das Gleiche and das Selbe, but in other passages, the two seem to function synonymously. 273. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Sprache, p. 19; idem, On the Essence of Language, p. 16. 274. Martin Heidegger, Ponderings VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), XI, §40, p. 307; idem, Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39) [GA 95] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), p. 393. For Susan’s characterization of Heidegger’s existential sense of self as the “individual’s experience of his infinite solitude,” see Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §55, p. 144, mentioned in ch. 3 n. 68. On the poetic and the solitary, see also Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2000), p. 79: Only rarely can poetry aid us in communing with others. . . . Solitude is the more frequent mark of our condition; how shall we people that solitude? Poems can help us speak to ourselves more clearly and more fully, and to overhear that speaking. . . . We speak to an otherness in ourselves, or to what may be best and oldest in ourselves (emphasis in original). In considering the connection between poetry and solitude, it is worthwhile mentioning the response to Celan’s emphasis in the Meridian that the poem intends and heads toward the other (see reference given above in n. 139) offered by Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. 802: “The poem makes a figuration of otherness, and yet there is no other, no God and no redemptive reader. Since no other exists, the poem is only a brief fiction of duration, a metaphor of time replacing otherness.” Finally, I note that the existential sense of loneliness in Susan bears affinity to the impact of Heidegger’s emphasis on the solitary nature of thinking on Arendt, a topic that cannot be pursued here. See Sherry Gray, “Hannah Arendt and the Solitariness of Thinking,” Philosophy Today 25 (1981): 121–130; Martin Shuster, “Language and Loneliness: Arendt, Cavell, and Modernity,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (2012): 473–497. 275. Robert Savage, Hölderlin After the Catastrophe: Heidegger—Adorno—Brecht (Rochester: Camden House, 2008), pp. 36–37. One can detect the influence of Heidegger in the following passage from Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950 bis 1973, volume 2, edited by Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002), 25:30, p. 728: “Was Denken und Dichten verbindet, ist die Metapher. In der Philosophie nennt Begriff, was in der Dichtung Metapher heisst. Das Denken schöpft aus dem Sichtbaren seine ‘Begriffe’, um das Unsichtbare zu bezeichnen.” The passage is translated in Wout Cornelissen, “Thinking in Metaphors,” in Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch, edited by Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), p. 84: “What connects thinking and poetry is metaphor. In philosophy one calls concept what in poetry is called metaphor. Thinking creates its ‘concepts’ out of the visible, in order to designate the invisible.” Like Heidegger, Arendt views the art of poetic speech as the most viable way to come to terms experientially with the task of thinking as the path to access the invisible through concepts that are shaped from the domain of the visible. Metaphor thus functions like a bridge to connect the visible and

Notes ­ —  439 the invisible, the known and the unknown. See Arendt, Denktagebuch, 26:32, p. 729: “Die Rolle der Metapher: die Verbindung (so = wie) des Sichtbaren mit dem Unsichtbaren, des Gewussten mit dem Unwissbaren.” 276. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Philosophy—Thinking and Poetizing, translated by Jacques Braunstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 43; idem, 1. Nietzsches Metaphysik 2. Einleitung in die Philosophie Denken und Dichten [GA 50] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), p. 138. 277. Heidegger, Gedachtes, p. 57. 278. For an alternative translation, see Heidegger, Thought Poems, p. 93: “Only by ever-changing / can the selfsame protect / itself as the spared one.” 279. Heidegger, Gedachtes, p. 57. 280. For an alternative translation, see Heidegger, Thought Poems, p. 93: “So, you want the same everywhere? / All the time it’s only the common, / boasting its own extraordinariness. / You don’t see the selfsame anywhere. / Uniquely it remains the unique one, / equipping the pure ownmost for us.” 281. Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung, p. 89; idem, “The Pathway,” p. 70. In the continuation of this text, Heidegger invoked the statement that “God is truly God” (Gott erst Gott) in the name of Eckhart, the “old master of letter and life,” to name what language leaves unspoken (Ungesprochenen) with regard to the breadth of the pathway. Concerning this passage, see Moore, Eckhart, pp. 11–12, who suggests that the sermon to which Heidegger is alluding is the one in which Eckhart makes a distinction between the representable God in relation to created beings and the Godhead beyond all representation and relatedness. The mystical goal is referred to as the breakthrough (durchbrechen) of the soul returning to the Godhead, a process in which God unbecomes (entwirt got), the inverse of the Godhead becoming God in creation. On the Eckhartian motif of the breakthrough, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Patriarchy and the Motherhood of God in Zoharic Kabbalah and Meister Eckhart,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Ra‘anan S. Boustan, Klaus Hermann, Reimund Leicht, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and Giuseppe Veltri, with the collaboration of Alex Ramos (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), pp. 1074–1075, and reference to other scholars cited on p. 1075 n. 110. For other scholarly discussions of Heidegger and Eckhart, see the sources cited in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 23 n. 94. 282. Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung, p. 89: “Aber der Zuspruch des Feldweges spricht nur so lange, als Menschen sind, die, in seiner Luft geboren, ihn Hören können.” English translation in idem, “The Pathway,” p. 70: “But the call of the pathway speaks only as long as there are men, born in its atmosphere, who can hear it.” 283. Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung, p. 90: “Alles spricht den Verzicht in das Selbe. Der Verzicht nimmt nicht. Der Verzicht gibt. Er gibt die unerschöpfliche Kraft des Einfachen. Der Zuspruch macht heimisch in einer langen Herkunft.” English translation in idem, “The Pathway,” p. 71: “Everything speaks of renunciation unto the same. Renunciation does not take away, it gives. It bestows the inexhaustible power of the simple. The call makes us at home in the arrival of a distant origin.” The renunciation of which Heidegger speaks corresponds to what he names in “Das Wesen der Sprache” as Erfahrung zu machen,

Notes  —  4 40 that is, “undergoing an experience.” See Heidegger, Unterwegs zu Sprache, p. 149; idem, On the Way to Language, p. 57: “To undergo an experience with language, then, means to let ourselves be properly concerned by the claim of language by entering into it and submitting to it.” 284. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, translated by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 12; idem, Parmenides [GA 54] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), p. 18. On the resemblance of this Heideggerian text to the rabbinic-kabbalistic hermeneutic, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 47. 285. Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 12; idem, Parmenides [GA 54], p. 18. 286. Heidegger, Gedachtes, p. 39. For a different rendering, see Heidegger, Thought Poems, p. 65: “the onetime selfsame always new / in its multifortuitous dominion.” 287. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §24, p. 71. 288. I have discussed Heidegger’s idea of repetition as the return of difference in a number of studies. See Wolfson, Giving, p. 243; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 35–40; idem, Suffering Time, pp. 61–62, 70, 354–361, 569 n. 160, 593–594. A different view was expressed by Heidegger in the essay “Die Sprache,” originally delivered as a lecture on October 7, 1950, and repeated on February 14, 1951, where he wrote in his explication of Trakl’s “Ein Winterabend” that the name of the author of a masterful poem remains unimportant because the “mastery consists precisely in this, that the poem can deny the poet’s person and name.” See Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 195; idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 15. 289. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §60, p. 153. 290. See Linda Leonard, “The Belonging-Together of Poetry and Death,” Philosophy Today 19 (1975): 137–145. 291. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, §92, p. 209. 292. Bachmann, Darkness Spoken, pp. 392–393. 293. Ibid., 334–337. 294. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §202, p. 146.

