Samuel Zeitlin
Jacob Taubes, Carl Schmitt, and Immanent Critique
The event will take place at the Einstein Forum.
It will also be live-streamed on Zoom. (Please register here to participate.)
The present lecture aims to develop an interpretation of Jacob Taubes’s (1923-1987) correspondence with and writings about the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) as a form of immanent critique, as this is understood within the tradition of critical theory. To this end, the lecture will engage with the substance of Taubes’s critique, Taubes’s intellectual relation to the work of Schmitt, and Taubes’s stance toward the tradition of critical theory. The lecture will engage closely with Taubes’s published work and his correspondences as well as biographic materials present in the recent biography of Taubes, Professor of Apocalypse (Jerry Z. Muller, 2022).
Samuel Zeitlin studies and teaches political philosophy, the history of political thought, and international relations at Cambridge University. His dissertation examined the themes of war and peace in the political philosophy of Francis Bacon. His translation and edition (co-edited with R.A. Berman) of Carl Schmitt’s “Land and Sea” won an award in the “Religion” category at the Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2016. His reviews have been published in Contemporary Political Theory, The Common Review, and the Cambridge Humanities Review. His articles have been published, or are forthcoming, in History of Political Thought, The Review of Politics, History of European Ideas, Telos, Politisches Denken Jahrbuch, and Modern Intellectual History. Prior to coming to Cambridge, he taught courses at UC-Berkeley, at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen, and at the University of Chicago, where he was Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.