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Article

“Forever Strange in This World.” Susan Taubes’ Diasporic Thinking

Department of Humanities, University Pompeu Fabra, 08005 Barcelona, Spain
Religions 2025, 16(8), 1074; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081074
Submission received: 10 June 2025 / Revised: 11 August 2025 / Accepted: 15 August 2025 / Published: 19 August 2025
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rabbinic Thought between Philosophy and Literature)

Abstract

This essay explores the philosophical core of Susan Taubes’ thought through her diasporic ontology—a philosophy of becoming that does not derive from statics but precedes and reconfigures them. Instead of treating exile as loss or as a deviation from origin, Taubes roots her thinking in displacement, challenging fixed identities, theological certainties, and static notions of belonging. Although overshadowed by her husband Jacob and, due to the fragmentation of her work and her tragic death, largely neglected—with the important exception of the work of Elliot R. Wolfson, who in recent years has contributed enormously to her discovery in the field of Jewish philosophy—Taubes’ writings offer a radical rethinking of Jewish thought as a diasporic identity grounded in hermeneutic openness. Through a close reading of her letters and novel Divorcing, this paper reveals how her diasporic thinking—also evident in her critical engagement with Heidegger—forms the basis for rejecting theological dogma, Zionist ideologies, and the reification of meaning, while opening space for a lived understanding of Judaism. Moreover, I show how, by accepting worldliness as brokenness, her post-apocalyptic hopelessness does not collapse into nihilism but instead clears the ground for radical openness, where meaning emerges not from redemption but from the refusal to close the interpretive horizon. More than a thinker to be studied, Taubes enables a change of perspective: through her lens, concepts like Heimat or identity lose their static authority and are re-seen from the standpoint of exile.

1. Introduction

In a revealing letter to her husband Jacob, from 8 October 1950, Susan Taubes writes: “And I begin to grow into my life of wandering + migration even as the peasant grows into the climates of the land, and even as the peasant after a while learns to love the hoe whereon he breaks his back, the lands of his sweat and the stubborn seasons—so the wanderer, the uprooted, learns to love the dusty routes, the trunks, the warehouses, freight trucks and ticket-booths, the packing and unpacking. One grows into a familiarity with all the strange faces of Fate—slowly a pattern lights through the daily toil and redeems the sweat, backache and anxiety; The moment comes when the exile also celebrates his fate” (Taubes 2011, p. 42). Rather than perceiving her exile as a traumatic experience to be overcome, Susan—born a Jew in Hungary, who emigrated to the USA with her father in 1939 and spent her life in constant movement between Europe and America1—reconceives it as a form of rootedness in motion. Naming herself as the wanderer, the uprooted, and the exiled, she oscillates between the condemnation and the celebration of her fate.2 Her existential and ontological reflection on exile lies at the heart of her diasporic ontology, a way of thinking that takes movement, dislocation, and rupture as its primary orientation. Unlike metaphors of nomadism that emerge from a stable background, in Taubes’ case, the movement is a prius: not derived from the static, but rather a ground from which the fixed can be interrogated. Exile, Taubes argues, is not a nostalgic loss but a deep engagement with the unfamiliar, where constant movement itself becomes a form of belonging and the dispersed elements of diasporic life form not chaos, but a new kind of order, a lived pattern.3 Susan is someone who has found a pattern in unpredictability, a rhythm in the unrooted, and shifts from nostalgia to transformation.
Despite being largely and unfairly forgotten—partly due to the overshadowing presence of her husband, the fragmentation of her work, and her tragic death—Taubes’ writing situates her within modern Jewish philosophy. Her work reflects a profound tension between hermeneutics, literature, and the radical rethinking of Jewish epistemologies, offering a pathway for understanding Jewish tradition as a living, evolving narrative.4 In this paper, I argue that her diasporic ontology provides the philosophical foundation for her rejection of theological certainty and offers a lens for rethinking Jewish identity. By diasporic ontology, I mean a philosophy of becoming that serves as a conceptual framework to interpret her work, highlighting the fluid, constantly shifting nature of identity and thought at the core of her resistance to dogmatism. This nomadic mode of thought underlies her interpretation of Heidegger, whom she reads not from a standpoint of rooted existential authenticity, but as a thinker of existential and ontological exile.
While recognizing the Gnostic elements in Heidegger’s ontology—its estrangement from the world and latent nihilism—Taubes reverses its logic: rather than clinging to the hope of redemption or ontological grounding, she embraces a post-apocalyptic hopelessness, where all metaphysical frameworks have collapsed. This hopelessness, however, is not despair but a clearing—an openness that resists final meaning and invites ethical relation within the brokenness of existence. From this perspective, her nomadic thought leads to a radical refusal of any doctrinal rigidity or fixed definition of Judaism, including its political reification in Zionism. Her linguistic skepticism arises from the same impulse: a deep mistrust of hermeneutic closure, philosophical system-building, and academic discourse, all of which she perceives as forms of symbolic domination. Language, for Taubes, is most alive when it is broken and intimate—capable of bearing the weight of rupture without covering it over with conceptual closure.
I owe a significant intellectual debt to the recent scholarship of Elliot R. Wolfson, whose work has powerfully highlighted Susan Taubes’ importance as a philosopher (see Wolfson 2023, 2025). My notion of diasporic ontology is drawn from his interpretation of errancy in her philosophy, especially his reading of her acceptance of brokenness as a constitutive dimension of existence. While I take great inspiration from his analysis, my reading shifts the emphasis toward the connection between diasporic ontology and linguistic skepticism. I interpret exile not only as the mark of a lost ground or a longing, but as an ontological prius inseparable from a form of linguistic skepticism. In this perspective, the condition of diaspora is mirrored in language itself, whose meanings—staged particularly in the open hermeneutic of Taubes—are never fully settled but remain in constant displacement. This connection between diasporic ontology and linguistic skepticism becomes more explicit in its political dimension, as a rejection of the reification of meaning and of dogmatism, including forms of nationalism reduced to a fixed identity.5
By examining the interconnected themes of diasporic thought, anti-dogmatic Judaism, and linguistic skepticism, this essay aims to uncover the philosophical bedrock of Taubes’ work. In this paper, I will trace the peculiarity of her thought through a ping-pong between her letters to Jacob and her novel Divorcing, leaving aside her academic and other published literary writings.6 Through this lens, I aim to show how Taubes’ thought offers a unique and dynamic contribution to the discourse surrounding Jewish thought, one that transcends static dogma and embraces the brokenness of life. This essay deliberately refrains from offering a systematic historization of Taubes’ intellectual development over time. Rather than tracing a linear evolution or periodizing her work, I focus on the underlying philosophical tension that runs through her writings—particularly the dialectical and fragmentary interplay between her letters and her novel Divorcing. This methodological choice stems from the conviction that Taubes’ thought resists historicist closure and that her intellectual gestures—even when temporally distant—reflect a persistent wrestling with identity, exile, and the brokenness of life. The selected corpus is thus not intended to be representative of her complete oeuvre or reducible to a chronology of ideological shifts, but to foreground a subterranean coherence that emerges precisely through dissonance and discontinuity. This approach is aware of the possible contradictions that may appear within her correspondence—such as her ambivalent stance toward Judaism, which at times seems affirming, at times distancing—but seeks to treat such tensions not as inconsistencies to be resolved, but as expressions of the fragility and volatility of belonging that define her philosophical sensibility. In this sense, the “ping-pong” reading is not a denial of change, but an attempt to render audible the rhythm of a thought that moves erratically yet meaningfully across the fragments of her writing.

2. Zigeunerleben

In her letters to Jacob, Taubes frequently describes herself as homeless and in exile (see Taubes 2011, p. 105, see also Pareigis 2011), a state she marks as central to her identity. In one poignant moment, she writes: “I am walking ‘the ways of the world’ walking through the connecting paths of nomads, wanderers, exiles” (Taubes 2011, p. 41). These words reflect her deep identification with the condition of exile—an identity that is not merely geographical but existential. This exile is a loss without return and a condition without arrival, marking the permanent disjunction between self and other. However, it is not just a personal condition, but—as we will see—a Jewish form of life, where the longing for and denial of a homeland are intertwined.
In her novel Divorcing, Taubes further explores the theme of wandering and exile through the character of Sophie Blind,7 who embodies the restless, exiled soul that Taubes herself describes in her letters. Sophie Blind is the alter-ego of the writer, embodied as a tormented, wandering soul who has travelled all her life. It is not by chance that also in Divorcing the plane and also the back and forth between Paris and America are recurring images. Beyond her way of life that pathologically refused to be settled too long in a place, there is also another aspect that is philosophically relevant, since travelling is a way of experiencing a different temporality.8 Existence is interpreted in its temporal ek-static movement as the only way to be one with time’s flow.
The novel begins with an oscillation between sleep and wakefulness, marked by a dreamlike atmosphere. Sophie’s state of confusion—uncertain whether she is dreaming, remembering, or living—mirrors the ontological groundlessness that characterizes her existence. In the first chapter, Sophie’s death is depicted not as an end but as an expansion in Paris, where her body becomes part of the city’s life, transcending individual boundaries. Sophie embraces the whole, and the particles of her body become “ghostly eidolon” (Taubes 2020, p. 16). She writes: “My body growing enormous, its thousands of trillions of cells suddenly set free, spread, speeded, pressed jubilant, rushing to the seven gates of Paris, out Porte de Clichy, Porte de la Chapelle, Porte d’Orléans, Porte de Versailles, the fingers of my outstretched arms plunged into the woods of Boulogne and Vincennes” (Taubes 2020, pp. 10–11). She describes the expansion of her body, her cells rushing jubilantly to the gates of Paris, a metaphor for the collapse of the principium individuationis. This description reflects Taubes’ philosophy of becoming, where existence is never fixed but always in flux, shaped by an ongoing process of transformation.

