Geopolitics

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Pauline Geopolitics: Thinking Apocalyptic Politics

with Jacob Taubes

Benedikt Korf

To cite this article: Benedikt Korf (13 May 2023): Pauline Geopolitics: Thinking Apocalyptic
Politics with Jacob Taubes, Geopolitics, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2023.2202463

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2202463

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GEOPOLITICS

REVIEW ESSAY

Pauline Geopolitics: Thinking Apocalyptic Politics with

Jacob Taubes

Jerry Z Muller (2022) Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes. Princeton
NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ole Jakob Løland (2020) Pauline Ugliness: Jacob Taubes and the Turn to Paul. New York:
Fordham University Press.

Willem Styfhals (2019) No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar
German Philosophy. Ithaka NY: Cornell University Press.

Why St Paul? Why should political geographers care about Paul of Tarsus, the apostle of
Jesus to the Gentiles? Certainly, the philological-hermeneutical reading of Paul’s letters
and the interpretation of his religious message is primarily the task of theologists. And yet,
a number of critical theorists, whose work resonates with the field of critical geopolitics,
have engaged Paul as a theoretical inspiration for their own work, among them: Giorgio
Agamben, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek – with Badiou opening the salvo with his ‘St Paul,
Founder of the Universal Subject’ (Badiou 1997). If we are to believe Jerry Z Muller, whose
book is reviewed in these pages, without Jacob Taubes, a scholar of Judaism, libertine
thinker and ordained rabbi, this engagement of critical (and mostly atheist) theorists with
Paul, the apostle, might not have happened. Muller contends that Agamben, Badiou and
Žižek ‘took from Taubes the conception of Paul as a radical critic of the existing political
and institutional order. What interested them was Paul as a model for the creation of
a community free from economic and political domination’ (Professor of Apocalypse,
p. 508). And while this debt was not always acknowledged (Badiou failed to cite Taubes’
work), Muller insists that ‘Badiou mentioned so many of the texts, events, and figures
(such as Marcion, Nietzsche, and Freud) discussed by Taubes that it is obvious that he had
not only read Taubes’s texts, but adopted some of its theses’ (Professor of Apocalypse,
p. 510). If we are to understand how Paul’s thinking intrigued critical theory, we have to
turn to Taubes.
Furthermore, without Taubes, neither Agamben nor other left theorists might have
engaged with the political theology of Carl Schmitt either. In fact, Taubes saw Schmitt
as a Meisterdenker of his age, despite the abyss that he saw between him as a Jew and
the ‘Nazi Jurist’. Horst Bredekamp considers Taubes’ Ad Carl Schmitt (Taubes 1987),
which appeared posthumously with Merve, a small, anarchist-libertine publishing
house in Berlin, as ‘one of the most influential publications on Schmitt ever written’
(Bredekamp 2013, 682). For Bredekamp, Taubes used a letter Walter Benjamin wrote
to Carl Schmitt in 1930 on the occasion of sending him his Trauerspielbuch, as ‘a kind
of talisman that guided him through his personal approach to Schmitt’ (Bredekamp
2013, 682). According to Muller, this short booklet “made Schmitt kosher for post-
2 B. KORF

Communist leftist intellectuals, just as Taubes’ posthumously published lectures on Die

