[PT 11.

1 (2010) 35-41] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X

doi:10.1558/poth.v11i1.35 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

The Eclipse of Eschatology:

Conversing with Taubes’s Messianism
and the Common Body

Antonio Negri*
Independent writer and researcher
Rome

Abstract
In this article Jacob Taubes’s idea of eschatology is examined. Taubes’s own
understanding of eschatology has profound implications on the very expres-
sion of political theology and political practice. If politics—as a practice—
assumes that time has a terminal point, than it will invariably change this
practice and encumber and even neutralize political action of a common-
body that gives voice to the oppressed. This article agrees with Taubes in
that eschatology must announce an end to itself, which is at once a birth of a
postmodern possibility of the principle of immanence in which a common-
body announces its infinite possibility. The end of eschatology is the end of
transcendence and the beginning of a struggle for liberating the infinite pos-
sibility of a common-body of labor.

Keywords: eschatology, Jacob Taubes, multitude, postmodern, time.

Jacob Taubes has written only one book in his life. Or, rather, he has written
many, published between 1942 and 1996, but it is always the same book,
or chapters or notes from the same book, or even plagiarisms of itself. The
title of this one book? I would propose “The End of the Modern.” But no,
someone could object, Taubes’s book is a history of eschatology. Certainly:
because the book on the end of the modern is a book about the survival
and metamorphoses, and even the soul and continuity of eschatology as
the essence of the modern. So, then, to speak of the end of the modern
means also to speak of the end of eschatology. If, in the postmodern era in
which we are living, I were able to make any recommendations to students
who seek to enter a department of philosophy that actually might concern
itself with the postmodern, in terms of books in which the philosophical

* Translated by Bruno Bosteels, Cornell University Press.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.
36 Political Theology

thematics of modernity might be torn down and liquidated, I would

propose the three books by Jacob Taubes that I have in my hands in Italian
translation: Western Eschatology (Escatologia occidentale, Garzanti, 1997), The
Political Theology of Paul (La teologia politica di San Paolo, Adelphi, 1997), In
Diverging Agreement: Writings on Carl Schmitt (In divergente accordo. Scritti su
Carl Schmitt, Quodlibet, 1996). These are books of exceptional erudition
and extraordinary intelligence, the fruits of untimely relations and a kind
of academic attention aiming for the anthological, and at the same time
they are books that, like Chinese boxes, contain one within the other and
thus end up representing the many facets of a didactic argumentation. At
least, that is, if by didactic one understands the didacticism of the best
Talmudic schools and, on the other hand, that of the typical seminars of
the nineteenth-century German university. Therefore, as a title for this
ensemble I propose: “The End of the Modern.”
Taubes would not agree. For him, this is not how things stand. It is
certainly true that the history of eschatology and that of modernity are
superimposed and arrive at the same result—Taubes might admit this
much—but he would add: the end of modernity does not contain that of
eschatology. On the contrary, eschatology offers the essential problem-
atic schema to philosophy and to thinking in general (also in its secular
and not only theological form), especially at the end of the modern.
Eschatology abundantly exceeds the result of the modern and, in this
sense, it is inexhaustible. To move beyond the modern could therefore
only mean to assume, without mystifications, the unresolvable radicality
of the eschatological question. But what, then, is in question in eschatol-
ogy? According to Taubes—and I don’t see why we would not agree with
him in this regard—it is the question about the essence of history. A
question that assumes the eschaton (the end) as limit and overcoming of
history, that is, as the point from where history can be unfolded as sub-
jective possibility, as real event, as affirmation of freedom. This dialectic
of possibility, event and freedom is therefore a search for meaning which
is situated between the possible and the real and which effectuates itself
in the leap taken by whoever traverses their separation. Teleology, in the
assessment of this leap, becomes apocalyptical. The enigmas of reason,
the uncertainties of the will, the tensions of hope: all this requires a
principle that might give it an eschatological solution. An opening prin-
ciple that is an end, an end that is an opening principle. A God to come.
In this sense eschatology presents itself as the experience of coincidence
between the “wherefrom” and the “whereto,” as a question of the spirit
about the “what for.” Eschatology always means revolution, because it
seeks to reach a telos that would confer upon freedom the dimension of
totality. Born in the domain of religion, identified in Israel with the place