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Index

136; gnostic, 143; self, 418n117 allegory, 258–259, 288n53, 330n219; of the cave, 159, 160, 163; mythos and, 247 alpha, 324n173 alterity, 13, 20, 26, 182, 230, 237; recurrent, 258 Altmann, Alexander, 266 ambivalent nihilism, 134 America: academic politics in, 109; hopelessness in, 157, 338n32; roots in, 112; superficiality and emptiness in, 107; values, 338n32 Anaximander, 133, 165 androgyne, myth of, 78, 412n73 aniconism, 74 animality, 321n145 annihilation, 177 Anshen, Ruth Nanda, 78 anthropocentrism, 235 anthropogony, 97 anthropomorphism, 259, 260 antinomianism, 56, 79, 91, 301n1, 312n101, 355n63; gnostic nihilism and, 153; kabbalah and, 92 antinomies, 395n151 antisemitism, 12, 17, 86, 115–116, 125, 220; Zionism as response to, 116 apocalyptic alienation, 166–185 apocalyptic epoch, 43 apocalyptic eschatology, 373n202 apocalyptic hope, 175 apocalypticism, 135–136, 168, 176, 180; final veil, 260; gnostic, 153; Gnosticism

abandonment, of personal god, 51–58 Abraham, 13, 26, 181–183, 292n68, 379n259 Abram, 182–183 absence: of being, 238; of God, 49, 149, 203–205, 208–209, 219, 221; of good, 349n35; of holy, 204; language and, 249; negative theodicy and, 219; presence and, 37, 44–45, 221, 251, 253, 265, 269, 291n63; of reality, 39 “The Absent God” (Taubes, S.), 3, 129 absent present, 421n142 absolute, 376n240; nothingness as, 167 absolute spirit, 168 abstract messianicity, 19 abyss, 83 academic politics, 102, 103, 109, 121 academy, 104–105 acosmic notion of self, 141 acosmism, gnostic, 152–153 Adorno, Theodor, 91–93, 95, 96; on Beckett’s nihilism, 388n90; on Beckett’s worldview, 202; kabbalah and, 368n170; on Kafka, 161–163; on poetry after Auschwitz, 401n22 aesthetic play, 61–62 affirmative nihilism, 312n101 African Myths and Tales (Taubes, S.), 3 agnosticism, 230, 260 alētheia, 159, 160, 164, 265, 367n162 Algiers, 343n66 alienation, 10, 37, 156, 191, 271; aboriginal, 12; apocalyptic, 166–185; of Dasein,

479

Index  —  48 0 and, 177, 184; prophecy and, 379n263; salvation and, 26 apocalyptic messianism, 155–156 apocalyptic pessimism, 362n118 apokalypse, 173, 175 apophasis, 44 apophatic, 16, 152, 177, 209; criticism of, 204; mystical atheism and, 220; poetic speech, 271–272 apophatic negation, 50 apophatic theology, 221 appearance, 367n157 appropriating event, 394n150 Arendt, Hannah, 113, 131, 341n51; on existential philosophy, 149; on Heidegger, 149; on poetry and thinking, 438n275; on Self of Heidegger, 147 art, 54, 418n117 asceticism, 70; abstinence, 153; Catholicism and, 71; cross and, 398n188; freedom and, 225; renunciation, 206; selfeffacement, 207 ascetic self-effacement, 207 atheism: authenticity of, 203–204; mystical, 203–210, 217; as purification, 206; theological, 212 atheistic existentialism, 210 atheistic faith, 205 atheistic ontology, 211 atheistic purification, 221 Auden, W. H., 244 Augstein, Rudolf, 49 Augustinian Gnosticism, 133 Augustinian Kantism, 148–149 Auschwitz, poetry after, 401n22 authenticity, 92–93 authoritarianism, 397n176 autochthony, 11, 15, 17, 123, 181 average everydayness, 359n99 Azriel of Gerona, 212 Babcock, Fern, 227

Bachelard, Gaston, 250 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 226, 279 Badiou, Alain, 26 barbarism, 223, 227, 398n189 Bataille, Georges, 62, 63, 134, 238, 349n35 Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 167 Beckett, Samuel, 202, 388n90 being, 92–93, 196, 347n16, 360n103; disclosure of, 50; groundedness of, 150; life as mode of beingness of, 427n184; meontological mystery of holy and, 210–217; nonteleological mode of, 54; nothing and, 213, 214, 238; nothingness and, 167; oblivion and, 166; truth of, 133; unconcealment of, 165 being-at-home, 181, 183 being-in-the-world, 150, 154 being-nothing, 59 being-toward-death, 155, 268 belief, 382n20 belonging-together, 194; of speech and thing, 240 Benjamin, Walter, 91, 92, 94; ontology in, 357n86 Bergmann, Hugo, 31, 89–90, 101, 103, 111–112, 233 Bialik, Ḥayyim Naḥman, 263 Bildung, 159 binary opposition, irresolution of, 188–195 Blake, William, 187, 244 Blanchot, Maurice, 249, 262, 268–269, 329n193 blemish, 66–67 Bloch, Ernst, 205 blood-community, 181 Bloom, Harold, 154, 236 Blumenberg, Hans, 135, 164 body, 260; symbolic use of, 193 Böhme, Jakob, 214 boredom, 192 boundaries: of law, 75; text and, 294n84 breathing of the holy, 58–71

Index ­ —  481 brokenness, 164, 184, 197–199, 306n31; healing, 40–41 Buddhism, 39, 421n141; Mahāyāna, 38; Nietzsche and, 304n24 Buddhist nihilism, 356n72 Bultmann school, 136, 139 bureaucratization, 119, 342n60, 385n60 call to conscience, 172 Campbell, Joseph, 74 Camus, Albert, 124–126, 173, 197, 227; generalizations about Judaism, 56–57 care, 200, 387n81 Cassirer, Ernst, 10, 247, 263, 266 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 196, 197, 385n55 Catholicism, 21–22, 70, 205, 227, 354n56, 396n165; asceticism and, 71; social incarnation, 25 Celan, Paul, 10–17, 28, 241–242, 252– 257, 294n92, 401n22; homeland strangeness, 291n63; on poetry, 226, 423n159, 424n162, 425n168 Chandos complex, 416n110 chaos, 131, 193–194, 373n200; of becoming, 199; creative process and, 42–43; ending and, 237; symbolic forms and, 245; tragedy and, 188; transformation and, 42, 185 chauvinism, 108 Christ, 25–26, 34, 50, 205, 207, 382n20; alpha and omega and, 73; as stepfather, 124–125; void and, 390n122 Christian esotericism, 6 Christianity, 7, 22, 42, 53, 56–57, 107; gnosis and, 135; godliness of, 223; Heidegger and, 137–140; Israel and, 107; Judaism classification by, 58; lack of secrecy, 96–97; mysterium of, 312n95; particularism, 25; as slave religion, 207; syncretistic nature of theology, 137; universality and, 300n135 Christological symbol, 222

