The UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory presents a symposium, co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies,
on Monday Feb. 27 at 5:30 [PLEASE NOTE TIME CHANGE]
in Royce 306 by
Martin Treml
(Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin)
entitled
“Paulinian Enmity: A story of the correspondence(s) of Jacob Taubes & Carl Schmitt”
Between 1977 and 1980, after two decades of an intense, mutual, yet indirect acknowledgment, Jacob Taubes, philosopher of religion and rabbinically trained Jew, exchanged with Carl Schmitt, Nazi crown jurist and theorist of the state of exception, letters and postcards. Taubes as well as Schmitt are often regarded as charlatans and demonic manipulators, but both of them are also remembered by many as some of the intellectually and spiritually most fascinating figures they ever encountered. In any case, there is no doubt that Taubes has made major contributions to the scholarship of apocalyptic thinking and messianic gnosticism. He has taken the field from the mere study of historical phenomena to a penetrating investigation of the dialectics of secularization and resacralization constitutive of what we call “religion.” In a similar way, Schmitt can be credited with fundamental insights into the relationship of theology and the study of law, between decision-making and the persistent difference between friend and enemy. The intellectual dialogue between Taubes and Schmitt in their correspondence took place before the background of a political, but also academic state of crisis in West Germany. The aftershocks of the late 1960s student movement were still evident in most if not all of the country’s institutions and discourses. This aftermath can be found Taubes’s and Schmitt’s discussions about ardent questions of political theology, such as: Saint Paul as the first illiberal Jew, Thomas Hobbes as the thinker of world civil war avant la lettre, Erik Peterson and Leo Strauss as sharp critics of the work of Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin as a mutual reference point. All of these concerns intersect with the central concerns of their respective thinking: the certainty of a liberating revelation; Catholicism as universal form; apocalyptical sentiment; the enduring power of the katechon set into the cold space of decision. Their correspondences were linked what may be called “Paulinian enmity.” The Taubes and Schmitt letters, which have been published in Germany last year, are now presented to the US academic public for the first time.
** Excerpts from the recent collection of letters between Schmitt and Taubes, edited by Professor Treml, are available here:
(Letters 1-5, 7 trans. by Timothy Edwards; Letter 6 trans. by Dana Hollander)
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