Benji’s Reviews > Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes > Status Update

Death and burial.
To her inquiries about how he was doing, his most frequent response was, 'Metastatically, not so good; metaphysically, wonderful!'

There was talk too of Aristotle and Maimonides - along with an admonition that philosophy was a dead end if taken by itself, without love, 'Because in love we admit to our fundamental imperfection. We confess that we are not autonomous, but terribly in need for each other.'

A questioning mind may not be satisfied with any of the potential answers to the most difficult questions. In that sense, Jacob's ambivalences were a reflection of a mind too questioning and a soul too divided to come down on either side.

Another such joke with a point: In 1943, two Jews, Aby and Sammy, go to a movie on Fifth Avenue, titled Mein Kampf. As they exit the theater, Aby asks Sammy, 'Well, what did you think of the film?' To which Sammy replies, 'Nu, the film was pretty good, but the book is much better!'The joke is a study in the propensity to intellectual one-upmanship; the humor a vehicle for critique and self-critique.

Jacob's visits to the École biblique continued year after year. The monks could not help but notice that he was often accompanied by attractive young women.

Erudition may be a way of fending off confrontation with ultimate questions.

One of the illusions of all those who have elevated 'critique' into a ubiquitous slogan - also because they themselves have never been the object of critique since they've not produced a consistent body of work - one of the illusions of those is that it is only critique that makes life worth while and the work worthy of existence.

In it, he recalled a 1962 conversation in Frankfurt, in which Adorno had said that Landmann performed an important function in combating antisemitism by refuting the stereotype that Jews were smart.

The philosopher is an atheist, or at least a skeptic when it comes to received opinion. Because not all truths are harmless, the challenge for the philosopher is to engage in the skeptical pursuit of philosophical truth without openly calling into question the truths that his society regards as 'self-evident.'

Everything in America has the same ideology, known here as 'common sense.' ... That there are some things that money can't buy is beyond the horizon of their imaginings. One can't speak, with Marx, of 'self-alienation'. For there is no real 'self' to be alienated.