3. Diasporic Ontology

According to my reading, Taubes attempts to sketch out a philosophy of becoming, an ongoing movement that rejects any form of fixation. This dynamic view is vividly encapsulated in the title of her book Divorcing, which suggests a process rather than a fixed state, and is echoed throughout many passages in her writings. The title, however, was not Taubes’ own choice but that of the publishing house; she had originally proposed the darker To America and Back in a Coffin. This alternative framing, with its stark imagery of mortality, stands in tension with the more open-ended, nomadic resonance of Divorcing. While the publisher’s title underscores the processual and diasporic thrust of her thought, Taubes’ own choice hints at a countercurrent in which movement is shadowed by fatality. Acknowledging this divergence is essential to my reading: rather than smoothing it over, I take this tension between titles as symptomatic of the oscillation—central to Taubes’ work—between an affirmation of perpetual becoming and an acute awareness of the finitude that haunts it.
This same oscillation structures the novel itself. Divorcing, like Sophie’s life, is portrayed as an endless process—one that is constantly unfolding. Sophie’s desire for divorce represents a rejection of stasis, in contrast to her husband Ezra, who seeks to deny it. While Ezra embodies the static, legalistic dimension of their relationship—anchored in control and permanence—Sophie figures the anarchic antithesis to this ontological confinement, affirming movement, rupture, and the refusal of imposed order. Sophie’s struggle to break free from the fixed state that Ezra represents reflects Taubes’ deeper philosophical concern with the tension between becoming and crystallization. One of the most poignant lines in the novel, “I know God can’t appear, he is still becoming,” encapsulates the essence of her philosophy: everything is in a constant state of flux, even divinity.
The concept of exile as a dynamic interplay of absence, loss, and perpetual movement naturally leads to Taubes’ exploration of diasporic ontology. Just as exile is defined by perpetual motion, so too does Taubes’ metaphysical framework reject fixed identities, seeing existence as a process of unfolding rather than being. In a letter to Jacob dated 26 September 1950, she critiques the binary of being and nothing, asserting that movement, becoming, and “doing” are essential to understanding existence. She writes: “There is movement, Becoming, ‘Eros,’ or quite prosaically, DOING—neither in the pure Being of Parmenides nor in the pure Nothing of the Indians can ‘doing’ conceive and bring about itself: nor does the Indian ‘passivity’ escape the circle of ‘doing,’ the circle of polarity, and it derives its power from being a term of the polarity. I realize all this is ‘metaphysical,’ whereas your approach is more mystical” (Taubes 2011, p. 27, but also pp. 92–93). For Taubes, the tertium datur—the third term bridging being and nothing—relates to the “is,” which maintains the dialectical tension between these opposites. As she writes in another letter from 6 October 1950: “For the separation of light and darkness, so that there is light + darkness, and the separation of Being and Nothing, so that the world is and is lifted out of the ambiguity of Being—Nothing—this is the mystery of the IS, the holy fiat of the Creator, a mystery because it can never be ‘deduced’ from any manipulation, calculation, or prestidigitation of Being—Nothing” (Taubes 2011, p. 38). In this passage—which can be read as a reinterpretation of the Hegelian speculative proposition—Taubes highlights the dialectical core of her ontology, where being and nothing are not ends but ongoing processes. Her philosophy, rooted in this tension, challenges the notion of fixed identities and reflects her broader existential stance: life is not a static condition but an ongoing, dynamic process. For Taubes, the interplay between being and nothing points to continual becoming always in motion. This wandering allows her to embrace fluidity and transformation as the essence of existence, mirroring the exilic condition she both philosophically and existentially inhabits. In this context, the exile becomes an ontological condition, one that disrupts any attempt to fix dogmatic assumptions. The continuous interplay of these opposing forces—being and non-being, home and exile—defines the human condition, highlighting the profound impossibility of ever fully returning to an original state of belonging. This tension underscores a central theme in Taubes’ thought: becoming, rather than being, is not only a theoretical framework to avoid reification but also a hermeneutical prism for understanding existence and rejecting any ultimate telos.

3.1. Taubes’ Diasporic Heidegger

To better understand Taubes’ diasporic ontology, it is important to consider her engagement with Heidegger’s work, particularly her “diasporic” interpretation of his philosophy, in which the concept of being cast out becomes an ontological condition intrinsic to the very structure of human existence. In her reading of Heidegger, Taubes emphasizes themes of expulsion, non-belonging, and exile, which are central to her own reflections. In a letter to Jacob from 4 January 1951, while discussing Heidegger’s Der Spruch Anaximanders, she writes: “I only smell ‘madness.’ I try to understand it ‘mythologically’ (and I may be on the wrong track) i.e.: any advance through ‘thinking’ beyond the sheer, awe-full reception of the present (—as ‘now’ and as a ‘gift’)—just this sky this grass at all—is going into ‘Errdom’: but we cannot ‘chose’ ‘therefore’ not to make this step because we are expelled every moment from the ‘ineffable’. We are thus every moment living the expulsion from Paradise. (Those who live ‘as if’ all is all-right, i.e., who do not think that they are expelled only feast on the error.) Then H. would say that the ‘expulsion’ happens already in the heart of Being, i.e., the ‘Seiende’ is expelled from the ‘Sein.’ Then the beginning of history is the casting out of the Seiende […]” (Taubes 2011, pp. 181–82).
Taubes reads Heidegger’s discussion of the relation between Sein and Seiendes not as a neutral ontological process, but as a traumatic rupture—an expulsion from immediacy, from a primordial state of dwelling. This interpretation resonates deeply with the diasporic experience of being displaced, perpetually exiled from the “gift” of presence, from the “now” and the fullness of Being. Taubes reframes Heidegger’s concept of “Errdom” (wandering astray, going into error) not simply as a misstep in thought but as a mythic expulsion from Paradise—one that is structurally inscribed in every moment of human existence. In this way, Taubes aligns the ontological drama of Being with the existential exile. For her, the very act of philosophical inquiry—seeking the truth of Sein—becomes a form of violence, a “rape” of Being, because it tears Being away from its hiddenness, from its protective, concealed nature. This interpretation echoes a skepticism toward claims of transparency, mastery, or the retrieval of origins. To ask for the truth of Being is to reenact the trauma of uprooting, to forget the necessary concealment that protects it. Taubes thus transforms Heidegger’s ontology into a meditation on the ethical weight of living and thinking in displacement. The act of thinking itself becomes a violent uprooting, where one is never fully at home and where the search for truth is inseparable from the trauma of being perpetually cast out from presence.
At this point, a decisive shift in perspective emerges: for Taubes, exile is not a state to be interpreted through the loss of a prior Heimat, but the originary condition from which concepts like Heimat themselves derive. In her reading of Heidegger, she finds a powerful intuition: the human being is always already expelled—cast out from immediacy, estranged from Being, marked by ontological rupture. But while Heidegger retains a trace of redemptive longing—whether through poetic Ereignis, dwelling, or the quiet return to language—Taubes refuses any such telos. The expulsion, for her, is not a fall to be overcome, but the ground of thought itself. What Heidegger experiences as a tragic loss, Taubes reclaims as the starting point of a new ethics and epistemology. She thus performs a reversal: rather than asking how exile might return to home, she asks how the very idea of Heimat looks when seen from the exile’s point of view. In this reversal, Heimat is no longer origin or essence, but a fragile construct made visible by estrangement—a myth formed by those who no longer belong. It is not the exile who lacks Heimat, but Heimat that is revealed as lacking, as a projection retroactively imagined from the site of dislocation. This makes Taubes’ thought more than a critique: it becomes a hermeneutic shift that displaces the static categories of belonging and identity altogether.
This reversal not only reframes the concept of Heimat but also casts exile as the fundamental structure of existence. In this sense, Taubes reads Heidegger against himself: the expulsion he portrays as a tragic rupture becomes, in her thought, the very possibility of thought and ethics. This brings her into a striking, albeit implicit, proximity to Gnostic themes, where being in the world is already a condition of estrangement. At the core of Heidegger’s being, there lies an expulsion, an exile, a fall in which we are living. To be in error or in an ontological expulsion is inevitable, and it is precisely this condition that, according to Taubes, connects Heidegger with Gnosticism.9 Being in the world is only possible in the mode of not being at home, with original banishment provoking a radical homelessness that characterizes the finitude of Dasein. Thus, the Gnostic condition of expulsion and exile is not merely a philosophical or theological concept; for Taubes, it represents a lived experience that resonates deeply within the ontological structure of being itself, where the tension between being-at-home and being-in-exile mirrors the existential finitude of Dasein.