Politische Theologie des Paulus would make Paul kosher for them” (Professor of
Apocalypse, p. 503).
Arguably, we can retrieve from the work of Taubes a ‘Pauline Geopolitics’. The three
books under review in this essay do not only help us to understand both the life and work
of Taubes, but point us potentially to three elements of a ‘Pauline Geopolitics’. Jerry Z
Muller’s fine biography emphasises the apocalyptic thinking that characterises Taubes’
reading of Paul as a Jew and subsequently points to Taubes’ retrieval of Jewish messianism.
Jakob Løland (2020) points us to the way Taubes reversed Nietzsche’s dismissal of Paul’s
ethics into an embrace of Pauline ugliness that accepts weakness, wounds and vulner­
ability. Finally, Willem Styfhals (2019) excavates the Gnostic elements in Taubes’ thinking,
which reflect Paul’s ambiguity towards the Gnostic movement of his own time. Styfhals
concludes that Taubes saw in Paul’s theology ‘a form of political protest’ (No Spiritual
Investment, 156). These three elements – apocalypticism, anti-Nietzscheanism and
Gnosticism as political protest – weaved together show us how Taubes makes of Paul
a post-colonial thinker avant la lettre: In Taubes’ reading, Paul’s anti-imperial, anarchist
geopolitics provide the theoretical vantage point for an emancipatory political theology
that is at odds with Carl Schmitt’s reactionary, ‘arcane geopolitics’ (Korf and Rowan 2020).
Taubes’ ‘Pauline Geopolitics’ thus stands at the origin of the fusion of political theology
and critical theory à la Agamben or Žižek (and, to some extent, Badiou).
Since the mid-1990s, critical left thinkers, such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou or
Slavoj Žižek, have placed the theology of Paul, the apostle to the gentiles, ‘in[to] the grip of
the philosophers’ (Frick 2013). Agamben, Badiou, Žižek and others read Paul’s political
eschatology horizontally, i.e. as radical immanence, without a reference to the afterworld
of a kingdom to come. And yet, Paul forces these thinkers at times to navigate the ‘twilight
zone’ of transcendence (Finkelde 2007, 12). (This rings the bells of Walter Benjamin’s
‘small door through which the messiah enters’. . .) Take Agamben: political geography
absorbed his writing on ‘homo sacer’, the ‘ban’ and the ‘state of exception’, much less so,
though, his more theologically inclined work, such as ‘The Time That Remains’ (Agamben
2005). In that latter work, Agamben reads Paul’s messianism in the ‘Letter to the Romans’
as ‘the time that remains’ until the final demise or apocalypse. Messianic time, Agamben
claims, is compressed time, it is kairos, not chronos; messianic time is operational and
transformative. Of interest for our purpose: Agamben dedicates his ‘The Time That
Remains’ to Jacob Taubes.
At first sight, these debates might seem a bit obscure to matter for readers of
Geopolitics. But this does not need to be so necessarily. What is required, perhaps, is
a switch in epistemological registers. In fact, most (political) geographers write about
‘religion’ from the position of a distanced critic and adopt methodological agnosticism or
even a secular antagonism (Henkel 2011). For example, apocalyptic thinking, for many
geographers, is simply ‘religious geopolitics’ of evangelical (right-wing) Christians (e.g.
Agnew 2006; Dittmer and Sturm 2010), i.e. apocalypse is read in a pejorative sense. This
style of writing adopts a ‘sociology of religion’ approach and makes theology into a system
of thought to be deconstructed, unmasked and debunked (e.g. Sidorov 2006; Wallace
2006) and the geopolitics of its institutional form to be critically analysed (e.g. Agnew
2010). But, we could also shift our register: Nick Megoran, for example, considers
apocalyptic thinking as a source ‘to conceive radical alternatives: Apocalypse is the
ultimate defence against the empire’s seductive lie that “there is no alternative”’
(Megoran 2013, 146). Jacob Taubes could not have agreed more with Megoran. Such
register would also allow us to read Carl Schmitt not through the prism of the political but
rather the theological – and from that reading dismiss his anti-emancipatory Gnosticism
 GEOPOLITICS 3

(Korf and Rowan 2020; Meyer, Schetter, and Prinz 2012). Indeed, the evasion of the
theological register that many geographers ascribe to comes at a cost: it fails to acknowl­
edge the emancipatory potential of apocalyptic thought that can be brought to rescue
political theology from the reactionary camp (Korf and Rowan 2020, 7f.). And this rescue
mission was exactly what Jacob Taubes’ intellectual project of a Pauline Geopolitics was
about.
The three books reviewed in this essay approach Taubes in very different ways: Muller
writes a comprehensive intellectual biography of ‘the many lives’ of Taubes. Løland
provides a dense reading of Jacob Taubes’ Paul interpretation and the reception of it in
theology and critical theory. Styfhals’ book is not primarily about Taubes, but Taubes
features as a central figure in his intellectual history of post-war German debates on
Gnosticism. All three are not written by geographers and not for geographers as a target
audience, and yet, they are of vital interest to political geography precisely because they
engage the question of space and time politically and theologically and, in this way, sketch
the contours of Taubes’ ‘Pauline Geopolitics’.

