Rethinking the modern and modernity with Jacob Taubes

Abstract

Jacob Taubes' book "Occidental Eschatology" (1947) offers a unique framework for examining cultural patterns across the line often construed as separating “the religious” from the “non-religious.” This paper highlights the implications of the application of this framework for our understanding of modernity: With Taubes, the “modern” conception of history, totality and sovereignty can be traced to the emphatic distinction between “world” and “god” in the Hebrew Bible. In this perspective, “the modern” appears as a cultural element that is analytically dissociated from any particular later historical period and from any cultural or geographical context, such as “the West”. Messianic thinking appears integral to the modern rather than as a source of fundamentally opposing insights. Competing appeals to reject the world are a source of instability and violence in modernity. Further research can address how the modern is linked with other cultural elements and with institutional arrangements in different contexts.