3.2. Accepting Worldliness

The question of transcendence and Being in Heidegger’s philosophy aligns with Gnostic themes. However, for Taubes, both Heideggerian and Gnostic thought to properly account for the necessity of living with rupture and estrangement. For her, the Gnostic discontent with the world reveals “an implicit affirmation of strictly worldly values” (Wolfson 2023, p. 134). The negation of the world, in a sense, is related to an acknowledgment or affirmation of the world itself, creating a logical contradiction reminiscent of the Hegelian verkehrte Welt—a dialectical movement where opposites are inseparably connected. In a letter to Jacob dated 12 February 1952, Susan writes: “If the Gnostic revolt is absolute, it must, in order to remain consistent, negate the world as world, absolutely without reference to judgment; i.e., negate good as well as evil, meaning as well as absurdity, purpose as well as senselessness; in other words, it must negate salvation and eschatology. But then it is no longer ‘gnosis’. If the analysis is right, then the moving principle of the gnosis is a dialectical trick, an evasion, a self-betrayal” (Taubes 2014, p. 91). If Gnosticism were truly consistent, it would negate itself. In her interpretation, even in Heidegger’s thought, this mechanism can be discerned, where negative elements are tied to an imagined salvation from evil. Exilic existence, for Heidegger, has as its counterpart the potential for a return in the openness of beings wherein we are thrown (see Wolfson 2023, p. 146).
In her critique of gnostic-eschatological thinking, Taubes argues that it is rooted in an “infantile psychological mechanism” (Taubes 2014, p. 187). This kind of thought, she claims, projects personal experiences of misery and impotence onto the world, rejecting the world wholesale as a means of escaping it. Salvation in this framework becomes a fantasy of escape, not through transformation but through the negation of reality. Taubes sees this thinking as both narcissistic and delusional: it assumes that the cosmos exists solely for human redemption, replacing a genuine engagement with the world’s brokenness with an imaginary escape from it. As she writes: “The otherworldliness of the gnosis is false only insofar as it is a cry against the harshness of the world + thus a secret yearning for a less harsh world—even an infantile yearning for a paradisic world” (Taubes 2014, p. 204). Her critique calls for a more mature, grounded response to suffering—one that neither renounces the world nor seeks refuge in illusion, but instead reckons with its reality and confronts the absence of any consolatory hope. Taubes’ rejection of apocalyptic hope—which we will return to at the end of this essay—parallels her call for a philosophy that accepts brokenness as not something to be overcome, but embraces as a necessary aspect of human existence. In this context, the absence of belonging and redemption becomes a strategy for confronting the radical immanence that denies any promise of happiness or salvation.10
As she writes to Jacob in a letter from 4 April 1952: “If there is something to be healed, the brokenness is within the world. To ask for the eradication of brokenness as such is to wish the annihilation of the world” (Taubes 2014, pp. 171–72). For Taubes, accepting this brokenness, rather than seeking to fix it through apocalyptic salvation, allows for a deeper engagement with the world as it truly is. Taubes offers a radically anti-utopian and anti-idealistic vision of healing and religion, grounded in the acceptance of brokenness rather than its denial. To wish away brokenness entirely is, for her, to wish away the world itself. Rupture and chaos are not flaws to be erased but conditions of transformation and creativity. In her critique, she challenges both escapist mysticism and sterile, abstract religiosity, proposing instead a religion that engages with the raw, violent, and creative forces of existence. True healing, for Taubes, does not come from fleeing into imaginary wholes or perfect systems but from confronting fractured human relations and cultivating them through the generative powers of science, art, and wisdom. Religion, she argues, must not be sanitized or idealized; it must face the ambivalence of the sacred, which includes both discipline and orgy, creation and destruction. Grounded in historical and existential reality, this vision of religion remains open to hermeneutic transformation, resisting any claim to transcendent detachment.
Building upon her nomadic thought, we now turn to examine how these themes are reflected in Taubes’ critique of dogmatization and symbolic closure, first through her account of Judaism and then through her linguistic skepticism.

4. Anti-Dogmatic Judaism

In her critique of dogmatism and institutionalized religion, Taubes challenges both the ideological confinement of Jewish identity and the instrumentalization of religious symbols, advocating instead for a radical, diasporic perspective that embraces spiritual estrangement. This critique is rooted in Taubes’ refusal to allow Jewish identity, or any identity, to become dogmatic or fixed. Just as her ontological framework challenges the concept of a static self, her rejection of political Zionism and religious dogmatism underscores the need for a flexible, evolving interpretation of identity and belief. As we will see, her rejection of the nationalist framework of Israel highlights her deep skepticism of history as the ultimate site of human meaning, while her engagement with Jewish traditions exposes the tension between cultural particularism and the quest for universal truths.

4.1. The Ghosts of Judaism

A crucial aspect of Taubes’ relationship with Judaism is a deeply personal struggle, which is evident not only in her letters but also in the character of Sophie in Divorcing. Both Susan and Sophie engage with their Jewish identity in an anarchic, performative way, reflecting a tension between belonging and rejection. In a letter to Jacob from January 1952, Susan writes: “I was in fact, after a long period of peace, again haunted by the ghosts of Judaism. It is of no use dwelling on the issue. It remains an unintegrable fact in my existence which I must carry with me like a sealed box containing I don’t know what, maybe dynamite, maybe just stones” (Taubes 2014, p. 156). This metaphor captures the heavy, persistent, and unresolved nature of her Jewish identity, one that cannot be fully reconciled. It becomes an inescapable part of her existence—both a burden and a potential danger, something that she carries without understanding its full weight. In her correspondence with Jacob, Susan describes this struggle as “my war with Judaism,” expressing frustration with what she perceives as an excess of particularism that prevents the attainment of a more universal perspective.11
Moreover, Taubes’ struggle with Judaism was one of the central issues from the beginning in her relationship with Jacob, who sought to live a “Jewish existence.” In contrast, Susan openly rejected “the nightmare of what men call religion” (Taubes 2011, p. 15). While she acknowledges that the Torah’s law, through its rituals, can provide a clear distinction between the holy and the unholy, she states that she “cannot live by this kind of logic” and cannot “participate in the traditions of a people who live by it” (Taubes 2011, p. 16). In a letter from May 1952, Susan underscores the gap between herself and Jacob, particularly when it comes to the law: “You were nurtured on the law. I was born outside of the law; I grew up in opposition to the law, with no roots in family, a people, or a state, standing outside of my fate as a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, etc. And out of my anarchic situation, I see the necessity of the law, and know that the ‘free’ life is limbo. But a pragmatic acceptance of law is only a subterfuge within the limbo; it shall not save us” (Taubes 2014, p. 229). Susan’s existential anarchy and her rejection of the law do not prevent her from acknowledging its necessity, though she does so with skepticism and without any hope of redemption.
Taubes’ complex relationship with Judaism is reflected in the character of Sophie in Divorcing, where she confronts her Jewish identity through personal conflict, rejection, and a redefinition of belonging. This struggle is key to understanding Taubes’ philosophical perspective on Judaism, as Sophie mirrors the tensions Taubes herself experienced. In Divorcing, Sophie’s relationship with Judaism is depicted through her interactions with her family and her personal feelings of alienation. While she acknowledges her Jewish identity at her grandmother’s house, she cannot reconcile it with the sense of superiority that her family places on being Jewish. Sophie’s father, for instance, ties his scientific mind and atheism to his Jewishness, but he reluctantly concedes that non-Jews can be truly great thinkers. For Sophie, “being Jewish” is a family affair, but not one that fully resonates with her personal beliefs. The contrast is stark: “Being Landsmann and being Jewish were the same thing” (Taubes 2020, p. 223), especially during religious celebrations, which she experiences more as a social obligation than a spiritual calling. This disconnection is exemplified when she recalls a Passover at her grandmother’s house, which felt “like a gathering for a massacre” (Taubes 2020, p. 229), reflecting a cynical view of Jewish rituals as being entwined with historical trauma. Sophie views her Jewish identity through a lens of exile and estrangement, much like Susan, who found herself questioning her relationship with her heritage in the face of its historical baggage and the ideological constraints it imposed.
Sophie’s rejection of Judaism’s traditional practices extends to her dealings with death, as seen in the surrealist morgue scene. In this dramatic sequence, Sophie’s husband Ezra attempts to perform a Jewish burial for her, but Sophie refuses to conform to any fixed religious or cultural expectations. During her burial, Ezra attempts to follow Jewish customs, but Sophie resists all fixed rituals.12 Her defiance is evident when she mocks the traditional rites, declaring that she is sick of the “fuss” and urging her family to “feed me to the dogs as is your custom” (Taubes 2020, p. 137). Sophie’s rejection of these rituals, including her dismissal of a Jewish funeral in favor of a more pagan one, symbolizes her broader rebellion against both the religious and cultural constraints imposed by her Jewish identity. This scene showcases her desire for freedom from tradition, reinforcing her anarchic approach to identity and faith. In this context, the trial-like scenario at her funeral, where her family and the rabbi condemn her actions, underscores the tensions between religious orthodoxy and personal autonomy. The final image of Sophie’s divorce—symbolized by the legal document and the turning of the coffin—further signifies her break from religious norms and societal expectations, echoing her rejection of Jewish identity defined by rigid tradition.
This anarchic interpretation of Judaism, which Sophie enacts in Divorcing, finds a parallel in Susan’s own critiques of religious dogmatism and the institutionalization of religious practices. In her letters, Susan sharply critiques the transformation of Judaism, or any religion, into a rigid and universalized system. While she acknowledges that a personal God might hold meaning for some, she condemns its dogmatization (see Taubes 2014, p. 259), arguing that when particular religious experiences are elevated to absolute truths, they inevitably alienate, distort, or hypocritically exclude those who do not share that belief.

