The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope

By Elliot R. Wolfson

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's writings, including her correspondence with Jacob Taubes, scholarly essays, literary compositions, and poems, Elliot R. Wolfson plumbs the depths of the tragic sensibility that shaped her worldview, hovering between the poles of nihilism and hope.

By placing Susan Taubes in dialogue with a host of other seminal thinkers, Wolfson illumines how she presciently explored the hypernomian status of Jewish ritual and belief after the Holocaust; the theopolitical challenges of Zionism and the dangers of ethnonationalism; the antitheological theology and gnostic repercussions of Heideggerian thought; the mystical atheism and apophaticism of tragedy in Simone Weil; and the understanding of 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 continued relevance of her work to the study of philosophy and religion today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781503635302

Elliot R. Wolfson

Elliot R. Wolfson is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Between 1987 and 2014, he was the Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton University Press, 1994); Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (Fordham University Press, 2005); A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (Zone Books, 2011); Giving Beyond the Goft: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (Fordham University Press, 2014); and The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (Columbia University Press, 2018).

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL PATHOS OF SUSAN TAUBES

Between Nihilism and Hope

Elliot R. Wolfson

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2023 by Elliot R. Wolfson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wolfson, Elliot R., author.

Title: The philosophical pathos of Susan Taubes : between nihilism and hope / Elliot R. Wolfson. Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish mysticism.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. |

Series: Stanford studies in Jewish mysticism | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022025976 (print) | LCCN 2022025977 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503633186 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503635302 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Taubes, Susan—Philosophy. | Jewish philosophy—20th century. | Religion—Philosophy.

Classification: LCC PS3570.A88 Z96 2023 (print) | LCC PS3570.A88 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20221025

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025976

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025977

Cover design: Lindy Kasler

Cover photo: Susan Taubes, Courtesy of Ethan Taubes

Stanford Studies in Jewish Mysticism

Edited by Clémence Boulouque and Ariel Evan Mayse

to the blessed memory of my mother zelda meisel wolfson february 11, 1923—march 1, 2014 whose critical sensibility and mathematical acuity helped carve the path i have walked in this world

The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech: there it petrifies and is henceforth dead but indestructible, like the petrified plants and animals of prehistory. As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere or at bottom serious. When it begins to exist for others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

When one lives alone, one neither speaks too loud nor writes too loud, for one fears the hollow echo—the criticism of the nymph Echo. And all voices sound different in solitude!

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Dream has its own time. While one is dreaming one does not know this of course; that it will end. In dreaming one assumes it will go on indefinitely, as in living—a reasonable delusion based on life experience: life goes on indefinitely until one is dead. Only dreams end. And in this respect loves and plays and stories are like dreams: they end. Books were better than dreams or life. A book ended not like life, abruptly; not like a dream, with a clumsy struggle and sense of deception; but gracefully and knowingly, preparing you for the final period. Between life and dream there was not much difference really, however the two wrangled, struggled, played tricks on each other. A book was something really different. . . . You can be dreaming and not know it. You can be awake and wonder if it’s a dream and not believe it. But a book is simply and always a book—you can be sure of that. And with a book, whether you’re reading it or writing it, you are awake.

—Susan Taubes, Divorcing

Contents

Introduction: Memory and Heeding the Murmuring of the Israelites

1. Ghosts of Judaism and the Serpent Devouring Its Own Tale

2. Zionism and the Sacramental Danger of Nationalism

3. Gnosis and the Covert Theology of Antitheology: Heidegger, Apocalypticism, and Gnosticism

4. Tragedy, Mystical Atheism, and the Apophaticism of Simone Weil

5. Facing the Faceless: Poetic Truth, Temporal Oblivion, and the Silence of Death

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Memory and Heeding the Murmuring of the Israelites

Pain is one of the keys to unlock man’s innermost being as well as the world. Whenever one approaches the points where man proves himself to be equal or superior to pain, one gains access to the sources of his power and the secret hidden behind his dominion. Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!

—Ernst Jünger, On Pain

But the more joyful the joy, the more pure the sadness slumbering within it. The deeper the sadness, the more summoning the joy resting within it. Sadness and joy play into each other. The play itself which attunes the two by letting the remote be near and the near be remote is pain. This is why both, highest joy and deepest sadness, are painful each in its way.

—Martin Heidegger, Words

And the price the soul pays for its errors is always a spiritual price; their sin is their own punishment.

—Susan Taubes, Letter to Jacob Taubes, September 29, 1950

Susan Taubes (née Judit Zsuzánna Feldmann) was born in Budapest in 1928 and died by her own hand on November 6, 1969, in East Hampton, New York.¹ It is surely prudent to circumvent reductionism when assessing a person’s life, but much can be ascertained about Susan’s psychological profile and intellectual temperament by noting that her grandfather Mózes Feldmann (1860–1927) was the grand rabbi of Budapest, and her father Sándor Feldmann (1889–1972) was a leading Freudian psychoanalyst. Departing from the two disparate orthodoxies, Susan forged a way that nevertheless emerged from these patriarchal figures, a trail marked by both a relentless quest to recover the spiritual vitality of Judaism as practiced by her grandfather as well as a ruthless obsession to uncover the root by a radical thinking apposite to the orientation of her father.

In 1939, Susan emigrated with her father to the United States, her mother eventually making her way at a later date. They went first to Pittsburgh, and then Susan moved with her father to Rochester, New York, while her mother settled in Manhattan.² Susan’s letters to Jacob Taubes confirm that she shuffled back and forth between her parents, but she clearly had a preference to be with her father, and over time the relationship with her mother completely deteriorated.³ Thus, in her letter from November 5–6, 1950, Susan wrote that the situation with her mother had become very unhealthy. She goes on to describe her as a dragon and a pitiful and neurotic dragon at that—so one could not become a ‘hero’ slaying her. I can’t get tangled up in old case histories, also if one ‘kills’ one should do it with a sharp knife, so I shall break relations with her altogether. . . . It is true, everything she touches turns to bad luck—and though I pity her I fear her too much to be able to be kind to her.⁴ The continuation of the letter reveals the tensions between her parents to the point that her father not only refused to live with her mother but also forbade her from visiting Rochester. Susan reiterated the desire to cut relations with her mother entirely because she was deemed to be too dangerous.⁵ The magnitude of the discord and the distance between mother and daughter is fictionalized in the following exchange in Divorcing between Kamilla and Sophie Blind:

