ABSTRACT
The publication of The Red Book or Liber Novus presents the reader with a complex and rather daunting hermeneutical challenge. In an early commentary Wolfgang Giegerich questions its very status as a book that can be seen as ‘part of Jung’s oeuvre.’ The Red Book, Giegerich argues, is ‘a most curious and puzzling phenomenon’ (Giegerich 2010: 362). My own effort to define a point of entry for thinking about The Red Book begins with the first line of Jung’s own narrative, following his citations from Isaiah and the Gospel of John, ‘If I speak in the spirit of this time, I must say: no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you’ (Jung 2009: 229b). Is Liber Novus, in fact, a proclamation?
