States of Exile

“Interiorization is not a dividing line between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’: it signifies a crisis within Jewish eschatology itself--in Pauline Christianity as well as in the Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth century. How else,” Taubes asks, “can redemption be defined after the Messiah has failed to redeem the external world except by turning inward?” Jacob Taubes, a man beyond petty distinctions between left and right, theism and atheism, is an enigma after my own heart : I discussed Taubes’s attraction to one of the leaders of the radical right wing in Israel, Geula Cohen. As Taubes’s own letters to Hugo Bergman demonstrate, it is impossible to separate his libidinal interest in her from his theopolitical curiosity regarding the Zionist 'political messianism.' I too have a hard time separating libidinal interest from theopolitical curiosity. The eschaton is a delayed orgasm, and the creative tension till that point is reached (internally or externally) is what drives th...