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

 Negri   The Eclipse of Eschatology 37

of revolution (which here consists in the becoming-people of a mul-

titude grouping together, separating itself from every yoke, in alliance
with God), the apocalyptical element further unfolds itself in a worldly
realm: here it becomes the process of revelation of the spirit in history.
In this process the spirit forms times and spaces, periods and figures
of liberation—which is the realization of the divinity. To the religious
side of apocalypsis there thus corresponds an apocalyptical gnosis which
absorbs the ontology of salvation into the dialectics of history. In every
case a teleology of revelation dominates the outlook onto history, all the
while retaining the dualism of possibility and the real as insoluble except
in the revelation of the divinity.
Taubes follows the definition of the eschatological demand and its
formal characteristics with a history of the apocalyptical element which
sees a place of origin in the conversion from the Old to the New Testament.
Then, he defines the crisis of the principle of the modern era (between the
Joachimite pre-Reformation and the revolutionary Anabaptist Reforma-
tion) as a place of renaissance. Finally, he identifies in the development
of historicism—between Lessing, Kant and Hegel—a central place of a
new gnosis. Marx and Kierkegaard complete this history, transforming
the crisis opened up, between the principle of incarnation in existence and
that of the ecstasy of transcendence, into a definitive caesura. The ancient
world of Christianity and the modern one, which had renewed eschatol-
ogy in the “coincidentia oppositorum,” has come to a close. The world
that opens up will not be able to renew eschatology, but it will renew
its principle: a naked principle, a break between the “no longer” and the
“not yet” in which we will have no other choice except to resist or to
decide. The history of eschatology thus leads the demand for meaning
into a definitive impasse, and negative theology has, as its corresponding
gnosis, only a negative philosophy and a negative ethics.
For Taubes, therefore, the definition and history of eschatology reach
their conclusion in the end of the modern, but at the same time they
restate the eschatological question as essential: to the latter it will be pos-
sible to give a negative answer, only a negative one, incarnated in decision
and resistance. Resistance is religious, decision is secular and gnostic: both
remain apocalyptical.
It seems to me that the entrance into the postmodern negates this con-
clusion of Taubes and that eschatology—in all its forms—is overcome and
denied by the experience of the telos and the absolute in the way it presents
itself after the end of the modern era. What is more: I believe that only the
overcoming of the schema of negative thinking allows us to underscore
all the way to the end that we are beyond the modern (in all its facets),
enabling us to think in the present, radically.