4.2. Faithful to the Absence

In this framework, Susan challenges the instrumentalization of Jewish symbols and rituals for an exclusive ideological purpose. She agrees that symbols and festivals have a lasting power that goes beyond transient ideologies, but she questions whether this enduring cultural force must always be harnessed for the glorification of one people—in this case, the Jewish people—at the expense of others.13 Her concern reflects a broader tension between cultural identity and exclusivity: the risk of reducing symbols and rituals to instruments of division rather than allowing them to exist as more universal expressions of human experience. This challenge also touches on her broader critique of religious and cultural systems that promote division through ideological boundaries.
Among the essentialisms and dogmatisms she rejected, Susan also presents a sharp critique of Zionism and the state of Israel, viewing them as forms of national retreat that fail to address the complexities of Jewish history. In a letter from 17–18 January 1952, she critiques the state of Israel: “Again: the center of the ‘crisis’ is not in the ‘Jewish problem’: the question is not posed, nor can it be solved within Judaism. Retreat into the clan, into national enthusiasm, preoccupation with national problems, is an evasion, because we were not only the ‘victims’ but the accomplices as well of European history” (Taubes 2014, p. 50). This statement challenges the foundational logic of political Zionism, which suggests that the Jewish question—particularly in the aftermath of the Shoah—can be resolved through national retreat or ethnic consolidation.14 Taubes argues that Jewish history is inseparable from European history, not only as passive victims but as entangled participants. Her argument is both uncomfortable and ethically demanding: it refuses the innocence of a purely martyred identity and calls for an engagement with historical complexity.
Taubes’ critique moves from the political to the theological, weaving a complex political and mystical analysis that exposes the illusion of return—whether to land, identity, or divine presence. She critiques the longing for sanctity in both Zionism and Orthodox Judaism as a self-deception if it denies the depth of estrangement. In her view, the longing for sanctity and a restored presence, whether in the Orthodox community or in the Zionist state, is exposed as an illusion. Sanctity, Taubes argues, must be lived “in secret, even from yourself”—not as a triumphal reclaiming of God but as a trembling posture within the void. For Taubes, accepting groundlessness in a radical sense means embracing the brokenness and the absence of God, viewing it not as a punishment or flaw, but as a hermeneutic horizon. Writing about God’s absence, she asserts: “The only experience of God accessible to us is the awfulness of the absence; the only experience of eternity: the anguish before the nothingness into which our life passes; the only experience of certainty: the anguish that our very anguish is baseless, incomprehensible, absurd because the only legitimate basis of our anguish would be that God is absent” (Taubes 2014, p. 50).
The absence of God is not a sign of defeat, but the foundation of an ethics.15 Just as political exile resists the closure of territorial identity, spiritual exile resists the closure of dogmatic certainty. The absence of God mirrors the impossibility of return: we are always already outside history, and this displacement becomes the condition for a radical form of fidelity. Both the political impossibility of return (in the face of Israeli nationalism) and the theological impossibility of presence are forms of idolatry. Diaspora, in contrast, becomes the ethical and spiritual space where one can live without illusions, faithful to the absence, open to the other, and bearing the weight of a truth that is always out of reach.
Instead of remaining in the realm of abstract theology, Taubes also stages this ethic of estranged fidelity within narrative form. Her fiction and poetry reimagine biblical figures to inhabit the very condition they refuse to overcome. A particularly revealing instance of this appears in her engagement with the story of Hosea and Gomer, which surfaces both in Downgoing and in her poem “Gomer and Hosea.” Downgoing, Taubes’ first unpublished novel, tells the story of Miriam and Joseph, both refugees from rabbinical families in Europe who resettle in the United States. Joseph, once unknowingly engaged to Miriam’s cousin Eve—murdered by the Nazis—recognizes Miriam years later while she is acting on Broadway. Haunted by the memory of the dead and resistant to reclaiming her origins, Miriam dreams of Eve dragging her into their grandparents’ abandoned apartment. Despite her reluctance, she marries Joseph. In a pivotal scene, he recites to her night after night the biblical story of Hosea and Gomer, until she “became the exiled presence, assumed all the incarnations of the people of God in its wanderings and estrangements” (quoted by Pareigis 2020, p. 176), blurring the line between scripture and her own fate. This reworking of the prophetic narrative resonates with Taubes’ unpublished poem “Gomer and Hosea,” a retelling from Gomer’s perspective in which she resists Hosea’s redemption, affirming “the thousand exiled winds” (quoted by Pareigis 2020, p. 182) that inhabit her. In a letter to Ernst Simon, Jacob Taubes compared this poem to the work of the Hebrew poet Saul Tschernichowski, noting its thematic “oscillation between idyll and estrangement” (Pareigis 2020, p. 182). In both the novel and the poem, exile is not a condition to be overcome but a mode of being that embraces dispersion, plurality, and the refusal of singular belonging—hallmarks of Taubes’ diasporic reimagining of biblical tradition.

4.3. Not from the Side of History

In a letter from January 1952, Susan articulates her distance from “Jerusalem” in both philosophical and theological terms.16 She writes: “My problem is how the center of man’s humanity can be rescued from history: how history can be ‘denied’, (that is how the view that man realizes his specifically human, spiritual possibility in history can be denied) without a gnostic denial of the world as such and without a naturalistic denial of man’s spiritual, a- or trans-natural being. ‘Israel’ insofar as it is taken to be seriously (insofar as it is not an ‘Algiers’ where one may start, as Camus, but where one doesn’t go if not for very private reasons) has already decided in favour of ‘history’; now it needs men to back its decision with the corresponding ‘ideology’. Not me” (Taubes 2014, p. 54). This passage brings into sharp focus Taubes’ central philosophical and theological dilemma—rejecting history as the sole foundation for human meaning without lapsing into gnostic world-denial or reductive naturalism. The backbone of her controversy with Israel concerns history; whether she defends an attitude of detachment or the better of denial of the world, Israel and the state are on the side of history.
Taubes does not oppose history itself, but she resists the modern notion that humanity achieves its fulfillment solely through historical development. She views this perspective as spiritually hollow and morally dangerous, especially when it forms the basis for nationalist ideologies. Her critique of Israel is not an attack on its people, culture, or suffering, but rather a critique of its decision to root itself in history, becoming a historical actor like other nations seeking sovereignty, territory, and power. In contrast, Taubes seeks a way to rescue the spiritual center of humanity from historical entrapment, without falling into despair or nihilism. This is where the nomadic hermeneutic comes into play: diaspora offers not a withdrawal from the world, but a non-totalizing relationship to it—a way of being that remains open to the divine, the other, and the unknown without collapsing these into ideology or territory. Her rejection of Israeli nationalism is not indifference; it is a form of resistance. By saying “not me,” she refuses to lend her voice to an ideology that would bind Jewish existence to statehood, to historical success, or to a redemptive national narrative. She chooses estrangement over belonging, questioning over resolution, exile over settlement—not because she denies meaning, but because she seeks to preserve a space for spiritual integrity beyond the logic of history. She further clarifies her position by stating: “A question to you: the historical obsession, while it is naive and optimistic in Judaism where it has its source, has driven the Occident into Nihilism; what has happened between the healthy, if crude, self-glorification of the children of Israel and the tortured historical mysticism of Heidegger. The history of the Jew in the Occident may be one of torture but the history of the Occident itself is self-torture; the Jew has a problem only within the Occident, once ‘at home’ he is content with himself: The Occident is problematic to itself” (Taubes 2014, p. 54). This passage sharpens that contrast: Judaism’s historical consciousness, though “naive and optimistic,” is grounded in covenant and meaning; it doesn’t spiral into nihilism. By contrast, the West transforms history into a metaphysical burden, culminating in Heidegger’s tortured mysticism—what Taubes elsewhere critiques as a “mythologization of Being.” Thus, the Jew suffers in the West, but the West suffers from its own estrangement from Being. Though exiled, Judaism continues to survive through its dislocation, whereas Western nihilism reflects a crisis of belonging, a spiritual exile within its own philosophical heritage.