Professor of Apocalypse
In his biography ‘Professor of Apocalypse’, Muller has assembled a rich amount of
material over more than 20 years to provide a fine balance between life stories and
intellectual critique. Muller first narrates the intellectual history of Jewish culture,
Zionism and Jewish intellectual milieus in the late German Empire, the Weimar
Republic and its demise with the turn to power of the Nazis. This was the intellectual
milieu that Jacob Taubes, son of a rabbi, was borne into – an intellectual milieu that
Taubes would remain indebted to throughout his life (he was ordained as a rabbi). Living
and studying in Switzerland during the Holocaust, Taubes was equally immersed in
German philosophy. Strangely, the Holocaust did not feature in Taubes’ writings, neither
in those years nor later, at least not openly. Rather, Taubes taught German philosophy in
New York from the early 1950s until the mid-1960s, most prominently at Columbia
University, most notably courses on Heidegger, Hegel and Nietzsche, at a time, briefly
after World War II and the Holocaust, when this was barely popular.
Taubes cannot be understood without Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, the ‘crown jurist’ of the
Nazis, attracted Taubes’ attention early on. If we are to believe Taubes’ own account in Ad
Carl Schmitt, he encountered Schmitt’s Politische Theologie already at the age of 19, when,
in a seminar, taught by the historian Leonhard Muralt at the University of Zurich in 1942,
he wrote a seminar paper on the book. Von Muralt, a historian of the reformation, was not
amused when Taubes presented his paper and dismissed Politische Theologie as the work
of an ‘evil man’. But Taubes would remain fascinated by Schmitt until his death (an
attitude that irritated many of his left friends). As Muller shows in detail, in addition to
Schmitt, Taubes was influenced by the work of theologians, such as Karl Barth, Hans Urs
von Balthasar, as well as Karl Löwith’s work on secularisation and Hans Jonas’ work on
gnosis.
In 1966, Taubes moved to the Freie Universität (FU) Berlin (from Columbia
University), where he had taught part-time since 1961, and was now tasked to head two
institutes, one for Jewish studies and one for hermeneutics. Soon after, he became involved
in university politics. The FU was one of the hotbeds of radical student politics in 1967 and
after, and Taubes was one of the few professors who sympathised with these radical
students. These increasingly dogmatic radical students influenced university politics
throughout the 1970s, not to its benefit, as Taubes realised in the late 1970s.
4 B. KORF

Disillusioned, he turned again to his intellectual interests, in particular the study of

