Chepurin, Kirill
Junior Fellow: October 2023–September 2024
Research Project: The Dark Ground and the Absent God: Negative Theodicy as a Sceptical Strategy in Jacob and Susan Taubes
This project advances a philosophical reconstruction and genealogy of the concept of “negative theodicy” through Jacob and Susan Taubes. It brings together their respective accounts of theodicy from the early 1950s onwards, arguing that although they often have divergent inspirations, it is possible to find in them a shared negative and sceptical core, which makes it possible to speak of “negative theodicy” as a concept that is common to them both and as their distinct contribution to the post-Holocaust theodicy debate. Jacob and Susan Taubes rethink theodicy as generating both a sceptical emphasis on questions over answers and hesitation and darkness over certainty and light, and also a sceptical strategy of questioning and resisting the imposition of truth, order, or authority from above. This strategy has ethical, political, and political-theological implications, which converge around the ideas of suffering and resistance and of approaching theodicy from below. This project contributes to the topic of “(Jewish) Scepticism as a Strategy and Challenge in Past and Present” by theorising the sceptical challenge (to positive theodicy) and strategy (of questioning and resistance) inherent in the rethinking of theodicy in two important post-war Jewish thinkers, a challenge that transforms the modern tradition of theodicy.
Kirill Chepurin is a postdoctoral researcher. He wrote his PhD thesis in theology at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.