Endless Flight from Providence: Indifference to Redemption and the Refusal of Theodicy in Susan Taubes

This article reconstructs Susan Taubes’s response to the postwar crisis of theodicy through the lens of her philosophical and literary writings from the 1950s and 1960s: her critique of Simone Weil’s “negative theodicy,” her novella Lament for Julia, and her novel Divorcing. These works refract Taubes’s critical engagement with Gnosticism and her wrestling with the possibility of inhabiting a world that cannot be justified, opening onto questions of more than theoretical significance: What makes a theodical narrative? What remains of this narrative when God is absent and salvation is foreclosed? And if the fundamental operation of theodicy is to embed evil and suffering in a narrative of redemption through which they can be made to serve the divine world order, then how to narrate the drama of a soul that refuses to reconcile herself with this order or be inscribed into such a narrative? For Taubes, the central problem is the place—or placelessness—of the estranged soul, in particular the female soul, in a world order full of suffering and darkness. Her works ultimately imply that freedom from the modern world’s exclusions and violences can be approximated solely through an endless flight, a fugitive messianicity that can be inhabited only as a secret shrouded in darkness and that can be expressed only indirectly in genres such as dream or lament.