This paper explores messianic and eschatological motifs in the work of Susan Taubes (1928-1969), a philosopher and writer of Hungarian-Jewish origin whose thought moves freely across philosophy, theology, and literature. Long overshadowed by her husband Jacob Taubes, she has often been relegated to a marginal position within twentieth-century religious and philosophical discourse, reflecting persistent inequalities in processes of canon formation and intellectual recognition.
Deeply shaped by her Jewish background—an inheritance she continuously revisited and critically confronted—her writings span tragic thought, gnosticism, Heidegger, Simone Weil, mysticism, poetry, and cultural criticism. Within this heterogeneous corpus, recurring, though never systematized, references to messianism and eschatology can be identified.
These themes emerge most clearly in her correspondence with Jacob Taubes, where Susan evokes Jewish topoi such as the Day of the Messiah and the Day of Judgment, figures like Paul, and reflections on redemption. Such passages reveal both her familiarity with Jewish and Christian traditions and her effort to rethink them from a personal philosophical and existential perspective. Further resonances appear in her doctoral dissertation on Simone Weil, where she compares Weil's understanding of messianism with that of Walter Benjamin, pointing to a lasting concern with time, history, and salvation.
The paper proceeds in four steps: (1) mapping explicit and implicit messianic and eschatological references across Taubes's writings; (2) analyzing her philosophical position toward these themes and the tensions they generate; (3) reconstructing the outlines of her implicit theory of the messianic and the eschatological; and (4) assessing whether this framework offers a key for interpreting her broader intellectual project.