Paul and Philosophy

Taubes’s readings of Paul demonstrate a hermeneutical art of disagreement within the intellectual life of post-Holocaust Europe. Taubes is a reader who looks for intellectual enemies with whom he can achieve a true disagreement without dismissing their true insights, whether they are historical or philosophical. This hermeneutic is not unattached to Taubes’s Jewish background but reflects a Talmudic spirit inherent within Taubes’s idiosyncratic readings of Paul. Moreover, Taubes’s readings are attuned to nuances, ambivalences, and contradictions within Paul, as Taubes powerfully demonstrates in his exegesis of 1 Corinthians. With the help of Nietzsche’s polemical reading of this Pauline epistle, Taubes detects the instances where Paul’s doctrine of the cross revolutionizes ancient perceptions and passages that contain the power to neutralize this very same conceptual revolution. This results in Taubes’s image of a contradictory apostle, who can be used throughout history for various purposes. In Taubes’s case, Paul becomes a messianic thinker and part of Taubes’s efforts to establish a powerful synthesis of the insights of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt—against what Taubes considers as the merely aesthetic tradition of “critical theory” in Theodor Adorno that remains indifferent to the historical struggles of the excluded.

Conclusion

Paul is a figure through whom Jacob Taubes can discern his true disagreement with his intellectual opponents, such as Friedrich Nietzsche. The Pauline epistles provide some perspectives for Taubes to reconsider the Christian culture that shaped his identity as a German-speaking Jew in a post-Holocaust Europe. These texts are useful for this particular reader to reconsider history without ever fully separating it from philosophy. The contemporary philosophical turn to Paul, considered by taking Taubes as its prime example, can partly be explained by these philosophers’ (Taubes, Badiou, Agamben, Žižek) attraction to Paul as an antinomian figure, a figure of lawlessness and freedom from law that can lead to apocalyptic violence (for Taubes) or pave the way for an existential and political break with the domain of law, as in the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. While these two continental philosophers draw upon other readings of the apostle than Taubes’s, Giorgio Agamben bases his readings of Paul on several aspects in Taubes’s works. Nonetheless, the call from Taubes to reinterpret Paul through Freud and Nietzsche is more consistently followed in the recent work of Ward Blanton.

Jacob Taubes’s Path to Paul

In the introduction to his lecture on the Epistle to the Romans from 1987, Jacob Taubes pointed to aspects of his biography as crucial for how Paul came to be a major concern for him as a Jew. The only book Taubes ever wrote as an intellectual, his doctoral thesis Occidental Eschatology (1947), already pointed to Paul, although the position about Paul became more elaborated throughout Taubes’s intellectual career. What Taubes wrote the most were letters. The letters to his former wife Susan Taubes and to his friend Armin Mohler provide a wider background to Jacob Taubes’s various paths to Paul the apostle. In these letters an inescapable reality for Taubes as a Jew in post-war Europe comes to expression: the horrors of Nazism. The question posed in one of the letters to Mohler “What was so seductive about National Socialism?”, underlies major inquiries with which Taubes confronts the reception history of Paul within modern Europe and German Christianity.

The Historical and the Philosophical

Recent discussions about Paul the apostle and contemporary philosophy have been taking place as conservations of disciplinary boundaries between history and philosophy. The competing paradigms for claims of ownership to the “truth” about Paul between historical and philosophical perspectives were expressed at a debate between philosophers (Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou) and biblical scholars about the new philosophical interest in Paul. As a precursor for the philosophers’ appropriation of the Pauline legacy, Jacob Taubes deliberately crossed the disciplinary boundaries separating history from philosophy. Taubes provocatively made claims about the supremacy of Nietzsche’s understanding of Paul vis-à-vis historically oriented biblical exegetes, and Taubes’s contributions are unavoidably implicated in this disciplinary competition. In Taubes’s case this violation of disciplinary boundaries has roots in a criticism of historicism with origins in German intellectual life of early twentieth century.

Introduction

Taubes’s use of Paul within intellectual debates produced new layers in the reception history of Paul. Readings of Paul cannot but lead to new layers, which is what recent theoretical developments of reception history of the Bible have demonstrated. There are no objective historical readings of the Pauline epistles that the philosophers’ readings might by measured with. Reception is, in a sense, all we are left with, as a never-ending deconstruction, negotiation and overlapping between historical and philosophical approaches to texts. The crucial question to be raised in the encounter with Taubes’s readings of Paul is not what is correct and incorrect in Taubes’s interpretations, but rather how we can acquire new understandings of apostle’s texts on the background of the philosophers’ readings of them. Through exegetical as well as genealogical perspectives on Taubes’s readings of Paul, a deeper historicity of the contemporary turn to Paul within philosophy can be attained.

Paul against Empire

The image of a political thinker that arises from Taubes’s readings of Paul is the result of Taubes’s peculiar method of reading Paul through key thinkers of the twentieth-century European thought, such as Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Barth. The political aspects of the philosophers’ readings are brought to the fore by Taubes’s intertwinement of historical and philosophical perspectives, but also of the crossing of the Jewish and the Christian. Taubes’s political Paul is drawn from contradictory meanings within the Pauline epistles, primarily Romans. On one hand Taubes’s Paul is anti-imperial as the apostle’s message amplifies a seething antagonism toward the values of the Greco-Roman world and “declares war” against the Emperor himself. On the other, Taubes’s Paul develops a “nihilism” which is actually “quietist” and withdrawn in relation to direct contestation of actually existing authority. This nihilistic view of the apostle can be further argued for through affinities between readings of biblical scholars of our day and Friedrich Nietzsche, building further upon Taubes’s interpretations of Paul.

Paul as Predecessor to Psychoanalysis

Jacob Taubes is a Jewish rabbi who proclaims to have discerned the fundamentally Jewish aspects of Paul’s thought. In that way Taubes reads against the whole tradition that sees Paul as the first Christian who definitely broke with Judaism. Nonetheless, Taubes deconstructs this Christian image of Paul partly through a comparison of Paul and Sigmund Freud that also relies significantly on earlier Christian layers of this reception of Paul. Moreover, Taubes claims that Paul is a predecessor of Freud, leading Taubes to read Paul as an introspective Jewish apostle, primarily based on Romans. This unique interpretative strategy with regard to Paul is made by the Jewish rabbi within a post-Holocaust world where biblical scholars have attempted to liberate Paul from Protestant readings of him as the introspective figure par excellance. Taubes, however, establishes Paul’s Jewishness by other means and comes close to considering Freudian psychoanalysis as a Pauline science. These idiosyncratic readings of Paul results in an intriguing deconstruction of what is “Jewish” and what is “Christian,” categories that are destabilized by Taubes’s provoking interpretations of Paul.