Church, social vocation, 25 coincidence of opposites, 43–44 colonial imperialism, 116 commemorative thinking, 273 communication, 227; of incommunicable, 259 Comte, Auguste, 401n22 concealment, 158–166, 270, 366n153, 428n200, 430n216; disclosure and, 170–171; unconcealment of, 264–265 concentration camps, 388n90; as challenge to religion, 218; reactions to experience of, 115 consciousness: escaping epistemological skepticism, 382n20; tragic-mythic, 189 consecration, 78; of fire, 72 consensuality, 67 conspiracy, 227 conversation, 243 copula, 141 Corbin, Henry, 260, 261, 403n30 Cornford, Francis M., 158 corruption, 66–67 covenant, 4, 47, 52–53, 89–90, 109; renewal of, 153 creation, 375n235, 428n200; dualism and, 214; nothing and, 212; violence of, 42; Weil, S., on, 390n125 creative process, 42–44 creative questioning, 154 creator-God doctrine, 183, 184 critical theory, 91 cross, 223, 225, 398n188, 398n190 crucifixion, 153, 221–223, 398n188 cruciform, 207 cultic ritual, 82 culture, 382n13 Cziczes, Menachem, 104 daemon, 37, 45, 50, 283n15 dance, 163, 325n177, 369n175, 369n176 dark light, 258; truth as, 166 darkness, 29

Index  —  482 Dasein, 132, 136, 144–147, 160, 191, 359n99; balance of antinomical forces, 235; call to conscience inciting, 172; innermost finitude, 156; shadow, 408n58; truth and, 161 death, 172, 231, 317n118, 401n22, 403n27, 432n238; anxiety from beingtoward, 155; divorce and, 402n25, 403n29; of God, 36–37; growth in, 232; Heidegger on, 234–236, 278; Hölderlin on, 234, 236; knowledge of, 229, 230; love and, 228–230; nonbeing of, 154; nontemporal and, 155; poetry and, 268; separation as, 5; time and, 233–247; of tragedy, 36–37; truth and, 231–232 death instinct, 236 Deborah, 318n133 deceit, 23, 201, 228 deception, 33, 201 dehumanization, 218 Deleuze, Gilles, 13, 292n71, 425–426n170 deliverance, 49 demonic shells, 64, 65 dependent origination, 39 Derrida, Jacques, 11–12, 15–16, 18–21, 244, 252–253, 262; messianicity, 295n100; rabbi and poet differentiation, 294n85 descent, 414n98 desecration, 78 desexualization, 194–195 despair, 349n35 destruction, messianism of, 153 dethinking, 230 devaluation, 109 “The Development of the Ontological Question in Recent German Philosophy” (Taubes, J.), 5 dialectic, 392n132, 395n151; beingnessnothingness identity, 214; freedom and, 179; gnosis and, 176, 178, 179; nihilism and, 393n142 dialetheic paradox, 38

dialetheism, 43, 52, 183, 209, 275, 428n200 dialogue, human existence and, 243 diaspora, 13 Der Dibuk (film), 48 dietary laws, 59 difference, 21, 24, 28–29, 37; erasure of, 86; ontological, 133, 145, 204; return of, 40; sameness as replication of, 44 disintegration, 193 dislocation, 9, 10 displacement, 182 dispossession, 12 dissipation, 63 diversity, sameness and, 217 divine agency, 67 divine androgyneity, 99 divine epiphany, 171 divine presence, 64, 65 divine present, 90 divine suffering, 90 divorce, death and, 402n25, 403n29 Divorcing (Taubes, S.), 2–3, 6, 8–9, 17, 186, 321n145; death and, 231–232; experience and imagination in dream, 250; hopelessness in, 190; hypernomian in, 69; marriage in, 81–82; “Notes for the Return” and, 35; pessimism about Judaism in, 87 dogmatic fallacy, 395n151 double doctrine of truth, 140–141 double mirroring, 4 Downgoing (Taubes, S.), 69 dragon, 2, 75, 77, 83 dream, 48, 416n111; experience and imagination in, 250; poetic calling and, 248; poetry and, 248–249; of waking, 247–258 dualism, 60, 169, 171, 176, 214 dwelling poetically, 15 early, apotheosis of, 379n263 Ein Sof, 24, 165, 216, 305n29 empathy, 190

Index ­ —  483 emptiness, 39, 44–45, 205, 207, 303n23, 324n173 encounter, mystery of, 252 endtime, 172 enlightenment, 39, 170 enrootedness, 20, 22, 181 Epictetus, 46 epistemological skepticism, escaping, 382n20 equiprimordiality, 256, 425n170 Eriugena, Johannes Scotus, 214 eros, 45, 174, 198, 213, 229, 283n16; brokenness and, 199; thanatos and, 400n10 eroticism, 47, 54, 63, 321n145 error, 170 eschatological, 96 eschatological hope, 146 eschatology, 131, 166; apocalyptic, 373n202; Heidegger on, 347n19; in Marxism, 130; occidental, 354n56 eschaton, 166, 180 esotericism, 7, 22, 97, 105, 273, 306n31 essence, 93 estrangement, 106–111, 132, 191, 204; self’s realization of, 142 eternality, 195 eternity: as movement of becoming, 409n59; as Prince of Life, 168 ethical nihilism, 146 ethics: humanistic, 197; ontology and, 146 ethnocentrism, 8, 20, 115, 124, 181; of Ḥabad teaching, 307n34 ethnonationalism, 101, 116 evil: purification of, 397n176; soteriological myth and, 145; tragedy and, 189 exchange of symbols, 78 exclusivity, 26–27, 80 exemplarity, 16–17, 19 exile, 9, 41, 157, 183, 190, 306n34; human existence and, 148; from nothing, 151; as ontological condition, 380n267 existential categories, 141

existentialism, 34, 41, 129, 283n16; Arendt on, 149; atheistic, 210 existential ontology, 152 experience: dream and, 250; fragmentariness of, 190; limit, 400n12; of tragedy, 188–195 face, 270 faith, 19, 25–27, 29, 358n95; atheistic, 205; fanatical, 50; idolatry of, 203–210; scriptural, 57; tragedy and, 189 faithfulness, 89–90; in void, 207 fallenness: of beings, 49; of Dasein, 359n97; error and, 68; of time, 143–158 fascism, 197 Fatherland, 296n104 Feldmann, Judit Zsuzánna. See Taubes, Susan Feldmann, Mózes, 1 Feldmann, Sándor, 1, 59, 340n41 Fichte, Johann, 103 finitization, 168 finitude, 156, 172, 175, 198 fire, consecration of, 72 forgetting, fear of, 200–201 forlornness, 21, 34–35, 193, 324n163 fortification, of law, 72 fragmentary wholeness, 195–203 Frankfurt school, 91 Frankist mysticism, 91 freedom, 169–170; dialectic and, 179; freed from, 251 Freudianism, 227 futural remembering, 426n176 Geistesgeschichtemystik. See historical mysticism gender symbolism, 318n133 geocentrism, 110 George, Stefan, 240, 272 gnosis, 22, 73, 80; academy and, 105; Christianity and, 135; dialectics and, 176, 178, 179; as Jewish heresy

