The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes

"The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes offers a detailed analysis of an extraordinary figure in the twentieth-century history of Jewish thought, Western philosophy, and the study of religion. Drawing on close readings of Susan Taubes' writings, including her correspondence with her husband Jacob Taubes, scholarly essays, literary compositions, and poems, Elliot R. Wolfson plumbs the depths of a tragic worldview hovering between the poles of nihilism and hope. Susan Taubes presciently explored the hypernomian status of Jewish ritual and belief after the Holocaust, as well as the theopolitical challenges of Zionism and the dangers of ethnonationalism. She engaged with numerous other thinkers, analyzing the antitheological theology and gnostic repercussions of Heideggerian thought; and the mystical atheism and apophaticism of tragedy in Simone Weil. And she understood poetry as the means to face the faceless and to confront the silence of death in the temporal overcoming of time through time. Wolfson delves into the abyss that molded Susan Taubes's mytheological thinking, making a powerful case for the relevance of her work to the study of philosophy and religion today"--