I don’t know why I’m sitting here, Kamilla says, We have nothing to do with each other, do we? . . . I called you because father asked me on the phone if I know how you are. I didn’t even know you were back in New York. You don’t write me. We haven’t been on speaking terms for years. I have accepted that I don’t have a daughter. . . . You are a stranger to me. I am a stranger to you.⁶

In late 1948, Susan met Jacob Taubes in New York, and they were married on June 5, 1949, at a time when she was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College, majoring in philosophy.⁷ Her honors thesis, entitled Myth and Logos in Heidegger’s Philosophy, was written under the direction of Isabel Stearns.⁸ In the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin (Summer 1951), Susan was praised as brilliant, mature, professional, and her thesis was acclaimed as being on a par with the work of an excellent Ph.D. candidate.⁹ Upon graduating in 1951, she received the Bryn Mawr European Fellowship, which afforded her the opportunity to continue her studies at the Sorbonne. After spending some time in Paris, she joined Jacob in Jerusalem and took courses at the Hebrew University. Subsequently, Susan returned to the United States and pursued graduate study at Harvard University, serving as the Josiah Royce Fellow in Radcliffe College. To the best of my knowledge, Susan was the first woman to receive a doctorate in the history and philosophy of religion from that institution. The original topic for her doctoral dissertation was the mythical and theological elements in Heidegger’s philosophy, but this plan was never brought to fruition, and instead the topic of the thesis, supervised by Paul Tillich and completed in 1956, was The Absent God: A Study of Simone Weil.¹⁰

Susan and Jacob had a son Ethan and a daughter Tanaquil, born respectively in 1953 and 1957. In 1960, Susan began teaching at Columbia University, where she was also curator of the Bush Collection of Religion and Culture. During the 1960s, she was a member of the experimental Open Theater ensemble, and in addition, she edited African Myths and Tales and a book of Native American myths called The Storytelling Stone. She also advanced her own creative writing by publishing a dozen short stories, and she wrote two novels: Divorcing, which appeared on November 2, 1969, four days before her suicide by drowning in the Atlantic Ocean, and the novella A Lament for Julia, which has appeared in German translation, but the original English is still unpublished.¹¹ It is noteworthy that on the day of the release of Divorcing, there was a scathing review by Hugh Kenner in the New York Times. Susan Sontag, the close companion of Susan Taubes about whom she wrote in her diary on July 21, 1972, that she was her double,¹² was the one who identified her deceased body.¹³ Sontag was of the opinion that the proximate cause of her friend’s demise may have been the bad reviews of the book, and especially the one by Kenner, although it should be noted that a short time before her death, Susan had written in her diary that she would be drowning herself in about two weeks.¹⁴

Of late there has been increasing interest in Susan Taubes prompted by the publication of several works by the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, including translations into German of literary and philosophical works originally composed in English, under the guidance by Sigrid Weigel, as well as two volumes of correspondence with Jacob from the years 1950–1952, edited and annotated by Christina Pareigis. These volumes are a treasure trove of wide-ranging intellectual exchanges—Susan’s letters, in particular, read like pages from philosophical diaries, Denktagebücher, which display remarkable analytic perspicacity and critical sophistication. The epistolic give-and-take also provides the reader with access to some of the intricacies of their private relationship. Susan effusively communicated her unwavering love for Jacob on many occasions, a love that encompassed in her own words both logos and eros,¹⁵ or, as she put it elsewhere, a love that rests on trust that cannot be thwarted by either logos or eros.¹⁶ Understanding her commitment to Jacob in scriptural terms gave Susan a linguistic medium to express the intertwining of the erotic and the spiritual threads. The obvious choice of Song of Songs, for instance, is signaled out in Susan’s letter to Jacob, written on May 3, 1952, as the looking glass through which to imagine and to verbalize her fervent craving:

Last night I put my nose into a bunch of lilies-of-the valley + the sudden whiff of fragrance made me sick with love and longing for you. I tried to remember passages from the Song of Songs; I couldn’t all the way; So I knocked on the door of my English neighbour Chippenfield + borrowed his Bible and read + thought of you.¹⁷

Noteworthy is the fact that the olfactory served as the catalyst for Susan to moor her sensual longing in scripture. The biblical verse enlivens the scent of the roses even as the scent of the roses enlivens the biblical verse. Hermeneutically, we can speak of a double mirroring, the textual mirror mirroring the tactile experience and the tactile experience mirroring the textual mirror. As Susan conveyed the matter of her yearning in the letter to Jacob, written at 1:30 in the morning on November 16, 1950, I think of you and think over how we met and what happened to us and how the reading of the Hosea was prophetic not only in relation to our personal fates but in that we too are ceaselessly living the analogy of the covenant of marriage to the covenant of God + his people.¹⁸ For his part, Jacob, too, thought of their relationship in biblical proportions, and thus he affirmed that his carnal desire for Susan intersected with the spiritual, as we see in the following outpouring of passion: Love you my animal, my dear animal very very much. If I want to know or to express to my self what holy means I see you and I feel a deep trembling of joy and extasy in you.¹⁹

The letters provide the reader with insight into Susan’s emotional loneliness when separated from Jacob,²⁰ her ardent pining to be with him physically and psychically to the point of experiencing actual discomfort in their separation.²¹ Typical of the despair Susan felt is the following remark in the letter she wrote to Jacob on September 26, 1950, I begin to feel like a sleep walker through the world—very efficient and quite dreamless but a sleep walker and in the gray hues of this sleep I can taste the blackness of death.²² Repeating the motif of the deprivation of passing away to express her anguish of not being together with Jacob, Susan lamented to Jacob in the letter from October 28, 1950, that going to bed without him is like going into the grave each night.²³ The letters also attest to Susan’s insecurity about Jacob’s willingness to reciprocate her abiding affection, leading her to ask after declaring her unconditional loyalty to him, do you love me?²⁴ Additionally, the letters give voice to the intellectual respect that Susan harbored for Jacob as an original thinker, even extolling his good genius and referring to his bold and beautiful daimon.²⁵ On October 21, 1950, she addressed Jacob as her Bodhisattva, which she glossed as the one whose being is enlightenment.²⁶ Susan’s admiration of Jacob is idealized in the letter written on February 16–17, 1951, Ah but it is sad without you. Everybody is soooo stupid—you are the only clever being I know—and everybody else bores me.²⁷