Index  —  484 and self-estrangement, 129–140; as knowledge form, 105; as lying against time, 154; negativism of, 152; nihilating power of, 135; redemption reconfigured in, 173; renunciation of worldly things and, 145; salvific, 134; spirit of, 141; Weil, S., and, 224; worldnegating, 168; world negation and fallenness of time and, 143–158 gnostic acosmism, 152–153 gnostic alienation, 143 gnostic apocalypticism, 153 gnostic dualism, 171 gnostic evening, 77–78 gnostic experience, 132; self and, 356n73 “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism” (Taubes, S.), 6, 129 Gnosticism: apocalypticism and, 177, 184; Augustinian, 133; cosmos in, 177–178; Heideggerian interpretation of, 128, 176; Israel and, 121–122; Judaism historical connection to, 183–184; nihilism and, 84, 129, 131; ritualism and, 75; undermining Judaism and, 140; view of world, 344n1, 349n35; world-denial and, 142 gnostic messianism, 362n118 gnostic myth, 178 gnostic nihilism, 153, 356n72 gnostic parable, mimetic function of, 164 gnostic revolt against the world, 217–225 Gnostification, of Sabbath, 71–77 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 10, 128 Der Golem (film), 48 good: absence of, 349n35; tragedy and, 189 goodness, of life, 237 greatness, 397n176 grief, 192 Guattari, Felix, 13, 292n71, 425–426n170 Ḥabad-Lubavitch, 305n29, 306n31, 306n34 halakhah, 8, 32–34, 44, 51, 88, 153; Sabbath celebration, 85; sexual mores of, 78

harmony, 390n125 healing, brokenness, 40, 41 Hegel, Georg, 24, 104, 194, 298n124, 373n200; apocalypticism and, 176; on being and nothing, 167; gnosticism and, 176, 178–179 Hegelian metaphysics, 94 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 6, 29, 298n124, 360n103, 373n200; acosmic notion of self and, 141; Adorno criticisms of, 92–93; Arendt on, 149; Christianity and, 137–140; on concealment and unconcealment, 265; on death, 234–236, 278; dwelling poetically and, 15; on eschatology, 347n19; gnosis as Jewish heresy and self-estrangement, 129–140; gnostic interpretation of, 128, 176; on healing and difference, 40; historical mysticism of, 123– 124; Hölderlin and, 143; influence of, 344n1; Joyce and, 157–158; on language, 240–243; loss of gods and, 144; on mythos, 247; on nothingness and time, 239; nothing of, 215; ontology in, 141, 357n86; on pain, 412n73; on poetic calling, 248; on poetry, 241–242, 246, 272, 276–278, 423n159; on poiēsis, 251, 275; on reduction, 387n87; on science, 337n10; secrecy and, 84; on Sein, 92; Self of, 147; silence and, 267; on solitude, 275, 438n274; Der Spiegel interview, 49, 50; Taubes, J., criticism of, 202; Taubes, S., dissertation and, 101, 345n5; on technology, 118; temporality of poem and, 253; theological reading of atheology of, 137, 148; on thinking, 274; thinking poetics, 291n63; time and, 150, 151; on truth and ontological meaning, 200; truth as unconcealment, 100; truth definition by, 160, 164; on unsaid, 273 Hinduism, 74

Index ­ —  48 5 Hippolytus, 43 historical consciousness, 46 historical mysticism, 123–124 historical religion, 330n219 historicism: theophanic, 403n30; Weil, S., critique of, 195; Zionism and, 124 history: eternity entering, 168; freedom and, 169–170; historical overcoming of, 166–185; Jews as metahistorical reference point in, 181; reconstruction of, 426n176; revelation as subject of, 170; salvation and, 180; spirit and, 180 Hitler, Adolf, 124, 220, 397n176 Hitlerism, 125 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 15, 43, 143, 195, 247; on death, 234, 236 holiness, 185; of Israel, 106, 108 Hollander, Dana, 19 Holocaust, 8, 115–117; Weil, S., on, 223 Holocaustia, 342n52 holy, 50, 308n40; absence of, 204; breathing, 58–71; meontological mystery of, 210–217; naming, 246; nothingness of, 215; poetry and, 239– 240; unspeakableness of, 60 holy seriousness, 61–62 homeland, 9, 12, 119–127, 182; strangeness, 291n63 homelessness, 29, 76, 83, 123, 132, 183; being-in-the-world and, 149–150 homeliness, 183 homesickness, 11, 106, 288n55 homo absconditus, 146 homosexuality, 384n43 hope, 106–111, 157; apocalyptic, 175; eschatological, 146; of language, 269 hopelessness, 157, 190; hope as proportionate to, 175 Huizinga, Johan, 62 human action, meaningfulness of, 150–151 human existence, 148; clash between satanic and divine in, 189; dialogue and, 243

humanistic ethics, 197 human reality, social reality and, 385n55 Husserl, Edmund, 103, 136, 150, 359– 360n102; the epochē and, 133, 414n98; the fragility of being and, 264n129; the irreal and, 248, 418n114; method of reduction, 387n87 hyperchristianity, 398n190 hypernomian excess of nomos, 58–71, 86 hypernomianism, 71, 72, 301n1, 312n101, 355n63; exchange of symbols, 78; law and, 85; space defined by, 86 Ibn Ṭabul, Joseph, 216 iconoclasm, 75 identicalness, 43 identitarian singularity, 26 identity, 43; of being and nothing, 167, 214; of non-self-identity, 18; of peoplehood, 57 idol, 73; of serpent, 74 idolatry, 81; Campbell and, 25; of faith, 203–210; history and, 195; Zionism as, 119 illusion, 135; poetry and, 249; truth as, 248–249 illusionism, 38 imaginal landscape, 403n30 imaginary language, 249 imagination, 411n71, 416n111, 421n142; dream and, 250; spiritual world and, 403n30; theophanic, 261 imago Dei, interpretations, 99 immaculate conception, 70 immanence, 13 incarnation, 27, 50, 222; kenosis and, 225; spectacle of, 206 incest, 320–321n142 inclusivity, exclusivity and, 26–27 indifference, 122, 189, 198, 298n124; nondifferentiated, 24, 40 indigeneity, 379n263 industrialized state, 118

Index  —  48 6 ineffable name, 12, 217, 255 infinite, 400n12; nothingness of, 212 infinitude, 156 intersubjectivity, 190 invisibility, 23, 190, 252, 262, 265 isolation, 343n66 Israel: chosenness, 20; Christianity and, 107; culture war in, 339n38; distancing from, 122; establishment of, 341n51; Feldmann, S., and, 340n41; holiness of, 106, 108; Judaism and, 107; mechanical domination of land in, 118; politicization of theological and, 111–119; religious political power in, 121–122; Scholem, G., on, 339n38; security situation in, 113; Taubes, S., views of, 106–111 Jabès, Edmond, 15 J. C., 77–80, 325n177, 326n178, 326n180 Jerusalem, 101, 109, 113, 335n2; academic politics in, 102, 121 Jesus, 26, 53, 55, 58, 118, 206; crucifixion of, 222–223, 225; itinerant status of Jews and, 291n64 Jewification, 14 Jewish ethnicity, 19 Jewish ethnocentrism, 20 Jewish gnosis, 6 Jewish history, 46 Jewish mode of being, 13 Jewish mysticism, Weil, S., and, 391n129 Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 111 Jews: essence of being, 181–182; as metahistorical reference point, 181; as poets, 244 John, Gospel of, 142 John of the Cross (Saint), 221 Jonas, Hans, 130–131, 136, 139, 169, 177, 183–184; negative theology and, 152; redeemer, 173 joy, 1

Joyce, James, 157–158 Judah, R., 64 Judaic heteronomy, 16 Judaism: affiliations, 49; Christian classification of, 58; generalizations about, 56–57; Gnosticism historical connection to, 183–184; Israel and, 107; itinerant status, 291n64; lack of secrecy, 96–97; mythos and, 431n223; personal God of, 24–25, 27; spatial facet of, 182; Taubes, S., pessimism about, 87; Torah-based, 31, 33 Judaizing, 294n92 Jünger, Ernst, 1 justice, 390n125 Kaballa, 22 kabbalah, 12, 64, 69, 92; Adorno and, 368n170; antinomianism and, 92; divine suffering, 90; dynamic of subversion, 68; imago Dei interpretation, 99; infinity and, 305n29; Lurianic, 208, 216, 434n247; poiēsis and, 258; Zohar and, 162 Kafka, Franz, 159, 161–163, 228, 266, 366n147, 368n168, 369n174 Kant, Immanuel, 132, 135, 144, 149; Taubes, S., critique of, 350n36 kashrut, 59 Kenner, Hugh, 3 kenosis, 206–209, 222 Kierkegaard, Søren, 6, 139, 141, 167, 192, 204, 230, 299n132, 355n68, 400– 401n15, 409n59, 436–437n267 Klotz, Andrée, 78 knowing, the inexhaustible mystery of the other and, 395n151 knowledge, 251; of death, 229, 230; gnosis as form of, 105; Prometheus myth and, 174; in tragic farce of world, 143 Koestler, Arthur, 121 Kristeva, Julia, 91 Kullmann, Eugen, 148

Index ­ —  48 7 Kusters, Wouter, 238–239 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 254 A Lament for Julia (Taubes, S.), 3, 62, 190, 202; gnostic motif in, 143 Langer, Susanne K., 196 language, 157, 227; absence and, 249; actualization of, 255; conversation and, 243; as dialectical act of naming, 243– 244, 410n66; Heidegger on, 240–243; hope of, 269; imaginary, 249; poetry and, 241–242, 249–250, 254–255, 266, 278, 414n102; as poiēsis, 240, 371n177; Prometheus myth and, 174 last sacred seriousness, 61–62 law, 36; boundaries of, 75; compliance to, 52; conditional, 53; diversification of, as logos, 198; fortification of, 72; juvenile nature of, 55; sovereignty in relation to, 59 Lebenswelt, 197 legalistic exteriority, 58 Leisegang, Hans, 175–176 Levinas, Emmanuel, 20–21, 89, 146, 181, 220, 253 life, 401n22; brokenness of, 199; death instinct and, 236; goodness of, 237; as mode of beingness, 427n184 light, 416n110; originary, 262 lighting the serpent, 71–77 limbo, 28–29, 36–37, 88–100, 330n219, 331n223 limit-experience, 400n12 Liska, Vivian, 16 liturgy, 313n105 logic, myth and, 158 logos, 50, 101, 151, 229, 264, 283n16; being of, 196; brokenness and, 199; law diversified as, 198; nomos as, 198 loss of gods, 144 lost objects, 87–88, 307n34 love, 45, 390n125; death and, 228–230; supernatural, 225; as unmasking, 270

Löwith, Karl, 137, 138 Lukács, György, 114–115, 187, 343n61 Luria, Isaac, 90, 216 Lurianic kabbalah, 208, 216, 434n247 Lurianic myth, 212, 434n248 Luzzatto, Moses Ḥayyim, 64–68, 318n133 magic realism, 416n110 Mahāyāna Buddhism, 38 Malkhut, 318n133 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 229, 269 manifest, 169 Marcionite theopolitics, 155–156 marriage, 81, 190–191, 323n163; as sacrament, 70–71; as social machination, 329n196; theatricality of, 82 martyrdom, 222, 398n188 Marx, Karl, 93, 118–119, 343n61 Marxism, 114–115, 227; eschatology in, 130; as messianic faith, 398n189 mask, 270 matrimonial liturgy, 330n208 matter, 349n35 meaningfulness, of human action, 150–151 melancholy, 201, 387n84, 416n111 meontological mystery of holy, 210–217 meontology, 210 Meridian speech (Celan), 13–17, 252–255 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 267 messianicity, 295n100, 297n108, 433n239; Marxism and, 398n189 messianic rectification, 64 messianism: apocalyptic, 155–156; of destruction, 153 metaphor, 416n110; mythos and, 247; thinking and poetry connected through, 438n275 metaphoricity, as veil of truth, 258–271 metaphysical binaries, 164 metaphysical melancholy, 360n103 metaphysics, 94–96, 103; nihilism and, 130; reduction and, 387n87

Index  —  488 micrological epistemology, 95 might, 42 migration, 92 militarism, Zionist, 126 mimesis: ritual, 187; tragic, 187 misanthropy, 227 Mitsein, 191 Moloch, 58, 85, 86, 115, 226 moment of transience, 94 monism, 176, 305n29, 349n35 monotheism, 25, 50, 57, 183, 305n29 moral values, transvaluation of, 42 mortality, 234, 238, 255, 432n238 mysterium, 312n95 mystery, 170, 330n219; encounter with, 247–258; power of, 234 mystery cults, 137 mystical atheism, 203–210, 217 mysticism, 24, 325n175; historical, 123–124; silence and poetry as language of, 272; skepticism and, 371n181; Taubes, S., objection to, 381n7; Weil, S., and, 391n129, 396n165 myth, 101, 266; allegorical and tautegorical interpretations, 415n107; being of, 196; gnostic, 178; logic and, 158; Lurianic, 212, 434n248; of Prometheus, 174; as religious experience, 144; soteriological, 145; symbolism and, 158; tragedy and, 189 “Myth and Logos in Heidegger’s Philosophy” (Taubes, S.), 2 mytheology, 80, 216 mythical lie, 195–203 mythos, 247, 263, 264, 431n223; of Lurianic kabbalah, 434n247 Naḥman ben Isaac, 64 Naḥman of Bratslav, 209, 306n31, 391n130, 392n133 naming, 174; holy, 246; language as dialectical act of, 243–244, 410n66; poiēsis and, 267

