A Mystic Conception of History: Negative Political Theology in Jacob Taubes

Abstract

This article offers an account of the political theology of the German‐Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes (1923–87), whose thinking has been described as a negative political theology. This article makes an intervention into how to read Taubes well. By proposing that the most generative essay for understanding Taubes’s thought is the 1955 essay “On The Symbolic Order of Modern Democracy,” it shows both how and why one might read Taubes (with assistance from Judith Butler) as offering a negative political theology in a non‐theocentric key.