5. Linguistic Skepticism

Taubes’ account of Judaism is deeply intertwined with her linguistic skepticism: both reflect a rejection of fixed meanings and closed systems, emphasizing instead the instability of interpretation and the impossibility of fully capturing the sacred through language or tradition. In her work, estrangement and nomadic thinking are intricately connected to a deep skepticism towards language, evident in both her letters and novels.

5.1. Linguistic Abuse vs. Poetry

Taubes’ linguistic skepticism is particularly apparent in her reflections on divine absence and language’s role in mediating it. Just as Taubes’ diasporic ontology resists the fixity of identity, her linguistic skepticism challenges the reification of meaning. Language, like identity, cannot capture the fullness of existence but instead distorts it. In a letter to Jacob, she writes: “A mystic like S. Weil says that when the soul is void god enters it. But god is not something other than the void; god is the void, god tastes like nothing in the mouth of mortals. But is it necessary then to speak of god? I think it is rather an abuse of the word” (Taubes 2014, p. 76). Here, she critiques the misuse of language when speaking of God and the divine void, where divine absence and silence are intricately linked. Living in the aftermath of the spell being broken, language’s reifying nature becomes problematic. In the divine void where God is absent, language itself becomes an abuse, a violent act of reification.
This violent quality of language is central to Taubes’ thinking. Speaking or asking questions, and by extension doing philosophy, is akin to violating the sacred. In a 1951 letter, she writes: “It is true, and we must know it, that we ‘rape’ the virgin being by thinking it, by piercing it with the needle of the question. And yet without the rape there could be no union” (Taubes 2011, p. 233). This rape symbolizes the necessary rupture that enables human history, agency, and thought to emerge. To philosophize is to intrude upon the ineffable, forcing Being into form. Paradoxically, this violation is essential for union with the sacred but must be done knowingly, not mechanically. The real danger, Taubes argues, lies not in questioning, but in the illusion of neutrality—treating questioning as a natural act. She resists this illusion, acknowledging that all language is a rupture, a departure from silence, and philosophy falters when it forgets the weight of speaking. Language is not a tool to access truth, but a site of tension where presence is both revealed and obscured.
A further dimension of Taubes’ linguistic skepticism is found in her ambivalence toward the act of naming. In a letter from September 1950, she reflects on language as both a tool of human empowerment and a source of existential and epistemological fallenness. She distinguishes between natural signs, which are “passing, ponderable, and cannot be produced by will,” and artificial signs like words, which are “fixed, manageable, and accessible to the subject at will” (Taubes 2011, p. 17). In this view, language acts like Medusa—fixing transient experience into static forms to make it communicable,17 but simultaneously losing the fluidity and complexity of existence. This process of translation, from object to name, becomes a “dialectical act” that both creates and limits: it opens a “field of possible relations” but simultaneously fixes and reifies what is inherently relational. Taubes further compares the act of naming to Prometheus’ theft of fire, viewing it as an act of control over the world. Naming, in this context, is an “instance of the fall,” a movement away from the “holy” or “whole” toward separation and exile from totality. Yet, she suggests a counter-movement: to “regain IN the word what has been lost THROUGH the word” (Taubes 2011, p. 18). In this sense, the act of naming becomes a way to recover the lost connection to the divine, and the poet, using language, reopens access to what language itself destroyed. Poetry, for Taubes, is the means through which this “regaining of the holy” occurs.18
The paradox is that the poet must heal language with language, transcending the ordinary use of words to touch the silence of the original and sacred. Taubes underscores the double nature of language as both reification and redemption. She writes: “And I must confess, speaking as a heretic, I can’t think of a greater poet than the writer of the Bible” (Taubes 2011, p. 18), suggesting that biblical language is not merely doctrinal but a mythopoetic performance of the origin. In this paradox, language is seen as the medium through which loss is both caused and redeemed—through the very language that distorts, the poet can recover what has been lost. Thus, Taubes points to a mystical-poetic reappropriation of language, where the poet, in transgressing the limits of ordinary speech, transforms it into a means of touching the unspeakable.

5.2. Mysticism Against Linguistic Reification

Her account of mysticism can also be framed within her linguistic skepticism. Taubes expresses her skepticism towards the term “mysticism,” noting: “If I am a mystic it is only in protest against the vulgar discourse of the world: there is nothing ‘beyond’ the ‘reality’, but there is a truth and many shades of truth that remain unsaid in ‘positive’ discourse, and that today are even denied” (Taubes 2014, p. 76). Her discomfort with the term stems from its association with transcendental claims, as her own mysticism emerges as a critique of reducing truth to positivist or utilitarian discourses. For Taubes, truth does not lie “beyond” reality but exists within the unsayable aspects of human experience—those dimensions that escape formalized, rule-bound language. By rejecting fixed philosophical and scientific frameworks, she argues that meaning arises from relational, living discourse, particularly in human interactions, where language is dynamic, affective, and open-ended. Her skepticism thus challenges objectivist epistemologies and instrumental uses of language, such as those that reduce speech to pragmatic functions like “tongues to chop ice.”
Mysticism, in her view, becomes less a retreat from reason and more a refusal of its limiting boundaries—a space where the unsaid, the intimate, and the sacred elude analytical reason. In a letter from early 1951 written from Venice, Taubes expands on this idea, writing: “Because stones are also a language, sometimes more precise than words, and I at least find in the ‘visible’ church—not of the clergy but the stones—the only genuine mysticism and incarnation of the ‘invisible’” (Taubes 2011, p. 253). Words, she argues, are unstable and prone to abstraction, while stones speak silently but precisely, embodying meaning without attempting to capture it fully. Here, the “visible” church—its architecture and enduring physicality—becomes a counter-language, one that incarnates the “invisible” without distorting it through conceptual overreach. This form of mysticism is grounded not in doctrine or speech, but in presence, form, and materiality, offering a way of understanding that resists linguistic reification and honors the unspeakable by giving it shape rather than definition.
Concerning her approach to linguistic skepticism in Divorcing, it is possible to observe a sense of linguistic Heimatlosigkeit, where the right word always seems elusive. This is not only a reflection of her emigration and the dislocation that comes with her experience of exile, but also a fundamental condition of language itself. One of the most striking passages concerning linguistic skepticism occurs when Sophie reflects on her departure from Hungary and her voyage across the Atlantic on the S.S. Aquitania to America. Upon arrival, she begins writing in her new language, grappling with the tension between her past and the foreignness of her present. Upon arriving she began writing in her new language: “She had to construct the sentences slowly, a Hungarian-English dictionary at her side—often prompting her to make up something she hadn’t intended just so as to possess on her page an exotic word glimpsed at random in the dictionary” (Taubes 2020, pp. 157–58).19 The search for words led her to unintended meanings, emphasizing the inherent frustration of language’s limitations.
Her relationship with words is described almost as a mystical experience, where they are not something she can control or possess. She notes: “Then there were the hours she spent writing; after everyone went to sleep, the words came to life, absorbed with their shapes and hues she was in an enchanted forest, hunting treasures far from the world where words were ugly sounds coming out of people’s mouths. It was only words from a dictionary; this happiness had nothing to do with her, she realized; moreover, she stood in its way. Sophie Landsman was an obstruction that wanted to be expunged” (Taubes 2020, p. 161). This description conveys a sense of disconnection from the very language she is trying to master, an experience where words, rather than serving as tools of communication, emerge as obstacles between her and expression.