apocalypticism and Gnosticism. It was in these final years of his life that he also sought
the personal encounter with Carl Schmitt ‘eye to eye’, visiting the old man at his home in
Plettenberg. In 1985–86, Taubes, together with Norbert Bolz and Nicolaus Sombart, held
a now famous seminar on Schmitt at the FU. It was also the time when Taubes turned
again to Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles. In February 1987, Taubes, who knew that he was
terminally ill, gave his now famous Heidelberg lectures ‘Die Politische Theologie des
Paulus’ [The Political Theology of Paul], which were posthumously published (Taubes
2004), thanks to the dedicated work of Aleida and Jan Assmann, whom Taubes had
befriended in his final years. In this series of talks, Taubes returned to the themes of his
intellectual life: Benjamin and Schmitt, questions of messianism, apocalypticism, while
diligently moving in his analysis between the intellectual fields of philosophy, critical
theory and Jewish and Christian theologies.
Muller ends with a somewhat inconclusive evaluation of Taubes, the person, and
Taubes, the scholar. On the one hand, Taubes was a difficult character. His manic
depression made him reckless and obsessive in his behaviour, while it was ‘the substrate
of his charisma . . . and his verbal high-flying’ (p. 522). On the other hand, it prevented
him from focus and sustained study. Some scholars, Muller writes, ‘have tried to make
Taubes into a systematic thinker . . . theirs is a fool’s errand’ (p. 520). Often, Muller
contends, Taubes’ claims were poorly substantiated or simply overstated (I think Muller
overstates this point). Muler singles out Taubes’ critique of Gershom Scholem’s work on
Jewish messianism, which he, Taubes, powerfully proclaimed at the eighth World
Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem in 1981. Muller writes: ‘Indeed, the closer one
compares Scholem’s work to Taubes’ talk, the clearer it becomes that Scholem himself had
made most of the points that Taubes offered in his critique’ (p. 435). Muller concludes
with the question: ‘Was Jacob Taubes an intellectual charlatan or was he a brilliant
thinker?’ Muller leaves it to the reader to judge, but he also acknowledges that Taubes
was an important bridge builder between philosophy and theology: ‘he tried to show
secular radicals that their true ancestors were religious, while showing the religiously
orthodox the buried subversive elements within their own traditions’ (p. 520).
Muller’s biography provides a concise account of both, Taubes’ life and intellectual
investments, as well as the intellectual terrains, in which Taubes operated. There are,
however, some elements of his intellectual life that he writes little about, for example the
milieu of the FU in the early 1980s. His account of the conferences on political theology,
gnosis and theocracy that Taubes organised then is rather short either. Nor does Muller
mention Klaus Heinrich, a professor of religious studies at the FU and colleague of Taubes.
Both were very popular teachers and attracted large audiences, but their relationship was
one of equal disengagement, although both studied the philosophy of religion. Both,
Heinrich and Taubes, were influenced by the work of the German protestant Theologist
Paul Tillich and by Freud’s psycho-analytic thinking; and yet, their thought style differed
radically: on the one hand, the ‘apocalypticist from below’ (Taubes), on the other hand, the
critic of mythology (Heinrich), who rejected the antagonism of Taubes’ anti-liberalism.
Heinrich’s keyword, instead, was ‘covenant’ (Bündnis), whose genealogies he detected not
only in the Hebrew Bible, but in a range of Ancient Greek and Roman mythologies
(Heinrich 2000). Both scholars also differed in style: Heinrich practiced the meandering
endless conversation, Taubes the brisk intervention and sharp critique. When Heinrich
submitted his controversial Habilitation with the title ‘Versuch, über die Schwierigkeit, nein
zu sagen’ [Essay on the Difficulty to Say No] in 1962, Taubes is said to have been among
those faculty members, who initially blocked its approval (Haug 2017, 399). This seems to
have poisoned their relationship.
 GEOPOLITICS 5

Muller also writes about ‘Poetik und Hermeneutik’, an interdisciplinary circle of

influential German professors, among them Hans Blumenberg, Wolfgang Iser, Hans
Robert Jauss, Hermann Lübbe, Reinhart Koselleck and Odo Marquardt, later to be joined
by Jan and Aleida Assmann, who were key figures in publishing Taubes’ work posthu­
mously. Their regular gatherings received iconic status in the German humanities; their
discussions have been published in 18 monumental proceedings. Taubes was a regular
participant and an intellectual stimulus. And yet, after his death, none of his colleagues in
the circle were eager to write an obituary, as most had been disillusioned with him. This,
perhaps, leads Muller to move on and give limited space in his book to account for this
intellectual terrain. And yet, one should not underestimate the intellectual debt that
Taubes owed to Poetik und Hermeneutik, especially to Hans Blumenberg and Odo
Marquard, his frequent interlocutors and vice versa (see on this in detail: Amslinger
2017). This intellectual terrain comes centre-stage in two other books reviewed in this
essay: Løland’s notion of ‘Pauline Ugliness’, which frames his analysis of Taubes’ turn to
Paul, is predicated on one of the first contributions that Taubes presented to his colleagues
of Poetik und Hermeneutik in their symposium in Lindau in 1966 (Taubes 1968). Even
more so does Styfhals place Taubes within the milieu of Poetik und Hermeneutik, when he
explores the intellectual debates on Gnosticism and modernity in post-war German
philosophy.