However, there is ample evidence that Susan was capable of being critical of Jacob. One of clearest examples is in the letter of March 6, 1952, where Susan offered her comments on Jacob’s essay The Development of the Ontological Question in Recent German Philosophy,²⁸ to which she refers as Q:

What you are driving at is important; the insight is creative and demonic, the language is still inadequate . . . even in the german. The source of the inadequacy is partly in the natural difficulty of penetrating a new abyss, but it is also due to a curious slavishness to the historical evolution of the idea. . . . Continuity cannot be denied, but you must establish it from your point and not from Husserl’s or Cohen. It is a problem to adopt, adapt, transform revolutionize the old language. Often you make it more difficult for yourself by playing with the old terminology. . . . Say what you mean and then refer to what is called x or y by another school. You have a tendency to develop your thought by playing around with titles. Take the harder way of articulating your own thought; these algebraic shortcuts are very questionable. There are the most dubious pretensions behind Heidegger’s thinking style and unless you are willing to go along the way of a clandestine Geistesgeschichtemystik I would advise you to learn rather from Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (who understood the fitting style if one doesn’t want to get entangled with history.)²⁹

There is much in this passage that necessitates a more careful scrutiny, including the comparison of Jacob’s style to a surreptitious intellectual history of mysticism deducible from Heidegger as well,³⁰ but for our immediate purposes it is sufficient to take note of the acuity of Susan’s critical interventions.

Let me note finally that the letters also indicate that Susan was agonizingly aware of Jacob’s dark side, corroborated, for example, in the fact that she refers to him occasionally as the devil boy (Teufelsknabe).³¹ One might argue that affixing this title to Jacob is done in a teasing or an endearing manner, but it is evident that at times it is used to mark undesirable qualities that are deserving of admonishment. The complexity of her concomitant attraction to and repulsion from Jacob is exhibited glaringly in the conclusion of the letter from April 11, 1952, where Susan communicated her desire to embrace her husband but also to beat him.³² The thorny convolution of Susan’s emotions can be seen in the antiromantic ideal of love communicated in her letter of April 26, 1952, I hate you lovingly. I send an angel to beat you in my name.³³ As is well known, the matrimonial difficulties were fictionalized in Divorcing, reissued in 2020 with an introduction by David Rieff, the son of Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff. Notably, the title suggests that the process of divorce is unending, and it is not a matter that can ever be finalized. The republication of this work has occasioned a number of journalistic reviews and, in some cases, a reassessment of the relationship as well as of the merit and relevance of Susan’s thought. Both of these topics have been greatly enhanced by Christina Pareigis’s intellectual biography of Susan, which appeared in November 2020.³⁴ This monograph should be commended not only for the lucidity of expression but for the author’s meticulous scholarship and documentation based on published and archival material.

My first serious engagement with Susan Taubes was reading the 1954 essay The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism. Being struck by the profundity of her discursive skill, I proceeded to read more of her scholarly writings, and when I was invited to contribute to a volume on Jacob Taubes, I decided to compare and contrast their respective interpretations of Heidegger. The fruits of that labor can be found in the essay Gnosis and the Covert Theology of Antitheology: Heidegger, Apocalypticism, and Gnosticism in Susan and Jacob Taubes,³⁵ a revised version of which appears in the third chapter of this book. Susan’s letters proved to be a major repository of philosophical reflections, and in particular they illustrate that her understanding of Heidegger, while in some cases indebted to exchanges with Jacob,³⁶ far exceeded him in discernment and depth, even though she intermittently appropriated a misogynist defamation of her own worth by alleging that she is nothing—symbolized by the Greek omega (Ω)—but a conduit to transmit ideas she received from Jacob.³⁷

I note, parenthetically, that there is a strong parallel between what I set out to accomplish in Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (2019) and the position taken by Susan Taubes. The significant difference is that I emphasized the Jewish mystical underpinning of some of the distinctive aspects of Heidegger’s thought, which likely reached him through secondary channels like Böhme and Schelling, and less the extent to which it is a hidden Christian tradition. It must be noted, however, that Susan did postulate that the surreptitious tradition originated as a Jewish heresy. If we assume that Christian esotericism was informed by Jewish gnosis with roots in Late Antiquity but most fully developed in medieval kabbalah, then it is important to lay claim to the Jewish wellspring of Heidegger’s esoteric and heretical Christian tradition. And this, in good Heideggerian fashion, should embolden us to give thought to what is unthought.³⁸ Susan did comment in a few passing remarks on the affinity between Heidegger and Jewish esotericism and in one context even coined the phrase Heidegerian Kabbala.³⁹ Be that as it may, the mutual interest in Heidegger drew me to Susan’s essay, and this became the catalyst to engage in working on a monograph with the hope of showing that she should be taken seriously as a thinker who has contributed not only generally to the study of philosophy and religion but particularly to Jewish philosophy in the period right after the dreadful upheaval of the Holocaust and the momentous establishment of the modern state of Israel. While others have contributed to a reassessment of Susan’s literary talents and theoretical acumen, I wish to make a case for the relevance of her writings to Jewish religious thought.

To prevent misunderstanding, let me state unequivocally that my analysis is not prosopographic in nature as I am not interested in an exhaustive investigation of the biographical question of Susan’s Jewish upbringing. Furthermore, the attempt to reclaim the legacy of this extraordinary figure for the history of Judaism should not be construed parochially as a flaunting of ethnic pride. As will become abundantly clear in the ensuing chapters, Susan vehemently opposed such a narrowminded portrayal of Jewish religion and culture. The letters to Jacob and other writings, especially her novel Divorcing, demonstrate beyond question that she considered problematic the emphasis on Jewish particularity when specularized through an ethnocentric lens. Thus, from the specific example of the Passover seder, Susan extrapolated her more general discontent with the implicit ethnocentrism of the halakhah:

That symbols and festivals are more permanent than ideology is also my conviction; but this is my war with Judaism. Must every gesture serve for the glorification of the jewish people and the condemnation of the others? The satisfaction obtained from heaping plagues of frogs, vermin etc. on others is hardly redeeming. Is it not from spite, misunderstanding and hatred that we want to be redeemed?⁴⁰

Despite such unambiguous statements, it cannot be denied that her Jewishness persisted as an Archimedean point whence she was oriented—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say disoriented—in the world.⁴¹ The struggle to let go of her devotion to a religious-cultural heritage, which she could neither possess nor dispossess, is beautifully articulated in the following interchange on the nature of recollection cast in neurophysiological terms between Sophie and Kate in Divorcing:

Memory, we discover, is stored in a glutenous protein substance—mucopolysaccharides—a cell glue. Fuzz collects around the neurons. Now, in studying brain waves it turns out that there is a best fit pattern in which a wave closely resembles the one where the original information is stored. The waves are whispering together.