5.3. Topology of the Book

In another striking passage, Sophie reflects on the experience of writing her childhood memories from Budapest in another language. She states: “It was a strange venture for Sophie Blind to write about what it was like to be a child in Budapest. The person who would be writing it wasn’t there, not as she was now. She was writing in English in a New York City apartment. The child was in another country, in another language. She who was writing had not been there, couldn’t be there, then. But she could go back. Sophie Blind now in New York could go back. The child cannot, never having left” (Taubes 2020, p. 246). This passage underscores the complex relationship between language, memory, and identity. Two distinct temporalities, languages, and places coexist within Sophie—the adult writer in New York and the child in Budapest, each inhabiting separate linguistic and existential worlds. This tension exemplifies how language, in Taubes’ view, both enables and limits the experience of belonging, rendering it impossible to fully capture the past or the self without the distortions of time and language.
Drawing on her reflections on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in a letter to Jacob, Taubes recognizes the text’s mythic and chaotic structure as a profound challenge to the conventional order of language and history.20 She writes: “There is a certain heroism in H.[Heidegger]’s new language which reminds me of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This language of madness finds its justification in the experience of ultimate perplexity. It is the world that is ‘schizophrenic’ + not the madmen” (Taubes 2014, p. 219). For her, this language of madness is not an escapist rejection of the world, but a radical affirmation of existence in all its brokenness. Joyce’s embrace of linguistic play and excess exemplifies how language can both constrain and liberate, and Taubes sees this as a form of resistance to the reductive and objectifying tendencies of traditional language. Her comparison between Joyce’s linguistic revolt and Heidegger’s late philosophy reflects a shared commitment to confronting the limits of conventional thought. In this context, Taubes argues that the “madness” in language is not pathological, but rather a necessary and truthful response to a world that is itself schizophrenic—disjointed and opaque. Ultimately, this style of writing, filled with ambiguity and paradox, represents—one could argue—Taubes’ own “mad” prose, a refusal to accept language as a neutral or transparent tool. Instead, she embraces it as a site of tension, where the limits of meaning are continually tested and explored.
Taubes’ writing, much like her approach to Jewish identity, resists closure and dogmatism, rooted in her diasporic ontology. Just as Judaism, for her, is not a static inheritance but a tradition in flux, writing is not a final expression of truth but an open-ended process—restless, fragmentary, and in motion. In this context, Sophie, the protagonist of Divorcing, reflects a parallel to Taubes’ own life story, especially in her insistence that her book could only be written posthumously. Sophie, in the novel, states: “It’s about a dead woman… It’s told by the dead woman” (Taubes 2020, p. 151), capturing the essence of an unfinished life, one that only truly exists in its fragmented, unresolved form.21 The cyclical nature of Sophie’s narrative echoes the unfinished quality of Taubes’ own life and work. Writing, like Jewish identity, becomes an act of survival through dislocation, resisting both ideological closure and the certainty of belonging.
In Divorcing, Susan intertwines the temporality of life, dreams, and writing, using the book as a stable medium for self-reflection. She writes: “A book ended not like life abruptly; not like a dream, with a clumsy struggle and sense of deception; but gracefully and knowingly, preparing you for the final period” (Taubes 2020, p. 94). Moreover, a book offers certainty to the reader’s position: “To begin with, you know where you are: you’re in a book, and whether the setting is Paris or New York or the moon or not specified at all, you know you’re in a book. […] You can be dreaming and not know it. You can be awake and wonder if it’s a dream and not believe it. But a book is simply and always a book—you can be sure of that. And with a book, whether you’re reading it or writing it, you are awake” (Taubes 2020, p. 95). The novel concludes with an image of travel, a dream within a dream—a small European train station, hurried travelers, a flight ticket to Paris, and packing in New York. “At home neither. The one who got up no more myself than the one dreaming” (Taubes 2020, p. 265). Perhaps only the book, this page, represents her Heimat. She writes: “I never knew a world except in books” (Pareigis 2020, p. 52). The words of literature form a fragile, philological homeland.22

5.4. Literalism as Propaganda

Taubes’ critique of fixed interpretations extends beyond religious texts to the politics of identity and belief. She rejects literal interpretation, viewing it as an act of dogmatic closure. In a letter to Jacob from 25 January 1952, she writes: “The reading [of] a holy script is spiritually fruitful just to the degree that the ‘letter’ of the book is not fixed but open to the exploration of new meanings” (Taubes 2014, p. 64). For Taubes, both God and religious texts are in a state of becoming, continuously evolving through reinterpretation. She rejects the view of religious texts as static truths, instead emphasizing the need for their fluidity, akin to the rabbinic tradition of oral Torah and its ongoing interpretative process.23
In the same letter, Taubes criticizes “the method of argumentation which proceeds by identifying ideas with peoples” (Taubes 2014, p. 64, but also 256–58), a reduction of Jewish identity to a fixed essence, which she attributes to the essentialist arguments of thinkers like Camus and Weil. She calls their approach “a propagandistic logic,” which is similar to “the worst of Zionist zealots who make the bloodthirsty passages of the Torah their slogans” (Taubes 2014, p. 64). Literalism, she argues, is a form of dogmatic closure that also mirrors the political violence of using scripture to justify militarism, as seen in Zionism (see Pisano 2025). This shows a strong connection between hermeneutics and politics, drawing parallels between rigid religious interpretations and militarism. By labeling ideas as “Jewish” or “Christian,” they overlook the diversity and evolution within Jewish thought, especially shaped by the diasporic experience. To view it as static is to ignore its evolving nature and the complex, living tradition that exists within it. As she writes: “The only Judaism that we really know, and the only Judaism to which we have a genuine attachment, was born out of the compromise of this tragic situation. A faithfulness that cannot be lived, a faithfulness to the memory of the dead, petrifies” (Taubes 2014, pp. 65–66). This tension between memory and survival, between the dead and the living, is central to her conception of Judaism in exile. Her critique underscores the importance of reinterpretation over rigid adherence to historical justification. Rather than relying on fixed interpretations that reinforce a singular, collectivist narrative, Taubes advocates for a more dynamic engagement with tradition—one that allows for constant reimagining and adaptation. This view aligns with her broader rejection of historical determinism and political ideologies that attempt to close off identity and meaning. In this sense, Judaism, as Taubes envisions it, is a living tradition that must constantly negotiate the tension between fidelity to the past and the demands of the present.24

6. Post-Apocalyptic Hopelessness

This dynamic engagement with tradition—resisting closure and embracing instability—extends to Taubes’ understanding of historical time and eschatology. Her rejection of linear, redemptive narratives culminates in a radical rethinking of hope itself, not as a teleological promise but as a state continually fractured by the conditions of exile. Taubes’ concept of what we might call post-apocalyptic hopelessness emerges from her refusal to anchor meaning in either theological redemption or philosophical synthesis. In a letter to Jacob from 24 November 1950, she describes her experience in Israel as one of “positive hopelessness,” where hope is continuously assaulted by the very conditions that claim to offer it. She contrasts this with the “sheer hope-less-ness” she experiences, where hope cannot even form (Taubes 2011, p. 114). For Taubes, hope is not a permanent state but a concept that often proves elusive or impossible to attain, especially in contexts where it is promised but remains unfulfilled.
This skepticism toward hope extends to her critique of apocalyptic thought, which she sees as an escape from the complexities of human existence. She argues that embracing apocalyptic redemption seeks final meaning and ultimate truth, often leading to violence and exclusion. As she writes: “But if we chose apocalypse, it means we have renounced these hopes and that we have no right to look forward to a heavenly paradise” (Taubes 2014, p. 102). Taubes rejects apocalyptic frameworks—whether religious or secular—because they risk silencing differences and collapsing plurality into a singular, definitive vision of salvation. She is critical of the desire for closure and finality, as these desires impose a resolution that eradicates ambiguity and the space for personal transformation. Instead of embracing apocalyptic thinking, Taubes advocates for a life that continues despite its meaninglessness. She writes: “We cannot bring about the apokalypse and yet we must go on living; suicide is not consequential, my life and my death are equally meaningless without total redemption. What are we to do? We are in the midst of an ocean dying of thirst, the saltwater only increases our thirst; but we must drink the saltwater and die of it and that’s all there is to do; sometimes there is a little rain from heaven which relieves for a while the nausea and suffocation. Or make peace with the earth, a suffering peace, not without some sadness and reproach and in the knowledge that the craving is always greater than the fulfillment and that perhaps this is the eternity of love” (Taubes 2014, p. 103).
Taubes rejects apocalyptic redemption as unreachable, yet shows that life must continue despite its meaninglessness. The image of drinking saltwater evokes the pain of unfulfilled desire—existence deepens the thirst it cannot quench. Redemption does not come, but fleeting moments of grace do. Taubes’ alternative is a grounded existence, where the eternal lies not in fulfillment but in the enduring gap between longing and love. Rather than seeking endings, she embraces what remains unresolved, unfinished, and open to alterity. The acceptance of redemption’s absence allows for transformative existence, where closure is avoided in favor of continuous engagement with the unfinished.

