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Speaker(s): Professor Martin Treml (ZfL, Berlin)

Between 1977 and 1980, after two decades of a intense, mutual, yet indirect acknowledgment,

Jacob Taubes, philosopher of religion and rabbinically trained Jew, exchanged with Carl Schmitt, Nazi crown jurist and theorist of the state of exception, letters and postcards. Taubes as well as Schmitt are often regarded as charlatans and demonic manipulators, but both of them are also remembered by many as some of the intellectually and spiritually most fascinating figures they ever encountered. In any case, there is no doubt that Taubes has made major contributions to the scholarship of apocalyptic thinking and messianic gnosticism. He has taken both fields from the mere study of historical phenomena to a penetrating investigation into the dialectics of secularization and resacralization, into what is constitutive for what we call “religion.” In a similar way, Schmitt can be credited with fundamental insights into the relationship of theology and the study of law, between decision-making and the persistent difference between friend and enemy.

The intellectual dialogue between Taubes and Schmitt constituted by their correspondence took place before the background of a political, but also academic state of crisis in West Germany. The aftershocks of the late 1960s student movement were still evident in most

if not all of the country’s institutions and discourses. And the history of the shoah threw its dark shadow on their conversations. How could a Jewish survivor and someone, who had at least been temporarily involved into Nazi anti-Semitism, talk and write to each other?   

An answer may be found in Taubes’s and Schmitt’s discussions about ardent questions of political theology, such as Saint Paul as the first illiberal Jew, Thomas Hobbes as the thinker of world civil war avant la lettre, Erik Peterson and Leo Strauss as sharp critics of the work of Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin as a mutual reference point. All of these intersect with the central concerns of their respective thinking: the certainty of a liberating revelation; Catholicism as universal form; apocalyptical sentiment; the enduring power of the katechon versus the cold space of decision; the Bible as common ground beyond all difference.

The basis for this lecture has been given by the Taubes and Schmitt letters, which have been published by a team of historians, philosophers, and philologists in Germany in 2011. The lecturer is among them. These letters will be presented to a èצӰ�� audience for the first time.

Martin Treml, Dr. phil., studied History of Religion, Jewish Studies, Philosophy and Art History at the University of Vienna and the Free University of Berlin (1988 M.A., 1996 PhD). Since 2000 he has been working at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin, since 2008 as head of the department Archive/First Kulturwissenschaft.

His main fields of research are history and methodology of First Kulturwissenschaft, theories and figures of Western religions, German-Jewish cultural history since 1750, and reception of antiquity.

From 1999 to 2000, he was Research Fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Center for German-Jewish Literature und Cultural History, Hebrew University Jerusalem. In 2006, he awarded the Senior Saxl Fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London, in summer 2012 he was Short Time Fellow of the International College for Research into the Technology of Culture and the Philosophy of Media (IKKM), Weimar. During the winter semester 2012/2013 he was Supply Professor for the History and Theory of Culture at the Humboldt University Berlin. 

He is the editor of Aby Warburg Werke (with S. Weigel and P. Ladwig, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010).

Recent publications: Warburgs Denkraum. Formen, Motive, Materialien (with S. Flach and P. Schneider, Munich: Fink, 2014), Die Ordnung pluraler Kulturen. Figurationen europäischer Kulturgeschichte, vom Osten her gesehen (with Z. Andronikashwili e.a., Berlin: Kadmos 2014), Hans Blumenberg – Jacob Taubes. Korrespondenzen 1961–1981 (with H. Kopp-Oberstebrink, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2013), Jacob Taubes – Carl Schmitt: Korrespondenz und Materialien (with H. Kopp-Oberstebrink, Th. Palzhoff, Munich: Fink 2012), Grenzgänger der Religionskulturen. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu Gegenwart und Geschichte der Märtyrer (with S. Horsch, Munich: Fink 2011).