Pauline Ugliness
Løland’s book works in a different register than Muller’s: Løland provides a dense
hermeneutical and genealogical exegesis of Taubes’ engagement with Paul. According to
Løland, Taubes reads Paul with Nietzsche against Nietzsche. In Der Antichrist, Nietzsche
had detected in Paul a praise of the ugly and a denunciation of beauty, which was directed
against the ethics and morality of Antiquity. Nietzsche’s project was to return to Antiquity
and to discard Paul’s ethics. Taubes praises Nietzsche’s historical insight, which he finds
unmatched by theological exegesis (Taubes 1968, 170). But in his analysis of 1 Corinthian,
Taubes turns against Nietzsche in two ways: ‘For Taubes insisted that it was not Pauline
Christianity that triumphed after Antiquity. Far from it, it was the Roman Empire that
triumphed over Christianity’, writes Løland (Pauline Ugliness, 97). The empire’s triumph
came to the open in the ‘Constantinian turn’, when the Church and the empire became
one, and the doctrine of the Church started to imagine the Cross as a sign of glory rather
than weakness: ‘It was not Taubes’s “power from below” that had won with the
Constantinian turn. It was instead Schmitt’s “power from above”’ (Pauline Ugliness, 83).
But Taubes insisted that the Christian impulse of Pauline ugliness was not completely
eliminated, but lay ‘latent’ in history. This latent impulse would come to the fore again in
the work of Karl Barth and Walter Benjamin in the early twentieth century, two thinkers
that Taubes valued very highly. In celebrating this anti-aestheticist stance, Taubes posi­
tioned himself against other figures in Critical Theory, in particular Theodor W. Adorno.
Indeed, Taubes’ relation to the Frankfurt School had been one of admiration as much as
tension and repudiation.
Taubes celebrates in Paul the latter’s assumption of ‘the subaltern fool’s role’ (Pauline
Ugliness, 86), a role Taubes also strove to perform himself. Taubes was so fascinated with
this figure that he painted the image of a ‘political and anti-imperial Paul from the obvious
threat of the words of subjection’ in the Letter to the Romans (13, 1), where Paul famously
asks his disciples to accept the governing authorities, in that age, the Roman Empire, and
Taubes reads this demand through the lens of apocalypticism of an eschatological
6 B. KORF