Babel-Towers in the Vacuum

In her poem Post Apocalypse, Taubes encapsulates this vision of truth, which offers no redemption but instead confronts the harsh reality of existence. She writes: “The truth we know is a terrible truth, nothing/follows from it/Said the wise men of the flat plain./It is like a huge crack in the sky/whence no waters flow nor lightning strikes./And it does not matter how many know the truth/it shall not save them/They shall simply know that it is of no matter/to be saved” (Taubes 2014, p. 255). This truth does not promise salvation but reveals the world in its brokenness, like a huge crack in the sky. The key to salvation, she suggests, lies not in trying to fix or erase this brokenness but in accepting it as it is. The absence of hope in this context is not a denial of meaning but a way of accepting the world’s imperfections and remaining open to its potential for change. In a remarkable passage from a letter to Jacob dated 20 January 1951, she writes: “[…] we should live and think rooted in creation in the essentials of human existence and not build Babel-towers in the vacuum” (Taubes 2011, p. 211). For Taubes, recognizing the world’s brokenness means resisting the urge to impose grand, totalizing solutions or illusions of repair. This resistance is not only existential or theological, but also profoundly political: the renunciation of building a Tower of Babel signifies a refusal of uniqueness and of authoritarian structures that seek to impose unity through domination, rather than accepting the impossibility of closure.
In conclusion, Taubes’ work articulates a distinctive mode of Jewish thought—one grounded in exile, estrangement, and the refusal of closure. Exile, in her work, does not appear as a secondary or reactive condition but as an ontological prius—a fundamental starting point from which identity, thought, and relation unfold. This refusal of closure mirrors the diasporic ontology that runs through Taubes’ work, where identity, belief, and meaning are never fixed but constantly in flux. In this way, Taubes offers a philosophy that not only reshapes Jewish thought but also challenges any ideology that seeks to impose finality or closure on the complexities of human existence. Her writing does not aim to resolve contradiction, but to dwell within it: to inhabit the brokenness of the world without recourse to redemptive illusions. By resisting the promises of eschatology and the comforts of theological finality, Taubes proposes a different kind of truth—one that does not save, but clarifies; that does not resolve, but deepens. This is a truth born from the diasporic condition, marked not by despair but by an active, interpretive engagement with absence, loss, and ambiguity. Through her fusion of narrative and thought, life and text, Taubes reclaims exile as a critical standpoint from which to reshape the contours of modern Jewish philosophy and to challenge any system that seeks to close off meaning. This dynamic interplay between life and work is embodied in her literary alter ego, Sophie, who echoes Taubes’ own entanglement with exile, fractured identity, and the refusal of resolution—transforming the tension between the personal and the philosophical into the very ground of her inquiry. Through Sophie, Taubes gives narrative form to her diasporic ontology, blurring the boundaries between fiction and confession, thought and experience. In this way, Taubes remains—as she once described herself—forever strange in this world: estranged not in defeat, but in a mode of critical, creative, and mortal fidelity to the unredeemed.

Funding

The core of this article was written during my research at Nova University Lisbon. I gratefully acknowledge that this research was funded by FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under project reference 2020.01845 CEECIND, with DOI identifier 10.54499/2020.01845.CEECIND/CP1586/CT0009 (https://doi.org/10.54499/2020.01845.CEECIND/CP1586/CT0009).