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38 Political Theology

In what does radical thinking consist today? In eradicating every

dualism, in accepting the horizon of absolute immanence as destiny. Ever
since the modern, by transforming the transcendent into the transcen-
dental, thereby once again mystifying the real, has forced us finally, in the
crisis, to put our trust in those last specters of transcendence that we call
resistance and/or decision, this nakedness has appeared to be immodest
and unacceptable. A bizarre and ineffective mysticism has espoused this
nakedness. The impotence of resistance and the cynicism of decision have
joined themselves to the greatest dramas of our history: terrorism won
on both sides. Resistance, decision: never did they seem so essential. But
not in their nakedness! On the contrary, they are possible only when they
are incarnated in real ontological assemblages. Not the void but plenitude
is what they need. And in the postmodern, in the regime of immanence
that it proposes, ontological radicality shows itself as constituent process,
as the commonality that precedes and forms the condition of every resis-
tance and every decision. It is not to God but to the plural and articulated
ensemble of relations, of communication, of the formative processes of
meaning that we answer; it is not to a limiting measure, but to an explo-
sion of values, to a measureless excess of potentiality, that we remit our-
selves. In the common context, which is where the postmodern manifests
itself, precisely there where every transcendence has been eliminated. Nor
is time anymore what modern eschatology wanted it to be; it is no longer
the arrow that carries the value of life elsewhere. In the postmodern, time
is an intensity, and every instant is eternal, charged with responsibility and
constituent potentiality. There is no more transcendence.
Let us assume, as an example of the end of eschatological thinking,
the metamorphosis of the theological virtues: faith, hope and love. Who
would any longer accept the way this problem is situated with the dia-
lectic between justification by faith or by love? And yet we know, and
Taubes insists on this, that at least starting with Paul of Tarsus, two dif-
ferent eschatological arrangements take shape around this alternative.
These are spectral images in a world—our own postmodern world—in
which faith in life (the adherence to eternity) is not possible without love
of the other (without the constitutive consistency of the common). The
theological end in this case is completely absorbed in a new ontological
condition, in which the postmodern common radically grounds existence.
And hope, who would accept to entrust it to the arrow of time? Time is
no longer something inside of which action unfolds but it is constitu-
tive of the action of the multitude. Hope is the actuality of life as lived;
it is the overabundance of the potentiality of affects; it is freedom freed
of the eschaton. The telos consists in the construction of community, in
its absolute self-affirmation: not teleological but tautological. Rebellion

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 Negri   The Eclipse of Eschatology 39

itself and its destructive capacity are absolute potentiality, end in itself,
revelation of a common that preconstitutes its form and its figure. Paul’s
negative nomos is not governed by expectant waiting but by the common;
the common body of believers is not mystical but productive.
Why continue then with the anachronistic reading of Taubes? In part,
we already gave a hint of an answer above: because his work is an excellent
introduction to the self-destructive definition of the modern. A didac-
tic self-destruction. Perhaps Franz Rosenzweig did better for theology,
Walter Benjamin for the theory of history, and Carl Schmitt for political
theology: but Taubes offers us the sum. And in his didacticism, apart from
those great figures, he includes the general accomplishments of philo-
sophical culture from between the two wars, seizing on the two names
of Marx-Kierkegaard as the apex of the crisis. True, the one excluded
from Taubes’s synthesis is Heidegger, who always appears marginally and
somewhat caricatured, whereas his historical place is actually that of the
final destroyer of the modern-eschatological which Taubes exhumes as
the form of thinking to come. The exclusion is therefore appropriate. In
fact, from this point of view, we can see the complete insanity of nega-
tive thinking from Heidegger on, which finally goes back to the mystical.
No, Taubes suggests, this road is foreclosed, Heidegger is a tombstone on
the modern, and therefore, he adds, he wants to know nothing of him.
Precisely, because from Heidegger no dialectical somersaults are possible
from crisis to mysticism; the nakedness of being in Heidegger is a deadly
rigidity. (It is useless to add that this deadly rigidity is certainly more alive
in modern phenomenology than in the form of eschatology that persists
in Taubes.)
Implicit in the one already mentioned, there is another good reason for
reading Taubes, which we can find by developing and bringing to their
conclusion two cues that he offers in his work for the definition of teleol-
ogy. Now Taubes precisely recalls for us that teleology and axiology, the
theory of the end and the theory of value, always go together. But, put
differently, this connection which in eschatology is underlined in a special
way carries with it another connection: that which presses (and/or subor-
dinates) the rhythm of time to a principle of value, which defines the limit
prior to the development, and consequently puts the command (as science
of the limit) before the action (as freedom in time). This description cor-
responds to modern philosophy which from Platonic transcendentalism
draws—by transforming it into a transcendental principle—the science of
command, with the archè being the principle and the command and, thus,
the end-goal. Paradoxically, by emptying the relation between teleology
and axiology of all content and making it into a formal structure of con-
sciousness, Taubes contributes to offering us, by way of a diagnostic, the