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 224, 262 nationalism, 123; Nietzsche criticism of, 337n10; Zionist, 111, 117 nationhood, 181 naturalistic positivism, 97 nature, 99 “The Nature of Tragedy” (Taubes, S.), 186 Nazis, 110, 114, 115; vindictiveness of, 218 negating world as world, 142 negation, 167–169; of negation, 221 negative dialectics, 92, 94 negative ontology, 209, 210, 212 negative theodicy, 217–225 negative theology, 152, 204 negativism of gnosis, 152 neurasthenia, 360n103 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 138, 187, 226, 235, 243, 272; Buddhism and, 304n24; dance and, 163, 369n176; on deceit, 23; nationalism criticism by, 337n10; on poetry, 248, 249; redemption and, 304n24; on science, 337n10; tragedy and, 187; transvaluation of moral values, 42 nihil, 44, 212 nihilism, 22, 29, 82, 96–97, 123; affirmative, 312n101; ambivalent, 134; Beckett and, 388n90; dialectics and, 393n142; ethical, 146; gnostic, 153, 356n72; gnostic foundations of, 129, 131; Gnosticism and, 84; metaphysics and, 130; poetic, 262; revolutionary longing of, 169; sentimentality of, 356n72; theopolitical, 166–185 nirvāṇ a, 38–39 nomadic, 88, 155, 190, 291n64, 292n68, 328n192 nomian, hypernomian surplus of, 86 nomos, 53, 54; hypernomian excess of, 58– 71; as logos, 198; subservient nature of, 73 nonbeing, 360n103; meontological mystery of holy and, 210–217

Index ­ —  48 9 nonexistence, 169 nonmanifest, 169 non-self-identity, 18 nonshowing, showing of, 251 nonteleological mode of being, 54 nontemporal, death and, 155 nostalgia, 142; pain and, 329n201; for presently future past, 83–88; Taubes, S., antipathy toward, 84 “Notes for the Return” (Taubes, S.), 35, 113 nothing, 150, 394n148; being and, 213, 214, 238; creation and, 212; divine essence in being, 211; exile from, 151; of Heidegger, 215; revelation of, 271–280 nothingness, 43, 44, 202, 395n155; as absolute, 167; being and, 167; of holy, 215; of infinite, 212; time and, 151, 239 nudity, 262 objectivity, 37; of time, 150 oblivion, being and, 166 occidental eschatology, 354n56 Occidental Eschatology (Taubes, J.), 43–44, 135–136, 139, 166, 173, 179 ocularcentrism, 171 omega, 324n173 ontic cloaking, 165 ontological difference, 133, 145, 204 ontological method, 210 ontological-nihilistic meaning, 37 ontological untruth, 195–203 ontology: atheistic, 211; ethics and, 146; existential, 152; existential analysis of self and, 145; in Heidegger, 141, 357n86; need for, 156; negative, 209, 210, 212; temporality and, 357n86 openness, 202 Open Theater ensemble, 3 Oppenheim, Paul, 325n175 opposites, coincidence of, 43–44 optimistic pessimism, 201 originary light, 262 otherworldliness, 134

pain, 1, 412n73; nostalgia and, 329n201 Palestine, 121, 341n51, 343n66 parable of the cave, 158–159, 163 Paradise, 54 paradox, 400n15; sameness of polarities, 140–143; of time, 238; of tragedy, 188–189 Pareigis, Christina, 4, 6, 31, 75 Parmenidean philosophy, 212 Parmenides, 213, 214, 277, 393n145, 394n148 parousia, 184 particular, universal enrooted in, 26 particularism, 21, 25–26, 197 Passover, 17, 18, 86 Passover seder, 8 Paul: Badiou on, 26; law and, 55; Marcionite theopolitics of, 155– 156; representation of religious universalism, 56 Pauline epistles, 142 penal suffering, 223, 398n188 peoplehood, 181; identity of, 57 Perse, Saint-John, 51, 69 persistence, 151 personal, universality of, 28 personal god, abandonment of, 51–58 pessimism: apocalyptic, 362n118; about Judaism, 87; optimistic, 201 pessimistic optimism, 201 Pétrement, Simone, 130 phallus, 55–56 Pharisaic radicalism, 26 phenomenology: of nonphenomenal, 252; of spirit, 376n240; theistic, 348n23 philology, 310n69 philosophical disorientation, 152 philosophical nationality, 19 philosophical time, 425n170 Pirandello, Luigi, 223 Plato, 104, 158–159, 161, 163, 393n145, 421n142 play, 1, 61–62, 83

Index  —  49 0 playfulness, 313n106 plurivocality, 24, 252 “Poem of the End” (Tsvetaeva), 10 poetic autonomy, 16, 294n85 poetic calling, 248 poeticization, 256; of truth, 246–247 poetic nihilism, 262 poetics, thinking, 291n63 poetic speech, silence of, 271–280 poetic time, 247–258 poetry, 10–11, 15, 288n53, 329n193, 436n267; after Auschwitz, 401n22; Celan on, 226, 423n159, 424n162, 425n168; classification of, 27; death and, 268; dream and, 248–249; Heidegger on, 241–242, 246, 272, 276–278, 423n159; holy and, 239– 240; illusion and, 249; language and, 241–242, 249–250, 254–255, 266, 278, 414n102; as measure-taking, 235; mysticism and, 272; Nietzsche on, 248, 249; revelation and, 264; solitude and, 438n274; temporal component of, 253; temporal deferment in, 256; temporal space of, 424n162; thinking and, 258, 438n275; time and, 257 poets, 294n85 poiēsis: Heidegger on, 251, 275; kabbalah and, 258; language as, 240, 371n177; naming unnameable and, 267 polarities: circle of, 213; paradoxical sameness of, 140–143 political theology, 112 The Political Theology of Paul (Taubes, J.), 138–139, 177, 179 politicization, of theological, 111–119 polytheism, 183 positivism, 97 “Post Apocalypse” (Taubes, S.), 39–40, 269 post-Holocaust moment, 110, 300n135 power, 42, 228; of mystery, 234 prayer, 32, 35, 37, 96, 274; service as, 309n55

presence: absence and, 37, 44–45, 221, 251, 253, 265, 269, 291n63; divine, 64, 65 presentism, 331n220 profane, 60, 68, 91–93, 95–96 prohibition, 63 projective saying, 272 Prometheus myth, 174 proscription, 63 Protagoras, 407n49 psychical reality, 385n55 public time, 408n58 Puech, Henri-Charles, 130 purification: atheism as, 206; atheistic, 221; of evil, 397n176 purity, 374n204 quarantine, 343n66 rabbis, 294n85 rape, 59, 61, 63–64, 68, 70–71 rationalism, 325n175 realities, 385n55, 391n129 rebirth, 91, 233–247 recollection, 426n176 rectification, 66–68, 214; messianic, 64 redeemer and redeemed, 173–174 redemption, 174–175, 183, 304n24, 361n118; gnostic reconfiguration of, 173 redemptive suffering, 389n109 reduction, 387n87 refugees, 9 reincarnation, 403n27 religion: concentration camps as challenge to, 218; disentangling from philosophy, 215; historical, 330n219; language of, 313n105; social power, 41; tragedy and, 382n13 religious experience: loss of gods and, 144; myth as, 144 religious ritual, 28, 52, 53 religious symbolism, 50, 51 religious universalism, 56 renunciation, 277, 439n283