So that’s what it is. The chorus of murmuring! Old Israelites in my cells.

Correct, and its time they shut up. We’re going to dissolve that old glue. One whiff and you’ve got a clean slate. . . .

Admit it, you can’t live without those murmuring Israelites. ‘May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem!’⁴²

But of course, to part is painful, to part with an old rag, even a tumor. It’s part of human nature to love one’s tumor.⁴³

Judaism is the tumor that tormented Susan, but a torment that she nonetheless treasured. Her memory was saturated with the murmuring of the Israelites that could not be silenced all the days of her short-lived sojourn on this planet. Like the heroine of Divorcing, Susan was a refugee exiled from her native land, who was never able to find another home in the foreign country to which she relocated. The homeland she could discover was in exile,⁴⁴ but in such a homeland, one finds one’s place only by being displaced. As she put in the letter to Jacob written on October 7, 1950, But I am walking ‘the ways of the world’ walking through the connecting paths of nomads, wanderers, exiles.⁴⁵ Elaborating on this theme in the letter written the next day, Susan ruminated:

And I begin to grow into my life of wandering + migration even as the peasant grows into the climates of the land, and even as the peasant after a while learns to love the hoe whereon he breaks his back, the lands of his sweat and the stubborn seasons—so the wanderer, the uprooted, learns to love the dusty routes, the trunks, the warehouses, freight trucks and ticket-booths, the packing and unpacking. One grows into a familiarity with all the strange faces of Fate—slowly a pattern lights through the daily toil and redeems the sweat, backache and anxiety. The moment comes when the exile also celebrates his fate.⁴⁶

Revisiting the point in Divorcing, Susan wrote about Sophie, who had been travelling all her life, that her way to deal with things was to pack and unpack and pack again.⁴⁷

Susan’s exaltation of itinerancy and uprootedness related to her Jewish pedigree and poetic disposition reminds one of the following lines from the Poem of the End by Marina Tsvetaeva:

Still. We are. Outside town.

Beyond it! Understand? Outside!

That means we’ve passed the walls.

Life is a place where it’s forbidden

to live. Like the Hebrew quarter.

And isn’t it more worthy to

become an eternal Jew?

Anyone not a reptile

suffers the same pogrom. . . .

Ghetto of the chosen. Beyond this

Ditch. No mercy

In this most Christian of worlds

all poets are Jews.⁴⁸

The dislocation from any physical location—to cross the divide and to be beyond the town limit—is a manner of demarcating life as a place in which no one can live, a condition typified by the Jewish ghetto but not limited to it, since anyone who is not reptilian experiences the anguish of an equivalent pogrom and is thus subject to the eternal misfortune of the wandering Jew. From the specific case of the dislodgment of the Jews, the Russian poet elicits a claim about the nomadic status of the human predicament. The ghetto of the chosen unquestionably signifies the alienation of the Jew, but the image is also rendered symbolically to delineate the existential forsakenness of humankind.

The idiosyncratic constellation of Judaism serves as the speculum through which to appreciate the universalization of the particular in the particularization of the universal. Here it is useful to recall the words of Goethe, The particular always underlies the universal; the universal must forever submit to the particular.⁴⁹ Expounding this maxim, Ernst Cassirer noted that the relation between the universal and the particular is not one of logical subsumption but of ideal or ‘symbolic’ representation. The particular represents the universal, ‘not as a dream and shadow, but as a momentarily living manifestation of the inscrutable.’⁵⁰ The poetic genius is concerned with particular feelings of the inner life rather than with the general facts of the outer world at large.⁵¹ As opposed to allegory wherein the particular serves the universal, the symbolic language of the poet focuses on the concrete reality of the particular as a sign of its ineffable referent⁵² and thereby is the means to discern the universal.⁵³ Along similar lines, Tsvetaeva maintained that the poet seeks the universal in the particular, and thus the poetic vocation is linked essentially to the Jew inasmuch as the latter is associated with a particularity that doggedly resists assimilation into a universality presumed to be allocated unreservedly to the human species. I would suggest, therefore, that the assertion by Tsvetaeva that in the Christian world, all poets are Jews, does not imply inversely that all Jews are poets. By proclaiming all poets to be Jews, Tsvetaeva is communicating that the poet, too, is inflicted with an incurable disquiet that leaves him or her feeling that life is the place where it is forbidden to live in a manner comparable to the intolerable conditions of the Jewish ghetto.⁵⁴ From this we can deduce that no appeal to autochthony can authenticate claims to superiority with respect to the potentially toxic triangulation of peoplehood, land, and language. Homesickness, as Tsvetaeva recounts in another poem, is the only natural condition for the one who has no natural home. The disaffection from a native land and an indigenous language, and the fatigue that ensues from the consequent leveling out of any ethnocultural difference that might secure or stabilize the identity of one’s being in the world, signify the plight of the poet that warrants the stigma of being a Jew.⁵⁵

Significantly, Paul Celan used Tsvetaeva’s line, written in the Cyrillic characters BСЕ поэты жиды (Vse poety zhidy), All poets are Yids, as an epigraph to And with the Book from Tarussa, included in the 1963 collection Memory Rose.⁵⁶ While the czarist epithet zhid may have been derogatory, and thus was used ironically by Tsvetaeva and perhaps also by Celan,⁵⁷ Jacques Derrida proffered that the statement denotes the alleged universality of the Jewish witness.⁵⁸ The import of that universality is brought into sharper relief by considering the comments from Celan’s Conversation in the Mountains, written in August 1959, which Derrida juxtaposed to the aforementioned epithet:

One evening when the sun, and not only that, had gone down, then there went walking, stepping out of his cottage went the Jew, the Jew and son of a Jew, and with him went his name, unspeakable . . . do you hear me, you hear me, I’m the one, I, I and the one that you hear, that you think you hear, I and the other one—so he walked, you could hear it, went walking one evening when something had gone down, went beneath the clouds, went in the shadow, his own and alien—because a Jew, you know, now what has he got that really belongs to him, that’s not borrowed, on loan and still owed—, so then he went and came, came down this road that’s beautiful . . . he, the Jew, came and he came.⁵⁹