indifference: as the end of times is near, it does not matter who the authorities are on this
earth, as its demise is immanent anyway. Løland admits that he has problems with this
interpretation of Paul, while he acknowledges that Taubes accepts certain contradictions
in different passages of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. But at the end of the day, ‘Taubes’ Paul
is an apocalypticist who dreams of theocracy’ (Pauline Ugliness, 174). This apocalypticism
explains Paul’s quietism towards the Roman Empire. But Løland seems to doubt that this
message can really be retrieved from the sources. He writes: ‘His [Taubes’] Nietzschean
Paul, blended with Barth’s quietism and Benjamin’s messianism, stands on some biblical
grounds’ (Pauline Ugliness, 175, my emphasis).
In his famous Heidelberg lectures Die Politische Theologie des Paulus [‘The Political
Theology of Paul’] (Taubes 2004), which he held in anticipation of his immanent death,
Taubes paints Paul as a heretic, antinomian Jew. This positioning is significant since
Taubes was the only Jew in the circle of Poetik und Hermeneutik (besides Hans
Blumenberg, who was half-Jewish), and questions of the Shoah, of guilt, of Nazi atrocities
were never openly discussed among these men, many of whom had served during the war,
and who all had their complicated relations with the Nazi regime. (On the extreme end
stood Hans Robert Jauss, who was later identified as a former SS officer, which led many of
his students to break up with him). Taubes stood out in this milieu, because he skilfully
blended the Rabbinic tradition, Christian theology and philosophy. Løland describes it
thus: Taubes was ‘contaminating both [Judaism and Christianity] by inhabiting the
borderlines themselves through idiosyncractic readings of both’ (Pauline Ugliness, 182).
In this context, Taubes’ critique of Heidegger is significant: Heidegger’s existentialism
had inspired many German intellectuals and theologians, in particular Rudolf Bultmann,
who taught in Marburg alongside Heidegger in the late 1920s. The adoration of Heidegger
continued even after the war, despite Heidegger’s early involvement with the Nazi regime.
For Løland, ‘Taubes’ reading of Paul is a crucial way of getting around Heidegger in order
to destroy the wisdom of this supposed wise man’ (Pauline Ugliness, 68). In particular,
Taubes warned the theologists, especially the ‘Bultmannian naivetés’ (Taubes 2004, 66)
that failed to acknowledge Heidegger’s attempt to dig theology’s grave. In similar ways,
Løland positions Taubes contra Badiou’s and Žižek’s ‘Bultmannianism’: Bultmann’s
programme of demythologisation produced a proliferation of secularised readings of the
New Testament, and Badiou and Žižek do exactly that: They read the Bible not as a sacred
text but as an existential message that can be appropriated beyond a Christian impulse.
Taubes aims at the opposite, claims Løland: He ‘detects the Pauline in modern thought’ as
an example of ‘religious and apocalyptic influences on modern philosophy’ (Pauline
Ugliness, 181).

No Spiritual Investment
Taubes’ interest in the apocalypticism of Paul brought him to meditate about Paul’s
possible Gnosticism. This is particularly fraught intellectual terrain: The early Church
considered Gnostics of various brands as heretics. Paul predated the Gnostics, although
Marcion, a leading Gnostic, is sometimes considered a disciple of Paul. Considered
a heretic, Marcion was famously rehabilitated by liberal Protestant theologist Adolf von
Harnack in his influential study Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, published in
1921. The rehabilitation of Marcion came with a firm anti-Judaism, which, Taubes
supposed, made liberal Protestant theology vulnerable to the Gleichschaltung of the Nazi
regime. This situation brought up a number of questions: was Marcion a true disciple of
Paul or his betrayer? What can be considered Gnosticism? Did Gnosticism exist before or
 GEOPOLITICS 7