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40 Political Theology

definitive critique of the teleological thinking of modernity. In sum, he

poses eschatology against teleology: naked eschatology against the teleo-
logical ornaments of the modern.
If these are negative reasons that justify the reading of Taubes, there
are also positive ones. First of all from a philological point of view. In the
end, Taubes suggests that modern thought is none other than a formidable
metaphor of religious eschatologism. And in performing this philological
labor of referring the secular to the religious, he opens crucial critical per-
spectives for us. These are useful as long as we do not forget that modern
thinking is always a thinking of power, that metaphysics in the modern
era is always a way of expressing the political. Such metaphors can above
all be found in the meditations of those who, in the era of which Taubes
himself is a product, managed to intuit the crisis of the modern. They thus
often interpret the emptying out of the contents of eschatology exactly
in the way Taubes does, as an exaltation of its forms. And these forms
dramatically present themselves to us as tragedy in the realm of ethics.
Even those who prefer the harsh ontological school of Heideggerianism
(or that formally colorless one of Wittgenstein) cannot remain insensi-
tive to the poetry and the self-destructive precursors of the modern, in its
eschatological version. It is true that this language has led many to a bout
of indigestion! And even the fascination of apocalyptical terms such as
“foreign life,” “stranger,” “errancy,” “nomadism,” “awakening,” “calling”
and so on has invested the unhappy consciousness of the crisis. And then
there are the words of rebellion, resistance, the affirmation of singularity:
these too metaphorize the ancient dogma and its modern use in favor of
control, but they open up spirals onto a life with no more teoleological
illusion.
As for us, more so than to any of the above we turn our attention to two
metaphors that may seem secondary, and perhaps they are, in the course
of the process of secularization and divestiture that the eschatological tra-
dition of the modern undergoes and that can still be of use to present a
postmodern thematic. These two terms are “body” and “the common.”
The body, then. Perhaps this is one of the few elements in the eschato-
logical tradition, in its matrix, that the modern has not been able to take
up and mystify. I have had this impression every time when, in the recita-
tion of the Christian “Credo,” I heard the verse about “the resurrection
of the dead.” It is clear why modern eschatologism has not been able to
digest this affirmation—which nonetheless might have been appropriate
to some of the implications of its material axiology (for example, in the
genesis of capitalism). The Platonic contamination, the Gnostic trend in
the reception of eschatology impeded this. Perhaps it is only in certain
“philosophies of medicine” that this corporeal spirit reappears: it is not a

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 Negri   The Eclipse of Eschatology 41

coincidence that these always had something to do with materialism and,

today, in some cases, they represent strong premises for the development
of philosophical thought beyond modernity (Canguilhem, Foucault, for
example). Now it is precisely in the eschatological thought of the body
that we find some metaphorical elements that are useful and adequate to
the advancement of thought in postmodernity. Because the eschatological
body is a full body, made up of all qualities and miseries, of each of the
passions and desires that pertain to it. What is more: for the same reason,
by extending itself and becoming collective, the body remains fixed in its
materiality. The mystical body of eschatology is a potent metaphor of the
biopolitical body of postmodernity. The transvalued body of labor.
All the more so when we push the metaphor of the body toward the
notion of the “common,” or rather from the common to the “ecclesia.” In
this case too the modern has absorbed the ecclesia or the common as body,
by castrating it: it could subsist and reproduce itself only by subordinat-
ing itself to the Platonic principle of teleology. Only the principle could
allow the common to develop itself, only God could allow the intellect,
the affects, the cooperation of the multitude, to become reality. State and
Church were born under the same Platonic cover. By contrast, the escha-
tological common bore its own potentiality (potenza) within itself. We
will therefore be able to use the postmodernism if only to be summonsed
by its metaphor. Because in it we capture the intuition of that principle of
immanence that the postmodern assumes for the definition of its depar-
ture from the nihilist tragedy of the modern.

Antonio Negri is an independent researcher and writer. He has been

a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Paris and a Professor
of Political Science at the University of Padua. He is the author of many
books including Time for Revolution, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the
Modern State, The Savage Anomaly, and with Michael Hardt, Empire, Multi-
tude, and Commonwealth.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.