By delineating the name of the Jew as unpronounceable, der unaussprechliche, Celan may have been alluding rhetorically to the rabbinic tradition about the most sacred of divine names, the ineffable Tetragrammaton, a tradition expanded significantly in the esoteric-mystical lore of the kabbalah.⁶⁰ That the name of the Jew cannot be spoken portends, moreover, that the noncompliance of the Jew impedes the possibility of permanent possession or stable attachment in the world. As Celan expressed the matter in the continuation of this prose text, the Jew and Nature, that’s two very different things, as always, even today, even here.⁶¹ The ontic restlessness—being askew in the natural terrain—is conveyed by the image of the Jew condemned to walk continuously. Perhaps reflected here is the well-worn antisemitic trope of the wandering Jew,⁶² but Celan undermined its negativity by arguing that it is precisely because of this dispossession—occupying the homeland strangeness (die Fremde der Heimat), as he put it in Schibboleth⁶³—that the exclusive identity of the Jew is inclusive of the other, and hence the Jew is destined to enter the shadow of self that is concurrently his own and not his own.⁶⁴ The poetic figure of Jewishness may indeed attest above all to marginalization and persecution,⁶⁵ but this is precisely what bestows on the Jew the asset of embracing the alien out of an aboriginal alienation. Thus, explicating Celan’s view, Derrida noted, The Jew is also the other, me and the other; I am Jewish in saying: the Jew is the other who has no essence, who has nothing of his own or whose own essence is to have none.⁶⁶ If the Jew possesses no innate properties and has no essence apart from the essence of having no essence, it follows that to be a Jew of necessity incorporates being other than the Jew by virtue of not being the being that one is. The alterity of Abraham—emblematic of the Jew—is an alterity not only determined by the depreciatory othering of the non-Israelite but by the scriptural demarcation ha-ivri, the Hebrew (Genesis 14:13),⁶⁷ which, according to a midrashic explanation, is related to the description of Abraham as the immigrant who was brought to the land of Canaan from across the river, me-ever ha-nahar (Joshua 24:3) and who spoke the Hebrew language (mesiaḥ bi-leshon ivri).⁶⁸ As one who unremittingly originates from another place and who converses in a foreign language, the Jew is always tainted as the self that is other in relation to the environment in which he or she is situated and is thus subject to persistent deterritorialization. Translated into the ethological-political terms of Deleuze and Guattari, the Jewish mode of being is illustrative of the nomadological plane of immanence assembled by the variable coefficients of the relative movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization linked together in the absolute deterritorialized territory, the territory beyond territorialization.⁶⁹ In the subversion of the topological homeomorphism, one inevitably resides nowhere because one is coerced to reside everywhere. From the standpoint of this heterogeneity—the zone of fluctuation that is coextensive with reality⁷⁰—there is no difference whether one lives in the land of Israel or in the diaspora. In the former as in the latter, the individual is situated in medias res with the memory of the promise of a homeland not yet realized in the present, induced therefore to extend the lines of the past and the future into a polycentric circle of rhizomic repetition that has no beginning or end.⁷¹

Here it is germane to recall the comments in the draft notes of Celan’s The Meridian, the speech on poetics that he delivered before the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize in Darmstadt on October 22, 1960:

One can become a Jew as one can become a human; one can jewify [verjuden] and I would like to add, from experience: most easily today in German . . . One can jewify; this is, admittedly, difficult and, why not admit this too?—even many a born Jew has failed to do so; that’s exactly why I believe it to be so commendable . . . Jewify: It is the becoming-other, to stand-toward\for\—the-other-and-his-secret—. . . Not by speaking of offense, but by remaining unshakably itself, the poem becomes offense—becomes the Jew of Literature—The poet is the Jew of Literature—One can jewify, though that happens rarely, yet does happen from time to time. I believe jewifying [Verjudung] to be recommendable—hooknosed-ness [Krummnasigkeit] purifies the soul. Jewification that to me seems to be a way to understanding poetry, and not only exoteric poetry.⁷²

The process of Jewification, Verjudung, entails becoming-other (Anderswerden) and standing toward the other and his secret (Zum-anderen-und-dessen-Geheimnis-stehn). In virtue of the dialogical propensity of poetic language to direct its attention to the other, the poem is classified by Celan as a turning, Das Gedicht ist eine Umkehr,⁷³ a point accentuated in the final version of the Meridian speech:

The poem is solitary. It is solitary and underway [Das Gedicht ist einsam. Es ist einsam und unterwegs]⁷⁴ . . . But doesn’t the poem therefore already at its inception stand in the encounter—in the mystery of the encounter [im Geheimnis der Begegnung]? The poem wants to head toward some other, it needs the other, it needs an opposite. It seeks it out, it bespeaks itself to it.⁷⁵

Celan’s notes in preparation of the lecture attest that he connected the essential feature of the poem—the desperate conversation (verzweifeltes Gespräch) of someone seeking and addressing the other⁷⁶—with the comportment of being Jewish. Thus, the Jew is identified as the poet of literature, and the Jewification, a term with unmistakable vituperative connotations, is hailed as the way to comprehend poetry: Verjudung, das scheint mir ein Weg zum Verständnis der Dichtung. Even the infamous racial image of the crooked nose is transposed by Celan into a somatic characteristic that purifies the soul. For the Jew to be identified as the poet par excellence, as I remarked above, does not denote that all Jews are poetically inclined, but rather that all poets share with the itinerant Jew the tribulation of being alienated in the world, and they are thus susceptible to the movement of the self-forgotten I (selbstvergessenen Ich) toward the uncanny and the strange (Unheimlichen und Fremden),⁷⁷ the darkness of being adrift that endows one with the distance necessary to honor the uniqueness of the other.⁷⁸ Aesthetically, poeticizing is a "stepping beyond what is human [ein Hinaustreten aus dem Menschlichen], a stepping into an uncanny realm [Unheimlichen Bereich] turned toward the human."⁷⁹ In this realm of the mysterious, where art seems to be at home (zuhause), the groundless poet is grounded. Commenting on this passage, Derrida remarked that the uncanniness of Unheimliche is close to what creates the secret of poetry, that is, the secret of the encounter, noting, moreover, that Geheimnis denotes the intimate, the withheld, the withdrawn into retreat, the concealed interior of one’s home, of the house, and hence the secret of the encounter "is at the innermost heart of that which is present and presence (Gegenwart und Präsenz) in the poem.⁸⁰ In contrast to Hölderlin’s idea of dwelling poetically, famously exploited by Heidegger, Celan’s poetry is a form of inhabiting a language where one knows both that there is no home and that one cannot appropriate a language . . . . He was a migrant himself, and he marked in the thematics of his poetry the movement of crossing borders."⁸¹

