“Forever Strange in This World.” Susan Taubes’ Diasporic Thinking
Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Zigeunerleben
3. Diasporic Ontology
3.1. Taubes’ Diasporic Heidegger
3.2. Accepting Worldliness
4. Anti-Dogmatic Judaism
4.1. The Ghosts of Judaism
4.2. Faithful to the Absence
4.3. Not from the Side of History
5. Linguistic Skepticism
5.1. Linguistic Abuse vs. Poetry
5.2. Mysticism Against Linguistic Reification
5.3. Topology of the Book
5.4. Literalism as Propaganda
6. Post-Apocalyptic Hopelessness
Babel-Towers in the Vacuum
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
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
Pisano L. “Forever Strange in This World.” Susan Taubes’ Diasporic Thinking. Religions. 2025; 16(8):1074. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081074
Chicago/Turabian StylePisano, Libera. 2025. "“Forever Strange in This World.” Susan Taubes’ Diasporic Thinking" Religions 16, no. 8: 1074. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081074
APA StylePisano, L. (2025). “Forever Strange in This World.” Susan Taubes’ Diasporic Thinking. Religions, 16(8), 1074. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081074