262 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
clarify Benjamin: “But it mustn’t be misread! It doesn’t mean that concepts of
theocracy aren’t political.”^69 Here Taubes simply seems engaged in flagrant mis-
reading; doesn’t Benjamin really, as clearly as anything in this fragment, say the
opposite? Taubes’s claim is rooted in the concluding part of the fragment:
The secular order should be erected on the idea of happiness. The relation of
this order to the messianic is one of the essential teachings of the philosophy
of history.... [J]ust as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can
augment another force on the opposite path, so the secular order—because of
its nature as secular—promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The
secular, therefore, though not itself a category of this kingdom, is a decisive
category of its most unobtrusive approach. For in happiness all that is earthly
seeks its downfall, and only in happiness is its downfall destined to find it....
For nature is messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.
To strive for such a passing away... is the task of world politics, whose
method must be called nihilism.In Taubes’s view, the notion of nihilistic secular politics causing the world to
pass away is a combined allusion to 1 Corinthians 7:31 and Romans 13, while the
rhythm of nature passing away is an exegesis of Romans 8:18–25. The profane
world has no significance; it cannot be sanctified. There is no divine immanence
here; there is nothing to be done on one’s own behalf; salvation is transcendent:
“The drawbridge comes from the other side.”^70 According to Taubes, both Ben-
jamin and Barth share this gnostic sense of an abandoned world that awaits
salvation.
This Pauline Benjamin, together with Taubes’s criticism of Buber’s Tw o Ty p e s
of Faith, live on today in the work of the contemporary Italian philosopher Gior-
gio Agamben. Agamben agrees that Benjamin’s philosophy of history is Pauline,
but he disagrees that Paul is apocalyptic: “What interests the apostle is not the
last day, it is not the instant in which time ends, but the time that contracts itself
and begins to end... the time that remains between time and its end.”^71 The apos-
tolic vocation also differs from the prophet’s: “The prophet is essentially defined
through his relation to the future.... This is what marks the difference between
the prophet and the apostle. The apostle speaks forth from the arrival of the
Messiah. At this point prophecy must keep silent, for now prophecy is truly ful-
fi l led.”^72 The position of the apostle between prophecy and apocalyptic is crucial
for Agamben, since “According to Scholem—who holds a view fairly widespread
in Judaism—the messianic antinomy is defined as ‘a life lived in deferment’... in
which nothing can be achieved: ‘So-called Jewish existence,’ he writes, ‘possesses
a tension that never finds true release.’”^73 Apostleship, however, announces that
messianic time has already arrived, and “the time that remains” is not simply
additional chronological time, as the end is indefinitely postponed; rather, it is a
different experience of time itself, one that happens now: “the pleroma of kairoi is