The relationship between the poet and the Jew that Derrida draws from Celan calls to mind the conclusion he educes from The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès: And through a kind of silent displacement . . . the situation of the Jew becomes exemplary of the situation of the poet, the man of speech and of writing. The poet, in the very experience of his freedom, finds himself both bound to language and delivered from it by a speech whose master, nonetheless, he himself is.⁸² The nexus between poet and Jew that bears even more affinity with Celan and Susan Taubes relates to the shared exilic and peripatetic state. Thus, commenting on Jabès’s description of Yukel, you have always been ill at ease with yourself, you are never HERE, but ELSEWHERE, Derrida writes:

The Poet and the Jew are not born here but elsewhere. They wander, separated from their true birth. Autochthons only of speech and writing, of Law. . . . Autochthons of the Book. . . . Poetic autonomy, comparable to none other, presupposes broken Tables. . . . Between the fragments of the broken Tables the poem grows and the right to speech takes root.⁸³

To be anywhere is always to be elsewhere, such is the portion allotted to the poet and to the Jew. The only homeland of which either can speak is the Torah, and thus indigeneity, strictly speaking, is textual and not topographical.⁸⁴ Even so, Derrida marks a decisive difference between the two interpretations of interpretation: Judaic heteronomy, which is typologized in the figure of the rabbi, gives way to poetic autonomy; whereas the former pivots around allegiance to the law and thus coincides with the horizon of the original text, the latter presupposes the shattering of the tablets of the law and thus coincides with the necessity of commentary, a form of exiled speech. Insofar as the poem grows like a weed between the shards of the broken tablets, the poet is branded an outlaw, that is, the one positioned outside the law by remaining inside the law, the one exercising the sovereignty to be chained to the very law from which one is unchained.⁸⁵ In this autonomous state, the poet is dislodged from the ancestral fatherland. Comparably, Celan’s poems bear the timebound traces of the harrowing migration foisted upon Jewish populations by the scourge of Hitlerism, but they morph for him into a timeless philosophical insight regarding the nature of language as that which sets into motion gestures of appropriation precisely because its very essence is not to let itself be appropriated. Derrida acknowledges explicitly that his interrogating the legitimacy of linguistic nationalism can be ascribed suitably to Celan,⁸⁶ the poet who exemplifies the commitment to linguistic differentiation dissociated from the temptation of nationalism and the political power of patriotism, an appeal to the singularity of the signifying body of language that eludes all possession and any claim of belonging.⁸⁷

The universal exemplarity anchored in the apophatic particularity of the other⁸⁸ is verified by the fact that the statement cited above from the draft notes of the Meridian address, One can become a Jew (Man kann zum Juden werden), is immediately glossed with the words as one can become a human (wie man zum Menschen werden kann).⁸⁹ This apposition conveys that the specificity of being a Jew is intricately linked to the constitution of being human more generally, and therefore one is Jewish to the extent that one is not exclusively Jewish. Vivian Liska perspicaciously commented that Celan’s passage articulates the paradox of exemplarity insofar as it invokes

a particular—the Jew—to describe a universally accessible condition of becoming other. . . . In bringing into play the word "verjuden," Celan both speaks of and performs a transformation: he invokes a vocabulary of exclusion and discrimination and simultaneously turns this historically loaded, negative term—a term indicating an abject contamination by the Jew and his spirit—into an affirmative metaphor for transformation, for becoming other.⁹⁰

Liska has rightly noted that Celan provocatively inverted the antisemitic insult: Verjuden denotes the potential to affirm the other—which is the essence of poiēsis wrought through the renunciation of self that facilitates becoming other—and not the degradation of othering the other to the point of annihilation. Moreover, "Celan’s use of ‘verjuden’ performs an ingenious crossing of the universal and the particular: one—anyone—can ‘become other’. . . . At the same time, however, the metaphor’s vehicle, the verb verjuden, retains in its resonance the singularity of its idiomatic use at a specific moment in German-Jewish history."⁹¹ The universal possibility of being human can only be enacted through the concrete individuation demonized by Nazi ideology as the venomous other that needs to be eradicated.

I propose that the paradox of exemplarity so described can be applied to the claim of Susan Taubes that the lack of an autochthonous nature enables the Jew to personify the universal through the channel of the particular. The repudiation of a reified self is what fosters the possibility of becoming the other; conversely, the Jew embodies the wisdom that to become the other is what it means to be a self. Alternatively expressed, the Jew attests figurally to the fact that the general must always be measured from the standpoint of a particularity that withstands collapsing the difference between self and other in the othering of the self as the self of the other. The marker of being Jewish, consequently, is not primarily religious, cultural, or political, but it is rather the ethical directive to uphold the dignity of the other based on a keen sensitivity to one’s own destiny of being other in this world.⁹² Pareigis aptly remarked that Susan had a special interest in the topic of estrangement, feeling estranged from any kind of belonging. Belonging to a nation, belonging even to a language. Belonging to other people, to a group, to a religion.⁹³ In Divorcing, Susan elicited the following insight from the description of the wicked son in the Passover Haggadah, mentioned together with the wise son, the son who does not how to ask, and the simple son: this cunning people predicts the deviant at every table, as if from the beginning; this too was a part of the Passover ceremony: the child who didn’t see the point of it, a Jewish child, because, as the saying goes, being a bad Jew didn’t make you any less of a Jew.⁹⁴ Insofar as wickedness is understood as the removal of oneself from the collective narrative, the suitable punishment would have been to preclude the possibility of being liberated from Egypt, which is indeed the explicit language of the advice offered in the traditional text, You should blunt his teeth and say to him, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went out of Egypt’ (Exodus 13:8), ‘for me’ and not ‘for him.’ Had he been there he would not have been redeemed. Susan’s heterodoxical exegesis turns the verdict on its head: not being redeemed is not only not a reprimand, it is the more perfect form of redemption, to be redeemed from the need to be redeemed. The recalcitrant child, accordingly, has a place at the table because the one who rejects the story is an integral part of the story.

