The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes

There has recently been an explosion of interest in the Hungarian-American writer Susan Taubes (1928–1964). With The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope, Elliot R. Wolfson offers the first monograph that brackets Taubes’ literary writings to firmly establish her as a Jewish philosopher in her own right. In his typically erudite and poetic style, he presents her philosophy as he promises: dripping with pathos.

In the introduction to Taubes’ recently republished novel Divorcing (NYRB Classics, 2020), David Rieff writes that her writing “bleeds,” something that Wolfson also captures in her philosophy. Rather than interpreting Taubes through her notable genealogy and relationships—her husband was the influential Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes (1923–1987), her father Sándor Feldmann (1889–1972) a Freudian psychoanalyst, and her grandfather Mózes Feldmann (1860–1927) the great rabbi of Budapest—Wolfson instead introduces Taubes with her death by suicide at the age of forty-one. In this way, Taubes’ ending is positioned at the beginning and accompanies the reader as they receive her philosophy that hemorrhages from start to the end.

Due to the source material available, Wolfson leans heavily on letters sent between Susan and Jacob from 1950 to 1952, when Jacob was residing in Israel and she in New York. These letters reveal her as brilliantly intuitive and masterfully poetic in her grasp of ideas. The form of the letter allows her to breathe as she rails against the boundaries set at the university—she attended Bryn Mawr College, Harvard University, the Sorbonne, and Hebrew University. It is clear from her letters to Jacob that she is sharply intelligent. Wolfson demonstrates this by lifting an excerpt or a phrase from the letters and using it as a springboard to delve into rich discussions of her ideas, which encompass the elegant—“breathing the holy”—as well as the sacrilegious and dark (so dark, in fact, that it is best not to reproduce them here). These short excerpts offer us enough of Taubes to inspire curiosity without making her fully appear. The reader is left wanting to read these allusive letters in full.

In the introduction, which is really a whole chapter, Wolfson riffs on Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s line that “all poets are Jews,” relying on Jacques Derrida's and Paul Celan's reading of this enigmatic statement. Wolfson emphasizes that the Jew is the symbol of the universalization of the particular (we are all estranged; we are all chosen); at the same time, the symbolic language of poetry is a particular site of the ineffable, universal referent. Emphasizing Taubes’ agonizing estrangement from her Judaism and thus her place in the world, Wolfson presents her all the more as poet and Jew.

Proceeding by paradox, Wolfson explains that Taubes’ approach to Judaism—her wrestling with the law (chapter 1), her estrangement from the holy land (chapter 2) and the world (chapter 3), her sense of the absence of God (chapter 4), and her epistemology or the “the concealment of truth” (chapter 5)—are, in fact, religious experiences of the first order. The difference between Taubes’ atheism and the religious atheism of the mid-century, however, is that God is not present in the absence. For Taubes, the absence is also the absence of presence or the unconcealment of the nothing (she perceived that Martin Heidegger was too theological). In this way, Taubes is pushed further than Simone Weil and Heidegger into the void, almost violently. As Wolfson writes, “Susan shrewdly understood that naming the holy is predicated on being banished from the holy” (245, my emphasis). In the same paradoxical or “doubled” way, Wolfson presents Taubes’ refusal to comply with Jacob’s Judaism as a genuine practice. For example, he writes that Taubes fulfils the law by transgressing it when she “lights the serpent,” her provocative term for lighting the candle to inaugurate the Sabbath.

Wolfson admits that Taubes can be bleak. Although he portrays her as having witnessed the light before being plunged into darkness—“Having seen the radiant fires of Jerusalem, her eyes will be sealed in darkness, but she will be sustained forever” (111)—I question if Wolfson’s portrayal sufficiently represents what sustained her. Wolfson could have addressed this with an expanded exploration of Taubes’ engagement with Weil. For example, in Taubes’ 1955 essay “The Absent God” (an abridged version of her doctoral dissertation of the same title), she criticized Weil for not having sufficient room for “revolt.” This essay reveals that Taubes’ bleakness and negative assessment of humanity sourced its energy from an excruciating vision that things should be better. While the subtitle of the book is “Between Nihilism and Hope,” the representation of Taubes’ hope at times felt eclipsed by her nihilism. But her hope is there too, even if not sufficiently revealed by Wolfson.

While sustenance might have been underplayed, Wolfson perceptively interprets her pathos as a sign of her boundary-breaking approach to the truth. One way that this is demonstrated is his preservation of Taubes’ spelling errors in the immediacy of her philosophical writing. It evokes the idea of “raccoon hands,” in which cereal boxes are shredded open with impatience to get inside. This idiosyncratic approach, which fuses the feverish creative instinct with sheer intellectual honesty, refused her entry into the demarcated fields of literature and philosophy in her lifetime. But as Wolfson shows, this estrangement is precisely what makes her interesting for us now. The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes is invaluable for the rising discourse around this intriguing figure, and I look forward to Wolfson’s forthcoming book that puts Taubes into conversation with Gillian Rose and Edith Wyschogrod.

Zoe Boyle is a PhD candidate in theology and religious studies at KU Leuven, Belgium.

Zoe-Jane Boyle

Date Of Review:

July 26, 2024