alongside Paul already, i.e. was there already a Jewish Gnosticism? All these are compli­
cated questions that are highly contested in historical research (e.g. Pagels 1975). Taubes
identifies Gnostic thinking in Paul, but he admits, that it is not consistent throughout
Paul’s reading. Løland is sceptical: ‘Where Taubes projects Gnosticism, it may be histori­
cally more plausible to inject apocalypticism’ (Pauline Ugliness, 84).
Gnosticism also stands at the centre of Styfhals’ book, the third under review here:
Styfhals’ approach again differs from Løland’s. Styfhals analyses how the concept of
Gnosticism was used and appropriated by a variety of German philosophers and theolo­
gians to make sense of the modern condition, first during the Weimar years and later in
post-war Germany. Styfhals wonders why such an obscure concept as Gnosticism could
become a key metaphor in shaping debates about secularism and modernity. Styfhals
starts his work with a statement of the late Taubes, who claimed: ‘I have no spiritual
investment in the world as it is’ (cited in No Spiritual Investment, p.1). Styfhals rightfully
points to the enigmatic character of this statement: Did Taubes reject any spiritual
investment because he displayed a nihilistic attitude to the world as it is or was it because
he rejected attachment now in awaiting another (better) world after the demise of the
present order? The Gnostics, writes Styfhals, ‘considered the world to be an evil, fallen,
godless, demonic, meaningless, or inferior place in comparison to the fullness of a radically
transcendent divine meaning’ (No Spiritual Investment, 2, my emphasis). Spiritual invest­
ment makes no sense in such a condition. But equally, ‘no spiritual investment’ could
express a decidedly secular or modern position where spirituality itself has become
meaningless because of religious agnosticism or atheism.
This point connects Gnosticism and modernity and leads straight to a set of inter­
connected key debates involving a range of thinkers of German-Jewish origin, among
them Hans Blumenberg, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Odo Marquard, Gershom Scholem and
Eric Voegelin (all white and male, by the way, and all, except Marquard, with Jewish
genealogies). In his New Science of Politics, published in 1952, Eric Voegelin had famously
declared modernity as Gnostic epoch (Voegelin 1952). Hans Blumenberg had opposed
this thesis in his magisterial Legitimität der Neuzeit (without ever-mentioning Voegelin)
by claiming that modernity was the (second) overcoming of Gnosticism (Blumenberg
[1966] 1988). Of interest here is the nature of the concept of Gnosticism, which is,
emphasises Styfhals, itself a modern invention (he follows here the pathbreaking work
of Karen L. King). Styfhals is not interested whether or not something like Gnosticism did
actually exist in late Antiquity, but rather, how the concept or, rather, metaphor of
Gnosticism – more specifically: the concept of Gnosticism as it was elaborated by Hans
Jonas in his influential study Gnosis und spätantiker Geist [Gnosis and Late Antique Spirit]
(1934)—enabled these thinkers to debate the nature of modernity (or rather ‘Neuzeit’) and
secularisation.
In a sense, the Gnosticism debate was a genuinely ‘German’ affair (Ritz 2015). It was
‘German’ as a territory of thought1: Poetik und Hermeneutik was a key site where German
philosophers, historians, theologians and literary scholars debated the issue. It involved
a number of (German) Jewish thinkers as well, who had been forced to flee from the Nazi
regime and who were either returning or writing from exile (mostly from North America).
In Styfhals’ account, Jewish thinkers, such as Hans Jonas and Gershom Scholem, play
a crucial role. It was ‘German’ in theoretical terms, too: it was deeply enmeshed in the
intellectual genealogy of German idealism and the idea of Geschichtsphilosophie (the
philosophy of history). And the ghost of Carl Schmitt is haunting some of the protagonists
of the debate, especially Blumenberg and Taubes, who both were corresponding with
Schmitt, but critical of his position. In a sense, Styfhals, without using the term himself,
uncovers the territory of thought of what could be called ‘German Theory’ (Bajohr 2022, 1;
8 B. KORF

Korf, Rothfuss, and Sahr 2022; Styfhals and Symons 1968), wherein Jacob Taubes was
a key figure to stir up controversy and make unexpected intellectual connections between
thinkers from the left and right.
For Blumenberg and Voegelin, a return to Gnostic thought in modernity would be
potentially devastating. That is why Blumenberg, who defended modernity, saw its legacy
in overcoming Gnosticism, while Voegelin, who thought modernity to be entrapped in it,
rejected the modern age. Scholem and Taubes turned Gnostic dualism dialectically and
promoted an antinomian investment in the world in order to overcome its current order.
For Taubes, contra Blumenberg, ‘Gnostic acosmism had very concrete implications for the
immanent spheres of history and politics – notably in the form of protest and revolt’ (No
Spiritual Investment, 162). For both, Scholem and Taubes, Walter Benjamin’s Politisch-
Theologisches Fragment, in which he promotes an antinomian and redemptive nihilism,
was an important source of inspiration, but with contrasting implications: ‘Taubes often
referred in his later works to Benjamin as a modern Paul or a modern Marcion, and
criticised Scholem’s strictly theological and Jewish reading of Benjamin’ (No Spiritual
Investment, 123). For Taubes, Paul’s apocalyptic theology ‘was from the outset also a form
of political protest that can be considered illiberal, anarchic or nihilistic’, writes Styfhals
(No Spiritual Investment, 156). Paul’s theology, according to Taubes, implied rejection of
the politics of his time and thus of the Roman imperial order.