Belonging by not belonging fittingly describes Susan’s path as a Jew fighting to free herself from the double bind of becoming more Jewish by being less Jewish, to paraphrase Derrida’s paradox of the identity of non-self-identity.⁹⁵ To cite one of the various Derridean formulations of this sentiment,

I still feel, at once, at the same time, as less jewish and more jewish than the Jew [comme moins juif et plus juif que le Juif], as scarcely Jewish and as superlatively Jewish as possible, more than Jew [plus que Juif], exemplarily Jew, but also hyperbolically Jew.⁹⁶

Or, as Derrida put it elsewhere,

And how does a Jew of whom I know only too well, and from so close, that he will never have been sure of being together with himself in general, a Jew who dares not stop at the hypothesis that this dissociation from self renders him at once as less Jewish and as most Jewish [d’autant moins juif et d’autant mieux juif]—how could such a split or divided Jew have received this remark?⁹⁷

The dissociation from self that casts the Jew as concomitantly less Jewish and most Jewish is predicated on the percipience that the otherness of the Jew perforce comprises its own other, the universal that transcends the particular in which it is contained, the cut of circumcision that is the mark of différance, the grammatological disruption of the logocentrism of Western philosophy.⁹⁸ For Derrida, the Jew elucidates the monolingual paradox that speaking one’s own language necessitates the possibility of speaking a language that is not one’s own.⁹⁹ Expressed in an eschatological register, Jewish ethnicity imbibes the abstract messianicity that transcends Jewishness insofar as the quest for peace or justice that it transports in its waiting without awaiting does not belong to the determinate revelation of this or any other Abrahamic religion, but it is rather a general structure of experience that

alone allows the hope, beyond all messianisms, of a universalizable culture of singularities, a culture in which the abstract possibility of the impossible translation could nevertheless be announced. This justice inscribes itself in advance in the promise, in the act of faith or in the appeal to faith that inhabits every act of language and every address to the other.¹⁰⁰

We can confidently apply to Susan the insistence of Derrida that this universalizable culture of singularities is what permits one to hypothesize a rational and universal discourse on the subject of religion. Moreover, she would have concurred that the principle of exemplarity personified in the figure of the Jew implies that the "more jewish the Jew [plus le Juif est juif], the more he would represent the universality of human responsibility for man, and the more he would have to respond to it, to answer for it."¹⁰¹ Dana Hollander cogently summarized the ethico-political concern of Derrida’s works articulating a philosophical nationality:

The writings highlight the paradoxes of exemplarism—that national affirmations are neither simply particularistic, since they take place in the name of universal-philosophical values, nor simply universalist, since they make their claims in the names of cultural particulars. In thus calling into question monolithic conceptions of identity, Derrida’s works challenge philosophy, as an exemplary universalist discourse, to continually renew itself and perpetually open itself to what lies outside and beyond its culturally specific heritages. His writings thus lead beyond the paradox that the more we assert a particular identity such as Europeanness or Jewishness, the more we are forced to do so in the name of the universal values and aims that this identity represents, and, consequently, the more we must deny its very particularity.¹⁰²

Derrida’s position can be profitably compared with the claim embraced by Emmanuel Levinas in his criticism of Simone Weil that Jewish ethnocentrism is the condition that safeguards the viability of a genuine alterity, since the notion of an absolutely universal, the tenet applied to the divine that grounds the respect for and obligation of a human being toward the other, can be served only through the particularity of each people, a particularity named enrootedness.¹⁰³ To understand the Levinasian position we would do well to recall that in his critique of Heidegger’s notion of comprehension as the openness to being, he duly noted that to comprehend the particular being is already to place oneself beyond the particular. To comprehend is to be related to the particular that only exists through knowledge, which is always knowledge of the universal.¹⁰⁴ The corrective to this quandary is to validate the universal on the basis of the particular, to particularize the universal rather than to universalize the particular, which in Levinas’s terms—indebted, as he readily acknowledged, to the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption¹⁰⁵—means to ground the universality of reason in the ethical duty that ensues from opening the face to the face of one’s neighbor, the epiphany of the other that occasions the discourse that compels entering into discourse.¹⁰⁶ Philosophically, this is the veritable meaning of enrootedness as well as the biblical concept of Israel’s chosenness:

It is because the universality of the Divine exists only in the form in which it is fulfilled in the relations between men, and because it must be fulfilment and expansion, that the category of a privileged civilization exists in the economy of Creation. This civilization is defined in terms not of prerogatives, but of responsibilities. . . . If being chosen takes on a national appearance, it is because only in this form can a civilization be constituted, be maintained, be transmitted, and endure.¹⁰⁷

Levinas placed the burden of bearing the encumbrance of this universal particularism at the heart of Israel’s messianic mission.¹⁰⁸ As the consummate stranger, the Jew is the figural token of the alterity that comports the nature of human subjectivity; that is, the Jew stands as witness to the fact that we are similar by virtue of our unassailable dissimilarity, that what is essential to our being is the refusal to allow ourselves to be tamed or domesticated by a theme, that proximity to the absolute exteriority of the other is achieved through relationship with a singular interiority that is always in excess of the mediation of principle or ideality, ¹⁰⁹ the element in consciousness that is not posited by consciousness,¹¹⁰ the difference that is non-indifference.¹¹¹

The position I have extracted from Derrida and Levinas—mindful, of course, that there are irresoluble disparities between them—underscores the existential impasse from which Susan could not flee: her only way to remain Jewish was to abandon Judaism. The blurring of the line separating the universal and the particular implied in this conserving the tradition through forsaking the tradition reverberates with Susan’s remark to Jacob, If it is true that this relation to the Arché defines the jew—or if it is true as your Father says that to be a jew and to be a ‘man’ are the same (not some ‘universal’ man but the daemonic man) then, that is something worthwhile to dwell on.¹¹² Inasmuch as the Jewish problem is indexical of the human problem—not as a universal that effaces the particular by absorbing the other and assimilating it as part of the same, but rather as a universal that is constantly configured by the unassimilability of the particular, which is represented here by the image of the beard¹¹³—her inability to find a home in this world as a Jew is tragically indicative of the migratory status of the human being more generally, the utter forlornness of the self experiencing the full wonder and terror of existence.¹¹⁴ With regard to this matter, we can delimit a crucial point of conflict between Susan and Weil. The latter’s position on the universal and the particular is addressed in the following passage from Susan’s dissertation:

