"Vom Sinn der Liebe"

Such was the title of a rather strange book published almost a hundred years ago in Jena by a young essayist named Margarete Susman, who had just a decade before and at the very turn of the century made a name among the bohème of Berlin with a little book of poetry titled "Mein Land" that saw three editions before the end of the Weimar Republic - an honour bestowed on few, certainly not on the greatest titans of the German-Jewish poetry like Else Lasker-Schüler and Walter Calé, her contemporaries. One of her poems, "A maiden sings in the plains', was turned into a symphony by Jan Sibelius as early as 1906. Today there're just very few who can remember the name of Margarete Susman, especially in an age when the categories and standards bestowed upon us to "remember" have uplifted their veils and thrown us into decay. For Margarete Susman, religiosity (intimately close to love) was a very different experience (and not merely phenomena) than it had been for most of the Jewish theologians of the time; for her this meant the intensive quality of language, the intensivity of speech... This religiosity didn't speak the language of myth any longer but interpreted itself and 'was become' through the intimate lyric of the "I". It is this intensive quality of speaking as a means to overcome the lack of pre-representation typical of burgeoise property relations and the age of commercial reproduction, the ethos of the flaneur; the dialogical and unsolipsistic nature of understanding as metaphysics itself - the step beyond the theology of the "Deus absconditus" that troubled the philosophers since the middle ages and in particular, since Scottus' ontological argument for the existence of God and accordingly, and contingent necessity of a concept of religiosity intimately bound to rationality and therefore hierarchies and ultimately unspeakable dogmas. Unspeakable not in the sense of having overcome language through the religious experience but out of not being inter-clusterical enough as to engage directly in the diaporias of human language; all theology (in particular with reference to Thomism and Orthodox Lutheran theology) was in that sense pre-linguistic, and therefore mythical only in negative terms, only by means of antinomies.