Pauline Geopolitics à la Taubes

Taubes makes of Paul a postcolonial thinker avant la lettre (though it should be
remembered, that this is a controversial interpretation of Paul, that was questioned
by Løland in Pauline Ugliness). These Pauline geopolitics à la Taubes stand in sharp
contrast to the arcane geopolitics of Carl Schmitt (Korf and Rowan 2020). Schmitt was
obsessed by the kat-echon – the restrainer (qui tenit), which Paul mentions in his
Second Letter to the Thessalonians (sec. 2, 6). According to Paul, the Anti-Christ
accelerates the apocalypse to provoke the second coming of Christ, the Day of
Judgement, while kat-echon holds the apocalypse at bay. Groh (2016, 24) commented
that Schmitt’s obsession with the kat-echon displays an anti-eschatological eschatology;
Schmitt abides by the evil world as it is rather than hoping for redemption at the end
of times. Taubes could not disagree more, as Styfhals emphasises: Taubes considered
Schmitt ‘an apocalyptic thinker but one who wanted to restrain rather than attain the
Apocalypse. In Taubes’ view, Schmitt wanted to save the world from its end. While
Taubes, as a modern Gnostic, delegitimized the world, Schmitt, as a jurist, ”has to
legitimate the world as it is”’ (No Spiritual Investment, 2). The personal exchange
between Schmitt and Taubes started in the late 1970s, and Schmitt’s anti-eschatological
political theology of the counterrevolution has to be read against the background of his
unwillingness to confess any wrongdoing of his during the Nazi era. Taubes, the Jew,
stood on the other side of this gulf, and he was certainly aware of this positioning.
Indeed, Taubes’ fascination with Carl Schmitt did not blind him of the sharp contrast
between the two: Taubes, the Antinomian Apocalyptic Jew versus Schmitt, the reac­
tionary Gnostic of the counterrevolution.
Taubes thus offers thought-provoking intellectual resources for critical theory (and
critical geography). One territory of thought in critical theory, where his thought has
found fertile grounds is ‘Italian Theory’ (Minca 2016). Through their sustained interest in
Carl Schmitt, Italian left theorists have engaged Taubes’ thought as well. For example,
Giorgio Agamben: As Taubes, Agamben turns against Schmitt and proposes a conception
 GEOPOLITICS 9

of Gnosticism that is ‘resolutely revolutionary’ and comes into being, ‘when man . . . takes
possession of his own condition of being insurrected’ (Agamben 1993, 101). As Taubes,
Agamben is indebted to Benjamin’s messianism of the profane. Similarly, Massimo
Cacciari promotes a revolutionary Gnosticism à la Taubes in his early work on
a critique of political theology (Cacciari [1981] 2009). Roberto Esposito is less enthusiastic:
‘the political theology that Taubes endorses’, laments Esposito, ‘can only assert the
“negative” . . . Absorbed into theology, the political can only be expressed by negating
itself’ (Esposito 2015, 69). Esposito instead follows Deleuze to sabotage the political-
theological machine altogether and ‘hollow it [political theology] from within’ (Esposito
2015, 201). But that sabotage of the political-theological machine entices him to befriend
Heidegger (a trait shared by Agamben), whereas Taubes’s religious musicality enabled the
latter ‘[to get] around Heidegger in order to destroy the wisdom of this supposed wise
man’ (Pauline Ugliness, 68) and to avoid the trap of ‘Bultmannian naivetés’ (Taubes 2004,
66). Given what we know from Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’, Taubes’ religious musi­
cality is in no small measure a great theoretical antidote on offer for critical theorists and
political geographers alike against such naivetés.

Note
1. I borrow the term «territory of thought» from Roy (2015, 16), who defines it as a site of
struggle.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Benedikt Korf
Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, Zurich CH-
8057, Switzerland
benedikt.korf@geo.uzh.ch http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4836-9929
© 2023 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2202463