Her critique of the Church culminates in the contention that the Church is catholic by right and not in fact. A genuinely catholic religion, she claims, would embrace the entirety of man’s spiritual tradition and would open its doors to all who desire to partake of its sacraments apart from adhesion to particular dogmas. Her critique of particularism thus involves on the one hand the relation between ritual and dogma, and on the other, the definition of the one, all embracing, true faith.¹¹⁵

According to Weil, to the extent that the subordination of a sacred act to social or ideological conditions violates its mystery, the particularism of any sacrament obfuscates its universalism. The conventional form of a given ceremonial rite, therefore, is immaterial and the choice to perform that rite is arbitrary, but it should not appear as arbitrary or as a matter of choice because this would vindicate the traditional belief that particular sacramental forms are instigated by someone inspired by God or by God himself. Challenging the logic of this argument, Susan wrote,

even in a religion where tradition enables the worshipper to overcome the tension between the universal and the particular in the sacramental act, the ideological character of the faith and the political character of adhesion to the faith, introduces a disturbing and illicit element of choice. Then the individual who desires sanctification comes up against the choice of joining one or another group and accepting its platforms.¹¹⁶

The element of choice points to the fact that the materialization of the universal must be mediated by the immediacy of the particular. As noted above, we find a similar criticism of Weil offered by Levinas in his notion of enrootedness; that is, in her condemnation of the parochialism of Judaism and the celebration of the catholicism of Christianity, she has ignored the prophetic teaching—exemplified by Malachi, the most nationalist of the prophets—that the absolute universality of the God of Israel can be realized only through the particularity of each nation on its own terms, and hence we must say that God is both universal and yet not universal. His universality is not accomplished so long as it is recognized only by thought and is not fulfilled by the acts of men.¹¹⁷ Following this path of envisaging the universal through the prism of the particular, Susan’s focus on the specificity of Judaism did not curtail her ostensibly voracious appetite to learn about diverse religious and spiritual cultures. Indeed, it appears that her interest in the esoteric was driven precisely by the belief in a common mystical and mythical truth. As she wrote to Jacob on October 29, 1950:

I am reading wonderful things from China . . . and India very near to all that you told me about Kaballa and gnosis. It seems the esoteric knowledge is one, and only the exoteric is many. Mythos, Mystery, Mystikos move in related realms of gnosis and opposed to it is either the one science of death, Nihilism, and the many sciences a-gnosticism.¹¹⁸

The core of esoteric gnosis is singular, the exoteric enfleshment of that gnosis in different traditions is multifarious. Moreover, there is a homology between mysticism and nihilism insofar as the latter also exhibits a unified theme and thus can be considered the one science of death. What Judaism has to offer to this discussion is the obstinate reminder that the unifying factor emerges from and must revert to the particular. At the deeper level, this can be expanded phenomenologically into the broader tenet that the perceptual horizon is such that in every act of perception we see an intended object from a circumscribed number of aspects but never in its wholeness; the noetic intentionality that shapes our consciousness cannot grasp the horizonal structure in its totality because there is no totality to grasp beyond the cointended noemata that allow the brain to presume the existence of a discrete sense datum. The presentation of the concrete phenomenon depends, therefore, on the intentional surplus of the nonperceptual that is visible in its invisibility at the fringe of the perceptual.¹¹⁹

This counter-intuitive intuition was anticipated by Nietzsche’s conjecture in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future that deception is a necessary component to the acts of reading and perceiving:

Just as little as today’s reader takes in all the individual words (or especially syllables) on a page . . . just as little do we see a tree precisely and completely, with respect to leaves, branches, colors, and shape. We find it so much easier to imagine an approximate tree instead. . . . What all this amounts to is: we are, from the bottom up and across the ages, used to lying. Or, to put the point more virtuously, more hypocritically, and, in short, more pleasantly: people are much more artistic than they think.¹²⁰

Nietzsche’s pinpointing the criterion of deceit as an indispensable constituent of our hermeneutical condition anticipated the phenomenological insight that the ungiven is the ground of all that is given and its epistemological corollary that there is no veracity but through duplicity. As he put it in the essay On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, when we speak of objects such as trees, colors, snow, and flowers, we think we have knowledge of the things themselves, but what we have are metaphors of those things that do not correspond to the original entities.¹²¹ All our truths, then, are inherently metaphorical, illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions.¹²² Expressed in the mathematical terms that have been pivotal for the exertion on the part of kabbalists to contemplate the emergence of difference from within the originary nondifferentiated indifference of Ein Sof, truth is the infinite that is unobtainable except through its condensation into the infinitesimal point within which measure is affixed to the immeasurable, but to ascribe any measure to the immeasurable is to falsify its nature as what cannot be measured. Disregarding this fundamental stipulation results in the failure to apprehend that the diversity of the rich tapestry of life is a masking of the univocity of being in the plurivocality of beings. As Susan expressed the matter in the letter to Jacob, written on April 9, 1952: One ‘saint’ is like another. Therefore there is one mysticism. (In die Nacht sind alle Kühe schwarz).¹²³ The final statement that in the night all cows are black is an allusion to Hegel’s comment in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit to mark the lack of differentiation in the monotony and abstract universality of the absolute—apparently an allusion to Schelling—wherein everything is presumed to be the same.¹²⁴ Susan’s utilization of this remark is meant to underscore the monochromatic nature of the unity professed by mysticism. The vivacity of the mystical should hinge rather on the concretization of the saintly in the commensurability of incommensurate traditions.

The view I ascribe to Susan has been endorsed by any number of historians of religion, philosophers, and theologians, but it is most pertinent to cite a passage from Tillich, Susan’s Doktorvater, as I mentioned above:

The personalism of biblical religion must be seen against the background of universal religion, representing it and, at the same time, denying it in a unique way. In the I-thou structure of the religious encounter the personalism of the Bible is like the personalism of any other religion. But it is different from the personalism of any other religion in its creation of an idea of personal relationship which is exclusive and complete.¹²⁵

Needless to say, the details of Tillich’s argument are not pursued by Susan. I have quoted this