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1
For a complete intellectual biography of Susan Taubes, see Pareigis (2020). On the relationship between Susan and Jacob, see also Muller (2022, pp. 134–40).
2
See the afterword of Pareigis with the title “The connecting paths of nomads, wanderers, exiles. Stationen einer Korrespondenz,” in Taubes (2011, pp. 259–88).
3
This resonates strikingly with Daniel Boyarin’s reflections on diaspora and the nomadic condition of Jewish identity, particularly in A Traveling Homeland, where he rethinks exile not as a historical misfortune but as a constitutive mode of Jewish life (Boyarin 2015; and also Boyarin 2023). A comparative analysis between Boyarin’s theoretical framework and Taubes’ reflections could thus illuminate a shared, albeit differently articulated, commitment to a Judaism unbound by territorial or doctrinal fixity.
4
Please note that in this text, whenever I refer to “Taubes,” I am specifically referring to Susan Taubes. Whenever I mention “Jacob,” I am referring to Jacob Taubes, as specified. Besides Wolfson, who has engaged with Taubes in recent years, the renewed scholarly interest in Susan Taubes owes much to the pioneering work of Sigrid Weigel and Christina Pareigis, who have critically engaged with Taubes’ intellectual legacy and helped reinsert her voice into contemporary debates on exile, theology, and gender.
5
The connection between diaspora and linguistic skepticism has been central to my recent work, culminating in The Exile of Language (Pisano 2025), where I explore similar dynamics in other German–Jewish thinkers.
6
Susan Taubes wrote very few academic essays: a “Review of Albert Camus. L’homme révolté” (Taubes 1952); “The nature of tragedy” (Taubes 1953); “Review of Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall by Herbert Weisinger” (Taubes 1954a); “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism”(Taubes 1954b); “The Absent God” (Taubes 1955); “The Riddle of Simone Weil” (Taubes 1959). According to the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin, which hosts the Susan Taubes Archive, a volume of her philosophical writings—Susan Taubes. Philosophische Schriften, translated by Rüdiger Hentschel and Konrad Honsel, and edited by Thomas Macho and Johannes Steizinger (Schriften von Susan Taubes, vol. 2)—is forthcoming in 2026 with Fink Verlag (München, Paderborn) (Taubes forthcoming).
7
As Pareigis notes, the surname “Blind” is not only a semantic pendant to “Taubes” that means “deaf,” but also the surname of Jacob Taubes’ mother, Fanny Blind. Pareigis (2020), p. 174. On Susan Taubes’ experimentation with naming in her published works, see Thein (2007, pp. 374–76).
8
See Taubes (2020, pp. 16–17): “Yes, she loved traveling. It’s the only way to live, Sophie always said, the only way to live in time: fly right with it.” In another passage of the book, recalling her first trip to Budapest after WWII in 1947 to meet her mother, she said: “Time was oppressive, superfluous. And time passed more easily when one travelled” (p. 164).
9
See Taubes (1954b). In this essay, she also elaborates on the differences between Gnosticism and Heidegger, see p. 168, where she writes: “The gnostic drama of fall, exile, and redemption is developed immanently from the dynamic structure of the self. Whereas the gnosis saw the drama in an objective mythical time frame where the drama happens, in Heidegger’s analysis the time frame is ultimately the self.” On Taubes’s account of Gnosticism, see Weigel (2010, pp. 125–27). For the association of Heidegger with Gnosticism, see the well-known interpretation by Hans Jonas (Jonas 1952, pp. 430–52). Jonas interprets Heidegger’s existential analytics as bearing Gnostic traits, particularly in the dualism between human existence and physis, where the world appears as an absolute vacuum, devoid of meaning and fundamentally indifferent. According to Jonas, modern nihilism surpasses even the Gnostic anti-world in its radical rejection of immanence. Jonas was also the reviewer of Taubes’ (1954b) essay and, in his peer review, criticized her for basing her understanding of Gnosticism almost exclusively on his Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. In his review, he writes: “One objection I have is, paradoxically, that she accepts, and uses, my interpretation of Gnosticism too unconditionally and all too exclusively. This may be flattering to me, but it is obvious that she ‘knows’ Gnosticism only through the medium of my book, unchecked by either independent study of sources or even comparison with other presentations. This, of course, is insufficient for a scholarly study. I nevertheless think that it is a valuable essay.” This review is quoted by Herskowitz (2022, p. 547).
10
As Wolfson stated, for Susan, “not being redeemed is not only not a reprimand, it is the more perfect form of redemption, to be redeemed from the need to be redeemed” (Wolfson 2023, p. 18).
11
As Wolfson notes, her Jewish identity served as “an Archimedean point whence she was oriented—or perhaps disoriented—in the world” (Wolfson 2023, p. 8). He further explains that Susan believed the universal is rooted in the particular, and this inclusion of the universal arises through the exclusion of the other: “The exclusion of the other is the mode by which the other is included as the one that is excluded” (Wolfson 2023, p. 26).
12
As Wolfson stated, referring to Taubes: “the fate of being condemned to an everlasting exile undermined her capacity to accede to traditional Jewish ritual as a mode of structuring her life and placating her groundlessness” (Wolfson 2023, p. 88).
13
See Taubes (2014, p. 211): “Must every gesture serve for the glorification of the Jewish people and the condemnation of the others?”
14
A poignant example of her critique of Zionism and the ideal of return is captured in a brief lyric she wrote to Jacob: “Let us go to Galilee + watch the lilies grow/—Do lilies grow in Galilee?/—There are no lilies in Galilee, Oh, no./With a hey + a ho the bulldozers big/ Build Babel on Galilee’s shore/—there are probably no bulldozers either in Galilee/ but the spirit of bulldozers (technic)” (Taubes 2014, p. 20). This brief, lyrical piece—that Jacob defined as “vergiftet”, poisoned—by Susan plays with biblical and poetic imagery to express a sense of disillusionment and irony, blending longing for transcendence with the starkness of historical and technological reality. This metaphor highlights Taubes’ disillusionment with the political and technological forces that seek to rebuild sacred spaces, rendering them sterile and mechanized. Here, the bulldozers symbolize the destructive force of modernity that overshadows the sacred, reducing it to a tool of imperial power. See also a letter to Jacob from 19 January 1952: “The existence of the Jewish state may improve the status of Jews all over the world, personally it makes me feel ill at ease. Unless, the state means the renunciation of the Jew’s religious pretensions as a group. But it doesn’t mean that. The devil is a master at ‘syntheses’” (Taubes 2014, p. 52).
15
On this constellation—where experiences of strangeness and hopes for salvation converge in the context of an absent God—see Weigel (2010, p. 116): “In circumstances defined by an absent God, she is especially interested in a thought where experiences of strangeness and hopes for salvation combine. […] In this manner her work reveals a correspondence between two transitional scenes: starting from a specific dialectic of secularization that arrives at a negative theology under the sign of an absent God, philosophical reflections thus taking on the character of a new religion, she looks back historically at transitional constellations whose manifestations—as in tragedy and gnosis—emerged from negotiations between myth, religion, and philosophy;” and also, p. 124: “[…] the twentieth-century experience of an absent God is given expression in the form of a masked or negative theology, or a religious atheism, its conceptual figures corresponding to those of the historical Gnostic movement.”
16
In a letter to Jacob from February 1952, Taubes compares Israel to a volcano, recalling Scholem’s famous letter to Rosenzweig, which she probably had never seen (Scholem 1990, pp. 97–99). She writes: “About Israel—no, no, no … Why do you want to jump in a volcano” (Taubes 2014, p. 89). Over time, Susan’s view of Israel evolves, and the idea of moving there gradually fades. In a literary fragment entitled “Notes for the Return,” that was a preparatory material for Divorcing, Susan writes: “—The promised land is not a piece of earth he said to his wife.—What then? She laughed. A piece of sky? An idea?—It’s a community of the just, the saints” (quoted by Pareigis 2020, p. 199).
17
There is also a sort of linguistic skepticism as a sort of degradation of linguistic meaning and degeneration of intellectual work in prostitution. In the letter from 28 November 1950, Susan writes: “I abhor all talking about things and building systems. I want to live in holiness, and remembering the silence, and I find it a desecration to speak at all about the things that are important, as men speak today under the name of Wissenschaft and a kind of professionalism that is prostitution” (Taubes 2011, p. 122). This disenchantment with language extends to the cold jargon of academic discourse, which she saw as alienating and lifeless. Instead, she cherished the immediacy of living dialogue. Her distance from the academic establishment is evident not only in her style but also in her choice of research topics, which often focus on marginal figures or adopt a perspective deliberately situated outside the dominant scholarly frameworks. At stake in her work is an attempt to liberate language from the constraints of formal logic and instrumental rationality—a gesture toward reclaiming its ethical, existential, and even sacred dimension.
18
On poetry, see Wolfson (2023, pp. 226–80). In a letter to Jacob from February 1952, she writes: “Eternity haunts us and we cannot shut our heart to it. But eternity is a mystical category, and the language of mysticism is silence or poetry” (Taubes 2014, p. 105). From the perspective of linguistic skepticism, this passage reflects her doubt about the capacity of conceptual language to capture ultimate truths like eternity or the divine. She contrasts the grasping nature of conceptual thought, rooted in control and power, with the non-dominating languages of mysticism—silence and poetry. Taubes suggests that some realities resist being encapsulated in fixed terms and can only be approached indirectly, through non-propositional and suggestive forms of expression. Language, in this context, is limited: not everything can or should be said. As she writes, “Some things are out of our greedy reach, and not to be grasped” (Taubes 2014, p. 105).
19
Sophie’s experience is the same as Susan described when she went to Hungary on her last travel. As reported by Pareigis, Taubes writes: “I’m at home in it and I’m afraid it’s beginning to have an effect on my feeling about English. A kind of alienation sets in. My acquired language shows its foreign face, it is not mine, not inside me but an external acquisition I handle. I become aware of the tension of the effort of maneuvering the language like a tem of horses (like in the wors moment of writing, and of my dissatisfaction with English. Why are the words, expressions so pale, abstract, colorless, inert compared to my native tongue?” (Budapest Journal, September–October 1969, 13 September 1969, quoted by Pareigis 2020, p. 84).
20
In a letter from 21 April 1952, Taubes relates Gnosticism with Joyce. While Finnegans Wake might appear gnostic in its mythic structure—“a destruction of history (unilateral Judeo Christian time) by reducing all historical events to an ever recurrent cosmic drama” (Taubes 2014, p. 205). Taubes sees it not as an escapist negation of the world, but as a joyful destruction of oppressive historical and symbolic orders (family, church, state, language). Unlike Gnosticism, which often rejects the material and bodily as evil, Joyce revels in them. His revolt is not a flight from the world but an eruption of embodied meaning—an affirmation of vitality against sterile authority. In this sense, Joyce resists gnostic dualism; his work explodes categories rather than fleeing them. On her reading of Joyce, but also Kafka and Dostoevsky, see Pareigis (2020, pp. 133–37).
21
The abrupt end of her life, only four days after Divorcing was published, casts a haunting resonance over the text’s unresolved quality. In a conversation with Ivan, her lover, the nature of the book is further revealed: it’s not just about a dead woman, but told by one. This paradox is captured in their dialogue: “‘The book I’m working on? Yes, I’ve begun …’ Reading love sonnets on the plane; of course I didn’t miss you. ‘It’s about a dead woman.’ ‘I remember, you wrote me about it from Paris.’ ‘This is something else. It’s told by the dead woman.’ ‘You would do something like that,’ he laughs. ‘It’s not so easy. You can’t remember a dream till you awake.’ ‘How will you do that?’ ‘You wake up when you have to.’ ‘You must know’” (Taubes 2020, p. 151).
22
It’s worth mentioning what Taubes writes in her short novel “Dr. Rombach’s Daughter.” See Taubes (2023, pp. 157–58): “Marianna loved words. Words were her only means of getting hold of things. The things remained outside and apart from her. The blue she saw, the sadness and shame she felt, the quivering moth on the lampshade, they eluded her. But the words, blue, sadness, shame, moth, belonged to her. The word blue was more than the blue of the sky or a piece of blue velvet. Everything blue was captured in the word blue. The world was like a wall. Its objects were turned away from her until she named them. Then the sky allowed her to enter. She called things by their names and they came to her like animals. Sometimes she fed them. Sometimes they offered themselves to her as food. Sometimes they sat on her heart and devoured her” (emphasis in the original).
23
This idea is—according to Wolfson—in line with the rabbinic idea of the chain of oral interpretation of the written scripture (Wolfson 2023, p. 98).
24
See Taubes (2014, p. 65): “I have been told by Bergman, Levinas and others of my perfect ignorance of what Judaism is. Nevertheless, I would hazard the following. The positive and imperishable element in Judaism is a sense of fidelity which pierces through the very center of man, sanctifies his earthly bonds and establishes a bond between heaven and himself. You have told me and it is true that by disloyalty to the past we jeopardize our own self-identity. The world of faithfulness becomes tragic when a man loses irrevocably his mate, his friend, his family, his people, his country. How can one remain faithful and continue to live? Not only death and destruction, but birth also, the entrance of a new reality, a new possibility into the old frame, a new discovery which is in itself legitimate and irrefutable, can shatter the world of loyalties. At this moment fidelity to the past and fidelity to the future cease to be identical, and one must choose between loyalty to the dead and loyalty to the living.”

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Pisano, L. “Forever Strange in This World.” Susan Taubes’ Diasporic Thinking. Religions 2025, 16, 1074. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081074

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Pisano L. “Forever Strange in This World.” Susan Taubes’ Diasporic Thinking. Religions. 2025; 16(8):1074. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081074

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Pisano, Libera. 2025. "“Forever Strange in This World.” Susan Taubes’ Diasporic Thinking" Religions 16, no. 8: 1074. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081074

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Pisano, L. (2025). “Forever Strange in This World.” Susan Taubes’ Diasporic Thinking. Religions, 16(8), 1074. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081074

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