SAMAN MAHDEVAR
Apocalypse "As If Not": Jacob Taubes and History in the "State of Exception"
This paper offers a systematic reconstruction of the late apocalyptic thought of the Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes, positioning it as a critical intervention in twentieth-century political theology and the philosophy of history. Against interpretations that reduce Taubes to a "Gnostic nihilist, " it argues his work elaborates a Pauline-inspired apocalypticism "from below" to destabilise the metaphysical foundations of historical reason and political order. The analysis is grounded in a crucial set of sources – lesser-known seminars, correspondence, and late essays – which are essential for understanding the definitive role of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history in shaping Taubes’s strategic reading of Carl Schmitt. These fragmentary materials reveal how Taubes, in dialogue with the Schmittian concept of the "state of exception" (Ausnahmezustand) and Benjamin’s concept of "now-time" (Jetztzeit), developed his core idea of history as a "compressed" (geballt) field of messianic intensity. They further document his critical appropriation of Schmitt’s katechon, reading it not as a guarantor of order but as a sign of eschatological domestication. By prioritising these often-overlooked aspects, the paper demonstrates that Taubes’s apocalypticism, governed by the Pauline hōs mē ("as if not"), articulates a negative metaphysics of history. It identifies an unrepresentable force that emerges only in fractures within linear time, challenging the symbolic orders of modern historiography and sovereignty from a position of constitutive weakness.