To Carl Schmitt, Letters and Reflections, by Jacob Taubes, translated by Keith Tribe, with an Introduction by Mike Grimshaw, New York: Columbia University Press, 120 pp., Hardcover, $26.00/£22.00, ISBN: 9780231154123, Publication Date: 2013.

Abstract

As a young boy in the 1930s, Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) and his family left Austria for Switzerland to escape Nazism. In Switzerland, Taubes received both ordination as a rabbi and a classical education in philosophy (culminating in a doctorate), before going on to further study with Leo Strauss in New York and Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem. Taubes held teaching positions at Harvard and Princeton before attaining permanent academic positions at Columbia and the Free University of Berlin, the last of which he held until his death in 1987. Ranging widely from Biblical hermeneutics to the philosophy of Heidegger to the interpretation of Hobbes1 to the political thought of Carl Schmitt, Taubes’s works take up an impressive range of issues in political theory, the sociology of religion, and the politics of his own time. Aside from his doctoral dissertation from the late 1940s, Occidental Eschatology (Abendländische Eschatologie), most of the writings which appeared during his lifetime took the form of essays, reviews, editions, opinion pieces, and contributions to edited volumes. All of his other monographs, from To Carl Schmitt (Ad Carl Schmitt, 1987) to his widely read Political Theology of Paul (Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, 1993), From Cult to Culture (Vom Kult zur Kultur, 1996), and Apocalypse and Politics (Apokalypse und Politik, 2017), were published posthumously. Curiously, the first of these posthumous works to be published in German, To Carl Schmitt, is the most recent to appear in English translation. This book assembles a number of Taubes’s occasional writings on Schmitt’s works, as well as part of their correspondence. A fuller scholarly edition2 of their correspondence appeared in German shortly before the appearance of Tribe’s 2013 English translation. There are many poignant, subtle, and sharp phrases of the rabbi, intellectual historian, and political theorist which are rendered aptly, even beautifully, in the translation, which is published by Columbia University Press under the title To Carl Schmitt, Letters and Reflections. However, there are also many places in this translation where Taubes’s quotation marks have disappeared, his ellipses have been omitted, and even whole phrases and sentences have been silently cut from the text. In some instances, Taubes’s quotation marks signaling direct quotations from Heidegger have been omitted, in other instances Taubes’s sentences have been truncated and his claims have been altered. Here I will focus on some of the alterations and truncations relevant to political philosophers and historians of political thought wishing to think with (or against) Jacob Taubes, as well as those wishing to reconstruct Taubes’s political thought. Taubes’s Ad Carl Schmitt, Gegenstrebige Fügung presents a detailed portrait and radical critique of anti-Jewish sentiment in the thought of Carl Schmitt and his circle, as well as the prevalence of such sentiments in the early years of the German Federal Republic more broadly. However, in Tribe’s English translation this portrait and critique are at times dampened or even suppressed and omitted altogether. Two instances of this facet of the translation are particularly noteworthy. First, in the third section of the collection, Gegenstrebige Fügung presents four excerpts or citations from letters written by Carl Schmitt to the extreme right publicist Armin Mohler in which Schmitt discusses his relation to Jacob Taubes. In the first of these citations, Schmitt in 1952 relates the story of sharing a letter written by Taubes to a fellow traveler in the politics of the German Right: