No Installement: Thresholds

Leonard Kaplan

Thresholds again and again

Taubes, Jacob Taubes is my scene of instruction. More particularly his The Political Theology of Paul. The text: he was dying of cancer, teaching in a Christian Seminary and delivering this his final opus before the Protestant Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Heidelberg Jan. 14, 1987-a four-day course, some heavy weights present.

An obscure scholar, no. Known to the cognoscenti. The man who prompted a generation and more of work realizing that Paul was a Jew, felt himself always a Jew but not “the idiot Jesus,” his words, and the founder of a new religion, one that eschewed law, went for mercy over righteousness and austerity and removed the mark, circumcision.

The law after all was bound on the heart why the penis as well? My question. A displacement from killing the ram and not Isaac? A move from the primitive to the sublimated? From the exterior to the internal. Before Luther, well before Jewish guilt internalized without Mommy but from the killing and substitution of Daddy the Father for, the son who Lyotard taught had to be better, smarter than the father or why bother. At least the Jewish Oedipus.

Here Freud, Of Moses and Monotheism as Taubes reminds. Agnatan, the Egyptian God, monotheism before Yahweh. Assman writes about this and he is one of those who collaborated to make the lectures a book. A Freud not making himself great as founder but the teacher pointing toward the rage against the man, the father and raising the stakes to the heights, heaven or to the levels of Merkava mystic. Freud, the stoic Jew, who smoked the damned cigar while his jaw degenerated with cancer. No illusions. No Pauline Jew he.

Taubes a student of Scholem who brought scholarship to Kabbalah and Taubes’ teacher who he so offended that the professor never forgave him. A different story but maybe also about killing the father. Something about Taubes denying the distinction that Scholem made between Jews and Christians, externalizing with the people or looking in. The story has to be more complex and Taubes could not gain access even when he proposed a Feshrift for Scholem. No.

The setting of his discursive talk (his not mine) over the several days was to have Taubes talk on Corinthians. But in the face of his own death, this self-described “poor Job” determined Romans his text. The text for law, lawyers, for wiping out the practice of the Pharisees of whom we think him a member. Though Taubes sees him as moving toward the Zealots, of Masada fame. A bit on “poor Job.” Taubes dying and knowing of his own brilliance and lack of acclaim, in pain, using literally his last breaths to champion Paul and making at least the scholarly community know that it got Paul wrong-very wrong.

The text says political theology. Carl Schmitt was the political theologist of that time and place. He, the student of Hans Kelson, the legal positivist of his generation, himself the teacher of the best and brightest in Germany including some of the Frankfurt School, interlocutor with Western Europe’s intellectual elite became the jurisprude for the Nazi’s. Romans, the Pauline text became the point of contest between Taubes and Schmitt. Schmitt figures in the text and is accorded respect, with Taubes very much aware of Schmitt’s attack on Jews. Taubes is very much a Jew in fact a rabbi, in fact one who taught at the Jewish Theological Center in New York, the orthopraxy home of American Jewish Conservatism. Taubes, a Pauline Jew, much to unpack there. Schmitt figures in the text and in an important supplement to the text. Schmitt who made politics ontological contra Plato. Politics before the individual. Schmitt drew on Paul who’s politics, to Caesar his due. What due? A dominant interpretation the state to Caesar, the conscience to the Church. Paul thought that “in the time remaining” do not mess with Rome, Jewish prudence. The Messiah was imminent. And what Church? Peter’s? A universal church presaged in the Hebrew Bible for all. Not a brick and mortar church with dues and building and food and ritual committees. This is the Church that the Jew Taubes commits to. This is different from Rosenzweig’s allocation: Jews particularized; Christians universal.

Where are the thresholds? Theological. Forget Athens and Jerusalem. Plato had a high truth- the good, what more – metaphysics. The text put together after Taubes’ death and after the publication of his former work on the history of apocalypse and Gnosticism is discursive and nastily funny, ranging and remarkable. Taubes was dying and knew it. He had much to say and some to smack. He belittles the Buber of the Hasidic tales and his assumption of the old bearded wise man guise but respects the older more serious Buber despite the beard, Taubes thinking an affectation.

Rosenzweig and The Star yes. Honored, particularly for digging theological essence from ritual, the star of David and perhaps for according Christianity a place without abandoning Judaism-shades of Paul. Not Taubes’ solution.

Names, not nominalism, feature in the text. The names: real people representing threshold moments of thought. I will not mention all. Some are mentioned with respect, some to take off the board. Krister Stendahl, A leading Pauline scholar who also remarked on Paul’s continued Jewish commitment is mentioned with teasing respect, not clear of Taubes’ influence there. Scholem too. Particularly his analyses of the Seventeenth Century (false) Messiah Sabbatai Zvi.

Scholem analyzed the history of “the manic depressive” furthered by his prophet Nathan who made him realize himself the Messiah and who provoked much of those Jews who were illiterate to follow him to their doom, hundreds of thousand until he was captured by the Turks and converted to Islam.

Scholem comments on this Messianic transvaluation of values the law turned on its head, good from sin. Taubes does not declare Sebattai Zvi false. He does invoke Nietzsche, particularly the man of transvaluation of values. Nietzsche’s target was Paul and here finally we get an explicit threshold. Paul takes the world into Christianity, a theology of the losers for Nietzsche, a slave mentality impressed on the world. A giving up the world for a better world. Now we are into it. For Paul, the Jew, apostle to gentiles transvalues Moses. Yet stays a Jew. Paul, hardly a Sabbatai Zvi, not any type of Messiah takes on Moses.

Thresholds: Moses founding the law dictated from Yahweh.

The threshold from Judaism to Christianity so decisive for Paul was not so straight. A second century reader of Paul, a close reader, reads Paul to say that the God of the Hebrew Bible is the creator but not the alien distant God of Jesus and of Christianity. Maricon, his name, apostate though he became had a broad and large following. The past you say. Well less distant than it would seem. Marcion theorized that the, God of creation, of the Hebrew Bible was a God of vengeance, justice yes but not the God of love. One can appreciate such a reading from the Book of Job. And remember Taubes called himself a poor Job. Taubes is not a Marcion.

But Carl Schmitt picked up on this Marcionite heresy. Schmitt, the lapsed Catholic who placed sovereignty in the executive, Hitler. He got it in his own Germany from Harnack, a prominent Protestant theologian who wrote on Marcion and whose father had written on Marcion. The heresy lingered and fit the Nazi credo nicely. The God of the Hebrew Bible was not he God of the volk. Halleluiah.

So back to thresholds. Paul takes on Moses and proffers Abraham. Two thresholds Moses and the law and Paul and the excision of law for love “In the time remaining” because the second coming was imminent? Paul not me.

Paul transvalued the law to love, he reduced distinctions man, woman, etc. All in Christ. No more law, the Pharisees were getting carried away with law making?

I mentioned names, names guideposts, thresholds for Taubes Nietzsche for transvaluation. Scholem picking up on this in Sabbatai Zvi who made evil, transcendence through sin.

Another name, Freud. Taubes values Freud for his lucidity, his prose. But more for his insight into the murderous rage from infantility to kill the father, the maker hemming us in with law and coercing the renunciation of instinctual gratification. Kill the bastard. The Greeks gave us the name Oedipus. He didn’t know it was his father he killed. Sure, but he killed an old man at the crossroad who got in his way. A displacement to avoid the psychological truth? But a partial Freud, not the one of “the Future of an Illusion.

Moses the stutter who delivers the tablets that according to the Rabbis did not contain the whole of the law, the Oral Torah, reduced after the Temples destroyed to the written Mishna. Lots of oral God talk. But was it all law? Moses who challenged God who threatened to break his oath to warrant the selected Jewish people to a future destiny and to rather destroy them for the people’s transgression. Taubes suggests that God’s forgiveness resulted in a shaken people. Yom Kippur, fear and trembling, awareness of the tenuous bound with Yahweh.

Taubes makes clear the dread exemplified by the wearing of a shroud (prayer shawl) by men ritualistically. So much of Jewish ritual to ward off death, to allay a vengeful God.

Taubes claims that Paul “outbids” Moses: The Sermon on the Mount mirrors and “surpasses” the reception at Sinai. Jesus even fled and then returned from Egypt. Paul the founder displaces Moses, the receiver of the law. Paul opens the promise to the gentiles expanding, universalizing the promise.

Taubes invokes Freud further for the insight that elaborating ritual, law allays anxiety. What anxiety? The anxiety that comes from responsibility where the old- time notion of virtue no longer obtains. With law at least one knows the boundary, the threshold. Taubes poor Job knows that even abject ritual wordship will not work. Consider Job.

So, if Paul is reducing the law to love is that easier? What boundary to love? Levinas plays with or actually demands the love of the other reflected on the other’s face with no required reciprocity. Levinas the Jew who mocked Cassirer in favor of Heidegger to his eternal regret. He told this tale to Taubes, but it is mentioned in the literature abundantly. Levinas did not finally love Heidegger who to his own stated loss he could never forgive. Love invokes guilt. Nietzsche saw this in Paul. So, what is the antinomian Paul? And how does that play into even a Marcion alien God if that excused the jurisprude cum Nazi Carl Schmitt. What threshold here?

Schmitt has become a writer who continues to provide critical leverage to those, left included, who critique the liberal left. He clearly saw that Weimar liberalism was subject to corporate rivalry for gain and that the goods divided by lobbying interests were not in advance of a greater good. More importantly he saw deadlock in the liberal state. Weber got around this problem invoking the charismatic leader. The state of exception, who would decide in stalemate, that was the question? The ruler, who became the Fuhrer, Hitler then Trump now? Schmitt was no fool.

Taubes though engaged him in letters and in person on Paul and the Jews. Taubes claims that he taught Schmitt that Paul was as apostle from the Jews but stayed a Jew and stayed chosen by God even if abused on earth and therefore not to be despised.

Another threshold? A recognition that antisemitism is not Pauline and contra to Paul? But even if Taubes really impressed Schmitt he did not solve the state of exception problem even the liberal state faces. Nor does Pauline love solve the Pauline directive. Love unanswered can make for rage, depression exception, rejection. Guilt does not trump action even if it leaves despair. God after all kept hardening Pharaoh’s heart. Ok he did not love the Jews. Paul’s love has not helped either. We are in the return of the return where Nietzsche’s heroism is a joke, Pauline love fails in the heart of the economic and Taubes has taken us from threshold to threshold. Each with promise and disillusionment. We have not become either Jew or Christian with law or love in basic institutional commitments to save our lives let alone our souls if such counts for us this new threshold.

Taubes has bequeathed a rich set of thresholds, each of which imperfectly hold in degenerated form. Love or law in the wilderness: each necessary, each imperfect.

False Messiahs do not help, and grace is given not achieved. So, we go on going on through the ruins hopefully taking moments of pleasure as Taubes does remind trying to be more than a creature among other creatures.

Moses and Paul warrant a visibility above and through the jungle, beyond mere survival. Still we stand, most of us at a threshold. We have not as a human community walked through.

______________________________________

The Leviathan by Benjamin Pierce

______________________________________

The Leviathan by Benjamin Pierce

I have taken on a position on a whaling ship—perhaps that is how a desk worker would put it—I have signed my name to the manifest. I have done so to save my sanity, at least my peace of mind, which I cannot long maintain on solid ground. There, it seems that I could walk in any direction, though in the city there are a thousand obstacles, a thousand generations of obstacles, before me.

Yet I can walk a path right to the docks—as if the openness of the ocean brought itself to the most crowded streets, past the highest gates and the most formidable guards, if only one is committed to go all the way to the ship, to be on the ship when it departs; if there is any doubt no doubt the gates will lock, the crowds will gather, the decree will go out heard by all others: and the way will close.

Yet I am resolved that I shall be on the ship.

On the ocean, one cannot leave the ship, though there is the flat chaos of the water in every direction—it stretches out as only a desert stretches out on the land; perhaps further—but to leave the confines of the vessel you are on, is to not merely perish, but to be utterly swallowed up, as if you had never been there.

Yet you can simply take a lifeboat—you say—always seeking to be contrary. It is not so, this is doubly false. For you are yet upon a vessel, and it is yet more confined—you have made the strictures of the ship so definite that you can reach out your hands to both borders of your confinement. More, the ship itself has stores and a size to resist the waves and storms and the denizens all of which must overwhelm, must swallow up your smaller craft.

It is this certainty, of my confinement and it’s necessity, with which I meet the false horizon and keep at bay the anxiety that land must bring me—the sense that I should be able to walk at any distance in any direction if I choose—whether there is a reason or destination or not—in fact, what can any goal or destination be but a way to place measure and direction on a wandering I may undertake anyway—or so it seems. Finally, no appointment can be kept, no entry gained, no message delivered but by accident—and then because somehow there has been an error in the strategy of obstacles and delays that imposes order on the world.

This, also, is why the life upon whatever ship I have ventured upon will keep my sense of order, my very sanity: everything here is done to a purpose, aimed at survival—arrival is only a result, a symptom obtained by survival. There is no obstacle to place in front of what might be done, and there is nothing else to do—even the Captain, given the fiat of an emperor, of an ancient law whose authorship is forgotten, he is bound in what he may command, though that command, having issued from him, is absolute.

Our Captain is Ahab.

Ahab is a formidable man, a captain that one could imagine commands the waves and the winds, though he must in fact obey their necessity as we do, must directly answer to these as the only law before him. One can imagine that pirates and whales alike must flee from his gaze if he but directs it upon them. Even, one imagines, the barnacles themselves must drop from our hull when he has directed his attention to them. In fact, Ahab has the means to carry our in his words and actions the things he intends to do, he knows what words and actions these are, and furthermore, there is nothing contrary in him to check him. It is in this way that our Captain Ahab has the power that we imagine him to have, as much a force as the necessity that he obeys.

It is true that Ahab is missing his lower left leg, that he employs a whale-bone substitute in it’s place—does this not fit him supremely for his task? For what is this ship but a vast artifice for all of us, strapped onto our equally vast inadequacy?

But must Ahab not have made an error to be deprived of his leg, you ask—ever the voice of argument, distant as I have tried to make you. Yet you fail to understand the lesson. No amount of prudence or sea-craft could have saved Ahab’s leg: we are never adequate to our voyages upon the ocean, to our very life anywhere on this world, not even upon the dry land. Our ships bear us out upon mere possibility, mere craft. They bring us to the place where hazard is made naked, not clothed in the bandages we wrap around it, as if we could buffer the hazard of the world, as if we are wrapping up our weaknesses as we would a freshly-bleeding stump.

In fact, where we bundle up the world against the danger poking up from it, we never had a limb to lose. Ahab’s whalebone leg, the stump beneath it, make him a symbol yet more than an example of our condition, on this ship, everywhere in the world when we have returned to land.

Our ship is the Pequod. In fact, the Pequod is of a piece with our Captain; as if they had come into the world together: as if, when the Pequod were built, Ahab walked out upon the deck: it is not so, his story is well-known, news of him is whispered on all the docks. Yet behold the ship, resembling deep jaws from all of the ivory mounted upon it’s prow, the bones of old prey poking everywhere, as if this ship were made a monster of deep hunger by the many such monsters it has captured, rendered, swallowed. This ship is ancient, and more, it has been shaped all along by the history it has heaped upon itself: if Ahab did not, in fact, walk out upon the deck when the ship was crafted, the ship has shaped itself, even as it has voyaged and returned, for the day when Ahab would walk upon it’s deck, even as our Captain has been shaped, even to the loss of his original leg, to the time when he would stand here, in command of it.

Our Captain bears a secret in his breast, though every man upon the ship knows it, has heard it aloud: Ahab has set this ship forth to hunt and capture the Leviathan.

Perhaps it was the Leviathan who bit off Ahab’s leg. Perhaps he knows that the whale that took his leg in a former voyage cannot be found, cannot be known again—who can fail to know the Leviathan, if they can but spy it out?

Surely, you say, to hunt the Leviathan—this is not even possible, to find the Leviathan, and if the Leviathan were to be found, to be approached—this creature is of such might, such magnitude—of such elusiveness equal to it’s might that this goal is as impossible—and as perversely intended—as any of the conventions of land?

Yet it is this very necessity of intent that Ahab must obey, though it is a thing he bears in his breast, not a condition of the wind.

Surely the Leviathan would smash Ahab’s ship with one stroke of the tail; sink it with one vast spout of water. Yet more certainly, the ship can never approach the Leviathan, can never see more than the suggestion that this vast being has abandoned the surface just now, at the farthest reaches of sight. Can it not be that this is just a whirlpool, that the Leviathan was never here?

And yet this is why Ahab must still search the ocean, every patch of every ocean, saying that he seeks the Leviathan—but perhaps there is a secret deeper than Ahab’s hatred for the Leviathan. For perhaps he knows that the Leviathan can never be approached, and that if it could be spotted, that the sight alone would drive his crew to mutiny—would excuse him from giving the final, fatal command.

Perhaps Ahab is Sancho Panza pretending to be Don Quixote—amused by the misadventure he has advised, yet distant from it’s consequence—but he is bounded in this ship as all of us: only if he were Quixote, in fact, could he fail to see his predicament is common—only Quixote could suppose himself to be Panza here.

And yet there is no certainty to be had by supposing in these ways: new doubts, monstrous in shape and vast beyond even their source emerge from the depths. For is the Leviathan, elusive as it is, to be so used, as a destination that cannot be reached, as prey that must be turned away from at the first sign of a spoor? Will the Leviathan allow it’s own elusiveness, it’s formidable repute, to render it in to the basis of an excuse, a fantasy, a pretense?

For this necessity rests alike in the very necessity of Ahab’s inner secret plan, to hunt the Leviathan exactly as it cannot be done—as if it had to be done—and, by him, and for this reason, it must be so. The Leviathan, just as captive to its’ own necessity, must therefore surprise this plan with the only success that it can ever have.

Surely, in it’s own vast nature an irritation must arise from this intent—at first, no more consequential than a grain of sand—but does not such an irritant, in the breast of emperors, bring about calamity, decrees of a capricious and destructive intent, the declaration of inquisitions and war? More, are not such irritants the cause of pearls, that the clam, all helpless, must suffer to be made, though it had resolved to suffer, to forget, to summon within the oblivion of the ocean to swallow this one grain of sand?

Therefore, from out Ahab’s very scheme to declare a hunt that cannot commence, must the Leviathan suffer itself to be seen, even to be injured by harpoons, to correct this diminishing intent. The very plan, to set out upon the ocean with goal that will never be meant—dooms our very ship to wreck by this very beast, this legend that in fact is a thing of solid flesh, that could not have been met in any other way. To have merely set out in disbelief, or with a certainty that the Leviathan, whatever other hazards there are to be met—could have seen a shipful of scoffers and a ship full of cautious, but confident men sail in sight of one another, exchange their passing greetings, never knowing that the moment they met in parallel then parted, the Leviathan had traveled in the fathoms juts below them. The Leviathan is not to be met but Ahab’s secreter plan with in his secret plan.

And how can I know of this? Even as I must venture upon this ship to secrete a hard but smooth and lustrous shell upon a grain of irritation I may not touch, let alone remove to consider it directly, though this condemns me to keep it in my own deepest recesses. Only that can prevent me from knowing it directly—and how else could I both discern and yet refuse myself direct sight of Ahab’s secret plan and the Leviathan’s secret counter to it? For I do not know that I know any of this.

Yet there is no time to consider—or even to look away from any of this.

Already see the water-spout of the Leviathan as it approached us – for Leviathan draws near, already Leviathan is the only thing upon the horizon where the mid-day sun had been.

This is a calamity, the only true calamity that there is, for all that has been planned for in the depths to come to the surface, to be made manifest and real where it had been perfected in the shadows of the will that escapes any contemplation of itself: the shattering of other plans or hopes is no calamity but only the falling away, the casting-off of all that we held up to conceal what has all along been intended, even agreed upon, by all who meet the calamity–

But there is no time for this! There is only the smashing of our boats as they are lowered, there is only the defiance and command of our Captain, Ahab—there is only the smearing together of time as we pursue or are more exactly pursued by the Leviathan—as three days bleed together as a single panicked hour—panicked as though we could somehow fail to fulfill the outcome to which we have all along been traveling.

But see—now I am overthrown into the water—am I to be excluded?

There is only my scrambling-up on the only flotsam—or is it jetsam—that I can find—there is only my witness as the Leviathan at last sunders the Pequod itself, yet seeing Ahab fixing himself to the Leviathan by a harpoon and it’s line—as if they can be merged more fully than their common intent had done long ago—there is only this bundle of our Captain and our quarry vanishing amidst the rubble of our ship. Our ship has no need to be whole for it has arrived. All of it is jetsam, discarded on purpose.

I must ride out upon a coffin—I shall be rescued by happenstance or if not I shall surely ride this coffin to the shore to tell it all—for my telling shall be the final flaw in all of this which has unfolded—and I am not “escaped to tell thee”–and I am not alone – for who among us has ever escaped anything at all?