Index ­ —  491 resurrection, 221–223, 225 revelation, 171, 251, 261; of nothing, 271–280; poetry and, 264; as subject of history, 170 revelatory knowledge, 52 revolution, 228 revolutionalism, 227 Rieff, David, 6 Rieff, Philip, 6 ritual, 28, 31–33, 42, 48, 52–55; effectiveness of, 53; tragedy and, 189 ritualism, 75 ritual mimesis, 187 ritual service, 77–83 Romanticism, 147, 227, 262, 266 Rosenzweig, Franz, 20, 181–183 ruinance, 434n247 Sabbath, 47, 48, 51, 55, 86; Gnostification of, 71–77; halakhic mode of celebrating, 85; kindling candles on, 72; writing letters on, 322n153 Sabbatianism, 91, 312n101; serpent and, 141 Sabbatians, 65 Sachs, Nelly, 279 sacrament, 21–22, 32–33, 69, 75–77, 90–91; of rape, 59, 61, 68, 70–71 sacramental service, 44–51 sacred, 55, 62–63, 96; encounter with, 50; exile from, 243; experiencing, 61; secularization of, 95 sacredness, 109; ascetic self-effacement, 207 sacred orders, 173, 175, 188 sacred societies, 54, 331n223 sacrifice, tragedy and, 189 sacrificial purification, 186 sadness, 1 sage, 104 salvation: apocalyptic expectation of, 26; history and, 180 salvific gnosis, 134

sameness, 28–29, 43–44; diversity and, 217; of polarities, 140–143; self, 200, 275 saṃ sāra, 38–39 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 7, 24, 171, 214–215, 247, 298n124; on freedom, 165; Husserl and, 103; on Jews, 181–182; on myth, 415n107 Schmidt, Christoph, 112 Schmitt, Carl, 179 scholarship, 103, 104 Scholem, Fanja, 108 Scholem, Gershom, 107–108, 110, 139, 212, 215, 313n101; academic politics and, 102; Adorno and, 91–92, 96, 161–162; apocalyptic pessimism and gnostic messianism, 362n118; on Israel, 339n38; on Lurianic kabbalah, 216; ṣimṣum and, 392n132; Taubes, J., antagonism with, 335n2, 344n68; Taubes, S., and, 120–121 schwanz, 108 science, 337n10 scientificized society, 104 secrecy, 47, 84, 96–97, 227, 252 secret fraternities, 227 secular existence, 28 secularization, 88–100, 333n232; of metaphysical, 94 Sein, 144–145, 147, 165, 198 Seinsdenken, 194, 245 Seinsfrage. See being self, 147, 356n73; acosmic notion of, 141; ontology and existential analysis of, 145; realization of estrangement, 142 self-alienation, 418n117 self-concealing concealment, 265, 430n216 self-contraction of God, 216 self-deception, 58 self-defense, 341n51 self-effacement, 207 self-estrangement, 129–140, 172, 177 self-identity, 89, 90 self-isolation, 191

Index  —  49 2 self-knowledge, 168 self-sameness, 200, 275 Seligson, Gerda, 78, 327n181 separation, 45, 157, 200; as death, 5 serious authors, 387n84 serpent, 140–143; lighting, 71–77 service, 327n185; as euphemism, 47, 79, 326n180; as prayer, 309n55; ritual, 77–83; sacramental, 44–51 sexuality, 47, 54, 321n145, 327n181, 384n43 sexualization of spiritual, 77–83 sexual violence, 317n118 shadow, 11–12, 29; illumining, 158–166 Shekhinah, 66, 69, 71 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, 306–307n34 Shoah, 49, 90, 117 showing, of nonshowing, 251 signification, 265–266 silence, 47; Heidegger and, 267; mysticism and, 272; of poetic speech, 271–280; signification and, 266; truth and, 263 Simeon ben Menasya, 55 ṣimṣum, 165, 209, 286n38, 372n187, 376n235, 392n132 singularity, 289n60; identitarian, 26; universalizable, 26 site, the gathering power and, 414n105 Śiva, 74 skepticism, 371n181; epistemological, 382n20; melancholia and, 387n84 slaves, 207, 319n134 Sloterdijk, Peter, 354n56 smiling, 202 social body, 83 social conventions, 199 social customs, 83 social power, of religion, 41 social reality, 385n55 social vocation, 25 solitude, 207, 275, 355n68; marriage and, 190–191; poetry and, 438n274; writing and, 249 Song of Songs, 4, 228

Sontag, Susan, 3, 6, 270, 327n181; on sexuality, 384n43; Taubes, J., and, 384n43; Weil, S., and Taubes, S., comparison by, 194–195 soteriology, 142–143, 145 soul, 149 sovereignty, 59 spatial dislocation, 76, 200 speaking, the unspeakable and, 267, 268 specialization, 385n60 sphinx, 117 Der Spiegel (newspaper), 49 spirit: absolute, 168; history and, 180; phenomenology of, 376n240; self objectification of, 373n200; time and, 180 spiritual, sexualization of, 77–83 spiritual interiority, 58 spiritualization, 74 Stearns, Isabel, 2 stillness, 435n256 The Storytelling Stone (Taubes, S.), 3 Styfhals, Willem, 128 sublation, 177, 178 suffering, 387n84, 407n53; penal, 223, 398n188; redemptive, 389n109 suicide, 192, 194, 195 supernatural love, 225 symbolism: body use in, 193; gender, 318n133; myth and, 158 symbols, 266; Christological, 222; interpretation of, 163 synthesis, 194 Szondi, Peter, 242 taboo, 55, 63; tragedy and, 189 Taoism, 421n141 Taubes, Jacob, 2, 3, 6, 128; halakhah and, 34; Heidegger criticism, 202; in Jerusalem, 101, 102, 111–112; at Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 111; philandering, 327n181, 327n185; political theology, 112; Scholem, G.,

Index ­ —  493 antagonism with, 335n2, 344n68; Sontag and, 384n43 Taubes, Susan, 1, 15; antipathy toward nostalgia, 84; dissertation change, 345n5; emigration to United States, 2; halakhah and, 32–34; heterodoxical exegesis, 18; on ideological gap with Jacob, 36; in Jerusalem, 101, 102; Jewishness, 18–19, 21–22; Kant critique, 350n36; on law, 36; Marx criticism, 118–119; on mysticism, 24; on Nirvana-Samsara, 38; objection to mysticism, 381n7; relations with mother, 2; Sabbath nightmares, 48; Scholem, G., and, 120–121; on social power of religion, 41; Sontag comparison to Weil, S., of, 194–195; studies, 2–3 technology, 118–119 temporal deferment, 256, 264–265 temporal ecstasies, 256 temporal evanescence, 76 temporality, 360n106, 407n53, 409n59; ontology and, 357n86; of poem, 253; unfolding of, 151 temporalization, 151, 257, 408n58 temporal modes, 85, 98 temporal reversibility, 233–247 Ten Commandments, 52 territory, 13 terrorism: of Hitler, 125; Zionist, 126 Tetragrammaton, 12 Thales, 394n148 thanatos, 151, 198, 229; eros and, 400n10 theistic phenomenology, 348n23 theistic positivism, 97 theodicy, negative, 217–225 theogony, 97 theolatry, 74; overcoming, 44–51 theological: politicization of, 111–119; secularization of, 88–100 theological atheism, 212 theology, 128; of absoluteness, 376n240;

apophatic, 221; characterizations of, 310n69; negative, 152, 204; ontological mandate of, 210–211; political, 112; task of, 210 theophanic historicity, 403n30 theophanic imagination, 261 theopolitical nihilism, 166–185 Thibon, Gustave, 220 thingliness, 246 thinking, 154, 230, 251, 436n267; being of, 196; commemorative, 273; Heidegger on, 274; poetry and, 258, 438n275 thinking poetics, 291n63 this-worldliness, 134, 135 Thora, 99 thrownness, 132, 153, 155 Tillich, Paul, 3, 24, 25, 91, 109, 129 time, 403n30; cyclical movement of, 106; death and, 233–247; divine present, past, and future, 90; end of, 168; erasure of difference in, 86; fallenness of, 143–158; gnosis as lying against, 154; Heidegger and, 150, 151; nothingness and, 151, 239; objectivity of, 150; paradox of, 238; philosophical, 425n170; poetic, 247–258; poetry and, 257; as poetry component, 253; as Prince of Death, 168; public, 408n58; spirit and, 180; as veil, 237–238 timelessness, 426n176 “Time of Midnight Snow” (Taubes, S.), 190 Torah, 58, 64, 74, 75; Zionism and, 126 Torah-based Judaism, 31, 33 tradition, 34, 45; as malleable and durable, 98; nullification and sanctioning of, 140 tragedy, 186–187, 224; irresolution of binary opposition and, 188–195; myth and, 189; paradox of, 188–189; religion and, 382n13; ritual and, 189 tragic mimesis, 187 tragic-mythic consciousness, 189

Index  —  49 4 Trakl, Georg, 101 transcendence, 156, 178, 238, 252; of being, 92–93 transcendental immanence, 218 transformation, 277 transgression, 63, 65, 79, 187, 361n118 transparency, 261 transvaluation of moral values, 42 traveling, 87–88, 328n192 truth, 391n129; allegory of cave and, 159; of Being, 133; cave allegory and occurrence of, 159; clothing, 259– 260; concealing unconcealment and, 158–166; as dark light, 166; Dasein and, 161; death and, 231–232; double doctrine of, 140–141; of forgetfulness, 201; freedom and, 169–170; Heidegger definition of, 160, 164; Heidegger on ontological meaning and, 200; as illusion, 248–249; metaphoricity and untruth as veil of, 258–271; poeticization of, 246–247; silence and, 263; symbolic alignments and, 259; as unconcealment, 100 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 10, 11, 244 Übermensch, 42, 187 Umkehr, 293n73 unconcealment, 158–166, 260, 265, 366n153, 428n200; truth as, 100 unhiddenness, 160–161 universal, 295n101; enrooted in particular, 26; indexicality of, 311n88 universalism, 21, 25–26, 180, 197, 311n88; religious, 56 universality: Christianity and, 300n135; of incomposite oneness, 305n29; of personal, 28 universalizable culture, 19 universalizable singularity, 26 universalization, 27; of particular, 51–58 univocity, 24, 198 unreal, 248, 250

unsaying, 212 unspeaking, 267, 268 untruth: ontological, 195–203; as veil of truth, 258–271 utopianism, 114 Valle, Moses David, 318n133 veil: final, 260; lifting of, 196; metaphoricity and untruth as, of truth, 258–271; of reality, 237; time as, 237–238 veil of illusion, 37–44 Verjuden, 293n73, 294n92 violence, of creation, 42 void: faithfulness in, 207; God as fullness of, 37–44; Weil, S., on, 390n122; will and, 206 Wahl, Jean, 345n5 Wahrheit, 159 Wailing Wall, 87 waking, 247–258 Weigel, Sigrid, 4, 25, 158 Weil, Éric, 27, 154 Weil, Simone, 20–21, 29, 119, 129, 203– 209, 354n56; on barbarism, 398n189; on creation, 390n125; on cross, 398n188, 398n190; divine suffering, 90; generalizations about Judaism, 56–57; gnosis and, 224; on God in soul, 38, 44; historicism critique, 195; on Holocaust, 223; Jewish mysticism and, 391n129; mysticism of, 217, 396n165; negative theodicy of, 217–225; Sontag comparison to Taubes, S., of, 194–195; Taubes, S., dissertation and, 345n5; transcendental immanence, 218; on void, 390n122; Zionism and, 125–127 Westerhoff, Jan, 38 Whitehead, Alfred North, 282n8, 393– 394n145, 395n151; fallacy of misplaced concreteness and, 80

Index ­ —  49 5 Whitman, Walt, 338n32 wholeness, 40; fragmentary, 195–203 will, 381n5; void and, 206 will to power, 42 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 266–267, 430– 431n221; the description of tragedy and, 302n1 Wolff, Georg, 49 Wolfson, Harry A., 140 women: passivity of, 67; subordination of, 319n134 world-denial, 142, 152 worldlessness, 341n51 world-negating gnosis, 168

world negation, 143–158 Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, 3 Zionism, 49, 84, 101, 114, 127, 156; as antisemitism response, 116; Arendt, 341n51; distancing from, 122–123; historicism and, 124; Holocaust and, 116–117; as idolatry, 119; militarism of, 126; moral implications of, 117 Zionist nationalism, 111, 117 Zionist utopianism, 114 zoharic text, 162 Zusammengehörigkeit, 194, 240

Stanford Studies in Jewish Mysticism Clémence Boulouque & Ariel Evan Mayse, Editors Stanford Studies in Jewish Mysticism seeks to provide a prominent forum for pathbreaking academic scholarship that explores the multifaceted phenomena of Jewish mysticism spanning from late antiquity into the present from a variety of perspectives. This new series is meant to serve as an intellectual meeting ground for scholars interested in the many worlds of Jewish mysticism. Stanford Studies in Jewish Mysticism welcomes innovative studies that draw upon textual, hermeneutical, historical, philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and cultural modes of analysis. The series also invites work that interrogates mysticism as a central category and thereby aims to apply new theoretical and methodological lenses; manuscripts that engage with broader issues and cut across disciplinary silos are particularly welcome. Further, the series will consider rigorous works of constructive theology that represent a sustained engagement with the writings and traditions of Jewish mysticism. Melila Hellner-Eshed, Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (The Great Assembly) of the Zohar Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, The Light of the Eyes: Homilies on the Torah, translation, introduction, and commentary by Arthur Green